The French in the Heart of America | Page 9

"Histoire de la Nouvelle France," 1618, pp. 15-22.]
"Children of the west." His fervid appeal found as little response then as doubtless it would find if made to-day, and the children of the sea were interpreted as the children of the south of Africa. The sons of France have ever loved their homes. They have, except the adventurous few, preferred to remain children of the rivers and the sea of their fathers, and so it is that few of Gallic blood were "spawned," to use Lescarbot's metaphor, in that chill continent, though the venturing or missionary spirit of such as Cartier and Champlain, Poutrincourt and De Monts gave spawn of such heroism and unselfish sacrifice as have made millions in America whom we now call "children of the west," geographical offspring of Brittany and Normandy and Picardy.
The lilies of France and the escutcheons of De Monts and Poutrincourt, painted by Lescarbot for the castle in the wilderness, faded; the sea which Lescarbot, as Neptune, impersonated in the pageant of welcome, and the English ships received back those who had not been gathered into the cemetery on land; and the first agricultural colony in the northern wilds lapsed for a time at least into a fur traders' station or a place of call for fishermen.
It was only by locating these points on Champlain's map of Port Royal that I was able to find in 1911 the site of the ancient fort, garden, fish- pond, and cemetery. The men unloading a schooner a few rods away seemed not to know of Lescarbot or Poutrincourt or even Champlain, but that was perhaps because they were not accustomed to my tongue.
The unquiet Champlain left Acadia in the summer of 1607, the charter having been withdrawn by the king. In the winter of 1607-8 he walked the streets of Paris as in a dream, we are told, longing for the northern wilderness, where he had left his heart four years before. In the spring of 1608 the white whales are floundering around his lonely ship in the river of his dreams. At the foot of the gray rock of Quebec he makes the beginning of a fort, whence he plans to go forth to trace the rivers to their sources, discover, perchance, a northern route to the Indies, and make a path for the priests to the countless savages "in bondage of Satan." Parkman speaks of him as the "Aeneas of a destined people," and he is generally called the "father of Canada." But I think of him rather as a Prometheus who, after his years of bravest defiance of elements and Indians, is to have his heart plucked out day by day, chained to that same gray rock--only that death instead of Herculean succor came.
There is space for only the briefest recital of the exploits and endurances of the stout heart and hardy frame of the man of whom any people of any time might well be proud. The founding of Quebec, the rearing of the pile of wooden buildings where the lower town now stretches along the river; the unsuccessful plot to kill Champlain before the fort is finished; the death of all of the twenty-eight men save eight before the coming of the first spring--these are the incidents of the first chapter.
The visit to the Iroquois country; the discovery of the lake that bears his name; the first portentous collision with the Indians of the Five Nations, undertaken to keep the friendship of the Indian tribes along the St. Lawrence; a winter in France; the breaking of ground for a post at Montreal; another visit to France to find means for the rescue and sustenance of his fading colony, make a depressing second chapter.
Then follows the journey up the Ottawa with the young De Vignau, who had stirred Paris by claiming that he had at last found the northwest passage to the Pacific, when he had in fact spent the winter in an Indian lodge not two hundred miles from Montreal; the noble forgiveness of De Vignau by Champlain; his crestfallen return and his going forth from France again in 1615 with four Récollet friars (Franciscans of the strict observance) of the convent of his birthplace (Brouage) inflamed by him with holy zeal for the continent of savages. For a little these "apostolic mendicants" in their gray robes girt with the white cord, their feet naked or shod in wooden sandals, tarried beneath the gray rock and then set forth east, north, and west, soon (1626) to be followed and reinforced by their brothers of stronger resources, the Jesuits, the "black gowns," upon a mission whose story is as marvellous as a "tale of chivalry or legends of lives of the saints."
Meanwhile Champlain, exploring the regions to the northwest, is the first of