The French in the Heart of America | Page 8

the dispersion of the Acadians, a
century and more later, as preserved in our literature by the poet
Longfellow. But doubtless not one in a hundred thousand has ever read
the earlier chapters of that Aeneid.

The best and the meanest of France were of the company that set out
from Dieppe to be its colonists: men of highest condition and character,
and vagabonds, Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, soldiers and
artisans. There were theological discussions which led to blows before
the colonists were far at sea. Fiske, the historian, says the "ship's
atmosphere grew as musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles as that
of a room at the Sorbonne." There was the incident of the wandering of
Nicolas Aubry, "more skilled in the devious windings of the [Latin
Quarter] than in the intricacies of the Acadian Forest," where he was
lost for sixteen days and subsisted on berries and wild fruits; there was
the ravage of the relentless maladie de terre, scurvy, for which Cartier's
specific could not be found though the woods were scoured; there were
the explorations of beaches and harbors and islands and rivers,
including the future Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, and the accurate
mapping of all that coast now so familiar; there were the arrivals of the
ship Jonas once with temporal supplies and again, as the Mayflower of
the Jesuits, with spiritual teachers; there was the "Order of Good
Times," which flourished with as good cheer and as good food at Port
Royal in the solitude of the continent as the gourmands at the Rue aux
Ours had in Paris and that, too, at a cheaper rate; [Footnote: "Though
the epicures of Paris often tell us we have no Rue aux Ours over there,
as a rule we made as good cheer as we could have in this same Rue aux
Ours and at less cost." Lescarbot, "Champlain Society Publication,"
7:342.] there was later the news of the death of Henry IV heard from a
fisherman of Newfoundland; and there was, above all else except the
"indomitable tenacity" of Champlain, the unquenchable enthusiasm,
lively fancy, and good sense of Lescarbot, the verse-making advocate
from Paris.
There is so much of tragic suffering and gloom in all this epic of the
forests that one is tempted to spend more time than one ought, perhaps,
on that bit of European clearing (the only spot, save one, as yet in all
the continent north of Florida and Mexico), in the jolly companionship
of that young poet-lawyer who had doubtless sat under lecturers in
Paris and who would certainly have been quite as capable and
entertaining as any lecturers on the new world brought in these later
days from America to Paris, a man "who won the good-will of all and

spared himself naught," "who daily invented something for the public
good," and who gave the strongest proof of what advantage "a new
settlement might derive from a mind cultivated by study and induced
by patriotism to use its knowledge and reflections."
It cannot seem unworthy of the serious purpose of this book to let the
continent lie a few minutes longer in its savage slumber, or, as the
Jesuits thought it, "blasted beneath the sceptre of hell," while we
accompany Poutrincourt and Champlain, returning wounded and
weather-beaten from inspecting the coast of New England, to find the
buildings of Port Royal, under Lescarbot's care, bright with lights, and
an improvised arch bearing the arms of Poutrincourt and De Monts, to
be received by Neptune, who, accompanied by a retinue of Tritons,
declaimed Alexandrine couplets of praise and welcome, and to sit at the
sumptuous table of the Order of Good Times, of which I have just
spoken, furnished by this same lawyer- poet's agricultural industry. We
may even stop a moment longer to hear his stately appeal to France,
which, heeded by her, would have made Lescarbot's a name familiar in
the homes of America instead of one known only to those who delve in
libraries:
"France, fair eye of the universe, nurse from old of letters and of arms,
resource to the afflicted, strong stay to the Christian religion, Dear
Mother ... your children, our fathers and predecessors, have of old been
masters of the sea.... They have with great power occupied Asia....
They have carried the arms and the name of France to the east and
south.... All these are marks of your greatness, ... but you must now
enter again upon old paths, in so far as they have been abandoned, and
expand the bounds of your piety, justice and humanity, by teaching
these things to the nations of New France.... Our ancient practice of the
sea must be revived, we must ally the east with the west and convert
those people to God