The French in the Heart of America | Page 9

before the end of the world come.... You must
make an alliance in imitation of the course of the sun, for as he daily
carries his light hence to New France, so let your civilization, your light,
be carried thither by your children, who henceforth, by the frequent
voyages they shall make to these western lands, shall be called children
of the sea, which is, being interpreted, children of the west." [Footnote:

Lescarbot, "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having been withdrawn by the king.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