The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism | Page 3

Thus it was that the administration,
like a pyramid, broadened towards its base, and the whole structure
rested upon the third estate, or rank and file of the people. Such was the
position, the power, and administrative framework of France when her
kings and people turned their eyes westward across the seas. From the
rugged old Norman and Breton seaports courageous mariners had been
for a long time lengthening their voyages to new coasts. As early as

1534 Jacques Cartier of St Malo had made the first of his pilgrimages
to the St Lawrence, and in 1542 his associate Roberval had attempted
to plant a colony there. They had found the shores of the great river to
be inhospitable; the winters were rigorous; no stores of mineral wealth
had appeared; nor did the land seem to possess great agricultural
possibilities. From Mexico the Spanish galleons were bearing home
their rich cargoes of silver bullion. In Virginia the English navigators
had found a land of fair skies and fertile soil. But the hills and valleys
of the northland had shouted no such greeting to the voyageurs of
Brittany. Cartier had failed to make his landfall at Utopia, and the
balance-sheet of his achievements, when cast up in 1544, had offered a
princely dividend of disappointment.
For a half-century following the abortive efforts of Cartier and
Roberval, the French authorities had made no serious or successful
attempt to plant a colony in the New World. That is not surprising, for
there were troubles in plenty at home. Huguenots and Catholics were at
each other's throats; the wars of the Fronde convulsed the land; and it
was not till the very end of the sixteenth century that the country settled
down to peace within its own borders. Some facetious chronicler has
remarked that the three chief causes of early warfare were Christianity,
herrings, and cloves. There is much golden truth in that nugget. For if
one could take from human history all the strife that has been due either
to bigotry or to commercial avarice, a fair portion of the bloodstreaks
would be washed from its pages. For the time being, at any rate, France
had so much fighting at home that she was unable, like her Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, and English neighbours, to gain strategic points for
future fighting abroad. Those were days when, if a people would
possess the gates of their enemies, it behoved them to begin early.
France made a late start, and she was forced to take, in consequence,
what other nations had shown no eagerness to seize.
It was Samuel Champlain, a seaman of Brouage, who first secured for
France and for Frenchmen a sure foothold in North America, and thus
became the herald of Bourbon imperialism. After a youth spent at sea,
Champlain engaged for some years in the armed conflicts with the
Huguenots; then he returned to his old marine life once more. He sailed

to the Spanish main and elsewhere, thereby gaining skill as a navigator
and ambition to be an explorer of new coasts. In 1603 came an
opportunity to join an expedition to the St Lawrence, and from this
time to the end of his days the Brouage mariner gave his whole interest
and energies to the work of planting an outpost of empire in the New
World. Champlain was scarcely thirty-six when he made his first
voyage to Canada; he died at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1635. His
service to the king and nation extended over three decades.
With the crew of his little vessel, the Don de Dieu, Champlain cast
anchor on July 9, 1608, beneath the frowning natural ramparts of Cape
Diamond, and became the founder of a city built upon a rock. The
felling of trees and the hewing of wood began. Within a few weeks
Champlain raised his rude fort, brought his provisions ashore,
established relations with the Indians, and made ready with his
twenty-eight followers to spend the winter in the new settlement. It was
a painful experience. The winter was long and bitter; scurvy raided the
Frenchmen's cramped quarters, and in the spring only eight followers
were alive to greet the ship which came with new colonists and
supplies. It took a soul of iron to continue the project of nation-planting
after such a tragic beginning; but Champlain was not the man to recoil
from the task. More settlers were landed; women and children were
brought along; land was broken for cultivation; and in due course a
little village grew up about the fort. This was Quebec, the centre and
soul of French hopes beyond the Atlantic.
For the first twenty years of its existence the little colony had a stormy
time. Some of the settlers were unruly, and gave Champlain, who was
both maker and enforcer