Scott W. See. The History of Canada. Second Edition

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Europeans determined that Native peoples lacked legal traditions, a

sense of property rights, and a meaningful and organized religion.

These were key touchstones for their lives in Europe, and all were

ideals that they attempted to transplant in the New World.

Norsemen: Exploration and Settlement

Few traditional records exist to give us a clear sense of the earliest

European groups that came in contact with the North American

continent. Without the benefit of compasses, which were introduced

in the twelfth century, Nordic peoples made their way across the

Atlantic from Iceland to Greenland over several centuries. Around

1000

A.D. Leif Eriksson made a voyage that brought him in contact

with Baffin Island, the Labrador Coast, and a mysterious Vinland

where the group found grapes and a temperate climate for wintering

over. Scholars place Vinland somewhere between Labrador and

Florida. This and subsequent voyages to the coastal areas of present-

day Canada brought the Norse into contact with a people called

skraelings,or“barbarians.” Scholars believe these were Inuit-related

peoples. Bloody confrontations between the groups thwarted the

efforts of Nordic peoples to colonize the Vinland settlement, and after

repeated efforts from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, trade for

raw materials such as wood probably accounted for the only contact

between Europeans and Amerindians. According to the period’skey

source—the sagas, or oral accounts passed along by generations

through the centuries— Norse settlements existed in northern North

America for a brief time.

The only Norse site that has been confirmed is in l’Anse aux

Meadows in the northwestern tip of Newfoundland. The remains of

a small number of earthen huts and some artifacts indicate that

Norse peoples had a temporary settlement in Canada around the year

1000

A.D. Women were known to be present because of the discovery

of implements that were used to make yarn from wool. The irregular

encounters probably ceased around the thirteenth century, and for

about five hundred years European contact with the region that

would become Canada was infrequent and poorly documented.

Nordic peoples retreated even from the older Greenland settlements

30 Norsemen: Exploration and Settlement

because of increasingly cold temperatures, so the story of Nordic

contact is disconnected from the intensive European drive that

erupted in the fifteenth century to explore and colonize the New

World. The hearty Nordic peoples who touched on the Arctic islands

and northern continental coast did, however, point to an essential

truth in Canadian history. The land was rich in resources such as

timber and fish. Canada had much to offer as the European continent

experienced dramatic population growth and economic development.

The New World: Early Exploration

In the age of exploration, Europeans sought a sea route to Asia,

primarily to facilitate a trade in spices that were crucial for the

unrefrigerated European diet of meats and other foods. Northern

European groups by the fifteenth century were attempting to break

the trade monopolies of Italian cities. Moreover, improvements in

navigational devices, such as the astrolabe, and technological

developments in designing and building more seaworthy vessels

helped to spur oceanic passage. Timeless human qualities explained

the late fifteenth-century quest for exploring and exploiting the

potential of the New World: human curiosity and a desire to earn a

profit. Interwoven in this motivational mixture was the dedication on

the part of some early explorers, as well as their important European-

based sponsors, to spread Christianity. The growing western

European sea powers —Spain, Portugal, England, the Netherlands,

and France—were the prime contenders during the period under

discussion. As fate would have it, France ended up focusing a great

deal of energy in the region now called Canada largely because it was

not on the cutting edge of the exploration quest. Rather late in joining

the competition, France was habitually short of the necessary capital

for the successful development of the New World.

Explorers regularly bumped into the coast of northern North

America in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s celebrated 1492

voyage. Virtually all of the initial explorers of Canada sought a relatively

direct, and with any luck swift, northwest passage to the riches of Asia.

Sailing for the English, the Italian mariner John Cabot (born Giovanni

Caboto) probably landed in northern Newfoundland and Cape Breton

The New World: Early Exploration 31

in 1497. Although the precise locations of his landfalls continue to be

contested by scholars, his contact and active attempt to claim the land

for England’s Henry VII almost immediately created a context for

imperial rivalry. Cabot and a large contingent of mariners disappeared

without trace the following year. The Portuguese Corte-Real brothers,

tracking the coastline of North America, also touched on Newfound-

land and Labrador in 1500 and 1501. Like Cabot, the Corte-Real

brothers were lost to the sea, and the Portuguese turned their energies

toward developing southern islands and territory in the New World.

Another Italian mariner who sailed for the French, Giovanni da

Verrazano (1524–1528), plied a great swath of the eastern seaboard of

North America, probably from North Carolina or Virginia to Gaspé at

the eastern tip of present-day Quebec. The voyage, sponsored by

François I, the first French monarch to be truly interested in the New

World, gave the French a sense of the North Atlantic. Verrazano

designated the shores of northern North America Nova Francia,or

New France. These explorers collectively grasped the idea that a

landmass blocked the northern passage to Asia, although some

believed the Pacific Ocean was extremely close to the Atlantic Ocean.

Also, after Cabot’s voyage, explorers tapped into an old European

interest: feeding a growing and increasingly urban population.

Portuguese, French, and British mariners fished for cod in the rich

waters off present-day Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. T his endeavor

became such an important Canadian practice that it was only recently

altered with a cod fisheries moratorium in the waters off Newfound-

land to protect dwindling fish stocks. Whalers came as well, especially

from the Basque region, summering and sometimes wintering over

on North America’s hostile shores. By the mid-1500s, these hardy

fishermen had grasped the fact that the land would yield another

commodity that fetched handsome prices in Europe: furs and pelts.

Cartier’s Voyages: An Attempted

French Foothold

The initial series of intensive explorations for France were shaped by

thedesiretofindapassagetoAsiaandtodiscoverriches,twoofthe

classic driving forces behind transatlantic movement in the sixteenth

32 Cartier’s Voyages: An Attempted French Foothold

century. Jacques Cartier, a mariner from Saint-Malo in Brittany, made

three voyages for François I in 1534, 1535–1536, and 1541–1542.

Cartier and his men “discovered” little in the gulf of St. Lawrence.

Instead they encountered fishing boats and visited harbors already

named by Basque whalers. Cartier expressed ambiguous feelings

about the land he encountered. In an obvious reference to the hostility

of the landscape, he called the Labrador coast in the Strait of Belle Isle

the “land God gave Cain.” Cartier’s voyages illustrated the French

desire to gain a stake in the New World; he planted a cross on the

shores of the gulf of St. Lawrence. His desire to locate a western

passage to Asia brought him up the St. Lawrence River to the

Amerindian communities of Stadacona (Quebec) and Hochelaga

(Montreal). At Hochelaga the water passage to the west was blocked

by rapids, which the French named Lachine with an expectation that

China lay beyond the foaming waters of the St. Lawrence.

Cartier’s voyages also yielded the first clear evidence of the clash

of cultures between Native peoples and Europeans that has been such

a persistent theme in Canadian history. He met both Mi’kmaq and

Iroquoian groups, who eagerly sought to trade furs and other goods.

On one trip, Cartier kidnaped an Iroquoian chief named Donnacona,

his two sons, and other children and adults. They never returned from

France; all probably fell victim to European diseases. Cartier and

his men wintered over in Stadacona, a brutal time when they

encountered the frozen and snow-covered landscape for many long

months. One-quarter of Cartier’s men perished, most because of

scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency. Native peoples showed the whites

how to alleviate the problem with a tea made from the bark and

leaves of white cedar. The final voyage brought a more intensive

group, with Cartier theoretically under the command of a nobleman

named Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval. Delayed by one

year, Roberval’s group, which had been prepared to attempt a

settlement, endured a harsh winter where Cartier had stayed the

previous year. Unable to find the mythical land of riches, called the

Saguenay, Cartier made haste for home with holds filled with what

he assumed were gold and diamonds. Dumped on the wharves of

France, alas, was worthless iron pyrite (fool’s gold) and quartz.

Cartier’s and Roberval’s voyages from 1534 to 1542 put the

French off the scent of the New World for the remainder of the

sixteenth century. Although misled by false gold and quartz, not

Cartier’s Voyages: An Attempted French Foothold 33

the riches that the Spanish had encountered to the south, the French

had dimly grasped the fact that furs would be a lucrative commodity.

Moreover, the seas yielded fish, whales seemed plentiful, timber stands

were lush, and apparently the St. Lawrence lowlands held the potential

for agricultural pursuits. Yet negative factors clearly outweighed the

positive prospects of the New World. Struggles and a lack of trust

between the French and Amerindians led to skirmishes on several

occasions. Europeans, used to the temperate climate of northwestern

France, found the land austere. And the riches, promised in such

abundance by Native peoples who quickly grasped the intentions of

the excitable Europeans, proved elusive. Despite tantalizing informa-

tion about great inland freshwater seas (the Great Lakes), the water

paths, including the immensely promising St. Lawrence River, were

frustratingly blocked. Finally, Cartier’s voyages lent an Iroquoian

word for a village to the land the French intended to master: Canada. A

combination of factors led to a period of inattention: hostilities with

Native peoples, the harsh terrain and dramatic climate, obstructed

passages to the west, a dearth of readily accessible riches, and limited

financial support. Soured on the Canadian experience, the French

turned their colonizing attentions to the south in a mostly unsuccessful

effort to capture territory in areas largely controlled by the Portuguese

and Spanish.

Champlain and the Establishment

of New France

For the remainder of the sixteenth century Spanish, English, French,

and Basque fishermen exploited the abundant fisheries of the eastern

seaboard of North America. The island of Newfoundland was

regularly used either to dry cod or pack the fish in barrels of salt.

Along the St. Lawrence, trade continued between French and Basque

fishermen and Amerindians, primarily where the Saguenay River

joins the St. Lawrence at the Montagnais tribal village of Tadoussac.

This informal activity yields little historical evidence of European

encounters with the New World, yet we know that trade and fishing

continued. The next serious attempts at exploration and settlement

largely resulted from the energies of a remarkable man named Samuel

de Champlain.

34 Champlain and the Establishment of New France

The fur trade drove the renewed French interest in Canada. In

particular the beaver was highly prized for making hats and coats for

Europe’s growing number of merchants and businessmen. For two

and a half centuries after 1600, a struggle to create a monopoly to

dominate the fur trade shaped much of Canadian history. Supported

by a trading monopoly and royal permission, the French trader Sieur

de Monts and Samuel de Champlain initially attempted a settlement

in 1604 in the Bay of Fundy region of the current Maritime Provinces

of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. A commoner who had fought

for France, Champlain first wintered near the mouth of the St. Croix

River, which divides present-day New Brunswick and Maine, and

then moved across the bay to Port-Royal. De Monts and Champlain

started with 125 settlers, but difficulties in controlling trade and

uncertainty with Amerindians led de Monts to return to France

with the group in 1607. Significantly, during the brief period of

abandonment of New World settlement for the French, the English

located their first successful colony along Virginia’s modest James

River.

The following year, 1608, Champlain obtained permission from

de Monts to attempt a settlement along the St. Lawrence. Champlain

had determined that a colony along the majestic river would be easier

to protect, there would be better prospects for development and

exploration of the interior, and he hoped to improve trade with

Native peoples who prized copper pots and iron goods such as axes.

Champlain also found that in the years since Cartier’s voyages, the

Amerindians along the St. Lawrence River had changed dramatically.

The Iroquoian groups that Cartier had encountered and even fought

had mysteriously retreated. Algonquian Indians, primarily the

Montagnais, had replaced them. Eager to trade with the French,

the Algonquian tribes quickly formed a tenuous relationship with the

French to offset what appears to have been a long-standing struggle

with the fierce Iroquoian groups to the south and west.

Choosing the settlement where the St. Lawrence River narrows,

called Quebec in the Algonquian language, Champlain’s small party

constructed a habitation under the looming rock that dominates the

landscape. Quebec served as the administrative center of New France

during the French regime and is the current capital of the province of

Quebec. Nearly three-quarters of the small party died of scurvy or

dysentery that first winter, a stark reminder that settlement in the

Champlain and the Establishment of New France 35

New World would continue to be a difficult endeavor. Supplies and

new men came after the river thawed in the spring of 1609, thereby

ensuring the survival of a permanent settlement in New France and

establishing a pattern of reinforcement from the Old World that

would be such a critical factor for life in early colonial Canadian

history. The struggle to gain a trade monopoly and control over the

St. Lawrence occupied Champlain’s interests until 1612.

Champlain’s mandate was to create a settlement sustained by

agricultural production, yet it was in his skills as an explorer and

extraordinarily perceptive cartographer that he made his mark in

history. Over the next several years, after excursions to the hinterland

with Amerindian guides, Champlain found a large lake that he named

after himself, reached the eastern boundaries of two of the great

inland seas (Lakes Ontario and Huron), and wintered with a

powerful tribe of Iroquoian cousins named the Huron in present-

day southern Ontario. With the help of protégés, such as Etienne

Brûlé, Champlain worked to cement the relationship between Native

peoples and French and gathered tantalizing news of the Mississippi

system and the Pacific Ocean. The French were swiftly gaining a

cursory sense of the geography of the interior of North America. As it

turned out, their position on the education curve was far ahead of

their English counterparts to the south, a fact that would create

tensions in the decades ahead as the European powers struggled to

gain control of the continent.

Champlain and his Algonquian allies clashed repeatedly with the

Iroquoian confederacy. Beginning with a dramatic encounter near

Lake Champlain in 1609, where Champlain and his men purportedly

killed three Iroquois chiefs, the French with their guns regularly

defeated smaller Iroquoian forces. The bitter encounters between the

French and Iroquoian peoples would persist for generations and

become one of the important themes in New France’s history. Native

peoples also suffered from the introduction of European diseases.

Although it is hard to measure the decimation that European-borne

diseases inflicted on Amerindians, the seventeenth century brought a

calamity of the first order to the continent’s original inhabitants. In

one of the most clearly documented accounts, the Huron, once a

thriving group that essentially controlled the trading routes of the

Lake Huron area, lost over fifty percent of their population by 1639

through disease or warfare. Their population would never recover to

36 Champlain and the Establishment of New France

predisease levels, a dramatic illustration of the fate of hundreds of

thousands of Native peoples in North America.

By the 1620s, Quebec’s fort was but a small outpost of the French

Empire. It reflected the French trading impulse, for the early settlers

hoped to make rapid fortunes in the New World. In 1627, when

Quebec welcomed its first birth of a child of European extraction in

New France, the settlement was home to fewer than one hundred

people. Heavily dependent on regular supply ships, the settlers also

survived largely thanks to their trade with the Native peoples, as well

as the information they gleaned about coping with Canada’s

inhospitable environment.

Acadia: Early French-English

Rivalry in Canada

The St. Lawrence River valley was not the only focal point for

French settlement and trade in the New World. The eastern area of

colonization, called Acadia, was a distinct enterprise from the more

aggressively developed colony along the St. Lawrence. Settlers to

Acadia were drawn from distinct regions in France, primarily

centered near the port of La Rochelle. To the present day, Acadians

are of a different hereditary lineage then are their French-speaking

counterparts in Quebec and other regions. Their distinctive culture

and linguistic patterns explain a persistent lack of cohesion between

the groups.

The propertied Sieur de Poutrincourt, his family, and a handful of

settlers followed the initial designs for a French settlement in the Bay

of Fundy region after Champlain shifted focus to the St. Lawrence.

By 1611, Port-Royal had been reestablished, only to be sacked by a

raid of English settlers from the Virginia colony led by Samuel Argall

in 1613. The next several decades brought a weak attempt on the

part of the French to reestablish the colony and a small but bloody

clash between rival groups of Acadians over trading rights. Most

important, in 1621 Sir William Alexander received a grant in the

same region from the English king, James I, to create a Scots

settlement. Most of the original Scots settlers left the area, which they

called Nova Scotia, soon after their arrival. However, the overlapping

Acadia: Early French-English Rivalry in Canada 37

claims—Acadia for the French and Nova Scotia for the British—

placed the Acadians at the crossroads of a struggle between empires

in the New World well into the eighteenth century.

A European Foothold in the New World

By the 1620s, a tiny European-based population clustered in a handful

of habitations along the St. Lawrence River and in some beleaguered

settlements in Acadia. Far to the north, the English mariner Henry

Hudson had explored a massive saltwater bay in 1610. Hudson Bay,

claimed for England, would later become a strategic location for

shipping furs from the interior of North America.

Few men and women in New France considered themselves

permanent settlers. Compared with the relatively thriving and rapidly

growing English settlements in Virginia, New France was a minuscule

trading post that had modest designs on agricultural development.

Trade was expanding with Native peoples of Algonquian language

and culture, facilitated by energetic French trappers called coureurs

de bois (runners of the woods). Conversely, as a result of the actions

of leaders such as Cartier and Champlain, the French found them-

selves in perpetual conflict with the powerful Iroquoian confederacy.

Spreading out of present-day New York State, Iroquoian tribes played

a pivotal role in developing fur trade to the south with the Dutch and

English. As French trade relations tightened with some groups, the

Huron, for example, they deteriorated with the formidable Iroquois.

A hint of riches in the interior and the prospect of discovering a

quick and navigable passage through the landmass of North America

to get to Asia remained an enticing, if not elusive, prospect. In 1627,

the Company of New France, also called the Company of Hundred

Associates, was established under the guidance of Louis XIII’s chief

administrator for New France, Cardinal Richelieu. The company of

shareholders was granted entire control over trade, land distribution,

and colonial governance. In return it promised to settle hundreds of

Roman Catholics annually for fifteen years. Unfortunately for the

French, English raiders in 1628 led by the Kirke brothers intercepted

the company’s initial convoy of settlers and supplies to Quebec.

The following year, with the colony near starvation, Champlain

38 A European Foothold in the New World

surrendered, and most of the settlers returned to France. While the

territory was ceded back to the French after a peace treaty in 1632,

the inauspicious beginnings of European settlement in this place

called Canada pointed to a nascent conflict for a continent. Native

peoples, while clearly enjoying superior numbers at the time, were

rapidly becoming interwoven in the competitive trading patterns and

disputes between the European interlopers. By the 1630s the seeds

of the interaction among three groups—Amerindians, French, and

English—were planted. Through periods of confrontation, peace, and

trade, these peoples would chart Canada’s colonial development.

The French Design for the New World

The persistence of the French colony along the St. Lawrence can be

attributed to several factors that converged in the seventeenth

century: the remarkable determination of Samuel de Champlain

and a handful of colonial proponents; the growing popularity of

beaver hats in Europe, which put a premium on one of the few

marketable goods that the colony could produce; and the French

alliance with Algonquian groups in their ongoing struggles against

the powerful Iroquois. In general, life remained exceptionally strenuous

for colonists in Canada. As with their English, Dutch, and Spanish

counterparts in the New World, the French had to contend with a

grueling and often dangerous passage across the Atlantic Ocean that

could last from several weeks to months, Native peoples, a rigorous

climate, and uncertainty. Moreover, the growing season was especially

short, and the waterways, including the St. Lawrence River, were frozen

during the winter months, thereby limiting the colony’stradeand

communication with France to certain seasons.

The French design for the New World encompassed three

common themes of European colonial development: the prospect

of discovering riches more lucrative than furs, especially gold and

diamonds; finding an expeditious, easily traversable passage through

the continent to the Pacific Ocean; and a relatively small number of

missionaries who dedicated themselves to converting and minister-

ing to the untold thousands of Amerindians, all of whom were

considered heathens by European standards. By the eighteenth

The French Design for the New World 39