INDEPTH: CHAMPLAIN ANNIVERSARY
Unsettling disasters: colonizing New France before 1600
Alison Hancock, CBC News Online | March 5, 2004
Spain and Portugal had been establishing colonies in South and Central America since the early 1500s. By 1509 there were as many as 10-thousand Spanish colonists in the Caribbean. And by 1570, there were about 200-thousand of them.
Jacques Cartier
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By contrast, France was a late starter in the race to colonize the New World. It wasn’t until 1541 that the French made their first serious, but ill-fated, attempt at setting up a permanent settlement in Canada.
Jacques Cartier had made two earlier voyages to New France, in 1534 and again in 1535-36. On the second trip he explored the St. Lawrence River, sailing up the brackish waters as far as Hochelaga, the site of Montreal.
Soon after Cartier’s return in 1536, France was once again at war with Spain and there was no appetite for foreign expeditions. It was five more years before King Francis I commissioned Cartier to return to the New World, this time with the ambitious goal of establishing a permanent colony to cement France’s claim to Canada.
Francis appointed a nobleman, Jean-François de La Roche de Roberval, as Lieutenant-Governor of Canada with sweeping powers to govern and establish towns and fortresses and convert the native population to the Holy Faith. The two-year project, begun in 1541, has been described as something between a disappointment and a calamity.
CAP-ROUGE, 1541
In May 1541, Cartier sailed from St-Malo with a hundred colonists in five tall ships, and in late August reached Stadacona (site of Quebec City), where he had spent the winter during his 1535-36 trip. He set up his colony at Cap Rouge, a few miles upriver from Stadacona, and named it Charlesbourg-Royal.
There is no record of how the colonists fared that winter, except for fishermen's reports that natives killed thirty-five French carpenters. More were undoubtedly lost to scurvy, as had happened during Cartier's first winter on the St. Lawrence.
Roberval left France the following spring with more colonists, including women and children. When he reached St John's, Newfoundland in June 1542, he unexpectedly encountered Cartier – who had abandoned his colony and was heading back to France.
Roberval proceeded upriver and occupied Cartier's settlement, renaming it France-Roy. Then the historical record gets fuzzy. We know only that the colony was again abandoned, and that surviving colonists were eventually repatriated to France in 1543, their numbers reduced by scurvy.
After this debacle, France made no further attempt at colonization for nearly 60 years. During that time an increasingly busy fur trade flourished, and the cod fishery continued to bring fleets of French ships to the St. Lawrence each season.
SABLE ISLAND 1598
Sable Island Nova Scotia
Courtesy: NASA
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The next attempt at a permanent settlement was that of the Marquise de La Roche who chose Sable Island, 300 km off the coast of Nova Scotia.
La Roche sailed from France in April 1598 with two shiploads of settlers, both
men and women. As with all colonization attempts, there was a lack of volunteers. Undoubtedly France's catastrophic experiment in 1541, combined with the general lack of knowledge of distant and strange lands, contributed to the makeup of the colony: they were beggars, vagabonds and convicts. The motley group landed on Sable Island's north shore and built a storehouse and dwellings in the summer of 1598.
By October, La Roche had returned to France. Documents show that in 1599, 1600, and 1601, he sent more settlers and supplies to his isolated colony. In 1602, however, no ship bearing food arrived from France, and the following year the settlement's leaders were found assassinated. The remaining eleven colonists were repatriated to France, and the nation's disastrous history of colonizing the New World remained unblemished by success.
TADOUSSAC 1600
Reconstruction of Tadoussac building
Courtesy: civilization.ca
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In 1600 Pierre Chauvin, an Honfleur merchant who held a monopoly in the fur trade, sailed for the St. Lawrence in four ships, the most ambitious French fleet since 1541.
His intention was to establish a year-round trading post at Tadoussac. With him were Francois Gravé, Sieur du Pont, known also as Pont-Gravé, and Pierre du Gua de Monts, Champlain's future mentor. Pont-Gravé would accompany Champlain to the St. Lawrence in 1603.
Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, was the centre of the St. Lawrence fur trade. But it was an unsuitable location for a colony. Chauvin returned to France leaving behind sixteen men in a roughly-constructed shelter until the following spring.
The winter was a disaster. The French ran out of food, the buildings were inadequate, and in the end the French found refuge with their aboriginal neighbours.
Tadoussac remained a trading post, but its time as a "settlement destination" was over.
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The Works of Champlain and The History of New France by Marc Lescarbot are available at: The Champlain Society
READING:
Champlain by Joe C. W. Armstrong (MacMillan of Canada, 1987)
The Beginnings of New France 1524-1663 by Marcel Trudel (McLelland and Stewart, 1973)
Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France by Samuel Eliot Morison (Little Brown and Company, 1972)
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