NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL
HISTORY OF AMERICA
| French Explorations and Settlements In North America AND THOSE OF The Portuguese, Dutch, and Swedes 1500-1700 |
|
NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL
HISTORY OF AMERICA
EDITED
By JUSTIN WINSOR
LIBRARIAN OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
VOL. IV
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1884,
By JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
[The French arms on the title are those used by the Royal Printing-Office in Paris in the Seventeenth Century.]
| INTRODUCTION. | |
| PAGE | |
| Physiography of North America. Nathaniel S. Shaler | i |
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| CHAPTER I. | |
| Cortereal, Verrazano, Gomez, Thevet. George Dexter | 1 |
| Illustration: Early Fishing Stages, 3. | |
| Critical Essay. | 12 |
| Illustration: The Verrazano map, 26. | |
| Autographs: Francis I., 23; Janus Verrazanus, 25. | |
| MAPS OF THE EASTERN COAST OF NORTH AMERICA, 1500-1535. The Editor |
33 |
| Illustrations: The Admiral’s map, 34; Portuguese Chart (1503), 35; Map of Lazaro Luis, 37; of Verrazano (1529), 37; of Ribero (1529), 38; of Maiollo (1527), 39; of Agnese (1536), 40; of Münster (1540), 41; Ulpius Globe (1542), 42; Carta Marina (1548), 43; Lok’s Map (1582), 44; John White’s Map (1585), 45; Map of North America (1532-1540), 46. | |
| CHAPTER II. | |
| Jacques Cartier and his Successors. Benjamin F. De Costa | 47 |
| Illustration: Jacques Cartier, 48. | |
| Autographs: Jacques Cartier, 48; Henri the Dauphin, 56. | |
| Critical Essay | 62 |
| Illustrations: Maps of Allefonsce, 74, 75, 76, 77; of Des Liens (1566), 78. | |
| CARTOGRAPHY OF THE NORTHEAST COAST OF NORTH AMERICA. 1535-1600. The Editor[vi] | 81 |
| Illustrations: The Nancy Globe, 81; Ulpius Globe (1542), 82; Maps of Rotz (1542), 83, 83; Cabot Mappemonde (1544), 84; Münster’s Map (1545), 84; Map of Medina (1545), 85; of Henri II. (1546), 85; of Freire (1546), 86; in British Museum, 87; of Nic. Vallard, 87; of Gastaldi, 88; belonging to Jomard, 89; of Bellero, 89; of Baptista Agnese (1544), 90; of Volpellio, 90; of Gastaldi in Ramusio, 91; of Homem (1558), 92; of Ruscelli (1561), 92; of Zaltieri (1566), 93; of Mercator (1569), 94; of Ortelius (1570), 95; of Porcacchi (1572), 96; of Martines (1578), 97; of Judæis (1593), 97; of John Dee (1580), 98; of De Bry, (1596), 99; of Wytfliet, 100; of Quadus (1600), 101. | |
| CHAPTER III. | |
| Champlain. Edmund F. Slafter | 103 |
| Illustrations: Map of Port St. Louis, 109; of Tadoussac, 114; of Quebec (1613), 115; of the St. Lawrence River (1609), 117; View of Quebec, 118; Champlain, 119; Defeat of the Iroquois, 120; Champlain’s Route (1615), 125; Taking of Quebec (1629), 128. | |
| Autographs: Champlain, 119; Montmagny, 130. | |
| Critical Essay | 130 |
| CHAPTER IV. | |
| Acadia. Charles C. Smith | 135 |
| Illustrations: Sieur de Monts, 136; Isle de Sainte Croix, 137; Buildings on the same, 139; Lescarbot’s Map of Port Royal, 140; Champlain’s Map of Port Royal, 141; Map of Gulf of Maine (circum 1610), 143; Buildings at Port Royal, 144; Map of Pentagöet, 146; Sir William Phips, 147; Jesuit Map (1663), 148. | |
| Autographs: Henry IV., 136; Razilly, 142; La Tour, 143; D’Aulnay, 143; Robert Sedgwick, 145; John Leverett, 145; St. Castine, 146. | |
| Critical Essay | 149 |
| Illustrations: Lescarbot’s Map of Acadia, 152; La Hontan’s Map of Acadia, 153; Sir William Alexander, 156; Francis Parkman, 157. | |
| Autograph: Francis Parkman, 157. | |
| Notes. The Editor | 159 |
| Illustrations: Map of Fort Loyal, 159; Map of Pemaquid, 160. | |
| Autographs: De Meneval, 160; De Villebon, 160; Le Moyne d’Iberville, 161. | |
| CHAPTER V. | |
| Discovery along the Great Lakes. Edward D. Neill | 163 |
| Illustrations: The Soleil, 192; its bottom, 193. | |
| Autographs: Argenson, 168; Mézy, 172; Courcelle, 177; Frontenac, 177; Henry de Tonty, 182. | |
| Critical Essay[vii] | 196 |
| Editorial Note | 198 |
| Illustration: Map of early French explorations, 200. | |
| JOLIET, MARQUETTE, AND LA SALLE. The Editor | 201 |
| Illustrations: Map of the Ottawa Route (1640-1650), 202; Dollier and Galinée’s Explorations, 203; Lakes and the Mississippi, 206; Joliet’s Map (1673-74), 208; Fac-simile of Joliet’s Letter, 210; Joliet’s Larger Map (1674), 212, 213; Joliet’s Smaller Map, 214; Basin of the Great Lakes, 215; Joliet’s Carte Générale, 218; Marquette’s Genuine Map, 220; Mississippi Valley (1672-73), 221; Fort Frontenac, 222; Map by Franquelin (1682), 227; (1684), 228; (1688), 230-231; by Coronelli et Tillemon (1688), 232; by Raffeix (1688), 233; Ontario and Erie, by Raffeix (1688), 234; by Raudin, 235; La Salle’s Camp, 236; Map by Minet (1685), 237; Murder of La Salle, 243; Portrait of La Salle, 244. | |
| Autographs: Joliet, 204; Raffeix, 232; De Beaujeu, 234; Le Cavelier, 234. | |
| FATHER LOUIS HENNEPIN. The Editor | 247 |
| Illustrations: Niagara Falls, 248; Hennepin’s Map (1683), 249; (1697), 251, 252-253; title of New Discovery, 256. | |
| BARON LA HONTAN. The Editor | 257 |
| Illustrations: La Hontan’s Map (1709), 258, 259; (1703), 260; his Rivière Longue, 261. | |
| CHAPTER VI. | |
| The Jesuits, Recollects, and the Indians. John Gilmary Shea | 263 |
| Illustrations: Paul le Jeune, 272; Map of the Iroquois Country, 281. | |
| Autographs: Trouvé, 266; Fremin, 268; Gabriel Druilletes, 270; Bailloquet, 270; Albanel, 271; Dalmas, 271; Buteux, 271; Bigot, 273; De Noue, 273; Sébastien Rale, 273; Belmont, 275; Garnier, 276; Garreau, 277; Chabanel, 277; Gabriel Lalemant, 278; Raymbault, 279; Claude Dablon, 280; Menard, 280; D’Ailleboust, 282; Lamberville, 285; Picquet, 285. | |
| Critical Essay | 290 |
| Illustration: J. S. Clarke’s Map of the Mission Sites among the Iroquois, 293. | |
| THE JESUIT RELATIONS. The Editor | 295 |
| Illustrations: A Canadian (Creuxius), 297; Map of Indian Tribes in the Ohio Valley (1600), 298; Map of Montreal and its Vicinity, 303; Map of the Site of Montreal (Lescarbot), 304; Map of the Huron Country, 305; Brebeuf, 307; Titlepage of the Relation of 1662-63, 310; The Forts on the Sorel River (1662-63), 311; Map of Tracy’s Campaign (1666), 312; Jesuit Map of Lake Superior, 312; Plans of the Forts, 313; Madame de la Peltrie, 314. | |
| Autographs: A. Carayon, 295; Lafitau, 298; Cadwallader Colden, 299; Bresani , 305; Gabriel Druilletes, 306; Ragueneau, 307; Brebeuf, 307; Josephus Poncet, 308; Simon Le Moyne, 308; Margaret Bourgeois, 309; Francois [viii]Evesque de Petrée, 309; Menard, 309; Vignal, 310; Tracy, 311; Allouez, 311; Courcelle, 311; Le Mercier, 311; De Salignac, 312; Jacques Marquette, 313; Claude Dablon, 313; L. Jolliet, 315; Bigot, 315; Chaumonot , 316; Jacques Gravier, 316; Marest, 316. | |
| CHAPTER VII. | |
| Frontenac and his Times. George Stewart, Jr. | 317 |
| Illustrations: Early View of Quebec, 320; Canadian on Snow Shoes, 331; Plan of Attack on Quebec (1690), 354. | |
| Autographs: Louis XIV., 323; Frontenac, 326; Duchesneau, 334; Seignelay, 337; Le Fèbre de la Barre, 337; De Meules, 337; De Denonville, 343; Champigny, 346; Engelran, 348. | |
| Critical Essay | 356 |
| Editorial Notes | 361 |
| Illustrations: Quebec Medal, 361; Plan of Attack on Quebec (1690), 362, 363; Canadian Soldier, 365. | |
| Autographs: Monseignat, 364; Frontenac, 364; William Phips, 364; John Walley, 364; Thomas Savage, 364; S. Davis, 364; Fitz-John Winthrop, 364; Philip Schuyler, 365; Ben. Fletcher, 365; De Courtemanche, 365; Colbert, 366. | |
| GENERAL ATLASES AND CHARTS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. The Editor | 369 |
| Illustrations: Title of Wytfliet’s Atlas, 370; Gerard Mercator, 371; Abraham Ortelius, 372; Mercator’s Mappemonde (1569), 373. | |
| Autographs: Gerardus Mercator, 371; Abraham Ortelius, 372. | |
| MAPS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY SHOWING CANADA. The Editor | 377 |
| Illustrations: Map of Molineaux (1600), 377; of Botero (1603), 378; Lescarbot’s Newfoundland (1609), 379; Map by Champlain (1612), 380, 381; (1613), 382; by Jacobsz (1621), 383; by Briggs (1625), 383; by Speed (1626), 384; by De Laet, 384; by Jannson, 385; by Visscher, 385; by Champlain (1632), 386, 387; by Dudley (1647), 388; by Creuxius (1660), 389; by Covens and Mortier, 390; by Gottfried (1655), 390; by Sanson (1656), 391; by Blaeu (1662), 391; in Ogilby’s America (1670), 392, 393; in Campanius (1702), 394. | |
| CHAPTER VIII. | |
| New Netherland, or the Dutch in North America. Berthold Fernow | 395 |
| Autographs: Peter Minuet, 398; Julian Van Rensselaer, 400; W. van Twiller, 401; P. Stuyvesant, 406; A. Colve, 409. | |
| Critical Essay | 409 |
| Illustrations: Ribero’s Map (1529), 413; Dutch Vessels (1618), 415; The Figurative Map (1616), 433; De Laet’s Map (1630), 436; Visscher’s Map, 438; Van der Donck’s Map (1656), 438. | |
| Autographs: Johan De Laet, 417; Adrian Van der Donck, 419; Johannes Megapolensis, 420; Isaac Jogues, 421; Cornelis Melyn, 425. | |
| Editorial Notes[ix] | 439 |
| Illustration: Map of New York and Vicinity (1666), 440. | |
| Autographs: Everhard Bogardus, 441; Willem Kieft, 441. | |
| CHAPTER IX. | |
| New Sweden, or the Swedes on the Delaware. Gregory B. Keen | 443 |
| Illustrations: Visscher’s Map (1651), 467; Trinity Fort, 473; Siege of Christina Fort, 480; Lindström’s Map (1654-55), 481; Map of Atlantic Colonies (Campanius), 485. | |
| Autographs: Willem Usselinx, 443; Gustavus Adolphus, 444; Axel Oxenstjerna, 444; S. Blommaert, 445; Peter Spiring, 445; Peter Minuit, 446; Clas Fleming, 447; Queen Christina, 448; Hendrick Huygen, 448; J. Beier, 449; Peter Hollender, Ridder, 449; Johan Printz, 452; Sven Schute, 454; Gregorious Van Dyck, 454; Peter Brahe, 458; Johan Papegåja, 458; A. Hudde, 461; Laurentz, 464; Hans Amundson, 465; Hans Kramer, 469; Gustaf Printz, 470; Erik Oxenstjerna, 471; Johan Rising, 471; Christer Bonde, 471; Thijssen Anckerhelm, 472; Peter Lindström, 472; Sven Höök, 475; Henrich von Elswich, 475; King Carl Gastaff, 477; Jöran Fleming, 477. | |
| Critical Essay | 488 |
| Illustrations: Title of Manifest und Vertragbrieff (1624), 489; Title of Campanius (1702), 492. | |
| INDEX | 503 |
INTRODUCTION.
PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA.
BY NATHANIEL S. SHALER,
Professor of Palæontology in Harvard University.
Part I.
PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA.
THE continents of the earth have two distinct types of form,—the one regular, symmetrical, triangular in outline; the other without these regularities of shape. To the first of these groups belong the continents of Africa and Australia of the Old World, and the two Americas of the New; to the second, the massive continent of Europe and Asia. Some have sought to reduce the continent of Asia to the same type as that of the other continents; but a glance at a map of the hemispheres will show how different is this Indo-European continent from the other land-masses.
These general features of the continents are not only of scientific interest; they are of the utmost importance to the history of man’s development upon these several lands. It is not without meaning, that, while man has existed for a great length of time upon all the continents, the only original civilizations that have been developed have been on the lands of the Indo-European continent. Working on several different lines of advance, several diverse races—Aryan, Semitic, Chinese, and perhaps others—have risen from the common plane of barbarism, and have created complicated social systems, languages, literatures, and arts; while on the four other continents, despite their great area, greater fertility, and wider range of physical conditions, no race has ever had a native development to be compared with that undergone by the several successful races of Asia and Europe.[1]
In this great Old-World continent there are many highly individualized areas, each separated from the rest of the continent by strong geographical barriers; it has a dozen[ii] or so of great peninsulas upon its seaboard, many great islands off its shores, and the interior of the land is divided into many separated regions by mountain ridges or by deserts. It is a land where man necessarily fell into variety, because of the isolation that the geography gave. If we look at the other continents,—namely, the Americas, Africa, and Australia,—we find that they want this varied and detailed structure. They each consist of a great triangular mass, with scanty subordinate divisions. In all of them put together there are not so many great peninsulas as there are in Europe. If we exclude those that are within the Arctic Circle, there are but few on the four regular continents, none of which compare in size or usefulness to man with the greater peninsulas of the Old World. The only one of value is that of Nova Scotia, in North America.
These regular continents are all in the form of triangles, with their apices pointing towards the southern pole. Near either long shore lie the principal mountain systems that give definition to the coast line. The middle portion of each continent is generally a region of plain, somewhat diversified by lesser mountain systems. Along either shore is a narrow fringe of plain land to the east and west of the main mountain chains. Near the northern part of the continent, and aiding to define the base of the triangle, there is another system of mountains having a general east and west course. With the exception of North America, none of these regular continents have seas inclosed within their areas,—such bodies of water as form so striking a feature in the Asiatic continent, which is indeed a land of mediterranean seas.
In a word, these continents are characteristically as simple as the Asiatic continent is varied. Their mass is undivided, and their organic or human histories are necessarily less diversified than in such a land-mass as Asia.
The continent of North America is, of all the triangular continents, the most nearly akin in its structure to the great Old-World land. In the first place, it is the only one of these continents that has the same general conditions of climate; then it has a far greater diversity of form than the similar masses of South America, Africa, and Australia. North America has several considerable seas inclosed within its limits or bordering upon its shores; its mountain systems are more varied in their disposition than in the other regular continents. So that in a way this continent in its structure lies intermediate between the Asiatic type and what is considered the normal form of continents.
Although this varied structure of the continent of North America makes it more fit for the uses of man than the continents of Africa, South America, and Australia, there are certain considerable disadvantages in its physical conditions. To show the relation of these evil and fortunate features, it will be necessary for us to consider the general geography of the continent somewhat in detail.
The point of first importance concerns the distribution of heat and moisture over the surface of the land; for on these features depends the fitness of the land for all forms of life. The influences which principally determine the climate of a continent come to it from the neighboring seas. The moisture arises there, and finds its way thence to the land; and the heat or coolness which modifies the land climate comes with it.
North America faces three oceans. On the north is the extremely cold Arctic Sea, mostly covered by enduring ice: it is the extreme coldness of this sea, and its ice-clad character near the continent of America, that in good part causes the great severity of its winters. Where the Arctic Sea lies against Europe and Asia it is partly warmed by the Gulf Stream, and so is not completely ice-bound even in winter; but that part of it which lies near the northern coast of America is ice-bound the whole year, and the winds that come from it are many degrees below those that come over open water.
Both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans send streams of warm water against the American coast. But the Gulf Stream has actually very little direct effect upon our climate; it only touches the coast about the Gulf of Mexico, where the temperature is naturally so high that its warming power is not felt. It then leaves our coast, to give its warmth to the shores of Europe and to the European part of the Arctic Ocean. The Pacific current corresponding to the Gulf Stream is feebler than the Atlantic current, and sends its tide of waters against the northwest shore of America. Its effects on that coast are very noticeable; but they are limited, by the geography of that shore, within narrow bounds. In the first place, the passage of Behring’s Strait is too small to permit its waters to have access to the Arctic Sea; then the high ranges of the Cordilleras fence off the interior of the continent, so that the warm winds that blow from the sea cannot penetrate far to the east. Confined to the shore, the heat of the Pacific Gulf Stream generates a large amount of fog; this fog shuts off the sun’s rays, and so lowers the temperature almost as much as the current itself serves to raise it.
The distribution of moisture over the surface of the continent is effected in much the same way as is the distribution of heat. The Gulf Stream gives an abundant rainfall to the States about the Gulf of Mexico lying to the north of that basin; its effects on the rainfall are seen even as far north as the New England States, but they have little effect to the west of the Mississippi River. The high mountains of the Cordilleras cut off the Pacific winds from the centre of the continent, so that very little of the water which flows down to the Gulf of Mexico or to the Atlantic is derived from the Pacific. From the general conditions thus rudely outlined the following arrangement of climates arises. The northern half of the continent is more completely under the dominion of the Arctic Sea than any part of Europe or Asia; the only parts of it fit for the use of civilized man are the northern watershed of the St. Lawrence, the valley of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, and the west-coast region as far north as Alaska. The rest of the northern part of the continent is practically barred out from the life of the race by the intensity of the winter cold, and by the brevity of the summer season.
South of this domain of northern cold, North America divides itself, by its climate, soil, and topographical reliefs, into the following fairly distinct regions: (1) The eastern lowlands lying between the shore and the Appalachian range; these shade southwardly into (2) the lowlands of the Gulf States, which is the only part of North America in the immediate control of the Gulf Stream. These Gulf lowlands pass northwardly into (3) the great plain of the Mississippi Valley. Between these lowlands of the centre of the continent and the Atlantic sea-coast lie (4) the table-lands and mountains[iv] of the Appalachian system. West of the Mississippi Valley lie (5) the region of the Cordilleras of North America; and finally on the western shore we find (6) a narrow region of low mountains, forming a slender fringe of shorelands.
The mountains of the Appalachian system are composed of two parallel series of elevations, an old eastern range of peaks which are worn down to mere shreds; so that in place of being as high as the Alps, as they once were, they have no peaks that rise seven thousand feet above the sea. This outer range is traceable from Newfoundland to Alabama; but it only rises above six thousand feet in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Black Mountains of North Carolina. In form these mountains are steep and rugged. Their steep sides hold the little untillable land that exists east of the Mississippi; their actual area is small, for the chain is very narrow, not exceeding a score or so of miles in width, except in the Carolinas and in the White Mountains, where it is somewhat wider. The total untillable area in this chain does not exceed twelve thousand square miles. West of this, the old Appalachian mountain system, separated from it by a broad, elevated, somewhat mountainous valley, lies the newer Alleghany range. This valley intermediate is one of the most fertile and admirably situated in the world; it extends from New Jersey to Georgia, with an average width of about forty miles and a length of about six hundred, having an area of over twenty thousand square miles. The Alleghany Mountains on the west are composed principally of round, symmetrical ridges, often like gigantic works of art, so uniform are their arches; none of them rise to more than five thousand feet above the sea, and their surfaces are so little broken that they generally afford tillable though as yet generally untilled land. Practically no part of this great range, which extends from near Albany to Alabama, is completely unfit for the uses of man, and it includes some of the most fertile valleys of America. The most important feature connected with this double mountain system of the Appalachians is the great area of table-lands which it upholds; these bordering uplands are found all around the mountain system. The greater part of the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio owe the considerable elevation of their surfaces to the table-land elevations bordering the Appalachian mountain system. Taken altogether, this mountain system is perhaps the finest region for the uses of man that the world affords; its great length, of more than fifteen hundred miles from north to south, gives it a range of climate such as would be had in Europe by a mountain chain extending from Copenhagen to Rome. The total area of this Appalachian district, mountains as well as table-lands, is about three hundred thousand square miles. This is an area equal to near thrice the surface of Great Britain.
The Appalachian table-lands fade gradually into the Mississippi Valley. Their distinct character continues to near the borders of that stream where it unites with the Ohio. As we come upon the table-land system of the Cordilleras, soon after we pass west of the Mississippi, this great valley may be considered as made up of the table-lands of two great mountain systems, with only a relatively small area of alluvial matter between the mouth of the Ohio and the Gulf. Unlike the Ganges, the Amazon, and most other great rivers of the first class, the Mississippi River has a small[v] delta section: not over twenty to thirty thousand square miles has this character. By far the greater part of the basin is really table-land, and is thus free from the evil of low countries to a degree equalled by no other very great river basin. Its valley is characteristically a table-land valley, with a general surface of rolling plain, varying from three hundred to five thousand feet above the level of the sea. Outside of the Cordilleras and the Appalachians, this valley has few mountain folds within its ample space. The absence of included mountain systems is almost as noteworthy a feature as the small amount of delta. There are only two or three patches of mountains that lie far beyond the limits of the great mountain systems of the east and west; and only one of these, the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas, is at any distance from the main ranges. This is an insignificant group of low hills having considerable geological but no geographical importance.
On the western border of the Mississippi Valley rise the vast ridges of the Cordilleras. This great mountain region is, next after the mountainous area of Central Asia, the most extensive region of great altitude in the world. From Mexico northward this system of mountains widens, until, in the parallel of forty degrees, it has a width of about one thousand miles. This system is made up of many ridges lying upon an elevated table-land. The valleys of the lesser streams are generally over seven thousand feet above the sea; the main peaks, to the number of many hundred, rise over twelve thousand feet above the sea level; many of them attain to about fourteen thousand feet of altitude. Its table-land extends east to near the Mississippi River. The great height and width of this mountain system produce a very marked effect upon the climate of the vast area that it incloses, and upon the country which lies within a thousand miles to the east of its mountain walls. The winds from the Pacific are to a great extent drained of their moisture in the western or Sierra Nevada section of these mountains, and have little moisture to give to the central and eastern chains; and when these winds emerge on to the western plains, they are as dry as those that blow over the Sahara.
Although these Cordilleras of North America afford access by their dislocations to a great supply of mineral substances, they are on the whole a curse to the continent. By the cold and dryness which their height entails, they reduce one third of the continent to sterility. Though here and there in their valleys we find oases of fertile land, and many regions of limited area may be made fertile by the use of irrigation, at least nineteen-twentieths of their lands are irretrievably barren. When their resources of precious metals are exhausted, as is likely to be the case within a hundred years, they will probably be to a great extent abandoned by man. Only the extreme northern section and a part of the central and border lands afford any other attractions to settlers than is found in their mineral wealth.
West of the Cordilleras of North America we have a narrow and mountainous coast region that is abundantly watered by the moisture from the Pacific, which penetrates some distance into the land over the lower ridges that border on them. Although this belt of fertile country cannot be compared in populationsustaining power with the Atlantic coast region, it is of great fertility, and has a climate of surpassing excellence.
On the borders of Mexico, within the limits of the United States, the mountains sink down to much less extreme heights, and the climate becomes less strenuous. This region is better fitted for the permanent occupation of man; but only a small part of the land is arable,—probably not one-tenth of its surface is or ever will be fit for the plough.
In Mexico proper we have a country that retains the character of the Cordilleras so far as its general elevation is concerned, but loses the lofty ridges which we find farther to the north. The loss of these barriers, combined with the narrowing of the space between the Atlantic and the Pacific waters, and its more southern position, increases the temperature and the rainfall; so that the fertility of the country augments in a rapid way as we go southwards, until finally in the isthmic part of the continent we have a tropical luxuriance of life. The lowland borders of the country gain upon the width of the table-land, until south of the Tehuantepec Isthmus the whole region is essentially unfit for the uses of our race.
The climate of North America south of the divide which separates the streams flowing toward the Arctic Circle from those entering the Atlantic south of Labrador may be said to resemble that of Europe in all important respects. The winters are far colder; but the summer seasons, which determine the usefulness of the soil to man, are as warm and quickening to plants as are those of the Old World. The more considerable cold of winter is a disadvantage, inasmuch as it limits the work of agriculture to a smaller part of the year, and requires a greater expense in the keeping of livestock. This is a considerable evil, especially in the regions north of the parallel of forty degrees; but the cold is not greater than in Northern Germany or in Scotland. There can be no doubt that the body and the mind receive certain advantages from the tonic quality of the winters which compensate for this loss.
Nearly the whole of North America that is within the limits of the United States receives some share of frost. This secures it against the permanent occupation of contagious fevers, which from time to time find their way to it from the tropics.
North America, east of the 100th meridian (west of Greenwich) and north of thirty-five degrees, has a soil which is on the whole superior to that of Europe. Practically the whole of this vast area is tillable, and the variety of crops is very great, considerably greater than that of Europe. West of the 100th meridian the rainfall diminishes rapidly, being especially limited in the summer season. The winters become longer and more extreme throughout all the region within or under the climatic influence of the Cordilleras; the soil is thinner, and over vast regions almost wanting. In certain exceptional tracts as far westward as the Saskatchewan, and at points along the line between the United States and Canada to the south of that valley, there are considerable areas of good soil; but, considered in a general way, we may exclude all the region between the 100th meridian and the Sierra Nevada range from the hope of any great agricultural future. Even should the rainfall be increased by tree-planting in those regions where trees may grow, the quality of the soil in this district, even where soil exists, is often too poor for any use. Yet in some parts it is very good, and if tree-planting should increase the rainfall, some limited areas will be tillable.
Next to the quality of the soil, the forest covering of a country does the most to determine its uses to man. Although the Western prairies have the temporary advantage that they are more readily brought under cultivation than wooded regions, the forests of a land contribute so largely to man’s well-being, that without them he can hardly maintain the structure of his civilization. The distribution of American forests is peculiar. All the Appalachian mountain system and the shore region between that system and the sea, as well as the Gulf border as far west as the Mississippi, were originally covered by the finest forest that has existed in the historical period, outside of the tropics. In the highlands south of Pennsylvania and in the western table-land north to the Great Lakes, this forest was generally of hard-wood or deciduous trees; on the shore-land and north of Pennsylvania in the highlands, the pines and other conifers held a larger share of the surface. The parts of the land bordering the Mississippi on the west, as far as the central regions of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, are forest clad. Michigan and portions of Wisconsin and Minnesota have broad areas of forests, but the cis-Mississippian States of Indiana and Illinois, and the trans-Mississippian country west to the Sierra Nevada, is only wooded, and that generally scantily, along the borders of the streams. Data for precise statements are yet wanting, but there is no doubt that this area is untimbered over about seven eighths of its surface, and the wood which exists has a relatively small value for constructive purposes. North of the regions described, except along the Pacific coast, where fine soft-wood forests extend from near San Francisco to Alaska, the forest growth rapidly diminishes in size, and therefore in value, the trees becoming short and gnarled, and the kinds of wood inferior. So that the region north of the St. Lawrence and of the Great Lakes is not to be regarded as having any very great value from the forest resources it affords. In estimating the value of North America to man, the limitation of good forests to the region east of the Mississippi must be regarded as a disadvantage which is likely to become more serious with the advance of time. Undoubtedly the timberless character of the prairie country for at least two hundred miles west of the Mississippi is in the main due to the constant burning over of the surface by the aborigines. It seems possible that these regions may yet be made to bear extensive woods. The elevated plains that lie farther to the west seem to have too little rainfall for the support of forests.
The rivers of a country are a result and a measure of its climate. The generally large rainfall of the eastern half of North America is shown by the number and size of its streams, which, area for area, are longer and more frequent than those of the Old World, except on the eastern coast of Asia. The heaviest rainfall and the greatest average of streams is found about the Gulf of Mexico and the southern part of the Appalachian district. Hence, northerly, westerly, and northwesterly, the rainfall decreases in amount. The average of the region east of the Mississippi and south of the Laurentian Mountains is probably about fifty inches per annum, somewhere near one-third more than that of Europe. North America, despite the very dry district of the Cordilleras, has an average rainfall about as great as that of Europe, and probably rather greater than Asia; indeed its water-supply is rather greater than the average for lands situated so far from the equator.
The rivers of America have been of very great importance in the settlement of the land. They afford more navigable waters than all the streams of Asia put together. Without the system of the Mississippi, which has more navigable waters than any river except the Amazons, it would not have been possible for America to have been brought under the control of colonies with such speed.
The elevation of the surface of North America, at least of its more habitable portions, is very favorable to man. A large part of its fertile soils lie from five hundred to fifteen hundred feet above the sea. It has a larger part of its surface within the limits of height that are best suited to the uses of man than Asia, but less than Europe has.
In considering the fitness of this continent for the use of European races, it will not do to overlook the mineral resources of the country. It may be stated in general terms that North America is richer in the mineral substances which have most contributed to the development of man than any other continent. The precious metals may be briefly dismissed. They occur constantly in two areas: the Cordilleran,—which, from Mexico, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, has doubtless furnished more gold and silver than any other one mountain district,—and the Appalachian region, which has given about sixty million dollars to the world’s store of gold. The precious mineral resources of the Cordilleran region are probably greater than those of any other continent. They have already exercised a very great influence on the commercial and political history of the continent, and are likely to become of more importance as time goes on, for at least half a century to come.
In the so-called baser, yet really more precious, metals this continent is even more fortunate. The supplies in the most important metal, iron, are very great,—certainly greater than in Europe. This metal is distributed with much uniformity over the country, there being scarcely a State except Florida that cannot claim some share of this metal. Especially rich in deposits of this metal are the States which share the Appalachian district, and the States of Missouri and Michigan. The Rocky Mountains also abound in iron ores, which there often contain a certain proportion of the precious metals; so that it is possible that the exploitation of the two metals may in time be carried on there together. There is probably no other continent that contains as large a share of iron,—the most important metal for the uses of man.
The other less used, but still commercially important, metals,—zinc, lead, and copper,—are found in considerable abundance in the Appalachian, the Laurentian, and the Cordilleran regions, especially in the last-named district. The only metal that is rarely found in North America, never yet in quantities of economic importance, is tin. Some specimens of bronze implements have been found in Mexico and Peru. They seem to afford the only evidence that the aboriginal peoples knew how to smelt any metals. Though the natives in the more northern districts used copper, they never discovered the art of smelting it.
Considering the useful metals as a whole, North America is proportionally richer than any other country that is well known to us.
The most considerable of the resources that the rocks of America offer, are found in the deposits of coal which they contain. These deposits are of vast extent, and[ix] are excellently fitted for the various uses of this fuel. While the other mineral resources of the country are most abundant in the region of the Cordilleras, the best of these deposits of coal are accumulated in and about the Appalachian district. At least nine tenths of the coal of America lies to the east of the Mississippi River. New England, New York, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana are the only States that are practically without coal; and even in New England, Rhode Island and the neighboring parts of Massachusetts have promising but essentially undeveloped fields. In the Cordilleran district coal deposits of small area occur; but the material is generally of poor quality, and is not likely to have a great utility.
As a whole, the resources in the way of subterranean fuel are far richer on this continent than in Europe. The area of coal-bearing rocks is at least eight times as great, and the deposits are much better disposed for working. No other continent save Asia is likely to develop anything like these coal resources; in China the coal area seems much larger than that of North America, but the richness of the field has not yet been fully proven: it is, however, undoubtedly great.
As the latent power of any modern society depends in an intimate way upon the buried stores of solar energy in coal-beds, the large area and good quality of the American coal-fields are very important advantages, and are full of promise for the economic future of its people.
Among the less important resources of the rocks in North America are the various classes of coal-oils which were first brought into commerce from its fields. Although these oils are not peculiar to North America, the small amount of disruption which its rocks have undergone have caused them to be retained in the subterranean store-houses; while in other countries, where the rocks have been more disturbed, these oils have been allowed to escape to the streams or the air. The areas where these oils occur on the continent are widely scattered. They are, however, principally confined to the Upper Ohio Valley; they are known to exist also in the Valley of the Cumberland River, in California, and in Western Canada north of Lake Erie. Besides these flowing oils there are immense areas of black shales, which yield large quantities of oil to distillation. These are not now of value, on account of the abundance of these flowing oils; but as in the immediate future these flowing wells are likely to cease their production, we may look to these shales for an almost indefinite supply of oil. In the Ohio Valley, extending eastward in Virginia into the valleys of the Atlantic streams, there is an area of over one hundred thousand square miles of this shale, which is on the average over one hundred and fifty feet thick, and yields about ten per cent of oil. In other words, it is equal to a lake of oil as large as New York and Pennsylvania, and fifteen feet deep,—a practically unlimited source of this material.
It is important to note that the sources of supply of phosphate and alkaline marls are very large. As these substances are subject to a constant waste in agriculture, and are the most important of all materials to the growth of the standard crops, the soil of America promises on the whole to be as enduring as is that of Europe, though, owing to the larger rainfall, it tends to waste away more rapidly.
The building stones of a country are of importance, inasmuch as they affect the constructions of a people; in such materials, suited for the purposes of simple strength and durability, the country is very well supplied, being quite as well off as Europe. On the other hand, the stones that lend themselves to the more decorative uses, the pure white or variegated marbles, are not nearly as rich as the countries about the Mediterranean, which is of all known regions the richest in decorative stones.
It is not possible within the limits of this chapter to support by sufficient details the foregoing statements concerning the physical conditions of America. The necessary brevity of the work has made it difficult to find place for all the points that should be presented; it may be fairly said, however, that the statements as made are to a very great extent matters of general information, which lie beyond the scope of debate, being well known to all students of American physiography.
Accepting the foregoing statements as true, it may be fairly owned that the general physical conditions of the American continent closely resemble those of Europe, and that in all the more important matters our race gained rather than lost by its transfer from the Old World to the New.
Part II.
EFFECT OF THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA ON MEN OF EUROPEAN ORIGIN.
In their organic life the continents of America have always stood somewhat apart from those of the Old World. This isolation is marked in every stage of their geological history. In each geological period they have many forms that never found their way to the other lands, and we fail to find there many species that are abundant in the continents of the Old World.
The same causes that kept the animal and vegetable life of the Americas distinct from Europe and Asia have served to keep those continents apart from the human history of the Old World. Something more than the relations that are patent on a map are necessary to a proper understanding of the long continued isolation of these continents.
In the first place, we may notice the fact that from the Old World the most approachable side of these continents lies on the west. Not only are the lands of the New and Old World there brought into close relations to each other, but the ocean streams of the North Pacific flow toward America. Moreover the North Pacific is a sea of a calmer temper than the North Atlantic, and the chance farers over its surface would be more likely to survive its perils. In the North Atlantic, over which alone the Aryan peoples could well have found their way to America, we have a wide sea,[xi] which is not only the stormiest in the world, but its currents set strongly against western-going ships, and the prevailing winds blow from the west.[2] If it had been intended that America should long remain unknown to the seafaring peoples of Semitic or Aryan race, it would not have been easy, within the compass of earthly conditions, to accomplish it in a more effective manner than it has been done by the present geography.
The result is that man, who doubtless originated in the Old World, early found his way to America by the Pacific; and all the so-called indigenous races known to us in the Americas seem to have closer relations to the peoples living in northern Asia than to those of any other country. It is pretty clear that none of the aboriginal American peoples have found their way to these continents by way of the Atlantic.
Although the access to the continent of North America is much more easily had upon its western side, and though all the early settlements were probably made that way, the configuration of the land is such that it is not possible to get easy access to the heart of the continent from the Pacific shore. So that although the Atlantic Ocean was most forbidding and difficult as a way to America, once passed, it gave the freest and best access to the body of the continent. In the west, the Cordilleras are a formidable bar to those who seek to enter the continent from the Pacific. None but a modern civilization would ever have forced its barriers of mountains and of deserts. An ancient civilization, if it had penetrated America from the west, would have recoiled from the labor of traversing this mountain system, that combines the difficulties of the Alps and the Sahara. If European emigration had found such a mountain system on the eastern face of the continent, the history of America would have been very different. Scarcely any other continent offers such easy ingress as does this continent to those who come to it from the Atlantic side. The valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, in a fashion also of the Susquehanna and the James, break through or pass around the low-coast mountains, and afford free ways into the whole of the interior that is attractive to European peoples. No part of the Alleghanian system presents any insuperable obstacles to those who seek to penetrate the inner lands. The whole of its surface is fit for human uses; there are neither deserts of sand nor of snow. The axe alone would open ways readily passable to men and horses. So that when the early settlers had passed the sea, all their formidable geographical difficulties were at an end,—with but little further toil the wide land lay open to them. I propose in the subsequent pages to give a sketch of the physical conditions of this continent, with reference to the transplanted civilization that has developed upon its soil. It will be impossible, within the limits of this essay, to do more than indicate these conditions in a very general way, for the details of the subject would constitute a work in itself. It will be most profitable for us first to glance at the general relations of climate and soil that are found in North America, so far as these features bear upon the history of the immigration it has received from Europe.
The climate of North America south of the Laurentian Mountains and east of the Rocky Mountains is much more like that of Europe than of any we find in the other continents. Although there are many points of difference, these variations lie well within the climatic range of Europe itself. On the south, Mexico may well be compared to Italy and Spain; in the southern parts of the Mississippi Valley we have conditions in general comparable to those of Lombardy and Central France; and in the northern portions of that area and along the sea-border we can find fair parallels for the conditions of Great Britain, Germany, or Scandinavia. As is well known, the range of temperature during the year varies much more in America than in Europe, but these variations in themselves are of small importance. Man in a direct way is not much affected by temperature; his elastic body, helped by his arts, may within certain limits neglect this element of climate. The real question is how far these temperatures affect the products of the soil upon which his civilization depends. In the case of most plants and domestic animals, their development depends more upon the summer temperature, or that of the spring season, than upon the winter climate. Now the summer climates of America are more like those of Europe than are those of the winter. So the new-won continent offered to man a chance to rear all the plants and animals which he had brought to domesticity in the Old World.
The general character of the soil of North America is closely comparable with that of Europe, yet it has certain noteworthy peculiarities. In the first place, there is a larger part of America which has been subjected to glacial action than what we find in Europe. In Europe, only the northern half of Great Britain, the Scandinavian peninsulas, a part of Northern Germany, and the region of Switzerland were under the surface of the glaciers during the last glacial period. In America, practically all the country north of the Susquehanna, and more than half of the States north of the Ohio, had their soils influenced by this ice period. The effects of glaciation on the soils of the region where it has acted are important. In the first place, the soils thus produced are generally clayey and of a rather stubborn nature, demanding much care and labor to bring them into a shape for the plough. The surface is usually thickly covered with stones, which have to be removed before the plough can be driven. I have estimated that not less than an average of thirty days’ labor has been given to each acre of New England soil to put it into arable condition after the forest has been removed; nearly as much labor has to be given to removing the forest and undergrowth: so that each cultivated acre in this glacial region requires about two months’ labor before it is in shape for effective tillage.[3] When so prepared, the soils of glaciated districts are of a very even fertility. They hold the same character over wide areas, and their constitution is the same to great depths. Though never of the highest order of fertility, they remain for centuries constant in their power. I have never seen a worn-out field of this sort. Another peculiarity of the American soils is the relatively[xiii] large area of limestone lands which the country affords. America abounds in deposits of this nature, which produce soils of the first quality, extremely well fitted to the production of grass and grains. Although statistical information is not to be obtained on such a matter, I have no doubt, after a pretty close scrutiny of both America and Europe, that the original fertility of America was greater than that of Europe; but that, on the whole, the regions first settled by Europeans were much more difficult to subdue than the best lands of Central and Southern Europe had been.[4]
The foregoing statement needs the following qualification: Owing to the relative dryness and heat of the American summer, the forests are not so swampy as they are in Northern Europe, and morasses are generally absent. It required many centuries of continued labor to bring the surface of Northern Germany, Northern France, and of Britain into conditions fit for tillage.
Next to deserts and snowy mountains, swamps are the greatest barriers to the movements of man. If the reader will follow the interesting account of the Saxon Conquest given in Mr. Green’s volume on The Making of England, he will see how the tracts of marsh and marshy forest served for many centuries to limit the work of subjugation. In America there are no extensive bogs or wet forests in the upland district, south of the St. Lawrence, except in Maine and in the British Provinces. In all other districts fire or the axe can easily bring the surface into a shape fit for cultivation. In taking an account of the physical conditions which formed the subjugation of North America by European colonies, we must give a large place to this absence of upland swamps and the dryness of the forests, which prevented the growth of peaty matter within their bounds.
The success of the first settlements in America was also greatly aided by the fact that the continent afforded them a new and cheaper source of bread, in the maize or Indian corn which was everywhere used by the aborigines of America. It is difficult to convey an adequate impression of the importance of this grain in the early history of America. In the first place, it yields not less than twice the amount of food per acre of tilled land, with much less labor than is required for an acre of small grains; it is far less dependent on the changes of seasons; the yield is much more uniform than that of the old European grains; the harvest need not be made at such a particular season; the crops may with little loss be allowed to remain ungathered for weeks after the grain is ripe; the stalks of the grain need not be touched in the harvesting, the ears alone being gathered; these stalks are of greater value for forage than is the straw of wheat and other similar grains. Probably the greatest advantage of all that this beneficent plant afforded to the early settlers was the way in which it could be planted without ploughing, amid the standing forest trees which had only been deadened by having their bark stripped away by the axe. This rough method of tillage was unknown among the peoples of the Old World. None of their cultivated plants were[xiv] suited to it; but the maize admitted of such rude tillage. The aborigines, with no other implements than stone axes and a sort of spade armed also with stone, would kill the forest trees by girdling or cutting away a strip around the bark. This admitted the light to the soil. Then breaking up patches of earth, they planted the grains of maize among the standing trees; its strong roots readily penetrated deep into the soil, and the strong tops fought their way to the light with a vigor which few plants possess. The grain was ready for domestic use within three months from the time of planting, and in four months it was ready for the harvest.
The beginnings in civilization which the aborigines of this country had made, rested on this crop and on the pumpkin, which seems to have been cultivated with it by the savages, as it still is by those who inherited their lands and their methods of tillage. The European colonists almost everywhere and at once adopted this crop and the method of tillage which the Indians used. Maize-fields, with pumpkin-vines in the interspaces of the plants, became for many years the prevailing, indeed almost the only, crop throughout the northern part of America. It is hardly too much to say, that, but for these American plants and the American method of tilling them, it would have been decidedly more difficult to have fixed the early colonies on this shore.
Another American plant has had an important influence on the history of American commerce, though it did not aid in the settlement of the country,—tobacco. That singular gift of the New World to the Old quickly gave the basis of a great export to the colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina; it alone enabled the agriculture of the Southern colonies to outgrow in wealth those which were planted in more northern soil. To this crop, which demands much manual labor of an unskilled kind, and rewards it well, we owe the rapid development of African slavery. It is doubtful if this system of slavery would ever have flourished if America had been limited in its crops to those plants which the settlers brought from the Old World. Although African slavery existed for a time in the States north of the tobacco region, it died away in them even before the humanitarian sentiments of modern times could have aided in its destruction; it was the profitable nature of tobacco crops which fixed this institution on our soil, as it was the great extension of cotton culture which made this system take on its overpowering growth during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Another interesting effect of the conditions of tillage which met the early settlers upon this soil depends upon the peculiar distribution of forests in North America. All those regions which were first occupied by European peoples were covered by very dense forests. To clear these woods away required not less than thirty days’ labor to each acre of land. In the glaciated districts, as before remarked, this labor of preparation was nearly doubled. The result was that the area of tillage only slowly expanded as the population grew denser, and the surplusage of grain for export was small during the first two centuries. When in the nineteenth century the progress westward suddenly brought the people upon the open lands of the prairies, the extension of tillage went on with far greater celerity. We are now in the midst of the great revolution that these easily won and very fertile lands are making in the affairs of the world.[xv] For the first time in human history, a highly skilled people have suddenly come into possession of a vast and fertile area which stands ready for tillage without the labor that is necessary to prepare forest lands for the plough. They are thus able to flood the grain-markets of the world with food derived from lands which represent no other labor beyond tillage except that involved in constructing railways for the exportation of their products. This enables the people of the Western plains to compete with countries where the land represents a great expenditure of labor in overcoming the natural barriers to the cultivation of the soil.
There are many lesser peculiarities connected with the soils of North America that have had considerable influence upon the history of the people; the most essential fact is, however, that the climatic conditions of this continent are such that all the important European products, except the olive, will flourish over a wide part of its surface. So that the peoples who come to it from any part of Europe find a climate not essentially different from their own, where the plants and animals on which their civilization rested would flourish as well as in their own home.[5]
We may note also that the climate of North America brought Europeans in contact with no new diseases. North of the Gulf of Mexico the maladies of man were not increased by the transportation from Europe. It is difficult to arrive at a satisfactory determination concerning the effect of American conditions upon the peoples who have come from Europe to live a life of many generations upon its soil. Much has been said in a desultory way upon this subject, but little that has any very clear scientific value. The problem is a very complicated one. In the first place it is very difficult, if not impossible, to separate the effects of climate from those brought about by a diversity of the social conditions, such as habits of labor, of food, etc. Moreover, the problem is further complicated by the fact that there has been a constant influx of folk into America from various parts of Europe, so that in most parts of the country there has been a constant admixture of the old blood and the new.
After reviewing the sources of information, I am convinced that the following facts may be regarded as established: The American people are no smaller in size than are the peoples in Europe from which they are derived; they are at least as long-lived; their capacity to withstand fatigue, wounds, etc. is at least as great as that of any European people; the average of physical beauty is probably quite as good as it is among an equal population in the Old World; the fecundity of the people is not diminished. The compass of this essay will not permit me to enter into the details necessary to defend these propositions as they might be defended. I will, however, show certain facts which seem to support them. First, as regards the physical proportions[xvi] of the American people. By far the largest collections of accurate measurements that have ever been made of men were made by the officers of the United States Sanitary Commission during the late Civil War. These statistics have been carefully tabulated by Dr. B. A. Gould, the distinguished astronomer. From the results reached by him, it is plain that the average dimensions of these troops were as good as those of any European army; while the men from those States where the population had been longest separated from the mother country were on the whole the best formed of all.[6]
The statistics of the life-insurance companies make it clear that the death-rate is not higher in America among the classes that insure than in England. I am credibly informed that American companies expect a longer life among their clients than the English tables of mortality assume.
The endurance of fatigue and wounds in armies has been proved by our Civil War to be as good as that of the best English or Continental troops. Such forced marches as that of Buell to the relief of the overwhelmed troops at Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh,—where the men marched thirty-five miles without rest, and at once entered upon a contest which checked a victorious army,—is proof enough of the physical and moral endurance of the people. The extraordinary percentage of seriously wounded men that recovered during this war,—a proportion without parallel in European armies,—can[xvii] only be attributed to the innate vigor of the men, and not to any superiority in the treatment they received. The distinguished physiologist, Dr. Brown-Séquard, assures me that the American body, be it that of man or beast, is more enduring of wounds than the European; that to make a given impression upon the body of a creature in America it is necessary to inflict severer wounds than it would be to produce the same effect on a creature of the same species in Europe. His opportunities for forming an opinion on this subject have been singularly great, so that the assertion seems to me very important. That the fecundity of the population is not on the whole diminishing, is sufficiently shown by the statistics of the country. In the matter of physical beauty, the condition of the American people cannot, of course, be made a matter of statistics. The testimony of all intelligent travellers is to the effect that the forms of the people have lost nothing of their distinguished inheritance of beauty from their ancestors. The face is certainly no less intellectual in its type than that of the Teutonic peoples of the Old World, while the body is, though perhaps of a less massive mould, without evident marks of less symmetry.
Perhaps the best assurance we obtain concerning the fitness of North America for the long-continued residence of Teutonic people may be derived from the consideration of the history of the two American settlements that have remained for about two hundred years without considerable admixture of new European blood. These are the English settlement in Virginia and the French in the region of the St. Lawrence; both these populations have been upon the soil for about two hundred years, with but little addition from their mother countries. In Virginia, essentially the whole of the white blood is English; the only mixture of any moment is from the Pennsylvania Germans, a people of kindred race, and equally long upon the soil. I believe that not less than ninety-five per cent of the white blood,—if I may be allowed this form of expression,—is derived from British soil. We have no statistics concerning the bodily condition of the Virginian people which will enable us to compare them with those of other States. The few recruits in the Federal army who were measured by the Sanitary Commission were mainly from the poorer classes, the oppressed “poor whites,” and are not a fair index of the physical condition of the people of this State. We have only the fact that the Confederate army of northern Virginia, composed in the main of the small farmers of the commonwealth, fought, under Lee and Jackson, a long, stubborn, losing fight, as well as any other men of the race have done. No other test of vigor is so perfect as that which such a struggle gives. Where a people make such men as Jackson, and such men as made Jackson’s career possible, we may be sure that they are not in their decadence.
In Kentucky and Tennessee we have little else than Virginia blood and that of northwestern Carolina, which was derived from Virginia, with the exception of the very localized German settlements along the Ohio River: practically the whole of the white agricultural population of these States is of British blood that has been on this soil for about two hundred years. I do not believe there is any other body of folk of as purely English stock as this white population of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee: it amounts to almost three millions of people, and there is scarcely any admixture of other blood. In Virginia, as before remarked, there are no statistics to show just[xviii] what the physical conditions of the population are; but in Kentucky and Tennessee a large number of men who were born upon the soil were measured by the Sanitary Commission. The results were as follows: the troops from Kentucky and Tennessee were larger than those from any other State; in height, girth of chest, and size of head, they were of remarkable proportions. The men of no European army exceed them in size, though some picked bodies of troops are equally large. We must remember also that these men were not selected from the body of the people, as European armies are, but that they represent the State in arms, very few being rejected for disability. We must also remember that the men from the most fertile parts of these States, those parts which have the reputation of breeding the largest men, went into the Confederate army; while the Union troops were principally recruited from the poorer districts, where the people suffer somewhat from the want of sufficient variety in their food. The fighting quality of these men is well shown by the history of a Kentucky brigade in the Confederate army in the campaign near Atlanta in 1864, in which the brigade, during four months of very active service, received more wounds than it had men, and not over ten men were unaccounted for at the end of the campaign.[7] The goodness of this service is probably not exceptional; it has for us, however, the especial interest that these men were the product of six generations of American life,—showing as well as possible that the physical and moral conditions of life upon this continent are not calculated to depreciate the important inheritances of the race.
Although it is only a part of the problem, it is well to notice that the death-rate in these States of old American blood is singularly low, and the number of very aged people who retain their faculties to an advanced age very great. The census of 1870 gave the death-rate of Kentucky at about eleven in a thousand,—a number small almost beyond belief. It should also be noticed that the emigration from Kentucky has for fifty years or more been very large, relatively almost as heavy as that from Massachusetts. It is a well-known fact, which is made most evident by the statistics of the Sanitary Commission above referred to, that the larger and stronger citizens of a State are more apt to emigrate than those of weaker frame, the result being that the population left behind is deprived of its most vigorous blood.
The Canadian-French population presents us with another instance in which a European people long upon the soil, and without recent additions of blood from the native country, have maintained themselves unharmed amid conditions of considerable difficulty. This French population has been upon the soil for about as long as that of Virginia; that is to say, for two centuries and more. I have been unable to find any statistics concerning the numbers brought as colonists to America. I have questioned various students on this matter, and have come to the conclusion that the original number[mxix] did not exceed twenty-five thousand souls. This people has not perceptibly intermingled with those of other blood, so that its separate career can be traced with less difficulty than that of any other people. Race-hatreds, differences of language, of religion, and of customs have kept them apart from their neighbors in a fashion that is more European than American. This has been a great disadvantage to the race, for they have remained in a state of subordination as great as that in which the Africans of the Southern States now are. No other folk of European origin within the British Empire have remained so burdened by disabilities of all kinds as this remarkable people. The soil with which they have to deal is much more difficult than the average of America; most of it lies beyond the limits where Indian corn will grow, and much of it will scarcely nourish the hardier small grains. Despite the material difficulties of their position, their general illiteracy and intensified provincialism, this people have shown some very vigorous qualities; they have more than doubled in numbers in each generation; they are vigorous, exceedingly industrious, and have much mechanical tact. In New England they hold their own in the struggle with the native, so that it seems likely that the States of that district may soon be in good part peopled by the folk of this race. As near as I can ascertain, these Canadian-French of pure blood in Canada and the United States amount to about two and a half millions; if this be the case, the population has more than doubled each thirty years since their arrival upon American soil,—which is about as rapid a rate of increase as can be found among any people in the world, perhaps only surpassed by the population of Virginia; which commonwealth, starting with an original English emigration which could not have exceeded one hundred thousand, counts at the present day not less than six million descendants, or about twice as many as there would be if each generation only doubled the numbers of the preceding.
There is yet another separate people on the American soil which has been here for about six generations without any addition from abroad: these are the so-called Pennsylvanian Germans. I shall not take time to do more than mention them, for they, without recent European admixture, show the same evidences of continued vigor that is presented by the Virginian British and the Canadian French blood. Their progeny are to be counted by millions; and though they, like the Canadian French, have shown as yet little evidence of intellectual capacity, this may be explained by the extreme isolation that their language and customs have forced upon them.
Imperfectly as I have been able to present this important series of facts, it is enough to make it clear that they are mistaken who think that the recent emigrations from Europe have helped to maintain the vigor of the American people. It seems more likely that, so far from adding to the strength of the older stocks, the newer comers, mostly of a lower kind of folk than the original settlers, have served rather to hinder than to help the progress of the population which came with the original colonies.
These considerations may be extended, by those who care to do so, by a study of several other isolated peoples in this country,—the German colonies of Texas, the Swiss of Tennessee, and several others; all of which have prospered, and all of which have gone to prove that the climate of North America is singularly well fitted for the[xx] use of Northern Europeans. No sufficiently large colonies of Italians, Spanish, or Portuguese have ever been planted within the limits of the present United States to determine the fitness of its conditions for the peoples of those States. There is no reason, however, to believe that they would not have succeeded on this soil if fortune had brought them here.
It is worth while to notice the fact that the European domesticated animals have without exception prospered on American soil. The seven really domesticated mammals and the half-dozen birds of our barnyards have remained essentially unchanged in their proportions, longevity, and fitness for the uses of man. As there can be no moral influences bearing upon these creatures, they afford a strong proof of the essential identity of the physical conditions of the two continents. Evidence of the same sort, though less complete, is afforded by the history of European domesticated plants on our soil. Speaking generally, we may say that with trifling exceptions they all do as well or better here than on their own ground. With the same care, wheat, rye, oats, barley, etc., give the same returns as in their native countries.
Imperfect as this résumé is, it will make it clear that we are justified in believing that the climate and other physical conditions of central North America is as favorable to the development of men and animals of European races as their own country. Those who would see how important this point is to the history of our race should consider the fact that the empire of India has proved utterly unfit for the uses of Europeans, though other branches of the Aryan race have attained a high degree of development within its limits.
I next propose to consider the especial physical features of the continent with reference to several settlements that were made upon it, the extent to which the geography and the local conditions of soil, climate, etc. have affected the fate of the several colonies planted on the eastern shore of North America north of Mexico.
Chance rather than choice determined the position of the several colonies that were planted on the American soil. So little was known of the natural conditions of the continent, or even of its shore geography, and the little that had been discovered was so unknown to navigators in general, that it was not possible to exercise much discretion in the placing of the first settlers in the New World. It happened that in this lottery the central parts of the American continent fell to the English people; while the French, by one chance and another, came into possession of two parts of the coast separated by over two thousand miles of shore. It will be plain from the map that these two positions were essentially the keys to the continent. The access to the interior of the continent by natural water-ways is by two lines,—on the north by the St. Lawrence system of lakes and rivers; on the south by the Mississippi system of rivers, which practically connects with the St. Lawrence system. Fortune, in giving France the control of these two great avenues, offered her the mastery of the whole of its vast domain. We have only to consider the part that the pathway of the Rhine played in the history of mediæval trade in Europe, to understand how valuable these lines would have been until railways and canals had come to compete with water-ways-.
The only long-continued and systematic effort that France made to perpetuate[xxi] her power in North America was made through the Valley of the St. Lawrence. Let us, therefore, consider the physical conditions of this valley, and their influence upon the colonies that were planted there. The St. Lawrence River system and the valley it drains is most peculiar. It is, indeed, without its like in all the world. At the mouth of the main river we have a set of rugged islands and peninsulas enclosing an estuarine sea, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which gradually narrows in the course of three hundred miles to the channel of the great river. Ascending this river, the early explorers found a wonderful set of rapids; then a lake larger than any sheet of fresh water that had been seen by Europeans; then the swift channel of the Niagara River with its great Falls; then, above, a series of four great lakes, giving a real Mediterranean of fresh water. On the north was a rude and unpromising country, rising upward into low but sterile and rugged mountains; but on the south the natural boundaries of the valley about the Great Lakes hardly exist: indeed, it was possible in the time of rains for small boats to pass directly from Lake Michigan to the waters of the Mississippi without a portage. It is this absence of the southern bounding wall which constitutes the most peculiar feature in this region of geographical surprises.
Viewed on the map, this system of waters seems to afford the natural avenue to the heart of the continent; and when its geography became known, we may well imagine that the French believed that they had here the way to secure their dominion over it. Not only did it afford a convenient water-way to the heart of the continent, but also, by way of Lake Champlain, an easy access to the rear of the New-England settlements and to the Hudson. Thus it not only flanked and turned the English settlements of the whole continent, but it made the New-England position appear almost untenable.
Experience, however, showed that there were certain grave disadvantages attending the navigation of these waters. The river itself is not readily accessible to large vessels beyond the tidal belt. Its rapids and the Falls of Niagara are very great obstacles to its use,—barriers which were never overcome during the French occupation of the country. The Great Lakes are stormy seas, with scarcely a natural harbor, requiring for their navigation even more seamanship than do the open waters of the Atlantic. Moreover, these channels are frozen for five months in the year, so that all movements made by them are limited to about half the year.
Despite these disadvantages, the St. Lawrence system doubtless gave the French a vast advantage in the race for empire on this continent. When we consider that for a long time they had the control of the Mississippi as well, it seems surprising that their power was ever broken. The facilities which this water system gave to military movements that took the whole of the English colonies in the rear was not the sole advantage it afforded its first European possessors; though, on the other hand, it must be remembered that the strategic movements of the English were on interior lines, if largely indeed without water-ways. It was the key to the best of the fur-trade country, and to the best fisheries in America. For the first hundred years after the settlement of this country, furs and fish were the only exports of value from the region north of Maryland. The French settlements gave them control of the best fishery grounds, as also the trade with the Indians, who occupied the best[xxii] country for peltries in the world. As soon as the English came to possess it, this trade was greatly developed. Along with these advantages, the country had many evils that made the beginnings of colonies a matter of great labor and difficulty. The soil is made up of drift, and requires a great amount of labor to fit it for tillage. The greater part of it is north of the maize belt, so that this cheap and highly nutritious food was denied to the people. I have already said something concerning the singular advantages that this grain had for the pioneer in the American forests. I am inclined to believe that the want of this plant in the French colonies was one cause of their slow development. Another hindrance lay in the very long and severe winters. This limited the time which could be given to the tillage of land, and made the keeping of domesticated animals a matter of great difficulty. Something, too, must be attributed to the character of the colonists and to the nature of the land-tenure in this region. Their system of immigration gave a smaller proportion of natural leaders to the people, so that the colony always remained in a closer dependence on the mother country. There was always an absence of the initiative power which so marked the English colonies. The seigniorial systems of Europe have never prospered in America, and the early experiments in founding colonies by the mere exportation of men to this soil were failures even when the men were of English blood. The efforts to colonize the seaboard region of North Carolina without giving the fee of the land to the people, and without care in the selection of the colonists, resulted in a failure even more complete than that of the Canadian colonies. The Pamlico-Sound settlements showed so little military power that they were incapable of protecting themselves against the savages of the country, and without the help of Virginia they would have been annihilated. The French-Canadian colonists have always showed this incapacity to act for themselves, which cannot be attributed to physical conditions. As compared with the New-England colonists, with whom they came most in contact, they represented a colonizing scheme based on trading-posts; while their neighbors established and fought for homes in the English sense. The struggle for existence was in the English settler met with a vigor which grew out of political and religious convictions; in the Frenchman it was endured for lucrative trade. Anything higher was left to the missionary, who, while he led the pioneer life, failed in turn to develop it.
We may sum up what is to be said of the St. Lawrence Valley, that it is the best inlet to the continent north of the Mississippi River, affording an easy way to the heart of the continent for six months of the year. The valley is peculiar in the fact that it has no distinct southern boundary, and that a large part of its area is occupied by a system of fresh-water lakes. These sheets of water and this absence of a strong ridge separating this basin from the water-sheds which lie to the south of it would, if the French had been strong in a military sense, have given them an advantage in the struggle for the continent; but as long as this valley was held by a less powerful people than their neighbors on the south, these geographical features would no longer be advantageous to its occupiers.
The soil and climate of the St. Lawrence Valley are both rather against the rapid development of agriculture, requiring far more labor to make them arable, and giving[xxiii] a more limited return than do the more southern soils; so that, despite the very great advantage which came from the peculiarly open nature of this path into the interior of the continent, the French did not succeed in maintaining themselves there until its great military advantages could be turned to profit.
At the present time the existence of railways has greatly lessened the value of geography as a factor in military movements, and the St. Lawrence, closed as it is for nearly half a year by ice, has no longer any military importance. As it is, we may be surprised that it has not played a more important part in the military history of the continent than it has done. We cannot avoid the conclusion that if the conditions had been reversed, and the English settlements had occupied the Valley of the St. Lawrence, and the French colonies the country to the southward, the English colonists would have made use of its advantages in a more effective way.
The settlements at the mouth of the Mississippi did not come into the hands of the French until a late day; but the use they made of this, the easiest navigated of all the great American rivers, was considerable. These settlements were pushed up the valley of the main stream and its greater tributaries, until they practically controlled the larger part of the shores of the main waters. The swift current of the Mississippi and its tributaries made ascending navigation difficult and costly. It was, in fact, only with small cargoes in little boats propelled by poles, or with the aid of sails when the winds favored, that the stream could be mounted. The effective navigation was downward towards the mouth. By way of the Mississippi the French power worked into the centre of the continent far more rapidly than by the St. Lawrence route; indeed, the advance was so rapid that if these Gallic settlements had not been overwhelmed by the stronger tide of the English people getting across the Alleghanies, a few years would have given them a chance to fix their institutions and population in this valley.
Throughout their efforts in North America, the French showed a capacity for understanding the large questions of political geography, a genius for exploration, and a talent for making use of its results, or guiding their way to dominion, that is in singular contrast with the blundering processes of their English rivals. They seem to have understood the possibilities of the Mississippi Valley a century and a half before the English began to understand them. They planted a system of posts and laid out lines for commerce through this region; they strove to organize the natives into civilized communities; they did all that the conditions permitted to achieve success. Their failure must be attributed to the want of colonists, to the essential irreclaimableness of the American savage, and to the want of a basis for extended commerce in this country. There were no precious metals to tempt men into this wilderness, and none of the fancy for life or for lands among the home people, that wandering instinct which has been the basis of all the imperial power of the English race. Thus a most cleverly devised scheme of continental occupation, which was admirably well adapted to the physical conditions of the country, never came near to success. It fell beneath the clumsy power of another race that had the capacity for fixing itself firmly in new lands, and that grew without distinct plan until it came to possess it altogether.
The British settlements on the American coast were not very well placed for other than the immediate needs that led to their planting. They did not hold any one of[xxiv] the three water-ways which led from the coast into the interior of the continent, as we have seen the French obtained control of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and as is well known the Dutch possession of the Hudson, which constituted the third and least complete of the water-ways into the interior of the continent.
As regards their physical conditions, the original English colonies are divisible into three groups,—those of New England; those of the Chesapeake and Delaware district, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and the central part of North Carolina; and those on the coast region of the Carolinas. Each of these regions has its proper physical characters, which have had special effects upon their early history. In New England we have a shore-line that affords an excellent system of harbors for craft of all sizes, and a sea that abounds in fish. The land has a rugged surface made up of old mountain folds, which have been worn down to their roots by the sea and by the glaciers of many ice periods. There are no extended plains, and where small patches of level land occur, as along the sea, there they are mostly of a rather barren and sandy character. The remainder of the surface is very irregular, and nearly one half of it is either too steep for tillage or consists of exposed rocks. The soil is generally of clay, and was originally covered almost everywhere with closely sown boulders that had to be removed before the plough could do its work. The rivers are mostly small, and from their numerous rapids not navigable to any great distance from the sea, and none of their valleys afford natural ways to the interior of the continent. In general structure this region is an isolated mass separated from the body of the continent by the high ridges of the Green Mountains and the Berkshire Hills, as well as by the deep valley in which lie the Hudson and Lake Champlain. The climate is rigorous, only less so than that of Canada. There are not more than seven months for agricultural labor.
The New-England district, including therein what we may term the Acadian Peninsula of North America, or all east of Lake Champlain and the Hudson and south of the St. Lawrence, is more like Northern Europe than any other part of America.
Nature does not give with free hands in this region, yet it offered some advantages to the early settlers. The general stubbornness of the soil made the coast Indians few in number, while its isolation secured it from the more powerful tribes of the West. The swift rivers afforded abundant water-power, that was early turned to use, and in time became the most valuable possession that the land afforded. The climate, though strenuous, was not unwholesome, and its severity gave protection against the malarial fevers which have so hindered the growth of settlements in more southern regions. Maize and pumpkins could be raised over a large part of its surface, and afforded cheap and wholesome food with little labor. The rate of gain upon the primeval forest was at first very slow; none of the products of the soil, except in a few instances its timber, had at first any value for exportation. The only surplusage was found in the products of the sea. In time the demand for food from the West Indian Islands made it somewhat profitable to export grain. Practically, however, these colonies grew without important help from any foreign commerce awakened by the products of their soil. Their considerable foreign trade grew finally upon exchanges,[xxv] or on the products of the sea-fisheries and whaling. Even the trade in furs, which was so important a feature in the French possessions, never amounted to an important commerce in New England. The aborigines were not so generally engaged in hunting, nor were the rivers of New England ever very rich in valuable fur-bearing species. The most we can say of New England is, that it offered a chance for a vigorous race to found in safety colonies that should get their power out of their own toil, with little help from fortune. It was very badly placed for the occupancy of a people who were to use it as a vantage-ground whence to secure control over the inner parts of the continent. But for the modern improvement in commercial ways, the isolation of this section from the other parts of the continent would have kept it from ever attaining the importance in American life which now belongs to it.
The settlements that were made along the Hudson were, as regards their position, much better placed than were those in New England. The valley of this stream is, as is well known to geologists, a part of the great mountain trough separating from the newer Alleghanian system on the west the old mountain system of the Appalachians, which, known by the separate names of the Green Mountains, Berkshire Hills, South Mountains, Blue Ridge, and Black Mountains, stretches from the St. Lawrence to the northern part of Georgia. In the Hudson district the Appalachian or eastern wall of the valley is known as the Berkshire Hills and the Green Mountains, while the western or Alleghanian wall is formed by the Catskill Mountains and their northern continuation in the Hilderberg Hills. On the south the Appalachian wall falls away, allowing the stream a wide passage to the sea; on the northwestern side the Catskills decline, opening the wide passage through which flows the Mohawk out of the broad fertile upland valley which it drains. It appears likely that the Mohawk Valley for a while in recent geological times afforded a passage of the waters of Lake Ontario to the channel of the Hudson. This will serve to show how easy the passage is between the Hudson Valley and the heart of the continent. Save that it is not a water-way, this valley affords, through the plain of the Mohawk, the most perfect passage through the long mountain line of the Alleghanies. Before this passage could have any importance to its first European owners, it fell into the hands of the English settlers. The fertility of this valley of the Hudson and Mohawk is far greater than that of New England. A larger portion of the land is arable, and it is generally more fertile than that of the region to the east. The underlying rock of the country is generally charged with lime, which assures a better soil for grain crops than those derived from the more argillaceous formations of New England. The Mohawk is for its size perhaps the most fertile valley in America. The climate of this district is on the whole more severe than that of New England, but the summer temperature admits the cultivation of all the crops of the Northern States.
Though from Holland, the original settlers of the Hudson Valley were by race and motives so closely akin to the English settlers to the north and south of them that a perfect fusion has taken place. The Dutch language is dead save in the mouths of a few aged people, and of their institutions nothing has remained.[8]
The most striking contrast between the physical conditions of the New York colony and those of New England is its relative isolation from the sea. Staten Island and Long Island are strictly maritime; the rest is almost continental in its relations.
South of New York the conditions of the colonists as regards agriculture were very different from what they were north of that point. To the north the soil is altogether the work of the glacial period. It is on this account stony and hard to bring into cultivation, as before described; but when once rendered arable, it is very enduring, changing little with centuries of cropping. South of this point the soil is derived from the rocks which lie below it, save just along the sea and the streams. The decayed rock that happens to lie just beneath the surface produces a fertile or an infertile earth, varied in quality according as the rocks. On the whole it is less enduring than are the soils of New England, though it is much easier to bring it into an arable state. It also differs from glacial soil in the fact that there is an absolute dependence of the qualities it possesses upon the subjacent rock. When that changes, the soil at once undergoes a corresponding alteration. In certain regions it may be more fertile than any glacial soil ever is; again, its infertility may be extreme, as, for instance, when the underlying rocks are sandstones containing little organic matter.
In this southern belt the region near the shore is rather malarial. The soil there is sandy, and of a little enduring nature, and the drainage is generally bad. Next within this line we have the fringe of higher country which lies to the east of the Blue Ridge. This consists of a series of rolling plains, generally elevated four or five hundred feet above the sea. Near the Blue Ridge it is changed into a rather hilly district, with several ranges of detached mountains upon its surface; to the east it gradually declines into the plain which borders the sea. Within the Blue Ridge it has the steep walls of the old granite mountains, which, inconspicuous in New Jersey, increase in Pennsylvania to important hills, become low mountains of picturesque form in Virginia, and finally in North and South Carolina attain the highest elevation of any land in eastern North America. This mountain range widens as it increases in height, and the plains that border it on the east grow also in height and width as we go to the southward in Virginia. All this section is composed of granite and other ancient rocks, which by their decay afford a very good soil. Beyond the Blue Ridge, and below its summits, are the Alleghanies. Between them is a broad mountain valley, known to geologists as the great Appalachian valley. This is an elevated irregular table-land, generally a thousand feet or more above the sea, and mostly underlaid by limestone, which by its decay affords a very fertile soil. This singular valley is traceable all the way from Lake Champlain to Georgia. The whole course of the Hudson lies within it. As all the mountains rise to the southward, this valley has its floor constantly farther and farther above the sea, until in Southern Virginia much of its surface is about two thousand feet above that level. This southward increase of elevation secures it a somewhat similar climate throughout its whole length. This, the noblest valley in[xxvii] America, is a garden in fertility, and of exceeding beauty. Yet west of this valley the Alleghanies proper extend, a wide belt of mountains, far to the westward. Their surface is generally rugged, but not infertile; they, as well as the Blue Ridge, are clad with thick forests to their very summits.
The shore of this, the distinctly southern part of the North American coast, is deeply indented by estuaries, which have been cut out principally by the tides. These deep sounds and bays,—the Delaware, Chesapeake, Pamlico, Albemarle, and others,—with their very many ramifications, constitute a distinctive feature in North America. Although these indentations are probably not of glacial origin, except perhaps the Delaware, they much resemble the great fjords which the glaciers have produced along the shores of regions farther to the northward. By means of these deep and ramified bays all the country of Virginia and Maryland lying to the east of the Appalachians is easily accessible to ships of large size. This was a very advantageous feature in the development of the export trade of this country, as it enabled the planters to load their crops directly into the ships which conveyed them to Europe, and this spared the making of roads,—a difficult task in a new country. The principal advantage of this set of colonies lay in the fact that they were fitted to the cultivation of tobacco. The demand for this product laid the foundations of American commerce, and was full of good and evil consequences to this country. It undoubtedly gave the means whereby Virginia became strong enough to be, on the part of the South, the mainstay of the resistance of the colonies to the mother country. On the other hand, it made African slavery profitable, and so brought that formidable problem of a foreign and totally alien race to be for all time a trouble to this country. Although the cultivation of cotton gave the greatest extension to slavery, it is not responsible for its firm establishment on our soil. That was the peculiar work of tobacco.
The climate of this region is perhaps the best of the United States. The winters want the severity that characterizes them in the more northern States, and the considerable height of the most of the district relieves it of danger from fevers. I have elsewhere spoken of the evidences that this district has maintained the original energy of the race that founded its colonies.
The Carolinian colonies are somewhat differently conditioned from those of Virginia, and their history has been profoundly influenced by their physical circumstances. South of the James River the belt of low-lying ground near the sea-shore widens rapidly, until the nearest mountain ranges are one hundred and fifty miles or more from the shore. This shore belt is also much lower than it is north of the James; a large part of its surface is below the level where the drainage is effective, and so is unfit for tillage. Much of it is swamp. The rivers do not terminate in as deep and long bays, with steep clay banks for borders, as they do north of the James. They are generally swamp-bordered in their lower courses, and not very well suited for settlements.
The soil of these regions is generally rather infertile; it is especially unfitted for the cultivation of grains except near the shore, where the swamps can often be converted into good rice-fields. Maize can be tilled, but it, as well as wheat, barley, etc., gives not more than half the return that may be had from them in Virginia. Were it not for the cotton crop, the lowland South would have fared badly.
All the shore belt of country is unwholesome, being affected with pernicious fevers, which often cannot be endured by the whites, even after the longest acclimatization. The interior region, even when not much elevated above the sea, or away from the swamps, is a healthy country, and the district within sight of the Blue Ridge and the Black Mountains is a very salubrious district. This region was, however, not at once accessible to the colonists of the Carolinian shore, and was not extensively settled for some time after the country was first inhabited, and then was largely occupied by the descendants of the Virginian colonists.
The history of this country has served to show that much of the lowlands near the shore is not well fitted for the use of European peoples; they are likely to fall into the possession of the African folk, who do not suffer, but rather seem to prosper in the feverish lowlands. The interior districts beyond the swamp country are well suited to Europeans, and where the surface rises more than one thousand feet above the sea, as it does in western North and South Carolina, the climate is admirably well suited to the European race. It is probable that the English race has never been in a more favorable climate than these uplands afford.
This Carolinian section was originally settled by a far more diversified population than that which formed the colonies to the northward. This was especially the case in North Carolina. This colony was originally possessed by a land company, which proposed to find its profit in a peculiar fashion. This company paid contractors so much a head for human beings put ashore in the colony. One distinguished trader in population, a certain Baron de Graffenreid, settled several thousand folk at and about New Berne, on the swampy shores of the Eastern sounds. They were from a great variety of places,—a part from England, others from the banks of the Rhine, others again from Switzerland. There was a great mass of human driftwood in Europe at the close of the seventeenth century, the wreck of long-continued wars; so it was easy to bring immigrants by the shipload if they were paid for. But the material was unfit to be the foundation of a State. From this settlement of eastern North Carolina is descended the most unsatisfactory population in this country. The central and western parts of North Carolina had an admirable population, that principally came to the State through Virginia; but this population about Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, though its descendants are numerous, perhaps not numerically much inferior to that which came from the Virginia settlements, is vastly inferior to it in all the essential qualities of the citizen. From the Virginia people have come a great number of men of national and some of world-wide reputation. It is not likely that any other population, averaging in numbers about five hundred thousand souls, has in a century furnished as many able men. On the other hand, this eastern North Carolina people has given no men of great fame to the history of the country, while a large part of the so-called “poor white” population of the South appears to be descended from the mongrel folk who were turned ashore on the eastern border of North Carolina.
South Carolina was much more fortunate in its early settlers on its seaboard than the colony to the north. Its population was drawn from rather more varied sources than that of Virginia, New York, or New England, but it would be hard to say that[xxix] its quality was inferior; despite the considerable admixture of Irish and French blood, it was essentially an English colony.
On the whole, although the quality of the climate would lead some to expect a lowering of the quality of the English race in these southern colonies, it is not possible to trace any such effect in the people. Although the laboring classes of whites along the seaboard appear to occupy a physical level rather below that of the same class in Virginia and the more northern regions, they have great endurance,—as was sufficiently proven by the fact that they made good soldiers during the recent Civil War. In the upland districts of these States, in western North and South Carolina, and especially in northern Georgia, the physical constitution of the people is, I believe, the best in this country. In the district north of Pennsylvania, the elevation of the mountains, or the table-lands which lie about them, is not profitable to the dwellers in these districts; each added height scarcely gives any additional healthfulness, and the additional cold is hurtful to most crops. In this southern region, however, the greater height and width of the Appalachian mountain system, including its elevated valleys, is a very great advantage to this region in all that concerns its fitness for the use of man. The climate of one half of the country south of the James and Ohio Rivers and east of the Mississippi is purified and refreshed by the elevations of this noble mountain system. It is the opinion of all who have examined this country, that it is extremely well fitted for all the uses of the race: an admirable climate, much resembling that of the Apennines of Tuscany, a fertile soil admitting a wide diversity of products, and a great abundance of water-power characterize all this upland district of the South.
A few words will suffice for all that concerns the mineral resources of the original colonies. At the outset of the colonization of America we hear a good deal about the search for gold; fortunately there was a very uniform failure in the first efforts to find this metal, so that it ceased to play a part in the history of these colonies. Very little effort to develop the mineral resources of this region was made during the colonial period. A little iron was worked in Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia, some search of a rather fruitless sort was made for copper ore in Connecticut, but of mining industry, properly so called, there was nothing until the Revolutionary War stimulated the search for iron and lead ores. The discovery of the gold deposits in the Carolinas did not come about until after the close of the colonial period. These deposits were not sufficiently rich to excite an immigration of any moment to the fields where they occur.
Practically the mineral resources of what we may term the Appalachian settlements of North America never formed any part of the inducements which led immigrants to them. In this respect they differ widely from the other colonies which were planted in the Americas. The greater part of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements in America were made by gold-hunters. The state of morals which led to these settlements was not favorable to the formation of communities characterized by high motives. There were doubtless other influences at work to lower the moral quality of the settlements in Mexico and South America, but the nature of the motives which brought the first settlers upon the ground and gave the tone to society is[xxx] certainly not the least important of the influences which have affected the history of the American settlements.
To close this brief account of the physical conditions of the first European settlements in North America, we may say, that the English colonies were peculiarly fortunate in those physical conditions upon which they fell. There is no area in either of the Americas, or for that matter in the world outside of Europe, where it would have been possible to plant English colonies that would have been found so suitable for the purpose: climate, soil, contact with the sea, and a chance of dominion over the whole continent were given them by fortune. They had but the second choice in the division of the New World; yet to the English fell the control of those regions which experience has shown to hold its real treasures. Fortune has repeatedly blessed this race; but never has she bestowed richer gifts than in the chance that gave it the Appalachian district of America.
NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL
HISTORY OF AMERICA.
CHAPTER I.
CORTEREAL, VERRAZANO, GOMEZ, THEVET.
BY GEORGE DEXTER.
JOHN CABOT discovered the continent of North America June 24, 1497; and his son Sebastian the next year coasted its shores for a considerable distance,—perhaps even, as some accounts say, from Hudson’s Bay to North Carolina.[9] The reports of their voyages doubtless reached the Continental courts of Europe without delay. Spain was occupied with the attempts of Columbus to attain the Indies by a southern route promising success; while Portugal, always among the foremost maritime nations, had now an energetic ruler in her young King Emanuel, who had succeeded to the throne in 1495. He had already sent out Vasco da Gama and Cabral, who followed the route to the Indies by the way of the Cape of Good Hope;[10] and he was well disposed also for an attempt to pursue the indications given by the Cabots, that a short way to the Land of Spices might lie through a northwest passage among the islands, of which the New World was still supposed to consist. Such is at least generally thought to have been the reason for the expeditions of the Cortereals, although we have no official reports of their voyages or their aims.
The family of Cortereal was not without position in the Portuguese kingdom. Ioâo Vaz Cortereal had been appointed, some years before this time, hereditary governor of the Island of Terceira; and his sons had perhaps learned there the secrets of navigation. It has been even asserted by some Portuguese writers that this Ioâo Vaz had himself discovered some part of America nearly thirty years before the first voyage of Columbus, and had received his governorship as the reward of the discovery; but there is no evidence for this claim.
It is known, however, that in the year 1500 a son of Ioâo Vaz, Gaspar Cortereal, having obtained from the King a grant or license to discover new islands, fitted out one, or perhaps two, vessels, with the help of his brother Miguel, and sailed from Lisbon early in the summer for a voyage to the northwest. The accounts say that he touched at the family island of Terceira, and in due time returned to Portugal with a report of having landed in a country situated in a high degree of latitude, now supposed to have been Greenland, which name, indeed (or rather its equivalent, Terra Verde), he is said to have given to the country. The details of the voyage are scanty, and have been confused with those of the second expedition; but it was so far successful that the enterprise was renewed the next year. Miguel Cortereal again contributed to the expenses of this second voyage. It appears, indeed, from a letter of his dated August 6, and preserved in the State archives at Lisbon, that he had prepared a vessel with the expectation of sharing personally in the expedition, but was delayed by a royal order to increase the number of his crew, and afterward by contrary winds, until it was too late in the season to follow Gaspar with any hope of success. Gaspar had sailed with three ships, May 15, 1501, and had directed his course west-northwest. After sailing in this direction two thousand miles from Lisbon, he discovered a country quite unknown up to that time. This he coasted six or seven hundred miles without finding any end to the land; so he concluded that it must be connected with the country discovered to the north the year before, which country could not now be reached on account of the great quantity of ice and snow. The number of large rivers encountered, encouraged the navigators in their belief that the country was no island. They found it very populous, and brought away a number of the natives; and those savages who safely arrived in Portugal were described as “admirably calculated for labor, and the best slaves I have ever seen.” A piece of a broken sword, and two silver earrings, evidently of Italian manufacture, found in the possession of the natives, were probably relics of the visit of Cabot to the country three years earlier. One of the vessels reached Lisbon on its return, October 8, and brought seven of the kidnapped natives. It reported that another ship had fifty more of these. This vessel arrived three days later with its expected cargo; but the third, with Gaspar Cortereal, was never heard from. Her fate remained a mystery, although several efforts were made to ascertain it.
The next year, 1502, Miguel Cortereal started with three ships (one account says two) well equipped and found, having agreed with the King to make a search for the missing Gaspar. The expedition sailed May 10. Arriving on the American coast, they found so many entrances of rivers and havens, that it was agreed to divide the fleet, the better to search for the missing vessel. A rendezvous was arranged for the 20th of August. Two ships met at the appointed time and place; but Miguel Cortereal’s did not appear, and the others, after waiting some time, returned to Portugal.
EARLY FISHING STAGES.
[This cut is a fac-simile of one in the corner of A New and Correct Map of America, 1738, which belongs to Sir William Keith’s History of the British Plantations in America: Part I., Virginia, London, 1738. It presumably represents the fashion of these appliances of the fishermen which had prevailed perhaps for centuries.
It was suggested by Forster, Northern Voyages, book iii. chaps. iii. and iv., that Breton fishermen may have been on the Newfoundland coast before Columbus. Scholars are coming more and more to believe the possibility and even probability of it. Every third day in the calendar was then a fast-day, and the incentive to seeking fish on distant seas was great. That Cabot should find the natives of this region calling the cod baccalaos, a name applied by the seamen of the Bay of Biscay to that fish, has also been suggestive; but this story, deducible apparently from no earlier writer than Peter Martyr in 1516, is not altogether trustworthy, since there is doubt if the folk who called the fish by that name were the natives, as Martyr seems to think, or simply the common people, as would seem to be implied in other forms of the statement (see Vol. III. p. 45). Greenland, as we know from the pre-Columbian maps (Ptolemy of 1482, etc.), was considered a part of Europe. Its adjacent shores were in the common mind but further outposts of the same continent; so that the returned sailors’ reports of the distant parts—islands they thought them—might cause no awakening of the idea of a new world. Cf. Navarrete, Viages, iii. 41, 46, 176; Eusebius, Chronicon (1512), p. 172; Wytfliet, Histoire des Indes, p. 131; Lescarbot, Nouvelle France (1618), p. 228; Biard, Relation (1616), chap. i.; Champlain (1632), p. 9; Charlevoix, Nouvelle France, i. 4, 14, or Shea’s edition, i. 106; Estancelin, Navigateurs Normands; Kunstmann, Entdeckung Amerikas, pp. 69, 125; Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters, etc., p. 332; Vitet, Histoire de la Dieppe, p. 51; Harrisse, Cabots, p. 271; Kohl, Discovery of Maine, pp. 188, 201, 203, 205, 280; Parkman, Pioneers, p. 171; Mag. of Amer. Hist., 1882, April; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1880, p. 229, etc.—Ed.]
Miguel also was never heard of again. Another expedition, sent out at the expense of the King, a year later, returned without having found a trace of either brother. And yet once more, the oldest of the family,[4] Vasqueanes Cortereal, then governor of Terceira, proposed to undertake the quest in person; but Emanuel refused the necessary permission, declining to risk the lives of more of his subjects.
The Cortereals had no successors among their countrymen in the attempt to reach the Indies by the Northwest Passage; but their voyages opened for Portugal a source of much trade. Individuals, and perhaps companies or associations, soon followed in their track in the pursuit of fish, until the Portuguese enterprises of this sort on the American coasts grew to large proportions, and produced considerable revenue for the State.
The consolidation of France into one great kingdom may be said to date from 1524, when the death of Claude, the wife of Francis I., vested the hereditary right to the succession of Brittany in the crown of France. The marriage of Charles VIII. with Anne, Claude’s mother, in 1491, had brought the last of the feudal fiefs into subjection; but it required many years to make the inhabitants of these provinces Frenchmen, and the rulers at Paris exercised little authority over the towns and principalities of the interior. The coasts of Normandy and Brittany were peopled by a race of adventurous mariners, some of them exercising considerable power; as, for instance, the Angos of Dieppe, one of whom (Jean) was ennobled, and created viscount and captain of that town. Such places as Dieppe, Honfleur, St. Malo, and others had already furnished men and leaders for voyages of exploration and discovery. These had made expeditions to the Canaries and the African coast, and the fishing population of the French provinces were not unused to voyages of considerable length. They were not slow, then, in seeking a share in the advantages offered by the new countries discovered by Cabot and Cortereal, and they speedily became skilful and powerful in the American fisheries. The fishermen of the ports of Brittany are known to have reached the Newfoundland shores as early as 1504. They have left there an enduring trace in the name of Cape Breton, which, in one form or another, is found upon very early maps. Two years afterward Jean Denys, who was from Honfleur, is said to have visited the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and to have made a chart of it; but what now passes for such a chart is clearly of later origin. Another two years elapse, and we read of the voyage, in 1508, of a Dieppe mariner, Thomas Aubert by name, who is said to have brought home the first specimens of the American natives. A contemporary chronicle relates the visit of seven of those[5] savages to Rouen in 1509. The frequency of the voyages of these fishermen and their skill in navigation are proved by the provision in Juan de Agramonte’s commission from the Spanish Crown, in 1511, that he might employ as pilots of his proposed expedition two mariners from Brittany.[11] In 1518, or (as M. d’Avezac thinks) perhaps a few years later, the Baron de Léry attempted a French settlement in the new country. But storms and unfavorable circumstances brought about the failure of this expedition.[12]
We have few particulars of the early life of Giovanni da Verrazano, who commanded the first French expedition sent out under royal auspices. The date of his birth is uncertain; but he is supposed to have been born shortly after 1480, in Florence,—where members of the family had attained high office at various times,—and to have been the son of Piero Andrea da Verrazano and Fiametta Capella. He is said to have travelled extensively, to have passed some years in Egypt and Syria, and to have visited the East Indies. It has also been stated, but on doubtful authority, that he commanded one of Aubert’s ships in that mariner’s expedition to America in 1508. With the year 1521 Verrazano begins to appear in Spanish history as a French corsair; in which character, and under the name of Juan Florin or Florentin, he preyed upon the commerce between Spain and her new-found possessions. It was, perhaps, while engaged in this occupation that he gained the notice and favor of Francis I. Indeed, his voyage of discovery was immediately preceded by, or even connected with, one of these predatory cruises. The Portuguese ambassador in France, Joâo da Silveira, wrote home, April 25, 1523: “Joâo Verezano, who is going on the discovery of Cathay, has not left up to this date, for want of opportunity, and because of differences, I understand, between himself and men.” And Verrazano himself says, in the cosmographical appendix to his letter, that the object of his expedition was to reach Cathay by a westward voyage, and that he expected to be able to penetrate any intervening land. But we know from Spanish sources that in May or June of this same year, 1523, Juan Florin captured the treasure sent home by Cortes to the Emperor, and brought it into La Rochelle; and Verrazano speaks in the beginning of his letter to the King of his success against the Spaniards.[13]
Later in the year, perhaps (but it seems impossible now to separate the voyage of discovery distinctly from the cruise against Spanish commerce), Verrazano started with four ships. Disabled by storms, he was forced to put back into some port of Brittany with two vessels, the “Normandy” and the “Dauphine.” After repairing these, he made a fresh start, but decided finally to proceed on the voyage to Cathay with the “Dauphine” alone.
In this vessel he sailed, Jan. 17, 1524, from the Desiertas Rocks, near the Island of Madeira, having fifty men and provisions for eight months. For twenty-five days he proceeded, with a pleasant breeze, toward the west, without any incident. Then on February 14 (20, according to another version of his letter) he encountered a very violent tempest. Escaping from this, he continued the voyage, changing the course of the vessel more to the north, and in another twenty-five days came within sight of land. This appeared low when first seen; and on a nearer approach it gave evidence, from the fires burning on the shore, that there were inhabitants. This landfall Verrazano places in 34° N., which would be not far from the latitude of Cape Fear, upon the coast of North Carolina; and most commentators upon his letter accept that as the probable point. He began his search for a harbor by coasting south about fifty leagues; but finding none, and observing that the land continued to extend in that direction, he turned and sailed along the shore to the north. Still finding no opportunity to land with the vessel, he decided to send a boat ashore. This was met on its approach to the land by a crowd of the natives, who at first turned to fly, but were recalled by friendly signs, and at last showed the strangers the best place for making a landing, and offered them food. These people were nearly black in color, of moderate stature and good proportions. They went naked except for their breech-cloths, and were, from the description, simple and of kind disposition. The coast is described as covered with small sand-hills, and as pierced by occasional inlets, behind which appeared a higher country, with fields and great forests giving out pleasant odors. There were noticed, also, lakes and ponds, with abundance of birds and beasts. The anchorage Verrazano thought a safe one; for though there was no harbor, he says that the water continued deep very close to the shore, and there was excellent holding-ground for the anchor.
Thence he proceeded along a shore trending east, seeing great fires, which gave him the impression that the country had many inhabitants. While at anchor (perhaps near Raleigh Bay), the boat was sent to the shore for water. There was no possibility of landing, on account of the high surf; so a young sailor undertook to swim to the land, and to give the natives some bells or other trinkets which the French had brought for the purposes of traffic, or for presents. He was overpowered by the waves, and, after a struggle, thrown upon the beach, where he lay almost stunned. The Indians ran down, picked him up, and carried him screaming with[7] fright up the shore. They reassured him by signs, stripped off his wet clothes, and dried him by one of their fires,—much to the horror, says the narrative, of his comrades in the boat, who supposed that the savages intended to roast and eat him. When he was refreshed and recovered from his fright, he made them understand that he wished to rejoin his friends, whereupon the natives accompanied him back to the water, and watched his safe return to the boat.
Following the shore, which here turned somewhat to the north, in fifty leagues more they reached a pleasant place, much wooded, near which they anchored. Here they landed twenty men to examine the country, and made a cruel return for the kindness which the natives had shown the French sailor a short time before. On landing, the men found that the Indians had taken refuge in the woods, with the exception of two women and some small children who had attempted to hide in the long grass. The Frenchmen offered food; but the younger woman refused it, and in great fright called for help to the natives who had fled into the forest. The French took the oldest of the children, a boy of eight, and carried him to their vessel, to take back with them to France. They attempted to kidnap also the young woman, who was handsome and tall, about eighteen years of age; but she succeeded in escaping. The people of this place are described as fairer than those first seen, and the country as fertile and beautiful, but colder than the other.
The vessel remained at anchor three days, and then it was decided to continue the voyage, but to sail only in the daytime, and to anchor each night. After coursing a hundred leagues to the northeast, they arrived at a beautiful spot where, between small steep hills, a great stream poured its waters into the sea. This river was of great depth at its mouth, and with the help of the tide a heavily loaded vessel could easily enter. As Verrazano had good anchorage for his ship, he sent his boat in. This, after going a half league, found that the entrance widened into a magnificent lake of three leagues circuit, upon which at least thirty of the natives’ boats were passing from shore to shore. These people received the strangers kindly, and showed them the best place to bring their boat to the land. A sudden squall from the sea frightened the French, and they returned in haste to the ship without exploring further this pleasant harbor,—which seems to have been that of New York.
Thence they sailed to the east about eighty leagues (fifty, by one account), keeping the land always in sight. They discovered an island of triangular shape, of about the size of that of Rhodes, and about ten leagues from the mainland, to which they gave the name of Louisa, the mother of Francis I.,—the only name mentioned in the narrative. This was covered with woods, and well peopled, as the number of fires showed. From this island, which has been generally identified with Block Island,[14] Verrazano, without[8] landing, as the weather was bad, steered for the coast again; and in fifteen leagues (perhaps retracing his course) came to a most beautiful harbor. Here the ship was met by many boats of the natives, who crowded close around it with cries of astonishment and pleasure. They were easily persuaded to come on board, and soon became very friendly. This harbor, which Verrazano places in the parallel of Rome, 41° 40´ N., and which has been identified as that of Newport, is described as opening toward the south, with an entrance a half league in breadth, and widening into a great bay twenty leagues in circuit. It contained five islands, among which any fleet might find refuge from storms or other dangers. The entrance could be easily guarded by a fort built upon a rock which seemed naturally placed in its centre for defence. The natives are described as fine-looking, the handsomest people seen in the voyage, of taller stature than Europeans, of light color, sharp faces, with long black hair and black eyes, but with a mild expression. The visits of their kings to the strange vessel are described, and the eagerness of these rulers to know the use of everything they saw is mentioned. The women are spoken of as modest in their behavior, and as jealously guarded by their husbands. The interior country was explored for a short distance, and found pleasant and adapted to cultivation, with many large open plains entirely free from trees, and with forests not so dense but that they could easily be penetrated.
In this agreeable harbor, where everything that he saw filled him with delight, and where the kindness of the inhabitants left him nothing to desire, Verrazano tarried fifteen days. Then having supplied himself with all necessaries, he departed on the 6th of May (Ramusio says the 5th), and sailed a hundred and fifty leagues without losing sight of the land, which showed small hills, and was a little higher than before, while the coast, after about fifty leagues, turned to the north. No stop was made, for the wind was favorable, and the nature of the country appeared much the same. The next landing was made in a colder country, full of thick woods, where the natives were rude, and showed no desire to communicate with the strangers. They were clothed in skins, and their land seemed barren. They would accept nothing in barter but knives, fish-hooks, and sharpened steel. When the French landed and attempted to explore the country, they were attacked. This landing has been placed somewhere north of Boston, possibly not far from Portsmouth, in New Hampshire.
The voyage was continued in a northeasterly direction. The coast appeared pleasanter, open, and free from woods, with a sight of high mountains far inland. Within a distance of fifty leagues thirty-two islands were discovered, all near the shore, which reminded the navigator of those in the Adriatic. He did not stop to explore the country, or to open communication with the natives, but continued another hundred and fifty leagues in the same general direction, when he arrived at about the latitude of 50° N. Here, having reached the country already discovered by the Bretons, and finding his provisions and naval stores nearly exhausted, he[9] took in a fresh supply of wood and water, and decided to return to France, having, he says, discovered more than seven hundred leagues of unknown territory. He arrived at Dieppe on his return early in July, for his letter to the King is dated from that port on the 8th of the month.
We lose trace of Verrazano after his return from this voyage. Francis I. was in no condition to profit from the opportunity offered him to colonize a new world. He had engaged in a struggle with the Emperor; was soon after the date of this letter busily occupied in fighting battles; and at that of Pavia, Feb. 24, 1525, was taken prisoner, and spent the next year in captivity in Spain. It has been suggested that Verrazano went to England, and there offered his services to Henry VIII., and there are contemporary allusions supporting the suggestion. Mr. Biddle, in his Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, advances the opinion that Verrazano was the Piedmontese pilot who was killed and eaten by the savages in Rut’s expedition of 1527, which would harmonize Ramusio’s statement that he made a second voyage to America and lost his life there. But this is extremely doubtful.[15] We know from French sources that in 1526 Verrazano joined with Admiral Chabot, Jean Ango, and others, in an agreement for a voyage to the Indies for spices, with a proviso inserted for the equitable division of any booty taken “from the Moors or others, enemies of the faith and the King our lord.” Spanish documents of official character show that Juan Florin, with other French pirates, was captured at sea in 1527, and hung at the small village of Colmenar, between Salamanca and Toledo, in November of that year. But it has been also lately stated that a letter has been found, dated at Paris, Nov. 14, 1527, which speaks of Verrazano as then preparing an expedition of five ships for America, expecting to sail the following spring. If this statement is accurate, and the date of the letter has been correctly read, grave doubts are thrown upon the Spanish story of his execution. Either Florin was not Verrazano, or he was not hanged at the time stated. I cannot undertake to reconcile all these statements, but must leave them as I find them.
The voyage of Estévan (Stephen) Gomez, although not made under the flag of France, should, perhaps, be studied in connection with that of Verrazano. Spain did not fail to take notice of the discoveries of the Cabots when the news of the return of Sebastian from the second voyage reached London in 1498. Her ambassador at that Court, Don Pedro de Ayala, in his despatch dated July 25 of that year, says that he has given notice to the English king that the countries discovered by Cabot belonged to his master. There are traces of voyages in a northwestern direction under Spanish auspices in subsequent years. Navarrete thinks that such[10] was the object of the Spanish king in sending for Juan Dornelos, or Dorvelos, in the spring of 1500. It is stated also that Hojeda had orders about the same time to follow the English tracks. The commission to Agramonte in 1511 (he having proposed a similar project previously) was for the purpose of planting a settlement in the tierra nueva at the northwest. Magellan’s discovery of the long-sought strait through the New World leading to the Land of Spices, although it brought no immediate advantages, as the voyage was long and perilous, revived and increased the interest in seeking for a shorter and more northern passage. The agreement made with De Ayllon, June 12, 1523, provided, among other things, for the search for another way through the continent to the Moluccas, to be found north of Florida. Hernando Cortes wrote home to the Emperor, Oct. 15, 1524, a letter on the probability of there being such a passage easier than the one already discovered, and proposed to seek for it. Gomez was of the same opinion, for his voyage was undertaken to find this northern strait.
Estévan Gomez was a Portuguese and an experienced navigator. He had entered the service of Spain a few years before this time, having received the appointment of pilot in 1518 at the same time that Sebastian Cabot was created “pilot major.” He had sailed with Magellan on his great voyage as pilot of the “San Antonio,” but had joined the crew of that vessel in their mutiny against her captain, Alvaro de Mesquita, at the strait. He thus deserted Magellan, and brought the ship home. In 1521 he was ordered to serve with the fleet which was then preparing to sail against the French corsairs. He obtained a concession from the Emperor, dated March 27, 1523, by which he was to have a small vessel for an expedition to the northwest, armed and provisioned for one year. Although this grant, like that made soon afterward to De Ayllon, contained a proviso that the expedition should carefully avoid trespassing upon the King of Portugal’s possessions in the New World, that Power seems to have raised objections to the voyage. The following year a council was convened at the small town of Badajos for the settlement of the rival claims of Spain and Portugal, and Gomez was sent with Cabot, Juan Vespucius, and others to this council,—not as members, but in the capacity of specialists or experts, to give opinions on questions of navigation and cosmography. The congress accomplished nothing in the way of an agreement between the rival Powers, and after its adjournment the Council for the Indies decided to allow the voyage proposed by Gomez.
Gomez sailed from Corunna, a port in the north of Spain, to which the “Casa de Contratacion,” or India House, had been removed from Seville, some time in February of the following year (1525), and was absent about ten months. We have unfortunately no detailed account of his voyage, and it does not now seem possible to say with certainty even in which direction he explored the American coast. The accounts given by the Spanish historians are very meagre. They seem to have paid little attention to the voyage, except to record its failure to discover the desired northern[11] strait. The Spanish maps, however, show plain traces of the voyage, in the Tierra de Estévan Gomez, the name applied by Ribero and others to the large tract of country between Cape Breton and Florida. Gomara, one of the earliest and best authorities on American matters, heads the chapter which he devotes to Gomez, “Rio de San Antonio,” which name is supposed to be the one given in Spanish maps to the Hudson River. Gomez is said to have visited the country at latitudes 40° and 41° north, and to have coasted a great extent of land never before explored by the Spaniards. It is related also that he visited the Island of Cuba, and refitted his vessel there. This would be presumably on the homeward voyage. Failing to obtain the rich cargo of spices which he had expected to bring home, he loaded his vessel with kidnapped savages of both sexes, and with this freight reached Corunna again in November, 1525.
All historians of the voyage made by Gomez have told the story about the mistake of a zealous newsmonger in reference to the nature of the cargo thus brought home. Peter Martyr is the first to tell it, in the final chapter of his last decade, inscribed to Pope Clement VII., written in 1526. In answer to a question as to what he had brought, Gomez was understood to reply “cloves” (clavos), when he really said “slaves” (esclavos). The eager friend hastened to Court with the news that the shorter strait had been discovered, thinking to obtain some reward for his intelligence. The favorers of Gomez’ project (in regard to which there appears to have been some difference of opinion) greeted the news with applause, but were covered with ridicule when the true story of the results of the voyage was published. Martyr quaintly says: “If they hadd learned that the influence of the heauens could bee noe where infused into terrestriall matters prepared to receiue that aromaticall spirit, saue from the Æquinoctiall sunne, or next vnto it, they woulde haue knowne that in the space of tenn moneths (wherein hee performed his voyage) aromaticall Cloues could not bee founde.”[16]
It does not fall within the limits of this chapter to relate the story of the early attempts of the French Huguenots to plant colonies in this country.[17] But I may refer very briefly to the first of these,—the expedition sent by Admiral Coligny to Brazil under the command of Villegagnon, in 1555; as a Franciscan monk, André Thevet, who accompanied it, claims to have coasted the continent of North America on his return voyage to France the next year.
Thevet says of himself that he had spent the early years of his life in travel, and that he had already made a voyage to the East, of which voyage, and of his skill in navigation, his friend Villegagnon was well aware when he asked him to join the proposed expedition to South America,—an offer which he (Thevet) was very ready to accept. The start, he says, was made from Havre, May 6, 1555, and the voyage across the ocean was long and tedious. It was not until the last day of October that, about nine[12] o’clock in the morning, their vessel came within sight of the high mountains of Croistmourou. These were within the limits of a country whose inhabitants were friends of the Portuguese, and the French therefore decided to avoid landing there. They continued the voyage, and seventeen days later cast anchor at the River Ganabara (Rio Janeiro), where they were received in a friendly manner by the natives, and decided to make their settlement.
Thevet remained with the colony only about ten weeks, leaving on his homeward voyage, Jan. 31, 1556. He says that the commander of the vessel decided to return by a more northern passage than that by which he had crossed from France; and goes on to describe at some length their voyage along the coast, and to give many particulars of the countries and natives, most of which he must have obtained from other travellers’ books and histories after his return. The progress was slow. At the Cape of St. Augustine the vessel was delayed, he says, two months in the attempt to round that promontory. The equinoctial line was not crossed until about the middle of April; and after leaving Espagnola a contrary wind blew them in toward the coast.
Thevet claims to have coasted the entire shore of the United States, and gives occasional accounts of what he saw, and of intercourse with the natives. But his details are always uncertain, and the places he professes to have visited cannot be identified. No satisfactory information can be obtained from his story; and indeed his reputation for truth-telling is so poor that many historians are inclined to reject altogether his recital of the voyage along our coast. It may well be that Thevet invented the whole of it as a thread upon which to hang the particulars about Florida, Norumbega, and other countries which he gathered from books. After his return to France he was made aumonier to Catherine de Medicis, and also royal historiographer and cosmographer.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
THE earliest mention in print of the Cortereal voyages is found in a small collection of travels (one of the very earliest collections made), entitled Paesi novamente retrovati. This was published at Vicenza, in Italy, as the colophon states, Nov. 3, 1507, and is supposed to have been compiled by Fracanzio da Montalboddo, or by Alessandro Zorzi.[18] The account of Gaspar Cortereal is contained (book vi. chap. cxxv) in a letter[13] written from Lisbon, Oct. 19, 1501 (eleven days only after the return of the first vessel which succeeded in getting home from the second voyage), by the Venetian ambassador in Portugal, Pietro Pasqualigo, to his brothers. This is, of course, an authority of great value. The writer gives a brief account of the voyage, speaks of the customs of the inhabitants of the new country, and describes the captives which the ship had brought. He says that the other vessel is expected immediately. Pasqualigo mentions, however, only one voyage, and has apparently confused it with the earlier one; for he says that the expedition sailed “lāno passato” (that is 1500), and writes of the failure to reach a country discovered “lanno passato.” Perhaps he received some account of both voyages from the mariners, and in preparing his letter failed to preserve the distinction between them. French versions of the letter appeared in Paris in 1517 and 1522. An English translation of the interesting portions of this letter is given in Biddle’s Cabot, at pp. 239, 240.
Another contemporary account of this voyage of Gaspar Cortereal has lately been discovered. M. Harrisse has obtained from the archives of Modena a despatch sent to Hercules d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, by Alberto Cantino, his representative at Lisbon, in which the arrival of the second vessel (expected immediately in Pasqualigo’s letter) is reported. This despatch is dated Oct. 17, 1501. The vessel arrived on the 11th,—three days after the first one,—and brought the expected cargo of slaves. Cantino says that he saw, touched, and surveyed (li quali io ho visti, tochi et contemplati) these natives. He gives some account of the savages, and tells the story of the voyage as he heard the captain of the vessel relate it to the King, being present at their interview. The caravel had been a month on her return, and the distance was two thousand eight hundred miles,—“Questo naviglio è venuto di la a qua in un mese, et dicono esservi 2,800 milia de distantia.” Cantino makes no mention of the return of the first vessel, but speaks of a third, commanded by Cortereal in person, as having decided to remain in the new country, and to sail along its coast far enough to discover whether it were an island or terra firma,—“Laltro compagno ha deliberato andar tanto per quella costa, che vole intendere se quella è insula, o pur terra ferma.”
Harrisse prints this interesting letter of Cantino in his Jean et Sébastian Cabot (pp. 262-264). Cantino appears to have also sent his master a map showing the new discoveries. This map Harrisse has since reproduced with a commentary, in his work on the Cortereals, as explained in the second volume of the present history.
It should be noted that Harrisse counts three voyages of Gaspar Cortereal,—the first, without result, before May, 1500; the second, between May and December of that year; and a third, sailing in January, 1501,—the return of two of whose vessels in the following October is related by Pasqualigo and Cantino.[19]
The confusion of the voyages continued. The Spanish historians and those of Italy, knowing, perhaps, of only one, or getting their information from the Paesi and the maps, speak of but one expedition. Gomara, whose work was published at Saragossa in 1552-1553,[20] says that Cortereal was seeking a northwest passage, but failed to find it; that he gave his name to the islands at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in 50° N.; and that, dismayed at the snow and ice, he returned home with about sixty of the natives whom he had captured.[21] Herrera, who published his History early in the next century,[22] gets his information from Gomara. Peter Martyr does not mention the Cortereals. Turning to[14] Italy, we find in Ramusio an account of Cortereal in the third volume of his great collection of voyages,[23] published in 1556, at fol. 417. Here, in an introductory discourse, written by Ramusio himself, “sopra la terra ferme dell’ Indie Occidentali,” it is stated that Gaspar Cortereal was the first captain who went to that part of the New World which “runs to the north,” in 1500, with two ships, in search of a shorter passage to the Spice Islands; that he penetrated so far north as to get into a region of great cold, discovering at 60° a river filled with snow, which was called the “Rio Nevado;” that he found inhabited islands to which he gave names, etc.
Even down to modern times the distinction between the voyages has not been recognized. Biddle, Humboldt, and others speak of only one expedition. The Portuguese authorities, however, are explicit in the matter. In 1563 there was published at Lisbon a volume of navigations and discoveries written by Antonio Galvano, who had died a few years before.[24] Galvano was born at Lisbon in 1503. He went, a young man, to India, and distinguished himself there, having command of the expedition which reduced the Moluccas to Portuguese rule, and becoming the governor of Ternate,—the largest of these islands. He was recalled home, and coldly received by the King. Becoming indigent, he was forced to take refuge in a hospital, where he finally died in 1557. His papers were bequeathed to a friend, Don Francisco y Sousa Tavares, who prepared the volume for the press. Galvano gives a good account of the expedition of Gaspar Cortereal, clearly dividing it into two voyages; and he tells also of Miguel Cortereal’s attempt to discover his brother’s fate. The original Portuguese text is very rare. Hakluyt published a translation of it in 1601,[25] and states in his Dedication of that book to Sir Robert Cecil that he could not succeed in finding a copy of the original. The translation was made, he says, “by some honest and well-affected marchant of our nation, whose name by no meanes I could attaine unto, and that, as it seemeth, many yeeres ago. For it hath lien by me above these twelve yeeres.” In 1862 the Hakluyt Society of London reprinted this translation under the editorial supervision of Vice-Admiral Bethune. In this edition corrections of the English version are noted, and the whole Portuguese text is given, page for page, from a copy of the original in the Carter-Brown Library. The passage relating to the Cortereals is found at pages 96, 97, of this Hakluyt Society’s volume.[26]
The Chronicle of King Emanuel, by Damiano de Goes, appeared at Lisbon in 1565-1567.[27] Goes was born in 1501, and died about 1573. He was employed in the diplomatic service of Portugal in Flanders, Denmark, and other countries, and travelled extensively. Galvano considered him, as a traveller, worthy of mention in his work, and says that he visited England, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Muscovy, and Norway. “He did see, speake, and was conuersant with all the kings, princes, nobles, and chiefe cities of all Christendome in the space of 22 yeeres (occupied in the work); so that by reason of the greatnes of his trauell I thought him a man woorthie to be here remembred.”[28] He became[15] afterward historiographer of Portugal, and was placed in charge of the public archives. But he fell under the ban of the Inquisition, and died in obscurity. His account of the Cortereals, which is clear and of great value, from the learning of the writer and from his excellent opportunities to inform himself, is given in the sixty-seventh chapter of the first part of the Chronicle, at pp. 87, 88.[29]
Hieronymus Osorius (as his name is Latinized), the Bishop of Silves,—known sometimes as the Portuguese Cicero, from the elegance of his style,—published his De rebus Emmanuelis in 1571.[30] He was born in 1506, and lived until 1580. His writings include treatises on philosophy and theology, as well as works of history. In the Chronicle, under date of 1503, he gives a full account of the Cortereal voyages, including the search expedition sent out by the King that year, and the proposition of the eldest brother to equip a new exploration. The story may be found at p. 63 of the edition of 1586.
Oscar Peschel and Friedrich Kunstmann, in Germany, used these Portuguese authorities freely in their accounts of the Cortereals. Peschel’s book, an excellent one, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, was published at Stuttgart in 1858, and went to a second edition in 1877. The discoveries of the Portuguese are treated in the ninth chapter of the second book.[31] Kunstmann’s work, of great learning and research, Die Entdeckung Amerikas, was published at Munich in 1859 by the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences, as part of the centennial commemoration (March 28, 1859) of its foundation. In addition to the printed authorities, Kunstmann instituted searches among the manuscript archives at Lisbon. He had the pretended early voyage of Joâo Vaz Cortereal examined, and ascertained that there was no foundation for it.[32] He found the letter of Miguel Cortereal, written Aug. 6, 1501, to Christovâo Lopez, which has been used in the preceding narrative; and that brother’s agreement with the King, Jan. 15, 1502, by which the grant previously made to Gaspar was continued to Miguel.[33]
An excellent account of the Cortereal voyages, based largely upon Kunstmann’s researches, is given by Dr. Kohl in the fifth chapter of his Discovery of Maine.[34] At the first session of the International Congress of “Américanistes,” held at Nancy in July, 1875, M. Luciano Cordeiro, professor in the Institut at Coïmbre, presented, through M. Lucien Adam, an elaborate essay on the share of the Portuguese in the discovery of America. M. Cordeiro’s paper shows great industry and research, but it should be read with caution, as his patriotism sometimes exceeds his discretion. He looks at everything with the distorted vision of an enthusiastic lover of his native land.[35]
With Kunstmann’s Entdeckung, the Bavarian Academy published, under the care of that gentleman, Karl von Spruner, and Georg M. Thomas, an elegant atlas of thirteen maps in beautifully executed colored fac-similes. Portions of three of these maps relating to the Cortereals are given in a greatly reduced form, without the brilliant colors, by Dr. Kohl, in the Appendage to his chapter on these navigators. The first of these is a Portuguese chart, made about 1504 by an unknown hand. The southern part of Greenland is laid[16] down upon it without a name; and farther to the west appears a considerable extent of country, answering, perhaps, to parts of our Labrador and Newfoundland, which bears the name “Terra de cortte Reall.”[36] The second chart, made by Pedro Reinel at about the same period, shows only Portuguese names and gives the Portuguese flag on that part of America visited by the Cortereals. Reinel was a Portuguese pilot of eminence, who afterward entered the Spanish service. The third map, also of Portuguese origin, of about the year 1520, although its exact date and its author’s name are unknown, contains at Labrador these words: “terram istam portugalenses viderunt atamen non intraverunt” (“The Portuguese saw this country, but did not enter it”); and again at a place farther west occurs the legend: “Terram istam gaspar corte Regalis portugalensis primo invenit, et secum tulit hōīes silvestres et ursos albos. In ea est maxiā multitudo animalium et avium necnon et pescium. qui anno sequenti naufragium perpessus nunquam rediit: sic et fratri ejus micaeli anno sequenti contigit” (“This country was first discovered by Gaspar Cortereal, a Portuguese, and he brought from there wild and barbarous men and white bears. There are to be found in it plenty of animals, birds, and fish. In the following year he was shipwrecked, and did not return: the same happened to his brother Michael in the next year”).[37]
The original authorities for the early French expeditions have, unhappily, not been preserved, or they still lie hidden in some dusky receptacle, baffling all search for them. The Breton fishermen perhaps wrote no accounts of their voyages across the Atlantic; but we might hope for some authentic reports of the voyages of Denys, Aubert, and others, made under the auspices of the rich and powerful Angos. The archives of Dieppe, however, were destroyed at the bombardment of that town in 1694, and those of La Rochelle met a similar fate.
The earliest mention of these transatlantic voyages that we now find occurs in a discourse attributed to a great French captain of Dieppe, preserved in an Italian translation by Ramusio, in his collection of voyages.[38] This discourse gives a summary description of the new countries, and a very brief mention of their discoverers. From internal evidence it appears to have been written in 1539. Ramusio, in introducing it, expresses his regret that he could not ascertain the name of its author. M. Louis Estancelin published in 1832 a journal of the voyage made by Jean Parmentier to Sumatra in 1529, which corresponds so exactly with the details of a similar voyage in the great captain’s discourse as to make it evident that Parmentier was the person described by Ramusio under that title.[39] This discourse mentions the voyages of Denys and Aubert, and speaks of Verrazano as the discoverer of Norumbega. From this source other writers have generally drawn their authority for these early voyages. The Chronicle of Eusebius,[40] however, contains an account of the visit of American savages to Rouen in 1509; and there is a curious bas-relief[17] over a tomb in the Church of St. Jacques at Dieppe, in which American natives are represented.[41] Charlevoix speaks of the map which Jean Denys is said to have made.[42]
The authorities for the voyage of Verrazano are two copies of his letter, written to the King of France from Dieppe July 8, 1524, on his return from the voyage. Both of these are, however, Italian translations of the letter, the original of which does not exist. One was printed by Ramusio in 1556, in the third volume of his collection of voyages.[43] The other was found many years later in the Strozzi Library (the historical documents in which were afterward transferred to the Magliabechian, now merged in the National Library) in Florence, and was first published in 1841 by the New York Historical Society, with a translation made by Dr. J. G. Cogswell.[44] This contained a Cosmographical Appendix not in the copy printed by Ramusio. The earlier printed version was translated into English by Hakluyt for his Divers Voyages, which appeared in London in 1582, and was incorporated by him into his larger collection published in 1600.[45] Dr. Cogswell’s translation was reprinted in London by Dr. Asher in his Henry Hudson the Navigator, prepared for the Hakluyt Society in 1860.[46] Dr. Asher considers the Cosmographical Appendix a document of great importance. With this Strozzi copy there was found a letter written by one Fernando Carli from Lyons, Aug. 4, 1524, to his father in Florence, accounting for sending Verrazano’s letter, which Carli thought would interest his countrymen. This letter of Carli was first printed in 1844, with the essay of George W. Greene on Verrazano, in the Saggiatore (i. 257), a Roman journal of history and philology. Professor Greene, who was the American Consul at Rome, had been instrumental in obtaining the Verrazano letter for the New York Society, and had previously published his essay in the North American Review for October, 1837. He reprinted it in his Historical Studies. Carli’s letter may be consulted in English translations in Mr. Smith’s, Mr. Murphy’s, and Mr. Brevoort’s essays on Verrazano.
References to the voyage occur occasionally in French, English, and Spanish authors;[47] and it was not until within a few years that any doubt was thrown upon the authenticity of the narrative.
In October, 1864, Mr. Buckingham Smith, an accomplished scholar, who had been secretary of the American Legation at Madrid, read a paper upon this subject before the New York Historical Society, afterward published the same year under the title, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Documents concerning a Discovery in North America claimed to have been made by Verrazzano. Mr. Smith’s death interrupted an enlarged and revised edition of this essay, which he was urged to prepare.[48] Mr. J. Carson Brevoort presented a paper on Verrazano, taking an opposite view, to the American Geographical Society, in 1871, which he printed three years later, entitled Verrazano the Navigator.[49] This was followed by the appearance, in 1875, of Mr. Henry C. Murphy’s The Voyage of Verrazzano, in which he makes an able plea against the genuineness of the accounts of the voyage. This book caused considerable discussion, and has been answered several times. It remains, I think, the last word on that side of the question,—except that Mr. Bancroft has omitted all notice of Verrazano in the revised edition of his History of the United States, and the editors of Appleton’s American Cyclopædia seem to adopt Mr. Murphy’s conclusions. Mr. Murphy’s book was reviewed by Harrisse in the Revue critique for Jan. 1, 1876, and his conclusions were accepted with some reserve. It was noticed unfavorably by Mr. Major in the London Geographical Magazine (iii. 186) for July, 1876 (copied from the Pall Mall Gazette of May 26, 1876), and by the Rev. B. F. De Costa in the American Church Review of the same date. In 1878-1879 papers on this subject by De Costa appeared in the Magazine of American History, which were afterward collected and revised by their author, and issued, with the title, Verrazano the Explorer, in 1881. This work contains an exhaustive bibliography of the subject, to which reference should be made.[50] In this same year, 1881, M. Cornelio Desimoni, vice-president of the “Società Ligure di Storia Patria,” printed in the fifteenth volume of the Atti of that Society a second Studio on Verrazano, in which he takes strong ground in favor of the genuineness of the voyage. This essay had been presented to the third congress of “Américanistes,” which met at Brussels in 1879. M. Desimoni had previously contributed to the Archivio Storico Italiano for August, 1877, an article upon this navigator,[51] but was able to review Mr. Murphy’s book only from notices he had seen of it. In a note at the end of his paper he states that he had procured a copy, and, so far from finding any reason to modify the views he had expressed, he thought that he could find in Mr. Murphy’s essay additional arguments for the authenticity of the voyage. The second Studio was followed by what M. Desimoni modestly calls a Third Appendix (the Studio having two Appendices printed with it). This is a paper of considerable importance, as it contains the reproduction of the map of which I shall speak later.[52]
Hieronimo da Verrazano, the brother of the navigator, made about 1529 a large mappamundi, on which the discoveries of Giovanni are laid down.[53] This map is preserved in the Borgiano Museum of the College “di Propaganda Fide” in Rome. It is not certain that the map is an original; and it was first mentioned by Von Murr in his Behaim, Gotha, 1801, p. 28, referring to a letter of Cardinal Borgia of Jan. 31, 1795, regarding it. It[19] was again referred to in Millin’s Magazin encyclopédique, vol. lxviii. (1807); but general attention was first directed to it by M. Thomassy in 1852, in a communication published in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages.[54] Mr. Brevoort[55] has given a description of it, which he prepared from two photographs, much reduced in size, made for the American Geographical Society in 1871. These photographs were not large enough nor sufficiently distinct to allow the names of places on the American coast to be read. This North American section of the map was first given with the names by Dr. De Costa, who had made a careful examination of the original during a visit to Rome, in the Magazine of American History for August, 1878.[56]
This map is not dated; but the following legend, placed at the position of Verrazano’s discoveries, fixes the date for 1529: “Verrazana sive nova gallia quale discoprì 5 anni fa giovanni da verrazano fiorentino per ordine e Comandamento del Cristianissimo Re di Francia” (“Verrazana, or New Gaul, which was discovered five years ago by Giovanni di Verrazano, of Florence, by the order and command of the most Christian King of France”).
One of the most interesting of the maps which show the traces and influence of Verrazano’s voyage is the copper globe known as the globe of Ulpius, from its maker, Euphrosynus Ulpius, constructed (as appears by an inscription on it) in 1542. This was found in Spain by the late Buckingham Smith, and bought for the New York Historical Society in 1859 by Mr. John D. Wolfe. Mr. Smith prepared a paper on this globe, which was printed, with a map of the portion relating to North America, in the Historical Magazine in 1862.[57] Dr. De Costa published, in the Magazine of American History for January, 1879, an excellent account of the globe of Ulpius, with a representation of one hemisphere, which, he says, “without being a fac-simile, is nevertheless sufficiently correct for historical purposes, and may be relied upon.”[58] On this globe, between Florida and the “Regio Baccalearum,” we find this inscription, covering a large extent of territory: “Verrazana sive Nova Gallia a Verrazano Florentino comperta anno Sal MD.” (“Verrazana, or New Gaul, discovered by Verrazano the Florentine, in the year of Salvation MD.”). It will be observed that the date has been left incomplete.
Other maps showing traces of Verrazano’s voyage are enumerated by Kohl, Brevoort, and De Costa, the account by the last-named being the latest, and perhaps the most complete.[59]
The controversy about this letter and voyage of Verrazano has excited so much interest, that it is well to give a concise summary of Mr. Murphy’s objections to the genuineness of the voyage, and to consider with equal brevity some of the replies to these objections, and the additional evidence for the support of the narrative which has been discovered since the date of Mr. Murphy’s essay.
The conclusions which Mr. Murphy seeks to establish are set forth in the following brief:—
“That the letter, according to the evidence upon which its existence is predicated, could not have been written by Verrazzano; that the instrumentality of the King of France in any such expedition of discovery as therein described is unsupported by the history of that country, and is inconsistent with the acknowledged acts of Francis and his successors, and therefore incredible; and that its description of the coast and some of the physical characteristics of the people and of the country[20] are essentially false, and prove that the writer could not have made them from his own personal knowledge and experience, as pretended; and, in conclusion, it will be shown that its apparent knowledge of the direction and extent of the coast was derived from the exploration of Estévan Gomez, a Portuguese pilot in the service of the King of Spain; and that Verrazzano, at the time of his pretended discovery, was actually engaged in a corsairial expedition, sailing under the French flag, in a different part of the ocean.”[60]
Mr. Murphy argues, first, that the letter is not genuine, because no original has ever “been exhibited, or referred to in any contemporary or later historian as being in existence; and, although it falls within the era of modern history, not a single fact which it professes to describe relating to the fitting out of the expedition, the voyage, or the discovery, is corroborated by other testimony, whereby its genuineness might even be inferred.”[61] He considers it “highly improbable” that there could have been a French original of the letter, from which two translations were made, with an interval of twenty-seven years between them, “and yet no copy of it in French, or any memorial of its existence in that language, be known.”[62] As the Carli copy contains a Cosmographical Appendix not in the Ramusio text, Mr. Murphy assumes that Ramusio took his version from the Carli manuscript, revising it, and changing its language to suit his editorial taste. Later in his book he goes farther, and accuses Ramusio of suppressing a fact here and adding another there, to make the Verrazano narrative agree with other documents in his possession. As Carli’s letter to his father covered his copy of Verrazano’s letter, the inquiry is narrowed down to a question of the authenticity of the Carli letter. Mr. Murphy argues that this letter cannot be genuine, because it was written by an obscure person, at a great distance from the French Court, and from Dieppe (the port from which Verrazano wrote), only twenty-seven days after the date of the letter which it pretended to enclose.
Mr. Murphy, in the next division of his argument, asserts that no such voyage was made for the King of France:—
“Neither the letter, nor any document, chronicle, memoir, or history of any kind, public or private, printed or in manuscript, belonging to that period or the reign of Francis I., who then bore the crown, mentioning or in any manner referring to it, or to the voyage and discovery, has ever been found in France; and neither Francis himself, nor any of his successors, ever acknowledged or in any manner recognized such discovery, or asserted under it any right to the possession of the country; but, on the contrary, both he and they ignored it, in undertaking colonization in that region, by virtue of other discoveries made under their authority, or with their permission by their subjects.”[63]
He claims that the accounts of Verrazano’s voyage given by French historians all show internal evidence that the information was derived from Ramusio. The life of Francis I., he further says, is a complete denial of the assertion that Verrazano’s voyage was made by his direction. Francis sent out the expeditions of Cartier and of Roberval, and yet never recognized the discovery made by Verrazano. And the map, sometimes called that of Henry II. (the date of which, however, has been supposed to be some years earlier than the accession of that monarch in 1547), an official map displaying all the knowledge the French Court possessed of the American coast, is destitute of any trace of Verrazano.[64]
Mr. Murphy considers next what he calls the misrepresentations in the letter in regard to the geography of the coast. Only to one place, an island, is a name given. A very noticeable omission is that of the Chesapeake Bay, which could not have been overlooked by an explorer seeking a passage to Cathay; and not even the named island really exists: there is none on the coast answering its description.
He next undertakes to show that the letter claims the discovery of Cape Breton and the southerly coast of Newfoundland; and that Ramusio, knowing this claim to be false, “deliberately” interpolated into his text a clause to limit Verrazano’s discoveries to the point where those of the Bretons began.
Mr. Murphy argues next that “the description of the people and productions of the land [were] not made from the personal observation of the writer of the letter. What distinctively belonged to the natives is unnoticed, and what is originally mentioned of them is untrue.”[65] He thinks that all the details given of Indian manners and customs may have been copied from well-known narratives of other visits to other parts of America, and instances a source whence they may have been drawn. Fault is found with Verrazano’s letter because it neglects to mention such peculiarities of the Indians as wampum, tobacco, and, “most remarkable omission of all,” the bark canoe. The falsity of the narrative, made probable by these omissions, is rendered certain by the positive statement of a radical difference in complexion between the tribes found in different parts of the country.[66] And, again, the condition in which plants and vegetation are described is equally absurd and preposterous. And so both in the case of the color of the natives and in that of the conditions of the grapes, Ramusio, says Mr. Murphy, is obliged to alter the text of the narrative to make these stories probable.
The extrinsic evidence in support of the Verrazano discovery is next considered. As Mr. Murphy knew this evidence, it consisted of two pieces,—the Verrazano map, and the discourse of the great French sea-captain. The map was known, at the time of the printing of Mr. Murphy’s essay, only by description and by two inadequate photographs. Our present information about this map is so much greater, that Mr. Murphy’s account of it may be passed over until the map itself is described, later. The French captain’s discourse is known only in the Italian translation printed by Ramusio, and placed in his third volume, immediately after the Verrazano letter. Mr. Murphy dismisses this piece of evidence with few words. Finding in the discourse a clause relating to Verrazano, he at once concludes that Ramusio interpolated it, to make this document consistent with the letter.
A skilled advocate, after proving to his own satisfaction the falsity of a document, likes to find some genuine story which may have served the concocters of the falsehood as a model and storehouse for their lies. He wants also to complete his case by showing the motive for the forgery. This motive Mr. Murphy finds in the civic pride of Florence. All the evidence in favor of the story is traceable, he says, to Florence. As for the model and source of the letter, he discovers these in an attempt “to appropriate to a Florentine the glory which belonged to Estévan Gomez, a Portuguese pilot ... in the service of the Emperor.” He gives the voyage of Gomez in pretty full details. The landfall occurred on the coast of South Carolina. Thence he ran the coast northwardly to Cape Breton, where he turned and retraced his track as far as Florida, returning to Spain by way of Cuba. Mr. Murphy brings forward the map of Ribero, made in 1529, which he claims as an official exhibition of the discoveries of Gomez, and which he thinks was used in the construction of the Verrazano letter, because the several courses and distances run, as described in the letter, agree with similar divisions on the map.[67]
Mr. Murphy adds a concluding chapter, in which he gives the true history of the life of Verrazano, as he gathers it from authentic sources. Beyond his birth and parentage nothing is perhaps certainly known, except his career as a French corsair, under the name of Juan Florin or Florentin. In this capacity he made several rich captures from the Spanish and Portuguese, notably the treasure sent home by Cortes in 1523. Mr. Murphy thinks that a passage in a letter of the Portuguese ambassador in France, which appears to refer to preparations for a voyage of discovery about this time, is really an allusion to the proposed raid, the other being used by the French as a cloak or cover. At all events, he says, Verrazano cannot have been in two places at once,—on the coast of America, or[22] on his return from Newfoundland to France, and at the same time have taken a ship on her way from the Indies to Portugal. He cites, as authority for this alibi, a statement of the capture of a treasure ship brought by a courier from Portugal, and mentioned in a letter of Peter Martyr, dated August 3, 1524.[68] Mr. Murphy then closes with an account of the capture and execution of Florin, or Verrazano.
Mr. Murphy’s argument is an ingenious and able one; and the book, having never been published, is not within the reach of all.[69]
To the objections named in the first divisions of Mr. Murphy’s argument,—that the letter could not have been written by Verrazano, and that no such voyage or discovery was made for the King of France,—replies suggest themselves very easily. We have no originals of many important documents, and yet do not doubt their general accuracy,—the letters of Columbus and Vespucius, for instance; the original French of Ribault; and, to come closer to Mr. Murphy, where is the report of Gomez’ voyage? There is none; and its only supports are an occasional not too flattering reference in the historians, and a map made by another hand. The despised voyage of Verrazano rests upon both a personal narrative and a map, the work of a brother.[70]
Mr. Murphy himself furnishes corroborative testimony to the probable truth of Verrazano’s voyage. He cites a passage from Andrade’s Chronicle of John III., then King of Portugal. By this it appears that John learned that one “Joâo Varezano, a Florentine,” had offered to the King of France to “discover other kingdoms in the East which the Portuguese had not found, and that in the ports of Normandy a fleet was being made ready under the favor of the admirals of the coast and the dissimulation of Francis, to colonize the land of Santa Cruz, called Brazil,” etc. The Portuguese King lost no time in sending a special ambassador, João da Silveyra, to remonstrate; and Mr. Murphy prints a letter from him to his sovereign, dated April 25, 1523, in which he says: “By what I hear, Maestro Joâo Verazano, who is going on the discovery of Cathay, has not left up to this date for want of opportunity, and because of differences, I understand, between himself and men; and on this topic, though knowing nothing positively, I have written my doubts in accompanying letters. I shall continue to doubt, unless he take his departure.”[71]
His Appendix contains also the agreement made by Admiral Chabot with Verrazano and others to “equip, victual, and fit three vessels to make the voyage for spices to the Indies.” Of this expedition Verrazano was to be chief pilot. Chabot was created admiral in March, 1526, which settles the date of this agreement. All these documents Mr. Murphy is obliged to twist into attempts to cover attacks on Spanish or Portuguese commerce by pretended voyages to the West. Is it not easier to take the simple meaning which they carry on their face? This agreement with the Admiral is supported by two documents first printed by M. Harrisse.[72] In the first Giovanni appoints his brother Jerome his attorney during the voyage to the Indies; the second is an agreement with one Adam Godefroy, bourgeois of Rouen, in reference to some trading contemplated in the voyage.[73] Dr. De Costa brings forward also another document relating to Verrazano, dated “the last day of September, 1525,” found in the archives of Rouen; and M. Margry states that he has a letter written at Paris, Nov. 14, 1527, in which Verrazano is said to be preparing to visit America with five ships.[74] And here, too, a reference should be made to the visit of[23] Verrazano to England with some map or globe, as mentioned more than once by Hakluyt.[75]
There is yet hope that the original of the Verrazano letter may be discovered. Dr. De Costa thinks that he has evidence of its probable existence at one time in Spain; and also that it was used by Allefonsce in 1545,—eleven years before the publication by Ramusio.[76] There certainly seems no greater improbability in the supposition of two independent translations, Carli’s and Ramusio’s, from a single original, now lost, than in the assumption that Ramusio rewrote the Carli text and omitted the cosmographical appendix. Indeed Mr. Murphy’s charge, renewed at intervals in his essay as his theory of the fabrication of the letter requires,—that Ramusio was guilty of almost fraudulent editing,—has no foundation. The reputation of the Italian editor stands too high to be easily assailed; and as he was not a Florentine, motive for the deceit is lacking. A careful collation of the verbal differences between the versions is said to support the theory that they are separate translations of one original.[77] And M. Desimoni, presumably an exact scholar of his own language, asserts that a philological examination of the two texts shows that, if either is a rimaneggiato (worked over) copy, it is Carli’s, and not Ramusio’s.[78]
As to the genuineness of Carli’s letter to his father, the epistle contains a reference to the expected arrival of the King at Lyons, fixing its date, and giving thereby internal evidence of its reality. There is really no improbability in the statement that Verrazano had sent a copy of his letter to the Lyons merchants, and it is very easy to suppose Carli in the employ, or enjoying the friendship, of one or more of these merchants. The government of France had not been extended over the seaports long enough to make it any breach of privilege to communicate the results of a voyage to others than the King. And, as Mr. Major observes, in regard to the great distance between Dieppe and Lyons, “it would be a poor courier who could not compass that distance in twenty-seven days.”[79]
AN AUTOGRAPH OF FRANCIS I.
A reason for the failure of the Verrazano letter to make any impression on the French King, or to influence his subsequent action in reference to American discoveries and colonization, is found in the peculiar circumstances of Francis at this time. Engaged in constant wars, almost from the date of his accession to the throne, he was, in the summer of 1524, hurrying south to defend Provence from the attack of the Constable de Bourbon and the Marquis of Pescara, who had obtained permission of Charles V. to invade it. Many towns, the capital, Aix, among them, soon submitted to the Imperial forces; Marseilles was hotly besieged, and only relieved by the close approach of Francis with his army. Now the Queen-Mother was renamed Regent of France, and the war transferred to Italy, where, at the battle of Pavia, Feb. 24, 1525, Francis was defeated and taken prisoner. The following year was spent in captivity in Spain. On his release he at once broke his plighted faith, to renew the bitter struggle with the Emperor. For the time there could be thought or plans for nothing but war. Verrazano and his discovery were entirely forgotten at Court.
To Mr. Murphy’s objections founded on the misrepresentations of the coast geography, and the mistakes and omissions in the description of the people, contained in the letter, it is sufficient to answer that that gentleman mistakes the character of the letter, and demands more from it than he has a right to expect. “We do not quite see,” says Mr. Major, “why the first description of a country should be the only one expected to be free from imperfections.”[80] All the accounts of the early visits to this country have mixed with the general truth of the narrative more or less absurd and improbable statements. Dr. Kohl says: “It is well known that the old navigators in these western countries very often saw what they wished to see.”[81] As for the omission to notice the Chesapeake Bay, and to describe wampum, tobacco, and the bark-canoe, others besides Verrazano have been guilty of the same offence.[82]
The Verrazano letter should be regarded, not as an exact, well-digested report of the voyage (such as a modern explorer might make), but rather as the first hasty announcement to the King of his return and of the success of the voyage. It should be remembered also that mention is made in it of a “little book,” called by Dr. Kohl “the most precious part of what Verrazano wrote respecting his voyage,”[83] wherein were noted the observations of longitude and latitude, of the currents, ebb and flood of the sea, and of other matters which he hoped might be serviceable to navigators. These and other notes were doubtless used by the brother, Hieronimo, in making his map, and the abundance of names displayed on that map is a reply to Mr. Murphy’s objection that the letter contains but one name,—the Island of Louise.
I shall enumerate the authorities for the voyage of Gomez later in this essay; but as Mr. Murphy finds in it the source of the forged Verrazano letter, something must be said of it here. First, it is to be noticed that while Mr. Murphy refuses the narrative of Verrazano’s voyage utterly, he finds no difficulty in accepting one of Gomez’ which is to a great degree of his own (Murphy’s) construction. Dr. Kohl and other scholars have found it impossible to decide with any certainty as to the extent and direction of this voyage. Mr. Murphy presents us with full details,—a landfall in South Carolina; a coasting voyage to the north as far as Cape Breton, a careful observation on the return of rivers, capes, and bays; a temporary belief that he had found the strait he was seeking in the Penobscot, or “Rio de los Gamos,” on account of the great tide issuing from it, and a return to Spain by way of Cuba. The authorities cited in support of these statements are Peter Martyr’s Decades, Herrera, and Cespedes’ Yslario general,—the last in manuscript. The extracts from Martyr and Herrera I have reserved for another part of this chapter.[84] They do not support Mr. Murphy’s details. The Cespedes manuscript was the subject of some remarks by Mr. Buckingham Smith before the New York Historical Society, briefly reported in the Historical Magazine.[85] Mr. Smith had not been able to find this manuscript, but understood that it contained a full account of the voyage of Gomez. Mr. Murphy’s note shows that he knew of its existence in the National Library at Madrid. The director of that library has examined this manuscript at the request of Harrisse, and has not found in it any report of the voyage of Gomez by the navigator, nor does it contain any detailed account of the expedition. There is a reference which shows, perhaps, that Cespedes had seen one of Gomez’ writings.[86]
The attempt to derive the Verrazano letter from the voyage of Gomez is called by Mr. Major the “climax of the series of Mr. Murphy’s constructive imputations.”[87] His elaborate comparison of the courses of Verrazano with similar divisions on Ribero’s map is open to serious question. There are no such divisions on the map. He argues from a knowledge of the two extreme terms of Verrazano’s voyage, and neglects the intermediate term, the latitude of the harbor where the explorers spent fifteen days, doubtless the most accurate latitude taken. And even at the close of his comparison he allows that the latitudes of Ribero’s map are wrong, and says that the map does not give a faithful representation of the voyage of Gomez. It does not give by name the “Rio de los Gamos” which[25] Cespedes says Gomez discovered, although that estuary was already drawn, in the same form given to it by Ribero, on the earlier Weimar map of 1527, which map omits the name of Gomez altogether.[88]
The passage from one of Peter Martyr’s letters, which Mr. Murphy cites to prove that Verrazano was capturing a Portuguese vessel at the time when the letter claimed him as making discoveries, is not very conclusive. Mr. Major thinks that there was time for him to have run down from Dieppe, after his return to that port, to the coast of Portugal, attracted by so rich a game as one hundred and eighty thousand ducats. But Martyr’s statement is indefinite. There are no particulars of time or place, when or where the treasure was taken. It is not even certain that the news brought by the courier was more than a rumor. Martyr’s language is: “Ad aliud hac, iter fecit regis Portugalliæ cursor, quod Florinus pyrata Gallus nauim regi suo raptauerit ab Indis venientem, qua merces vehebãtur gemmarum et aromatum ad ducatorum centum octoginta millium summam conqueritur.”[89]
The map of Hieronimo da Verrazano is without doubt the strongest support of the letter and voyage of his brother Giovanni. That these persons were brothers appears from a document dated May 11, 1526, whereby the navigator constitutes “Jarosme de Varasenne, son frère et heritier,” his attorney to act for him during a proposed voyage to the Indies. This paper, first printed by M. Harrisse in 1876, is signed “Janus Verrazanus.” Dr. De Costa gives a fac-simile of this signature,—here reproduced,—the only known autograph of Verrazano.[90]
Mr. Brevoort gives perhaps the best description of the map, and I condense the following from his account of it. The map is on three sheets of parchment, pasted together, and is 260 centimetres long and 130 wide (about 102 inches by 51), its length being just double the width. It is well preserved, somewhat stained; but no part, except coast-names, is indistinct. Its projection is the simple cylindrical square one, in which all the degrees of latitude are made equal to each other and to the equatorial ones. Like other maps of its period, it has the equator drawn below the middle of the map, and shows 90° of latitude north, and 64° south of it. In breadth it represents about 320° of longitude. There is no graduation for longitude; but the meridians that cross the centres and sides of the two great circles of windroses appear to be drawn seventy degrees apart. There is the usual network of cross-lines radiating from windroses, with one great central rose in north latitude 16°. From the centre of each rose thirty-two lines are drawn to the points of the compass, and these lines are prolonged to the margin of the map. One meridian is divided into degrees of latitude of equal size, each one numbered. Close to the upper margin there is a small scale, with a legend explaining that from point to point there are twelve and a half leagues, each of four miles. The scale is equal to eighteen degrees of latitude in length, and is subdivided into six parts, each having four divisions or points.
THE VERRAZANO MAP
A fac-simile of the engraving given by Brevoort, sufficient for a general outline.
Mr. Brevoort next gives a careful account of the representation of different parts of the world upon this map. Passing somewhat rapidly over the eastern hemisphere, which appears to be generally drawn from the most recent authorities, he takes up the western in some detail. The latitudes of the map are wrong; all the West India Islands are placed several degrees too high, thus forcing northward all other places. Verrazano’s landfall, for instance, is here indicated at about 42°, instead of 34°, as stated in the letter. With this correction the map shows the American coast with some approach to accuracy. Three French standards[91] are placed (according to Brevoort) on the territory claimed as Verrazano’s discovery,—one at the southern and one at the northern limit, with the third at the place where the explorers spent fifteen days. Over these three flags appears the inscription, in capital letters, “NOVA GALLIA SIVE IUCATANET,” and the legend, already cited, “VERRAZANA SIVE NOVA GALLIA,” etc.
Mr. Brevoort has industriously collected the scanty references to this map after it became the property of Cardinal Borgia, with whose collection it was bequeathed to the Propaganda in 1804; but he has been unable to discover the time when the Cardinal procured it, and the source whence it came to his collection. Nothing, indeed, is known of its early history.[92]
Dr. De Costa devotes a chapter of his book to the map of Hieronimo. After showing that the map-maker and the navigator were brothers, he proceeds to consider the genesis of the map, and finds the beginning of its North American portion in the Lorraine map, published in the Ptolemy of 1513. The latitudes of the Verrazano map are recognized as erroneous, and the observer is warned to disregard them. “When this is done, the student will have no difficulty in recognizing the outlines of the North Atlantic coast. For general correctness, the delineation is not equalled by any map of the sixteenth century.” Prominent places are identified and named.
The influence of this map upon subsequent ones is next considered, and a long list of maps showing this influence is cited. Dr. De Costa adds to the value of his discussion by giving tracings from several of these maps, with fac-similes of the Verrazano map, and an enlarged drawing of its coast-line.[93] But the strong point of his chapter, and that for which he deserves the greatest credit, is the publication of a sketch of Verrazano’s coast of the United States, with the names of places attached. These names he deciphered from the original map during a late visit to Rome. They are, of course, of the greatest value in any future study of the map. Dr. De Costa enters somewhat into a study of these names.[94]
M. Desimoni, while generally acknowledging his indebtedness to Dr. De Costa’s work, and praising that gentleman’s scholarship and research, could not accept all his inferences in the matter of the names, and doubted some of his readings. He therefore caused a fresh examination of the map to be made, through the kind and learned services of Dr. Giacomo Lumbroso and Canon Fabiani. He prints, in the Appendix to his Studio secondo on Verrazano, in parallel columns, the variations from De Costa’s readings. The great difficulty and doubt attending the deciphering words, particularly names, in old documents and maps, is well known to all who have attempted such work.[95]
A discovery made lately at Milan brings out a new map, and one of great value in the discussion of Verrazano’s voyage. M. Desimoni, on his return to Genoa from the Geographical Congress held at Venice in September, 1881, stopped at Milan, where he visited the Ambrosian Library to consult some maps. He was there told by the prefetto, the Abbé Ceriani, that a map by Vesconte Maggiolo, hitherto supposed to bear the date of 1587, and therefore to have been the work of one of the second generation of this family of map-makers, was really dated 1527. By comparing the legend on this map with[28] one of similar form and writing on a map of 1524, it could be seen that the numeral 2 in the first map had become an 8 by lengthening the curves of the figure until they were finally joined. This appeared to have been done with ink of a paler color. M. Desimoni reproduces the two legends, to show the process.[96] He finds also certain peculiarities in the map, supposed of 1587, which prove that it must belong to the first decades of the century, and therefore entertains no doubt of the correctness of the change in the date.
Fresh from studies of early American voyages, M. Desimoni examined the North American portion of this map, particularly the coast, with as great care as his limited time and the poor condition of the parchment permitted. He was not a little surprised to find that the coast bore names closely related both to the Verrazano and to other maps whose source is yet undiscovered. He made a copy of the names, and afterward submitted his work to Signor Carlo Prayer, of Milan, who verified it, and also furnished as perfect a copy as it was possible to make of the names, and a sketch of the whole coast. This was reproduced by M. Desimoni to illustrate a paper prepared for the Società Ligure di’ Storia Patria.
This map measures about seventy-five centimetres in length by about fifty in width,—about 29½ inches by 19½. Its legend reads: “Vesconte de Maiollo conposuy hanc cartam in Janua anno d̄ny. 1527, die xx Decenbris.” The place occupied in the Verrazano map by the title Nova Gallia, etc., and the legend about Verrazano’s discovery, bears in this map the name Francesca, to indicate exactly a name for the whole region.
There is no mention of Verrazano by name in this map, but there is ample evidence of a connection between Maggiolo’s map and that of Hieronimo da Verrazano; very probably, M. Desimoni thinks, through the intervention or medium of some chart or charts yet unknown. The Maggiolo map has a reference to Florence, Verrazano’s birthplace, in the names of “Valle unbrosa” (Vallambrosa), “Careggi,” etc.; references to France and Francis in such names as “Anguileme,” “Longavilla,” “Normanvilla,” “Diepa,” “San Germano,” and others, particularly “Luisa,” applied to an island. The map is connected with Verrazano’s, not only by this name, but by a great number which the two have in common. It is true that these names are not always applied to the same positions on the two maps: “Luisa” is a squarish island on the Maggiolo map, and a triangular one on the other, and in the letter. The latitudes of Maggiolo’s map are different. Florida is placed as far south as the tropic. There is naturally some diversity in the general direction of the coast, and in the distances from place to place. But the substantial points are equivalent, if not identical. We have the Nova Gallia in its equivalent, Francesca; the same allusions in the names to Tuscany, France, Dieppe; and an identity in the names of three very important places,—“Luisa,” the port of refuge, and the attempt to show Cape Cod.
M. Desimoni examines again the map of Gastoldo, first published in the Ptolemy of 1548, inserted later in Ramusio’s third volume, and the globe known as the globe of Ulpius, already mentioned here. Both contain names that appear on the Verrazano map; but an examination shows that both contain names not on that map, and each contains at least one name not on the other. All these names are found on the map of Maggiolo; and M. Desimoni concludes his paper with a table in four parallel columns, in which a careful comparison is given of the nomenclature of four maps,—the Maggiolo of 1527, the Verrazano of 1529, the Ulpius globe of 1542, and the Gastoldo of 1548.[97]
The earliest mention of the voyage of Gomez is found in Oviedo’s Sumario, which was published at Toledo in 1526.[98] It is there stated (folio xiv, verso) that Gomez returned in[29] November from a voyage begun the year before (1524, which we now know is an error); that he had found in the north “a greate parte of lande continuate from that which is caued Baccaleos, discoursynge towarde the West to the xl. and xli. degree [et puesta en quarenta grados y xli, et assi algo mas y algo menos], frō whense he brought certeyn Indians,” etc.[99]
Peter Martyr’s Decades were published in a complete edition at Alcala in 1530,[100] and his Letters appeared also that same year from the same press.[101] He speaks thus of Gomez in the Decades: “It is also decreed that one Stephanus Gomez, who also himselfe is a skillful navigator, shal goe another way, whereby, betweene the Baccalaos and Florida, long since our countries, he saith he will finde out a waye to Cataia: one onely shippe, called a Caruell, is furnished for him, and he shall haue no other thing in charge then to search out whether any passage to the great Chan, from out the diuers windings and vast compassings of this our Ocean, were to be founde.”[102]
And later he narrates the return of the expedition, its failure to find the strait (declaring his own opinion that Gomez’ “imaginations were vaine and frivolous”), and tells the story about the mistake of cloves and slaves.[103] In a letter written in August, 1524, he speaks also of the voyage of Gomez, but I find no mention of his return in that publication.[104]
Gomara devotes a short chapter to Gomez. He says that his purpose was to find a northern passage, but that he failed; and so, loading his ship with slaves, returned home. He also relates the clove anecdote.[105]
Herrera gives an account of Gomez and his voyage. He says: “Corriò por toda aquella costa hasta la Florida, gran trecho de Tierra lo que hasta entonces, por otros Navios Castellanos, no estaba navegado, aunque Sebastian Gaboto, Juan Verraçano, i otros lo havian navegado.... Desde la Florida, atravesò à la Isla de Cuba, i fue à dar al Puerto de Santiago, adonde se refrescò, i le regalò Andrès de Duero, por lo qual el Rei le mostrò agradecimiento, bolviò à Castilla i aportò à la Coruña diez meses despues que saliò de aquel Puerto,” etc.[106] “He ran along that whole coast as far as Florida,—a great stretch of land which, up to that time, had not been traversed by other Spanish ships, although Sebastian Cabot, John Verrazano, and others had sailed along it.... From Florida he passed to the island of Cuba, and entered the port of Santiago, where he refreshed, and Andrès de Duero regaled him, for which the King showed gratitude. He returned to Castille, and landed at Corunna ten months after he had sailed from that port,” etc.
Galvano, in his account of the voyage, appears to make Gomez sail along the American coast from south to north; while Herrera, it will have been observed, reverses this direction.[107] The testimony of Cespedes has already been considered.[108] Dr. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine, gives a good account of Gomez’ voyage, based on careful study of the authorities.[109]
The mutinous conduct of Gomez in the fleet of Magellan is related by Pigafetta, who accompanied that expedition, and kept a diary, from which he afterward made up an account of the voyage. One of the copies of this, which existed only in manuscript, was given to Louisa, mother of Francis I. of France, who employed Jacques Antoine Fabre to translate it into French. He made in preference an abridgment of the account, and this was published at Paris in 1525.[110]
For the opinion that a northern passage through America could be discovered somewhere between Florida and the Baccalaos, Navarrete’s work may be consulted.[111] He gives among his documents the letter of the King commanding the attendance of Dornelos;[112] the agreement with Agramonte in 1511, and his commission as captain of the expedition,[113] and the grant to De Ayllon.[114] He has found also the appointment of Gomez as pilot just before the sailing of his expedition, Feb. 10, 1525.[115]
The Agreement of Gomez with the Emperor for the voyage is printed in full in the Documentos ineditos.[116] Hernando Cortes’ letter about the existence of the northern passage may be consulted in an English translation in Mr. Folsom’s Despatches of Cortes.[117]
The discoveries of Gomez are laid down upon a map[118] of the world made, at the command of the Emperor, in 1529 by Diego Ribero, a well-known cosmographer, who had been sent to the Congress of Badajos as one of the Spanish experts.
On a large section of this coast extending from Cape Breton westward about three hundred leagues to a point where the land bends to the south, is the legend: “Tierra de Estevan Gomez la qual descubrio por mandado de su magt nel anno de 1525 ay en ella muchos arboles y fructas de los de españa y muchos rodovallos y salmones y sollos: no han allado oro.” (“The Country of Stephen Gomez, which he discovered at the command of his Majesty, in the year 1525. There are here many trees and fruits similar to those in Spain, and many walruses and salmon, and fish of all sorts. Gold they have not found.”)[119] This is supposed to have been drawn from the reports of Gomez, and to contain his coast-lines and the names which he gave to places.
Oviedo wrote in 1537 a description of the American coast from a map made by Alonzo de Chaves the year before. He frequently cites Gomez as his authority for the names of places, etc. This part of Oviedo’s work remained in manuscript until its publication by the Academy of Madrid in 1852. Dr. Kohl enters into an elaborate commentary of this description by Oviedo, and the Chaves map, of which not even a copy has come down to our times.[120]
The books of André Thevet which contain the accounts of his visit to this country are the Singularitez de la France antarctique and the Cosmographie universelle.[121] Besides[31] these works Thevet published an account of his journey to the East, Cosmographie du Levant, at Lyons, in 1554, and a series of portraits and lives of great men, ancient and modern, in two volumes, at Paris, in 1584. He left also several manuscripts, which are now preserved in the National Library at Paris.
The Singularitez passed to a second edition,[122] and was translated into Italian by Giuseppe Horologgi,[123] and into English[124] by M. Hacket. A reprint of the original edition was published at Paris in 1878, with notes, and a biographical preface by M. Paul Gaffarel of Dijon.
The Cosmographie was not reprinted, nor was it, so far as I know, translated into any other language. In the Magazine of American History for February, 1882, however, Dr. De Costa published a translation of the part of the book which relates to New England.
It seems quite probable that Thevet never made the voyage along the American coast of which he pretends to give an account. He gives nothing at all from Florida to what he calls the River of Norumbega, and is generally very indefinite in all his statements. He may easily have taken his stories from other travellers’ books, and it is known he used Cartier and others; and indeed he is said to have been ill nearly all the time of his stay in Brazil, and to have scarcely stirred out of the island where the fort was, waiting for the ship to make ready for home.
Thevet’s reputation for veracity is poor, particularly among his contemporaries. Jean de Léry, who was one of the party which went out to Villegagnon, in response to his appeal for Protestant ministers in 1556, after Thevet’s return home, wrote an account of the Brazil enterprise. This, first published at La Rochelle in 1578, passed through several editions. The preface of the second edition is occupied with an exposure of the “errors and impostures” of Thevet, and that of the fifth edition contains more matter of the same kind. De Léry calls Thevet “impudent menteur,” and speaks of his books as “vieux haillons et fripperies.” Again he says, “Il fait des contes prophanes, ridicules, pueriles, et mensonges pour tous ses escrits.” Possibly some allowance may be made for the odium theologicum of the writer, a Calvinist, disputing with a monk; and it may be remembered that both had been disappointed in any hopes they had entertained of the conversion of the Indians, through the treachery of Villegagnon.
Belleforest and Fumée have also written in harsh terms about Thevet. De Thou, a historian of far more dignified and impartial character than these others, is nearly as abusive. He says: “Il s’appliqua par une ridicule vanité à écrire des livres, qu’il vendait[32] à des misérables libraires: après avoir compilé des extraits de différents auteurs, il y ajoutait tout ce qu’il trouvait dans les guides des chemins et autres livres semblables qui sont entre les mains du peuple. Ignorant au-delà de ce qu’on peut imaginer, il mettait dans ses livres l’incertain pour le certain, et le faux pour le vrai, avec une assurance étonnante.”[125]
Even Thevet’s latest editor, M. Gaffarel, is forced to begin his notice of the monk by allowing that he was not “un de ces écrivans de premier ordre, qui, par la sûreté de leur critique, le charme de leur style, ou l’intérét de leurs écrits commandent l’admiration à leurs contemporains, et s’imposent à la postérité. Il passait, au contraire, même de son temps, pour ne pas avoir un jugement très sur,” etc. M. Gaffarel claims for Thevet the credit of introducing tobacco into France, and hopes that this may balance the imperfections of his books.
Dr. Kohl gave some credence to Thevet’s narrative, but admits that he is “not esteemed as a very reliable author.” Still, he translated the account of his visit to Penobscot Bay, and inserted it entire in his Discovery of Maine.[126] Dr. De Costa in 1870 criticised this view of Dr. Kohl.[127]
Note.—Harrisse, in his recent Discovery of North America (p. 234), cites for the first time a long passage about Gomez’s voyage from the Islario of Alonso de Santa Cruz, preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, and finds it to be the source whence Cespedes (see ante, p. 24) drew his language; and in it he finds somewhat uncertain proof that Gomez went as far north as the entrance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and corrected some cartographical notions respecting those waters. A map showing Gomez’s discoveries is attached to the Islario, and Harrisse gives this map in fac-simile.
MAPS OF THE
EASTERN COAST OF NORTH AMERICA,
1500-1535,
WITH THE CARTOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF THE SEA OF VERRAZANO.
BY THE EDITOR.
THE Editor has elsewhere[128] referred to the great uncertainty attending the identification of minor coast localities in the earliest maps. The most trustworthy interpreters recognize two important canons,—namely, that cartographical names during a long series of years, and at an era of exploration forerunning settlements, are always suspicious and often delusive, as Professor Bache has pointed out in the Coast Survey Report for 1855 (p. 10); and that direction is likely to be right, and distance easily wrong, as Humboldt has explained. Nothing is more seductive than to let a spirit of dogmatism direct in the interpretation of the early maps, and there is no field of research in which predisposition to belief may lead one so wrongly. It was largely in the spirit of finding what they sought, that the early map-makers fashioned their charts; and their interpretation depends quite as much on geographical views current in those days as upon geographical facts patent in these days.
The study of early American cartography may be said to have begun with Humboldt; and in this restricted field no one has since rendered greater service than Dr. Kohl.[129] Mr. Brevoort, not without justice, calls him “the most able comparative geographer of our day.”[130] The labor which Dr. Kohl performed took expression not only in his publications, but also in the collection of copies of early maps which he formed and annotated for the United States Government twenty-five years ago. His later printed books, using necessarily much of the same material, may be riper from longer experience; but the Washington Collection, as he formed it, is still valuable, and deserves to be better known. It belongs to the Department of State, and consists of not far from four hundred maps, following printed and manuscript originals. They are carefully and handsomely executed, but with little attempt at reproduction in fac-simile. By favor of the Secretary of State, and through the interest of Theodore F. Dwight, Esq., the librarian of that department, the collection has been intrusted to the Editor for use in the present work and for the preparation of an annotated calendar of the maps which will be printed by Harvard University.
THE ADMIRAL’S MAP, 1513.
Besides this collection in the State Department (which cost the Government nearly $6,000), the Reports of the United States Coast-Survey[131] describe three other collections, accompanied by descriptive texts, which he made for that office, and which he proposed to call collectively “The Hydrographic Annals of the United States.” They repeat many of the maps belonging to the State Department Collection. These supplemental collections are,—
1. On the eastern coast of the United States, giving copies of 41 maps; the titles of 155 surveys of the coast between 1612 and 1851; a list of 291 works on the early explorations of the coast; and an historical memoir on such voyages, from the Northmen down.
2. On the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico falling within the United States, giving copies of 48 maps from 1500 to 1846; the titles of 58 surveys (exclusive of those of the United[35] States), between 1733 and 1851; a list of 221 books and manuscripts on the explorations since 1524; and an historical memoir of the explorations between 1492 and 1722.[132]
3. On the west coast of the United States, giving a bibliography of 230 titles.
There is another historical memoir by Dr. Kohl, with other copies of the maps of the west coast, in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.; and this also has been in the temporary custody of the Editor.[133] At the time of his death Dr. Kohl was occupied with the preparation of a history of the Search for a Northwest Passage, from Cortes to Franklin, of which only a fragment appeared in the Augsburg periodical, Ausland. It was a theme which would naturally have embraced the whole extent of his knowledge of early American discovery and cartography.[134]
The best printed enumeration of maps of the eastern coast of North America is given by Harrisse for the earlier period in his Cabots, and for a later period in his Notes sur la Nouvelle France.
PORTUGUESE CHART, 1503 (after Kohl).
The map of La Cosa (1500) still remains the earliest of these delineations, and a heliotype of it is given in another volume.[135] Harrisse has lately claimed the discovery in Italy of a Portuguese chart of 1502, showing the coast from the Gulf of Mexico to about the region of the Hudson River, which bears coast names in twenty-two places; but the full publication of the facts has not yet been made;[136] and there is no present means of ascertaining what relation it bears to a large manuscript map of the world, of Portuguese origin, preserved in the Archives at Munich, of which a part is herewith sketched from Dr. Kohl’s copy, and to which he gives the conjectural date of 1503.
Dr. Kohl also reproduces it in part in his Discovery of Maine, p. 174, where he dates it 1504. His two copies vary, in that the engraved one seems to make the east and west coast-line from “Cabo de Conception” the determinate one, while his manuscript copy gives the completed character to the other line. It is held to record the results of Cortereal’s voyage, and shows in Greenland a more correct outline than any earlier chart. The other coast seems to be Labrador and Newfoundland run into one. Peschel (Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 331) puts the date 1502 or 1503. The present Cape Freels, on the Newfoundland coast, is thought to be a corruption of “Frey Luis,”—here given to an island. (Cf. Kunstmann, Die Entdeckung Amerikas, pp. 69, 128.) Harrisse (Cabots, p. 161) speaks of Kunstmann’s referring it to “Salvat de Pilestrina,” and thinks that the author may be “Salvat[ore] de Palastrina” of Majorca. Lelewel also gives in his Géographie du Moyen-Âge (plate 43) a map of importance in this connection, which he dates 1501-1504, and which seems to be very like a combination of the two Ptolemy maps of 1513. The Reinel Chart of 1505 has been referred to in the preceding text.[137]
The Catalogue of the Library of Parliament (Canada), 1858, p. 1614, gives what purports to be a copy of a “Carte de l’embouchure du St. Laurent faite et dressée sur une écorce de bois de Vouleau, envoyée du Canada par Jehan Denys, 1508.” Shea also mentions it in his Charlevoix, i. 106, with a reference to Ramusio’s third volume. Mr. Ben: Perley Poore, in his Documents collected in France, in the Massachusetts Archives, says he searched for the original of this map at Honfleur without success. Harrisse, Cabots, p. 250, says no such map is to be found in the Paris Archives; and a tracing being supplied from Canada, he pronounces it “absolument apocryphe,” with a nomenclature of the last century. Bancroft (United States, edition of 1883, i. 14) still, however, acknowledges a map of Denys of this date.
The question of the duration of the belief in the Asiatic connection of North America naturally falls into connection with the volume[138] of this work devoted to the Spanish discoveries. We may refer briefly to a type of map represented by the Lenox globe[139] (1510-1512), the Stobnicza map[140] (1512), the so-called Da Vinci sketch[141] (1512-1515), the Sylvanus map in the Ptolemy of 1511, the Ptolemy of 1513, the Schöner, or Frankfort, globe of 1515,[142] the Schöner globe of 1520,[143] the Münster map of 1532,[144] and even so late a representation as the Honter mappamundi of 1542, reproduced in 1552 and 1560. This type represents a solitary island, or a strip of an unknown shore, sometimes joined with the island, lying in the North Atlantic. The name given to this land is Baccalaos, or Corterealis, or some equivalent form of those words, and their coasts represent the views which the voyages of the Cabots and Cortereals had established. West and southwest of this the ocean flowed uninterruptedly, till you came to the region of Florida and its northern extension. The Portuguese seem to have been the first to surmise a continental connection to this region, in a portolano which is variously dated from 1514 to 1520, and whose legends have been quoted in the preceding text.[145]
The Portuguese claim of explorations in this region by Alvarez Fagundes in 1521, or later, is open to question. If a map which is brought forward by C. A. de Bettencourt, in his Descobrimentos dos Portuguezes em terras do ultramar nos seculos xv e xvi, published at Lisbon in 1881-1882, represents the knowledge of a time anterior to Cartier, it implies an acquaintance with this region more exact than we have other evidence of. The annexed sketch of that map follows a colored fac-simile entitled, “Fac-simile de uma das cartas do atlas de Lazaro Luiz,” which is given by Bettencourt. The atlas in which it occurs was made in 1563, though the map is supposed to record the explorations of João Alvarez Fagundes, under an authority from King Manoel, which was given in 1521. Harrisse in his Cabots (p. 277) indicates the very doubtful character of this Portuguese claim.
LAZARO LUIZ.
VERRAZANO, 1529.
The information concerning the Baccalaos region, which was the basis of these Portuguese charts, seems also to have been known, in part at least, a few years later to Hieronymus Verrazano, and Ribero, though the former contracted and the latter closed up the passages by the north and south of Newfoundland. The chart usually ascribed to Fernando Columbus[146] closely resembles that of Ribero. Of the Verrazano map sufficient has been said in the preceding text; but it may not be amiss to trace more fully the indications there given of its effect upon subsequent cartography, so far as it established a prototype for a great western sea only[38] separated at one point from the Atlantic by a slender isthmus. Mr. Brevoort (Verrazano, p. 5) is of the opinion that the idea of the Western Sea originated with Oviedo’s Sumario of 1526.
RIBERO, 1529.
The key is as follows:—
1. Esta tierra descubrierô los Ingleses, Tiera del Labrador.
2. Tiera de los Bacallaos, la qual descubrieron los corte reales.
3. Tiera de Esteva Gomez la qual descubrio por mandado de su. mag. el año de 1525, etc.
There are several early copies of this map. Harrisse describes the Weimar copy as having on “Tiera del Labrador” the words, “Esta tierra descubrieron los Ingleses no ay en ella cosa de pronecho.” Thomassy says the Propagande copy indicates the discovery of Labrador by the English of Bristol. See Vol. III. pp. 16, 24, and a note in chap. ix. of the present volume. The Ribero contour of the eastern coast long prevailed as a type. We find it in the Venice map of 1534, of which there is a fac-simile in Stevens’s Notes, and in the popular Bellero map of 1554 (in use for many years), and, with little modification, in so late a chart as Hood’s in 1592. It was held to for the coast between Florida and Nova Scotia long after better knowledge prevailed of the more northern regions. It was evidently the model of the map published by the Spanish Government in 1877 in the Cartas de Indias.
Reference has already been made to the map of Maggiollo, or Maiollo (1527), which Desimoni has brought forward, and of which a fac-simile of his sketch is reproduced on page 39. The sea will be here observed with the designation, “Mare Indicum.” Dr. De Costa showed a large photograph of it at a meeting of the New York Historical Society, May, 1883, pointing out that the name “Francesca” gave Verrazano the credit of first bestowing that name in some form upon what was afterward known as New France.[147]
In 1870 there was published in the Jahrbuch des Vereins für Erdkunde in Dresden (tabula vii.) a fac-simile of a map of America from a manuscript atlas preserved in Turin which gives conjecturally this western sea, closely after the type shown below in a map of Baptista Agnese (1536); its date is put somewhere between 1530 and 1540.
An Italian mappamundi of the middle of the sixteenth century is described by Peschel in the Jahresbericht des Vereins für Erdkunde in Leipzig, 1871, where the map is given in colored fac-simile. Peschel places it between 1534 and 1550; and it also bears a close resemblance to the Agnese map, as does also a manuscript map of about 1536, preserved in the Bodleian, of which Kohl, in his manuscript collection, has a copy. This Agnese map is a part of a portolano in the Royal Library at Dresden; and similar ones by him are said to be in the Royal Library at Munich, in the British Museum, and in the Bodleian, dated a few months apart. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine (pl. xiv.), sketches it from the Dresden copy, and his sketch is followed in the accompanying cut. An account of Agnese’s cartographical labors is given in another volume.[148]
Perhaps the most popular map of America issued in the sixteenth century was Münster’s of 1540, of which a fac-simile is annexed. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine (pl. xvª), erring, as has been pointed out by Murphy,[149] in giving a date (1530) ten years too early to this map, and in ignorance of the Maiollo map, was led into the mistake of considering it the earliest which has been found showing this western sea. The map was frequently repeated, with changes of names, during that century, and is found in use in books as late as 1572.[150]
MAIOLLO, OR MAGGIOLO, 1527.
The two legends, with date, are explained on p. 28.
In the same year (1540) a similarly conjectural western sea was given in a map of the Portuguese Diego Homem, which is preserved in the British Museum. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine (pl. xv.), gives this and other maps which support in his judgment the belief in the Verrazano Sea; but Murphy (Verrazzano, p. 106) denies that they contribute any evidence to that end. Of the Ulpius globe, mention has already been made.[151] A fac-simile of Dr. De Costa’s representation of the American portion is given herewith.
AGNESE MAP, 1536.
The key is as follows: 1. Terra de bacalaos. 2. (dotted line) El viage de france. 3. (dotted line) El viage de peru. 4. (dotted line) El viago a maluche. 5. Temistitan. 6. Iucatan. 7. Nombre de dios. 8. Panama. 9. La provintia de peru. 10. La provintia de chinagua. 11. S. paulo. 12. Mundus novus. 13. Brazil. 14. Rio de la plata. 15. El Streto de ferdinando de Magallanas.
Harrisse (Cabots, p. 191), referring to the dotted line of a route to India, which Agnese lays down on this map, crossing the Verrazano isthmus, thinks it is rather a reminiscence of Verrazano than of Cartier. Harrisse gives the legend, “el viazo de franza.”
There are two maps which connect this western sea, extending southerly from the north, with the idea that a belt of land surrounded the earth, there being a connection between Europe and Greenland, and between Greenland and Labrador, making America and Eastern Asia identical. This theory was represented in a map of 1544,—preserved in the British Museum and figured[152] by Kohl in his Discovery of Maine (pl. xv.), who assigns it to Ruscelli, the Italian geographer. Another support of the same theory is found in the “Carta Marina” of the 1548 edition of Ptolemy (map no. 60).
Jacobo Gastaldo, or Gastaldi, was the cartographer of this edition, and Lelewel[153] calls him “le coryphée des géographes de la peninsula italique.” Ruscelli, if he did not make this map for Gastaldo, included it in his own edition of Ptolemy in 1561, the maps of which have been pointed out by Thomassy as bearing “la plus grande analogie avec celles de la galerie géographique de Pie IV.,” while the same authority[154] refers to a planisphere of Ruscelli (1561) as “inédit, conservé au Musée de la Propagande.”[155]
This union of North America and Asia was a favorite theory of the Italians long after other nations had given it up.[156] Furlani in 1560 held to it in a map, and Ruscelli,[41] in another map of the 1561 edition of Ptolemy, leaves the question unsettled by a “littus incognitum.”
MÜNSTER, 1540.
Meanwhile Münster in the 1540 Ptolemy had given his idea of the western sea by making it a southern extension of the northwest passage. This is shown in a sketch of Münster’s 1540 map given above.
FROM THE ULPIUS GLOBE, 1542.
CARTA MARINA, 1548.
| The key is as follows:— 1. Norvegia. 2. Laponia. 3. Gronlandia. 4. Tierra del Labrador. 5. Tierra del Bacalaos. 6. La Florida. 7. Nueva Hispania. 8. Mexico. 9. India Superior. 10. La China. |
11. Ganges. 12. Samatra. 13. Java. 14. Panama. 15. Mar del Sur. 16. El Brasil. 17. El Peru. 18. Strecho de Fernande Magalhaes. 19. Tierra del Fuego |
One of the most conspicuous instances of a belief in this sea was the Lok map of 1582, which Hakluyt published, as has been already stated, in his Divers Voyages of that year, which, being made “according to Verarzanus’s plot,” is reproduced here from the cut already given in the preceding volume.[157]
With Lok we may consider that the western sea vanishes, unless there be thought a curious relic of it in the map which John White, of the Roanoke Colony, made in 1585 of the coast from the Chesapeake to Florida, which is preserved among the De Bry drawings[44] in the British Museum. The history of these drawings has been already told.[158] There is a copy of this map in the Kohl Collection; but the annexed sketch is taken from a fac-simile engraving given by Dr. Edward Eggleston in The Century Magazine, November, 1882. It will be observed that at Port Royal there seems to be a passage to western water of uncertain extent,[159] which was interpreted later as an inland lake.
LOK’S MAP, 1582,—REDUCED.
JOHN WHITE, 1585.
Other maps of this period have no trace of such western sea, like the protuberant “Terra del laboradore” of Bordone in 1521 and 1528;[160] the “Terra Francesca” of the Premontré globe, now in the National Library at Paris;[161] the northeasterly trend of the map of the monk Franciscus;[162] the “Nova Terra laboratorum dicta” of Robert Thorne’s map (1527);[163] Piero Coppo’s Portolano of 1528, in which America appears as a group of islands; and in the British Museum among the Sloane Manuscripts a treatise, De principiis astronomie, which has a map in which the eastern coast of America is made to consist of two huge peninsulas, one of them being marked “Terra Franciscana nuper lustrata,”[164] and the other, “Baccalear regio,” ending towards the east with a cape, “Rasu.”[165]
Kunstmann in his Atlas (pl. vi.) gives a map which he places between 1532 and 1540; it is of unknown authorship.
Wieser, in his Magalhâes-Strasse (p. 77), points to a globe of Schöner, the author of[46] the Opusculum geographicum, in which he claimed that “Bachalaos—called from a new kind of fish there—had been discovered to be continuous with Upper India.”
NORTH AMERICA, 1532-1540 (after Kunstmann).
There is a chart of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence dated 1534, and of which Kohl gives a sketch in his Discovery of Maine (pl. xviiiª). It is signed by Gaspar Viegas, of whom nothing is known. A map, in what Harrisse[166] calls the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript, has the legend upon Labrador: “This land was discovered by the English from Bristol, and named Labrador because the one who saw it first was a laborer from the Azores.” Biddle, in his Sebastian Cabot, p. 246, had conjectured from a passage in a letter of Pasqualigo in the Paesi novamente retrovati of 1507 (lib. vi. cap. cxxvi.), that the name had come from Cortereal’s selling its natives in Lisbon as slaves.
CHAPTER II.
JACQUES CARTIER AND HIS SUCCESSORS.
BY THE REV. BENJAMIN F. DE COSTA, D.D.
JACQUES CARTIER, the Breton sailor, sometimes styled “the Corsair,” was born at St. Malo, probably in 1491. He began to follow the sea at an early age, and soon attained to prominence. In 1534 the discovery of a western route to the Indies being a subject that attracted great attention, Cartier undertook an expedition, for which preparations had been begun during the previous year.
The Treaty of Cambrai having given peace to France, the privateersmen, or “corsairs,” found that the best excuse for their occupation was gone; and they were ready to engage in the work of exploration opened by Francis I. in 1524, by sending out Verrazano. Accordingly the King appears to have accepted the plan of Cartier submitted by Chabot, Admiral of France, and the arrangements were perfected. Cartier’s commission for the voyage has not yet been produced, though in March, 1533, he was recognized by the Court of St. Malo as a person already authorized to undertake a voyage to the New Land.
Cartier sailed from the ancient port of St. Malo, April 20, 1534. With two ships of about sixty tons each, and a company, it would appear, of sixty-two chosen men, he laid his course in the track of the old navigators, with whom he must have been familiar. On May 10 he reached Cape Bonavista, one of the nearest headlands of Newfoundland. Forced by storms to seek refuge in the harbor of St. Catherine, about fifteen miles south-southeast of Bonavista, he spent ten days in making some needed repairs. With the return of favorable winds he resumed his voyage, and coasted northward to the Island of Birds, which he found surrounded by banks of broken ice and covered by an incredible number of fowl. With these the French loaded their boats in half an hour. There, also, they saw a large bear, “as white as any swan,” swimming thither “to eat of the said birds.” On May 27 the ships reached the entrance of the Straits of Belle Isle, but were obliged by the ice to enter the neighboring harbor of Carpunt,[48] 51° N. From Carpunt, Cartier sailed to the Labrador coast, and, June 10, reached a harbor which he called Port Brest. The next day being the festival of St. Barnabas, divine service was said by the priest serving as chaplain, after which several boats went along the coast to explore, when they reached and named the harbors of St. Anthony, St. Servans, and Jacques Cartier. At St. Servans the explorers set up a cross, and near by, at a place called St. John’s River, they found a ship from Rochelle, which had touched at Port Brest the previous night.
[The familiar portrait of Cartier, of which a sketch of the head is given in the accompanying vignette, is preserved at St. Malo, and engravings of it will be found in Shea’s editions of Le Clercq’s Etablissement de la Foy and of Charlevoix’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France, vol. i. p. 110, and in Faillon’s Histoire de la Colonie Française, vol. i.—Ed.]
The boats returned to the ships on the 13th, the leader reporting the appearance of Labrador as forbidding, saying that this must be the land that was allotted to Cain. In this region they found some savages who were “wild and unruly,” and who had come “from the mainland out of warmer regions” in bark canoes. They appear to have been the Red Indians, or Boeotics, of Newfoundland, who were renowned as hunters, and who excelled in the manufacture of instruments carved in ivory and bone. Professor Dawson says that the Breton sailor here stood in the presence of the precise equivalent of the Flint Folk of his own country.
From Port Brest the expedition crossed the Strait and “sailed toward the south, to view the lands that we had there seen, that appeared to us like two great islands; but when we were in the middle of the Gulf we knew it that it was terra firma, where there was a great double cape, one above the other, and on this account we called it Cape Double.” This was Point Rich, Newfoundland. Coasting the land, amid mists and storms, June 24 he reached a cape, which in honor of the day he called Cape St. John,—now known as Anguille. From Anguille Cartier sailed southwest into the Gulf, reaching the Isles aux Margoulx, the present Bird Rocks, two of which were “steep and upright as any wall,” where he was again impressed by[49] the fowl, “innumerable as the flowers on a meadow.” Twenty-five miles westward was another island, about six miles long and as many wide, being fertile, and full of beautiful trees, meadows, and flowers. There were sea-monsters on the shores, which had tusks like elephants. This he called Brion Island, and the name still remains.
At this point both Ramusio’s narrative of the voyage and the Discovrs dv voyage (1598) make Cartier say: “I think that there may be some passage between Newfoundland and Brion Island;” but the text of the Relation originale[167] reads, “between the New Land and the land of the Bretons.” This has been accepted as teaching that Cartier at that time did not know of the strait between Newfoundland and Cape Breton; and it is argued that, as it afforded a shorter route from France to Canada, he would have followed it, if he had known of its existence; yet in 1541, when he certainly knew that strait, he took the route by Belle Isle, as twice before. Again, on his second voyage, while passing through the southern strait on his way to France, the narrative does not speak of any discovery. The inference may be drawn that the passage quoted misrepresents Cartier. Indeed, the portion of the narrative covering the movements around Brion and Alezay Island is so confused that one with difficulty takes in the situation. Dr. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine (p. 326), represents Brion’s Island as the present Prince Edward; though no map seems to bear out the statement.
Next Cartier passed to an island “very high and pointed at one end, which was named Alezay.” Its first cape was called St. Peter’s, in honor of the day. This, as it would appear, is the present Prince Edward Island;[168] but the account admits of large latitude of interpretation.
Cartier reached the mainland on the evening of the last day of June, and named a headland Cape Orleans; next he found Miramichi Bay, or the Bay of Boats, which he called St. Lunario. Here he had some hope of finding a passage through the continent. On July 4 Cartier was surrounded by a great fleet of canoes, and was obliged to fire his cannon to drive the natives away. The next day, however, he met them on the shore, and propitiated their chief with the present of a red hat. These were the Micmacs, a coast tribe wandering from place to place, fishing in the summer, and hunting in the interior during the winter. By July 8 he reached the bay which, on account of the heat, he called the Bay Chaleur, known by the Indians as Mowebaktabāāk, or the Biggest Bay. Here the Micmac country ended, and the natives were of another tribe, visitors from Canada, who had descended the St. Lawrence to prosecute[50] the summer fisheries.[169] They proved friendly, engaging in trade, and showing a disposition which Cartier thought would incline them to receive Christianity. The country was beautiful, but no passage was found extending through the land; and accordingly he sailed northward, reaching a place called St. Martin’s Creek, and saying that on this coast they have “figs, nuts, pears, and other fruits.” Leaving St. Martin’s Creek, the coast was followed to Cape Prato,—a name which appears like a reminiscence of Albert de Prato, who was at Newfoundland in 1527.[170] Forty natives were seen in canoes; but they were poor, and almost in a nude condition. They appeared to be catching mackerel in nets made of a kind of hemp. Reaching Gaspé, July 24, a large cross was set up, with a shield attached, bearing the fleur-de-lis and the motto: “Vive le Roi de France.” The natives, however, protested, understanding that by setting up this totem the strangers claimed a country to which they had no right. Afterward two of the natives, Taignoagny and Domagaya, were entrapped and made prisoners, while presents sent to the tribe seemingly afforded satisfaction. The next day the expedition left the land, and, sailing out once more into the Gulf, they saw the great Island of Anticosti, when, coasting its southern shore, they named its eastern cape St. Loys. Thence Cartier steered over to the coast of Labrador, searching for a passage to the west. On St. Peter’s day he was in the strait between Anticosti and Labrador, which forms one entrance to Canada. He called it St. Peter’s Channel; but he did not know whither it led, and accordingly called a council. As the result, the season being now far advanced, and the supplies running low, it was resolved to return to France, and defer the examination of the strait to some more favorable occasion. Cartier therefore left Anticosti, and reached White Sand Island, August 9; on the 15th, after hearing Mass, he passed through the Strait of Belle Isle into the ocean, and laid his course for France. He had a prosperous passage, and arrived at St. Malo early in September.
The main object of his voyage proved a failure, and a route to the Indies was not discovered. He had approached close to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, but was not aware of the fact. A correct knowledge of the situation would have filled him with chagrin. As it was, he determined to persevere; and upon reaching France he proceeded to prepare for another voyage.
The representations made by the intrepid sailor had the desired effect, and Admiral Chabot at once made known the condition of affairs to Francis I., who signed a commission for Cartier, Oct. 30, 1534, authorizing him to complete the exploration beyond Newfoundland. For this[51] purpose the King gave Cartier three ships,—the “Great Hermina,” of about one hundred and twenty tons, to be commanded by Cartier; the “Little Hermina,” of sixty tons, under Macé Jalobert; and a small galley, the “Emerilon,” in charge of Jacques Maingart. The men for his first expedition had been obtained with difficulty, the sailors of St. Malo preferring voyages with more certain and solid results than any to be gained in Cartier’s romantic quest. Accordingly the King authorized him to impress criminals. In a letter to the Most Christian King, Cartier advocated the enterprise as one destined to open new fields for the activity of the Church, which was now beginning to suffer from the effects of the Protestant Reformation.
On Whit-Sunday, 1535, the members of the expedition—which does not appear to have carried a priest, but included a number of prominent gentlemen—went, by direction of Cartier, to confession, and afterward received the benediction of the bishop as they knelt in the choir of the cathedral church of St. Malo. Three days later Cartier sailed. Head-winds and violent storms opposed the little fleet, rendering progress slow, and entailing much hardship. June 25 the ships separated in a storm; but on July 7 the “Great Hermina,” after much tossing, reached the Isle of Birds, on the northern coast of Newfoundland,—one of the scenes of the previous year’s visit. The port of White Sand, however, had been appointed the rendezvous, and thither, July 26, Cartier went, being joined there by the rest of the fleet. Next, crossing the strait to the Labrador coast, Cartier sailed westward, reaching St. John’s River, August 10. He named it the Bay of St. Lawrence,—a name afterward applied to the Gulf. August 12, he consulted the two Indians captured the previous year, who diminished his hope of finding a passage to the Indies, by showing that the channel before him, named in honor of St. Peter, led to a river whose banks rapidly contracted; while far within the interior the water was shallow, navigation being obstructed by rapids. This, they likewise said, was the entrance to the country of Canada. On August 18, sick at heart by the failure to discover any passage through the continent, Cartier sailed back to the northern shore. Three days later he named the great island lying in the mouth of the Gulf, Assumption,[171] in honor of the festival; and finally, disbelieving the Indians, and hoping that the channel between Labrador and Anticosti opened to salt water, he ordered the course to be laid toward the west, being led to this determination by seeing many whales. Soon, however, the water began to freshen; yet hoping, as did Champlain long after, that even the fresh water might afford a highway to the Indies, he entered the river, viewing the banks on either side, and making his way upward. Erelong he saw the wonderful Saguenay pouring through its gloomy gorge, scooped out of solid rock by ancient glaciers, and was tempted to sail in between the lofty walls which flung down their solemn shadows upon the[52] deep and resistless stream. Here he met some timid natives in canoes, engaged in hunting the seal. They fled, until they heard the voices of his two savages, Taignoagny and Domagaya, when they returned, and gave the French a hospitable reception. Without exploring the Saguenay, Cartier returned to the main river, passing up to the Isle aux Coudres, or Isle of Hazel-nuts, where he found the savages engaged in capturing a marine monster called the “adhothoys,”—in form, says the narrative, as shapely as a greyhound. This was the Beluga catadon, the well-known white whale, whose bones are found in the post-pliocene clay of the St. Lawrence. The manuscript of Allefonsce says: “In the Canadian Sea there is one sort of fish very much like a whale, almost as large, white as snow, and with a mouth like a horse.” Continuing his ascent, Cartier met more of the natives, and at last encountered the lord of the country, the well-known Donnacona, who dwelt at Stadaconna (Quebec). The chief addressed the French commander in a set oration, delivered in the native style with many gesticulations and contortions.
Finally Cartier reached a large island, which he called Bacchus Island, with reference to the abundance of vines; though afterward it was given the name it now bears, the Island of Orleans. Here he anchored his fleet, and went on in boats to find a convenient harbor. This he discovered near Stadaconna, at the mouth of the river now known as the St. Charles, calling it the harbor of the Holy Cross. On September 14 the ships were brought up. The French were received with great rejoicing by all except Donnacona and the two natives, Taignoagny and Domagaya; the latter had rejoined their old friends, and appeared “changed in mind and purpose,” refusing to come to the ships. Donnacona had discovered that Cartier wished to ascend the river to Hochelaga, and he regarded this step as opposed to his personal interests. Finally, however, a league of friendship was formed, when the two natives returned on board, attended by no less than five hundred of the inhabitants of Stadaconna. Still Donnacona persisted in his opposition to Cartier’s proposed exploration; and finally dressed several members of his tribe in the garb of devils, introducing them as delegates from the god Cudragny, supposed to dwell at Hochelaga. The antics of these performers did not intimidate Cartier, and accordingly, leaving a sufficient force to guard the ships, he started with a pinnace and two boats containing fifty men. It was now the middle of September, and the Canadian forests were putting on their robes of autumnal glory. The scenery was at its best, and the French were greatly impressed by the beauty of the country. On the 28th the river suddenly expanded, and it was called the Lake of Angoulême, in recognition of the birthplace of Francis I. In passing out of the lake, the strength of the rapids rendered it necessary to leave the pinnace behind; but with the two boats Cartier went on; and, October 2, after a journey of thirteen days, he landed on the alluvial ground close by the current now called St. Mary, about three miles from Hochelaga. He was received by throngs[53] of the natives, who brought presents of corn-bread and fish, showing every sign of friendship and joy. The next day Cartier went with five gentlemen and twenty sailors to visit the people at their houses, and to view “a certain mountain that is near the city.” They met a chief, who received them with an address of welcome, and led them to the town, situated among cultivated fields, and “joined to a great mountain that is tilled round about and very fertile,” which Cartier called Mount Royal, now contracted into Montreal. The town itself is described in the narrative of Cartier’s voyage as circular and cunningly built of wood, having a single gate, being fortified with a gallery extending around the top of the wall. This was supplied with ammunition, consisting of “stones and pebbles for the defence of it.” With the Hochelagans it was the Age of Stone. Their mode of life is well described in the narrative which, in the Italian version of Ramusio, is accompanied by a plan of the town. Cartier and his companions were freely brought into the public square, where the women and maidens suddenly assembled with children in their arms, kissing their visitors heartily, and “weeping for joy,” while they requested Cartier to “touch” the children. Next appeared Agouhanna, the palsied lord of Hochelaga, a man of fifty years, borne upon the shoulders of nine or ten men. The chief welcomed Cartier, and desired him to touch his shrunken limbs, evidently believing him to be a superior being. Taking the wreath of royalty from his own head, he placed it upon Cartier. Then the sick, the blind, the impotent, and the aged were brought to be “touched;” for it seemed to them that “God was descended and come down from heaven to heal them.” Moved with compassion, Cartier recited a portion of the Gospel of St. John, made the sign of the Cross, with prayer; afterward, service-book in hand, he “read all the Passion of Christ, word by word,” ending with a distribution of hatchets, knives, and trinkets, and a flourish of trumpets. The latter made them all “very merry.” Next he ascended the Mount, and viewed the distant prospect, being told of the extent of the river, the character of distant tribes, and the resources of the country. This done, he prepared for his return, and, amid the regrets of the natives, started on the downward voyage.
In 1603, when Champlain reached the site of ancient Hochelaga, the fortified city and its inhabitants had disappeared.[172] With a narrative of Cartier in hand, he doubtless sought the imposing town and its warlike and superior inhabitants, as later, on the banks of the Penobscot, he inquired for the ancient Norumbega, celebrated by so many navigators and historians.[54] But Hochelaga, like its contemporary capital on the great river of Maine, had disappeared, and the Hochelagans were extinct.
On October 11 Cartier reached the Harbor of Holy Cross, where, during his absence, the people had constructed a fort and had mounted artillery. Donnacona and the two natives reappeared, and Cartier visited the chief at Stadaconna, the people coming out in due form to receive him. He found the houses comfortable after their fashion, and well provided with food for the approaching winter. The scalps of five human heads were stretched upon boughs, and these, Cartier was told, were taken from their enemies, with whom they were in constant warfare, as it would appear from their defences and from other signs. The inhabitants of Stadaconna were nevertheless inclined to religion, and earnestly desired to be baptized; when Cartier, who appears to have been a good lay preacher, explained its importance,—though he could not accede to their request, as he had with him neither priest nor chrism. The next year he promised to provide both.
It would appear that at the outset Cartier had decided to winter in the country and upon his return from Hochelaga preparations were made. His experience, however, was somewhat sad, and nothing was gained by the decision to remain, except some traffic.
In the month of December a pestilence broke out among the natives, of whom finally the French came to see but little, as the Indians were charged not to come near the fort. Soon afterward the same disease attacked the French, proving to be a form of the scurvy, which at one time reduced all but ten of Cartier’s company to a frightful condition, while eventually no less than twenty-five died. In their distress an image of Christ was set up on the shore. They marched thither, and prostrated themselves upon the deep snow, chanting litanies and penitential psalms, while Cartier himself vowed a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Rocquemado. Nevertheless on that day Philip Rougemont died. Cartier, being determined to leave nothing undone, ordered a post-mortem examination of the remains of this young man from Amboise. This afforded no facts throwing light upon the disease, which continued its ravages with still greater virulence, until the French learned from the natives that they might be cured by a decoction made from a tree called ameda. The effect of this medicine proved so remarkable, that if “all the doctors of Montpelier and Louvain had been there with all the drugs of Alexandria, they would not have done so much in a year as that tree did in six days.” Winter finally wore away, and in May, on Holy-Rood Day, Cartier set up a fair cross and the arms of France, with the legend, “Franciscus Primus, Dei gratia Francorum Rex regnat,” concluding the act by entrapping the King Donnacona, and carrying him a prisoner on board his ship. The natives vainly offered a ransom, but were pacified on being told that Cartier would return the next year and bring back their king. Destroying one of his vessels, the “Little Hermina,” on May 6, Cartier bade the people adieu, and sailed[55] down to a little port near the Isle of Orleans, going thence to the Island of Hazel-Nuts, where he remained until the 16th, on account of the swiftness of the stream. He was followed by the amazed savages, who were still unwilling to part with their king. Receiving, however, assurances from Donnacona himself that he would return in a year, they affected a degree of satisfaction, thanked Cartier, gave him bundles of beaver-skins, a chain of esurguy,[173] or wampum, and a red copper knife from the Saguenay, while they obtained some hatchets in return. He then set sail;[174] but bad weather forced him to return. He took his final departure May 21, and soon reached Gaspé, next passing Cape Prato, “the beginning of the Port of Chaleur.” On Ascension Day he was at Brion Island. He sailed thence towards the main, but was beaten back by head-winds. He finally reached the southern coast of Newfoundland, giving names to the places he visited. At St. Peter’s Island he met “many ships from France and Britain.” On June 16 he left Cape Race, the southern point of Newfoundland, having on this voyage nearly circumnavigated the coast of the island, and thus passed to sea, making a prosperous voyage, and reached St. Malo July 6, 1536. Though, according to the narrative, Cartier gave the name of St. Paul to the north coast of Cape Breton, this appellation was on the map of Maijolla, 1527, and that of Viegas, drawn in the year 1533. Manifestly the narrative does Cartier some injustice.
Several years passed before anything more was done officially respecting the exploration of the New Lands. Champlain assumes that Cartier made bad representations of the country, and discouraged effort. This view has been repeated without much examination. It is clear that all were disappointed by finding no mines of precious metals, as well as by the failure to discover a passage to the Indies; yet for all this Cartier has been maligned. This appears to be so from the statement found in the narrative of the third voyage, which opens in a cheerful strain, the writer saying that “King Francis I. having heard the report of Captain Jacques Cartier, his[56] pilot-general, in his two former voyages of discovery, as well by writing as by word of mouth, respecting that which he had found and seen in the western parts discovered by him in the ports of Canada and Hochelaga; and having seen and talked with the people which the said Cartier had brought from those countries, of whom one was King of Canada,” resolved to “send Cartier, his pilot, thither again.” With the navigator he concluded to associate Jean François de la Roche, Lord of Roberval, invested with a commission as Lieutenant and Governor of Canada and Hochelaga. Roberval was a gentleman of Picardy, highly esteemed in his province; and, according to Charlevoix, he was sometimes styled by Francis I. the “petty King of Vimeu.” Roberval was commissioned by Francis I. at Fontainebleau, Jan. 15, 1540, and on February 6 took the oath in the presence of Cardinal de Tournon. His subordinate, Cartier, was not appointed until October 17 following, his papers being signed by Henry the Dauphin on the 20th.
AUTOGRAPH OF THE DAUPHIN.
The apparent object of this voyage is stated where the narrative recites that it was undertaken “that they might discover more than was done before in some voyages, and attain, if possible, to a knowledge of the country of the Saguenay, whereof the people brought by Cartier, as is declared, mentioned to the King that there were great riches and very good lands.” The first and second voyages of Cartier may not have attracted the attention of the Spaniards; but when the expedition of 1541 was in preparation Spain sought to interfere, as in the case of Verrazano in 1523.[175] Francis anticipated this, Alexander VI. having coolly given all America to Spain, as she eagerly claimed; and the explanation was that the fleet was simply going to the poor region of Baccalaos. The Spanish ambassador, knowing well that his master was too poor to support his pretensions by force of arms, finally came to the conclusion that the French could do no harm, while others prophesied a failure.[176]
To carry out the voyage, a sum of money was placed at the disposal of Roberval, who agreed with Cartier to build and equip five[177] vessels. Soon the shipyards of St. Malo resounded with the din of labor, and the Breton carpenters promptly fulfilled their task. Roberval, however, had not in the mean time completed his preparations, and yet, having express orders from the King not to delay, Cartier, with the approval of Roberval, set sail with three or more ships, May 23, 1541. He encountered a succession of storms for three months, having less than thirty hours of fair wind[57] in all that time. One ship, under the Viscount of Beaupré, kept company with Cartier, but the rest were scattered. The fleet assembled at Carpunt, in Newfoundland, waiting in vain for Roberval. Cartier accordingly went on, and reached the Harbor of Holy Cross, August 23. The savages hailed him with joy, and inquired for their chief, Donnacona, and the other captives. They were informed that Donnacona had died in France, where he had received the faith and been baptized, while the rest had married, and stayed there as great lords, whereas in fact all except a little girl had died.[178] Agona, who had ruled during the interregnum, was not at all dissatisfied, as it left him invested with kingship; yet, as a compliment, he took the crown of tanned leather and esurguy from his own head, and placed it upon Cartier’s, whose wrists he also adorned with his bracelets, showing signs of joy. This, however, was mere dissimulation. Next, Cartier took his fleet to a harbor four leagues nearer Quebec, where he built a fort called Charlesbourg Royal. On the 2d of September Macé Jalobert, his brother-in-law, and Etienne Noel, his nephew, were sent back to France with two of his ships, to report the non-arrival of Roberval. Leaving Beaupré in command at Charlesbourg Royal, Cartier ascended the St. Lawrence, visiting on the way a lord of Hochelay. In his previous voyage this chief had proved sincere, informing him of the meditated treachery of Taignoagny and Domagaya. He now bestowed upon him “a cloak of Paris red,” with yellow facings and tin buttons and bells. Going on, Cartier passed Hochelaga, and attempted to ascend the rapids, two of which he actually stemmed. Arriving at Hochelaga, he found that the chief had gone to Quebec to plot against him with Agona. Returning to Charlesbourg, he passed the winter, seeing little of the natives. In the spring, having gathered a quantity of quartz crystals, which he fancied were diamonds, and some thin scales of metal supposed to be gold, he sailed for France. In the Harbor of St. John, Newfoundland, Hakluyt says, he met Roberval, then on his way to Canada. The “gold” was tried in a furnace, and “found to be good.” Cartier reported the country rich and fruitful; but when ordered by Roberval to return, he pleaded his inability to stand against the savages with so small a number of men; while in Hakluyt we read that “hee and his company, moued as it seemeth with ambition, because they would haue all the glory of the discouerie of those partes themselues, stole privately away the next night from us, and, without taking their leaues, departed home for Bretainye.”
This, however, appears to be wrong; as at the time he is represented as meeting Roberval at Newfoundland his chief must have been in Canada, he having left France Aug. 22, 1541. Hakluyt’s informant was confused, and the ships met by Roberval at Newfoundland may have been those two despatched by Cartier to France under Jallobert and Noel during the previous autumn, or else Cartier on his way home in June met Sainterre.[179]
Jean François de la Roche, Lord of Roberval, in connection with Cartier, was commissioned for his expedition by a royal patent, Jan. 15, 1540. His fleet consisted of three tall ships and a company of two hundred persons, including women and gentlemen of quality. Sainterre was his lieutenant, and Jean Allefonsce his pilot-general. According to Hakluyt, he sailed from Rochelle, April 14, 1542,—more than a year after the time originally appointed,—reaching St. John’s, Newfoundland, June 8, where he found seventeen fishing-vessels. While delayed here, Hakluyt says, Cartier appeared in the harbor, and afterward left secretly, as already stated, to return to France. As a matter of fact, however, Roberval sailed from Honfleur, Aug. 22, 1541. We must not be misled, therefore, where Hakluyt says that on the last day of June, 1542, having composed a quarrel between the French and Portuguese fishermen, he sailed on his voyage through the Gulf. This he must have done during the preceding autumn. Yet, whenever he may have ascended the St. Lawrence, Roberval reached the Isle of Orleans in safety, and found a good harbor. Hakluyt says that at the end of July he landed his stores, and began to fortify above Quebec at France Royal;[180] if it was in July, it must have been July, 1542. Roberval, possibly, reached his winter-quarters in 1541, when it was too late to fortify. Hakluyt, having been misinformed on the expedition, supposed that Cartier and Roberval were not together in Canada; but there is much uncertainty in any conclusion.
A strong, elevated, and beautiful situation was selected by Roberval, with “two courtes of buildings, a great toure, and another of fourtie or fiftie foote long; wherein there were diuers chambers, an hall, a kitchine, houses of office, sellers high and lowe, and neere vnto were an oven and milles, and a stoue to warme men in, and a well before the house.”
Hakluyt says that, September 14, Roberval sent back to France two ships under Sainterre and Guincourt, bearing tidings to the King, and requesting information respecting the value of Cartier’s “diamonds.” It would appear, however, that these vessels were sent late in 1541, for the reason that Jan. 26, 1542, Francis I. ordered Sainterre to go to the rescue[59] of Roberval,—the language of the order indicating that he had already been out to Canada. On preparing for the winter, Roberval, according to Hakluyt, found his provisions scanty. Still, having fish and porpoises, he passed the season, though the bad food bred disease, and not less than fifty of the company died. The people were vicious and insubordinate; but the “Little King” was equal to the occasion, dealing out even and concise justice, laying John of Nantes in irons, whipping both men and women soundly, and hanging Michael Gaillon,—“by which means they lived in quiet.”
The account of Hakluyt ends abruptly; yet he states that June 5, 1543, Roberval went on an expedition to explore above Quebec, appointing July 1 as the time of his return. If he did not appear then, the thirty persons left behind were authorized to sail for France, while he would remain in the country. What followed is invested with more or less uncertainty, as we have no authority except Hakluyt, who says that in an expedition up the river eight men were drowned, and one “boate” lost; while, June 19, word came from Roberval to stay the departure from France Roy until July 22. To this statement Hakluyt adds, “the rest of the voyage is wanting.” His account of both Roberval and Cartier’s operations are hardly to be relied upon, since he was so badly informed. The circumstances under which Roberval returned to France may perhaps never be known; yet it is certain that Cartier went out to bring him home some time in the year 1543. He did not leave on this voyage until after March 25, as he was present at a baptism in St. Malo on that day, while he had returned before February 17, 1544, on which date, as Longrais has discovered recently among the documents, he was a witness in court at St. Malo. The subject will be referred to again.
At this point it will be proper to give some account of the personal operations of Jehan, or Jean, Allefonsce, the pilot of Roberval. He was born at Saintonge, a village of Cognac, and was mortally wounded in a naval combat which took place near the Harbor of Rochelle, having followed the sea during a period of forty-one years. He appears to have been engaged in two special explorations,—one carrying him to the north, and the other to the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay.
Of the first expedition—that connected with the Saguenay or vicinity—we have no account in the narrative which covers the voyage of Roberval. Father Le Clercq, however, says: “The Sire Roberval writes that he undertook some considerable voyages to the Saguenay and several other rivers. It was he who sent Allefonsce, a very expert pilot of Saintonge, to Labrador to find a passage to the Indies, as was hoped. But not being able to carry out his designs, on account of the heights of ice that stopped his passage, he was obliged to return to M. de Roberval with only this advantage, of having discovered the passage which is between the Isle of Newfoundland and the Great Land of the north by the fifty-second degree.”[181] Le Clercq[60] gives no authority for his statement, and one writer[182] discredits it, for the reason that Allefonsce is made to “discover” the passage between Newfoundland and Labrador. It is probable, however, that Le Clercq, or his authority, meant no more by the term “discover” than to explore, as the Strait of Belle Isle was at that period as well known as Cape Breton. Allefonsce’s narrative and maps do not show that he explored the Saguenay.
It can hardly be questioned that a voyage was made by Allefonsce along the Atlantic coast. The precise date, however, cannot be fixed. His Cosmographie proves that he had a personal knowledge of the country. The voyage might have been made on some one of the ships which returned to France while Roberval was in the country. Failing to discover any passage to the Indies, Allefonsce may have run down the Atlantic coast, hoping to find some hitherto neglected opening. At all events, when he visited the coast he found a great bay in latitude forty-two, apparently Massachusetts Bay. The original notice is found in his Cosmographie, now preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris. It runs: “These lands reach to Tartary; and I think that it is the end of Asia,[183] according to the roundness of the world. And for this purpose it would be well to have a small vessel of seventy tons, in order to discover the coast of Florida; for I have been at a bay as far as forty-two degrees, between Norumbega and Florida, but I have not seen the end, and do not know whether it extends any farther.”[184] The belief in a western passage was after all very hard to give up, and Champlain, in the next century, was consumed by the idea.
In closing this part of the subject, we have to inquire concerning the outcome of the costly and laborious efforts of Cartier and Roberval under Francis I. Some popular writers would lead us to suppose that subsequent to the return of the expedition of 1543 the region of the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence were deserted.[185] Gosselin, in his Documents relating to the Marine of Normandy, shows that the explorations of Cartier were attended and followed by active operations conducted by private individuals. During the first years of the sixteenth century, inspired by the example of Bethencourt, in connection with the Canaries, the seaport towns of France showed great enterprise. After the return of Verrazano, however, much discouragement was felt, nor did the voyages of 1534-1536 stimulate so large a degree of activity as might have been expected; but in 1540 all[61] the maritime towns were alive to the importance of the New Lands.[186] In that year, as we have already seen, such was the scarcity of sailors, owing to the prosecution of remunerative fisheries, that the authorities of St. Malo were obliged to order that no vessel should leave port until Cartier had secured a crew. In 1541 the prospect of the settlement of Canada under the French gave such a stimulus to merchants, that in the months of January and February, 1541, 1542, no less than sixty ships went “to fish for cod in the New Lands.”[187] Gosselin, who had examined a great number of the ancient records, says: “In 1543, 1544, and 1545, this ardor was sustained; and during the months of January and February, from Havre and Rouen, and from Dieppe and Honfleur, about two ships left every day.”[188]
In 1545 no ship of the King went to Canada, and a sense of insecurity prevailed, as the Spaniards and Portuguese at Newfoundland were ever ready to make trouble; but in 1560 no less than thirty ships left the little ports of Jumièges, Vatteville, and La Bouille, “to make the voyage to the New Lands;”[189] while at this period the tonnage of the vessels engaged rose from seventy to one hundred and fifty tons. In 1564 the French Government was engaged in New France, and April 18 of that year the King’s Receiver-General, Guillaume Le Beau, bought of Robert Gouel, as attested by the notaries of Rouen, a variety of material, “to be carried into New France, whither the King would presently send on his service.”[190]
On the seventh of the same month Le Beau paid four hundred livres for arms and accoutrements necessary for the “French infantry,” which “it pleased the King to send presently into his New France for its defence.”[191] This shows that the idea of colonization was not abandoned, and that the King asserted his rights there. He was no doubt accustomed to send cruisers to Canada to protect French interests, as the English at an early period sent ships of war to the coast of Iceland to protect fishermen and traders.[192]
In 1583 Stephen Bellinger, a friend of Hakluyt, being in the service of Cardinal Bourbon, of Rouen, visited Cape Breton and the coasts to the south.[193] In 1577 and 1578 commissions were issued by Henry III. to the Marquis de la Roche for a colony;[194] and Hakluyt says that in 1584 the[62] Marquis was cast away in an attempt to carry out his scheme.[195] In 1587 the grandnephew of Cartier was in Canada, evidently engaged in regular trade.[196] Beyond question communication was maintained with Canada until official colonization was again taken up in 1597.[197] The efforts of Francis I. in sending out Verrazano, Cartier, and Roberval were by no means thrown away, and we must take for what it is worth the statement of Alexander in his Encouragement to Colonies, where (p. 36) he says that the French in America effected more “by making a needless ostentation, that the World should know they had beene there, then that they did continue still to inhabit there.”
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
LITTLE is known of the personal history of Jacques Cartier, though Cunat discovered several points relating to his ancestry. It appears that one Jehan Cartier married Guillemette Baudoin; and that of their six children, Jamet, or Jacques, was the oldest, having been born Dec. 4, 1458. Marrying in turn Jeffeline Jansart, he had by her a son, Dec. 31, 1494. This son, up to a recent day, was held to be the great navigator; but Longrais has rendered it almost certain that he was not.
Like Verrazano, Allefonsce, and others, he appears to have done something as a privateer; and the Spanish ambassador in France, reporting the expedition of Cartier and Roberval, Dec. 17, 1541, spoke of “el corsario Jacques Cartier.”[198]
At an early age Cartier was wedded to Catharine des Granches, daughter of Jacques des Granches, the constable of St. Malo, this being considered a brilliant marriage. After retiring from the sea, he lived in the winter at his house in St. Malo, adjoining the Hospital of St. Thomas, and in the summer at his manor on the outskirts of the town at Limoilou.[199] The name of Des Granches appears in connection with the mountains on the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Cartier, so far as known, had no children. At least Cunat’s researches, supported by the local tradition, show that Manat had no authority now recognized for saying that in 1665 he had a lineal descendant in one Harvée Cartier.[200]
Following Verrazano, we have the earliest notice of French visitations to the coast in the statement of Herrera,[201] that in 1526 the Breton, Nicolas Don, pursued the fisheries at Baccalaos. In 1527 Rut, as reported in Purchas,[202] says that eleven sail of Normans and[63] one of Bretons were at St. John, Newfoundland.[203] According to Lescarbot,[204] who gives no authority, the Baron de Léry landed cattle on the Isle of Sable in 1528.[205]
Next in the order of French voyages we reach those of Cartier. The narrative of his first voyage appeared originally in the Raccolta, etc., of Ramusio, printed at Venice in 1556.[206] It was translated from the Italian into English by John Florio, and appeared under the title, A Short and Briefe Narration of the Two Navigations and Discoveries to the Northweast Partes called Newe Fraunce, London, 1580.[207] This was adopted by Hakluyt, and printed in his Navigations, 1600.[208] Another account of this voyage appeared in French, printed at Rouen, 1598, having been written originally in a langue étrangere. It has been supposed very generally that the “strange language” was Italian, and that it was a translation from Ramusio;[209] but this opinion is questioned.[210] Another narrative of the voyage has been found and published as an original account by Cartier.[211] In the Preface to the volume the Editor sets forth his reasons for this opinion. It is noticeable that each of these three versions is characterized by an obscurity to which attention has been called.[212] Nearly all the facts of the first voyage, handled, like the rest of his voyages, by so many writers, come from one of these three versions.[213] The patent for the voyage, as in the case of the voyage of Verrazano, is not known.
The narrative of the second voyage was published at Paris in 1545.[214] Ramusio[215] accompanies the narrative of the first voyage with an account of the second, also in Italian. Three manuscript versions of the narrative are preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and are described by Harrisse in his Notes.[216] Hakluyt[217] appears to follow Ramusio.[218] The patents for the second voyage will be found in Lescarbot (Nouvelle France), who used in his account of Cartier what is known as the Roffet text, though he abridges and alters somewhat; and he in turn was followed by Charlevoix.
For the third voyage of Cartier, unfortunately, we have only a few facts in addition to the fragment preserved by Hakluyt,[219] which ends with events at the close of September, 1541. An account of the voyage of Roberval is added thereto.[220] The commission of Cartier is found in Lescarbot’s Nouvelle France.[221] All that was formerly known was taken from Hakluyt; but facts that somewhat recently have come to light, though few, are nevertheless important, proving that Hakluyt’s information respecting Roberval was poor, like that which he gives of the voyage of Rut (1527). Rut’s voyage was tolerably well understood by Purchas, who wrote after Hakluyt. Bancroft, in his History of[65] the United States,[222] writes on the subject of Cartier as he wrote forty-nine years earlier;[223] while nearly all historical writers, whether famous or obscure, have written in a similar way. They have been misled by Hakluyt. The statement that Cartier, on his way home in June, 1542, encountered Roberval at Newfoundland, and deserted him in the night, is not in keeping with his character, and is rendered improbable by the fact that in the previous autumn Roberval sailed for Canada. All things, so far as known, indicate that a good understanding existed between the two commanders, and that circumstances alone prevented the accomplishment of larger results. Certainly, if Cartier had failed in his duty, history would have given some record of the fact. Francis I. would not have employed any halting, half-hearted man who was trying to discourage exploration. Let us here, then, endeavor to epitomize the operations of Roberval and Cartier:—
Jan. 15, 1540, Roberval was appointed lieutenant-general and commander.[224] February 6 he took the oath,[225] followed the next day by letters-patent confirming those of January 15.[226] February 27 Roberval appointed Paul d’Angilhou, known as Sainterre, his lieutenant.[227] March 9 the Parliament of Rouen authorized Roberval to take certain classes of criminals for the voyage.[228] October 17 Francis I. appointed Jacques Cartier captain-general and chief pilot.[229] October 28 Prince Henry, the Dauphin, ordered certain prisoners to be sent to Cartier for the voyage.[230] November 3 additional criminals, to the number of fifty, were ordered for the expedition.[231] December 12 the King complained that the expedition was delayed.[232] May 23, 1541, Cartier sailed with five ships.[233] July 10 Chancellor Paget informs the Parliament of Rouen that “the King considers it very strange that Roberval has not departed.”[234] August 18 Roberval writes from Honfleur that he will leave in four days.[235] Aug. 22, 1541, Roberval sailed from Honfleur.[236] In the autumn of 1541, Roberval, on his way to Canada, meets at St. John’s,[237] Newfoundland, Jallobert and Noel, sailing[66] by order of Cartier to France. Immediately on his arrival at Quebec, autumn of 1541, Roberval sends Sainterre to France.[238] Jan. 26, 1542, Francis I. orders Sainterre, who has already “made the voyage,” to sail with two ships “to succour, support, and aid the said Lord Roberval with provisions and other things of which he has very great need and necessity.”[239] During the summer of 1542 Roberval explores and builds France Roy.[240] Sept. 9, 1542, Roberval pardons Sainterre at France Roy, in the presence of Jean Allefonsce, for mutiny.[241] Oct. 21, 1542, Cartier is in St. Malo and present at a baptism, having spent seventeen months on the voyage.[242] Roberval spends the winter of 1542-1543 at France Roy.[243] March 25, 1543, Cartier present at a baptism in St. Malo.[244] In the summer of 1543 Cartier sails on a voyage which occupies eight months,[245] and brings Roberval home, leaving Canada late in the season, and running unusual risk of his freight (péril de nauleaige).[246] April 3, 1544, Cartier and Roberval are summoned to appear before the King.[247]
This, so far as our present knowledge goes, formed the end of Cartier’s seafaring. Thereafter, without having derived any material financial benefit from his great undertakings, Cartier, as the Seigneur of Limoilou, dwelt at his plain manor-house on the outskirts of St. Malo, where he died, greatly honored and respected, about the year 1555.[248]
Charlevoix affirms that Roberval made another attempt to colonize Canada in 1549;[249] Thevet says that he was murdered in Paris: at all events he soon passed from sight.[250]
There is no evidence to prove that Cartier gave any name to the country which he explored. The statement found at the end of Hakluyt’s version of the second voyage,[251][67] to the effect that the Newfoundlands “were by him named New France,” originated with the translator. It is not given in connection with the text of Ramusio, nor in the French edition of 1545, though that Relation (p. 46) employs the language, “Appellée par nous la nouvelle France.” In the same folio we find the writer stating of Cape St. Paul, “Nous nommasmes le cap de Sainct Paul,” though the name had been given at an early period, appearing upon the Maijolla map of 1527.
“Canada” was the name which Cartier found attached to the land,[252] and there is no evidence that he attempted to displace it. It is indeed said, in Murphy’s Voyage of Verrazzano,[253] that the name “Francisca” was due to Cartier. He says, “This name Francisca, or the French Land,”—found on a map in the Ptolemy printed at Basle in 1540,—was “due to the French under Jacques Cartier, and which could properly belong to no other exploration of the French.” This statement was made in rebuttal of that by Brevoort in his Verrazano the Navigator (p. 141), where he says that “the first published map containing traces of Verrazano’s exploration is in the Ptolemy of Basle, 1530, which appeared four years before the French renewed their attempts at American exploration. It shows the western sea without a name, and the land north of it called Francisca.” As it appears, there is no edition of Ptolemy bearing date of 1530; yet the student is sufficiently correct in referring the name “Francisca” to the voyage of Verrazano, especially as the Maijollo map, 1527, applies “Francesca” to North America, this map having been made only three years after the voyage of Verrazano, performed in 1524. Evidently, however, Verrazano was not more anxious than Cartier about any name, since on the map of his brother Hieronymus da Verrazano (1529), this region is called “Nova Gallia, sive Yucatania.”
Nor did Roberval attempt to name the country, while the commission given him by the King does not associate the name of Francis or any new name therewith. The misunderstanding on this point is now cleared up.[254]
Cartier did not give any name to the Gulf, simply applying the name of St. Lawrence to what may have been the St. John’s River, on the Labrador coast, where he chanced to be on the festival of that saint in 1535. Gomara thus writes in 1555: “A great river, named San Lorenço, which some consider an arm of the sea. It has been navigated two[68] hundred leagues up, on which account many call it the Straits of the Three Brothers (los tres hermanos). Here the water forms a square gulf, which extends from San Lorenço to the point of Baccallaos, more than two hundred leagues.”[255]
Little is known at present of the personal history of Jean Allefonsce. D’Avezac, in the Bulletin de géographie,[256] attempted to give an account of the man and his work; and Margry, in his Navigations Françaises, added substantial information. At one time he was claimed by the Portuguese as of their nation, because he voyaged to Brazil; but his French origin is now abundantly proved out of the book published by Jean de Marnef in 1559, entitled Les voyages avantureux du Capitaine du Alfonce Saintongeois. It is a small volume in quarto, numbering sixty-eight leaves, the verso of the last one bearing the epilogue: “End of the present book, composed and ordered [?] by Jan Alphonce, an experienced pilot in things narrated in this book, a native of the country of Xaintonge, near the city of Cognac. Done at the request of Vincent Aymard, merchant of the country of Piedmont, Maugis Vumenot, merchant of Honfleur, writing for him.”
Allefonsce appears to have been of a brave, adventurous, and somewhat haughty spirit. We are even told that he was once imprisoned at Poitiers by royal orders.[257] He was considered a man of ability, and was trusted on account of his great skill. In Hakluyt[258] it is said, “There is a pardon to be seene for the pardoning of Monsieur de saine terre, Lieutenant of the sayd Monsieur de Roberval, giuen in Canada in presence of the sayde Iohn Alphonse.”
The sailor of Saintonge met his death in a naval engagement, though most writers appear to have overlooked the fact. It is indicated in a sonnet written by his eulogist, Melin Saint-Gelais, and prefixed to the first edition of the Voyages avantureux, 1559. The allusion was pointed out by Harrisse in his Notes sur la Nouvelle France, Paris, 1872 (p. 8), indicating that this event must have taken place before March 7, 1557,—the date of the imprimatur of the edition of 1559.[259] Mr. Brevoort, in his Verrazano the Navigator, quoting Barcia’s Ensayo, etc., Madrid, 1723, fol. 58, shows that he fought Menendez, the Spaniard, near the reef of Rochelle, and was mortally wounded.[260]
There is no true connection between the manuscript of Allefonsce, now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, catalogued under Secalart, and the volume of Voyages avantureux which bears his name. This latter work we owe, in some not understood sense, to the enterprise of a publisher who brought it out after the old mariner’s death. The erroneous character of certain of its statements excited the criticism of Lescarbot;[261] yet several descriptions of our coast are recognizable, and very interesting. In this printed book the matter relating to the North Atlantic coast occupies only about three pages,—the[69] chief points for which were taken, it appears, from the manuscript of Allefonsce, though several particulars not found in his manuscript are given.
The manuscript itself must be judged leniently, as Secalart was concerned in the composition, and appears to have written some portions from the notes of Allefonsce.[262] The part of the Cosmographie applying to the North Atlantic coast begins with a description of the Island of St. John and Cape Breton. Three points south of Cape Breton, if not a fourth, are defined in connection with that cape. We read: “Turning to the Isle of St. John, called Cape Breton, the outermost part of which is in the ocean in 45° from the Arctic pole, I say Cape of St. John, called Cape Breton, and the Cape of the Franciscans, are northeast and southwest, and there is in the course one hundred and forty leagues; and here it makes a cape called the Cape of Norumbega. The said cape is by 41° from the height of the Arctic pole.” For the writer to call Cape Breton by another name is consistent with old usage.[263] Where, however, it is said, “here it makes a cape,” the language is obscure, as the writer seems to mean that on this coast there is a cape between the Franciscan Cape and Cape Breton, since on the map the Franciscan Cape is placed south of the Bay of the Isles, which the description places south of the Cape of Norumbega. The latter cape is not laid down on the map; but we have there the River of Norumbega, north of which is “Une partie de la Coste de la Norombegue,” while south of the river is “Terra de la Franciscaine.” The Cape of Norumbega should therefore have been marked on the map at the southern extremity of the Norumbega coast, near the Bay of the Isles. “Cap de la Franciscaine” would then stand for Cape Cod. If this interpretation is correct, the clause, “the said cape is by 41° from the height of the Arctic pole,” would denote the Franciscan cape.[264]
The next descriptive paragraph gives a clear idea of the region south of Cape Norumbega: “Beyond the Cape of Noroveregue descends the river of said Noroveregue, about twenty-five leagues from the cape. The said river is more than forty leagues wide at its[70] entrance, and continues inwardly thus wide full thirty or forty leagues, and is all full of islands that extend quite ten or twelve leagues into the sea, and is very dangerous on account of rocks and shoals.”[265] Here we have a clear representation of the Penobscot region, the writer taking the bay for the entrance to the river, as others did in later times. He also says that “fifteen leagues within this river is a city called Norombergue.” According to the old notion, he thought the Norumbega River extended to Canada, as in the map of Ramusio, which is substantially true. Taking up his account of the coast, the writer says: “From the River of Norombergue the coast runs to the west-southwest quite two hundred leagues, to a large bay which enters the land about twenty leagues, and is full twenty-nine leagues wide; and within this gulf there are four islands joined the one to the other. The entrance to the Gulf is 38° from the height of the Arctic pole, and the said isles are in 39 and a half degrees. And I have not seen the end of this Gulf, and I do not know whether it passes beyond.” Here he does not appear to be making an allusion to the great bay in 42° N. (ante, p. 60), but he has now reached the vicinity of the Franciscan Cape, or Cape Cod, and speaks of the mouth of Long Island Sound and contiguous openings, in connection with the great islands that stretch along the coast southwest of Cape Cod. He does not here mention the Franciscan Cape, before alluded to, distant from the “Cape of St. John, called the Cape of the Franciscans,” one hundred and forty leagues, but he indicates its situation by the islands and the Sound lying to the southward; while in its place it will be observed that the printed Cosmographie also identifies the region by means of the islands, and shows that the Franciscan Cape at one point was high land,—evidently what is now known as the Highland of Cape Cod, which, as the geological formation indicates, was even higher in the time of Allefonsce. He continues: “From this gulf the coast turns west-northwest about forty-six leagues, and makes here a great river of Fresh water, and there is at its entrance an island of sand. The said island is 39° from the height of the Arctic pole.” He is now speaking of the region of the Hudson and Sandy Hook, though the latitudes are incorrect, as was usual with writers of that time; while the courses and distances are equally confused. Nevertheless we have a general and recognizable description of the main features of the coast between Cape Breton and Sandy Hook, though in the printed Cosmographie, which is very brief, the island of sand is not mentioned. Therefore, feeling certain of the correctness of our position, minor errors and omissions may be left to take care of themselves. The principal points, Cape Breton, Cape Sable, Cape Cod, and the Hudson, are unmistakably indicated in the routier, though in the maps of Allefonsce, as in most of the maps of the day, essential features are not delineated with any approach to accuracy, the great peninsula of Nova Scotia, terminating in Cape Sable, for instance, having no recognizable definition. Yet he dwells upon the fierceness of the tides, and says that when the strong northeast winds blow, the seas “roar horribly.” This is precisely the case on the shoals of Georges and Nantucket, where the meeting of waves and tides, even in a dead calm, produces an uproar that is sometimes deafening.
At this point we may obtain a confirmation of the manuscript description from the printed work. The account says: “Having passed the Isle of Saint Jehan, the coast turns to the west and west-southwest as far as the River Norombergue, newly discovered[266] by the Portuguese, which is in the thirtieth degree.” After describing the river and its inhabitants, he says: “Thence the coast turns south-southwest more than two hundred leagues, as far as a cape which is high land (un cap qui est haute terre), and has a great island of low land and three or four little islands;”[267] after which he drops the subject and[71] hastens down the coast to the West Indies. Here, however, we have the same cape that we find in the manuscript, which is there called the Franciscan Cape, or our present Cape Cod, beyond which are the islands Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Elizabeth group, joined one to the other almost like beads on a string, as we see them on the modern map.
Here, however, it should be pointed out that, apparently in the lifetime of Francis I., the portion of Voyages avantureux which describes the North American coast was turned into metrical form by Jehan Maillard, “poet royal;” and thus, long before Morrell wrote his poetical description of New England, our coast from Newfoundland to Sandy Hook was described in French verse, Maillard being the first writer to pay a tribute of the kind.[268] This person was a contemporary of Allefonsce and Cartier, and possibly he was connected with Roberval, as Parmenius, the learned Hungarian of Buda, was connected with Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his expedition of 1585, who went for the express purpose of singing the praise of Norumbega in Latin verse.[269] In his dedication he refers to Cartier. These verses, like the printed book, contain the points which are not made in the manuscript of Allefonsce.[270]
Again, in our manuscript we find the writer going down the coast from Sandy Hook to Florida, describing, in a somewhat confused way, Cape Henlopen and Delaware Bay, with its white cliff (fallaise blanche), so conspicuous at the entrance to-day. Thus both the printed book and the manuscript make three divisions of the coast between Cape Breton and Florida, and show a general knowledge of essential features.
Hakluyt[271] gives a section from the original work of Allefonsce, to which he appears to have had access. The heading runs: “Here followeth the course from Belle Isle, Carpont, and the Grand Bay in Newfoundland, vp the riuer of Canada for the space of 230 leagues, obserued by Iohn Alphonse of Xanctoigne, chiefe Pilot to Monsieur Roberual, 1542.” This piece was translated from the French, and in one place Hakluyt makes Allefonsce say: “By the nature of the climate the lands toward Hockelaga are still better and better, and more fruitful; and this land is fit for figges and peares. I think that gold and silver will be found here.” This, however, is a mistranslation, or at least it does not agree with the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, which may be rendered, “These lands, extending to Hochelaga, are much better and warmer than those of Canada, and this land of Hochelaga extends to Figuier and Peru, in which silver and gold abound.”[272] Under the direction of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society, the English version found in Hakluyt was turned back into French, as the existence of the Paris manuscript was not known to the editors; and in the Voyages des déscouvertes au Canada (p. 86) we read: “Et cette terre peut produire des Figuee et des Poires.” In this, however, they were encouraged by the statement found in all three versions of the first voyage of Cartier, which say that at Gaspé the land produced figs.
Allefonsce confines his description chiefly to the route pursued by him in his voyage with Roberval, though he speaks of the neighborhood of Gaspé and Chaleur; while he calls the Island of Assumption “L’Ascentyon.” He also says of the Saguenay, “Two or three leagues within the entrance it begins to grow wider and wider, and it seems to be an arm of the sea; and I think that the same runs into the Sea of Cathay.”[273]
We turn finally to the cartology of the voyages under consideration, which, however, it is not proposed to treat here at much length, the subject being well-nigh inexhaustible.[274]
In the order of the Court of St. Malo, already referred to,[275] made on the remonstrance of Cartier, we find that in March, 1533, he was charged with the responsibility of a voyage to the New Lands, the route selected being that of “the strait of the Bay of the Castle,” now the Strait of Belle Isle. The existence of the Bay of St. Lawrence was evidently known to Cartier. He must have learned something of the region through the contemporary[73] fishing voyages of the French. He could have inferred nothing, however, from the map of Ruysch, 1508, which made Newfoundland a part of Asia; though the Reinel map, 1505, and the Portuguese map (1520), given by Kunstmann, show the Straits of Belle Isle and the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, between Cape Breton and Newfoundland. The anonymous map of 1527, published by Dr. Kohl, with the Ribero map (1529), show both straits; though when Ribero copied that map and made some additions, he substantially closed them up.[276] On the Verrazano map of 1529 the straits were indicated as open. The Maijolla map of 1527, though a Verrazano map, gives a deep indenture, but no indication of an opening beyond. It was, nevertheless, clear enough to Cartier at this time that the straits entering north and south of Newfoundland led either to another strait or to a large bay. Maps of the Gulf must have existed in Dieppe at the period of his voyage, though, owing to the desire of the various cities to gain a monopoly of the New World trade, he may not have obtained much information from that Norman port. Cartier seems to have made maps representing his explorations. There is a brief description of one map contained in the letter of Jacques Noel, his grandnephew, written from St. Malo in 1587 to Mr. John Grote, at Paris. In this map Canada was well delineated, but it has now disappeared.[277]
What may have been known popularly of Newfoundland at the time of Cartier’s first voyage is shown by the Maijolla map (1527), the map of Verrazano (1529), and the map of Gaspar Viegas (1534).[278] The latter shows a part of Newfoundland, and the Cape Breton entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence is simply the mouth of a cul-de-sac, into which empty two streams,—“R. dos Poblas” and “Rio pria,”—indicating that the Portuguese may have entered the Gulf. On the New Brunswick coast is “S. Paulo,”—a name that Cartier is erroneously represented as giving in 1535, at which time Cartier found the name in use, probably seeing it on some chart. The Island of Cape Breton is laid down distinctly, but we can hardly make “Rio pria” do duty for the St. Lawrence. The Maijolla map (1527) shows “C. Paulo.” A map now preserved in the Bodleian, given by Kohl,[279] and bearing date of “1536, die Martii,” shows a dotted line running from Europe to Cathay, and passing through an open strait north of Newfoundland. The map of Agnese (1536) makes no mention of Cartier.[280]
Oviedo,[281] in his description of the coast in 1537, shows no knowledge of the Gulf. He mentions an Island of St. John, but this lay out in the Atlantic near Cape Breton, close to the Straits of Canso. Nevertheless he gives a description of the four coasts of Cape Breton Island. Afterward describing Newfoundland out of Ribero, he puts an Island of St. John on the east coast near Belle Isle,[282] while in a corresponding position we see on Ribero’s map, as published by Kohl, the Island of “S. Juan.”[283] Mercator’s rare map of[74] 1538[284] exhibits Newfoundland as circumnavigated, the southern part being composed of broken islands, named “Insule Corterealis.” Canada is “Baccalearum regio,” and North America is “Americæ,” or “Hispania major, capta anno 1530.” A strait, “Fretum arcticum,” runs north of Labrador to the Pacific.
The Ptolemy published at Basle in 1540 shows a knowledge of Cartier’s second voyage, Canada being called “Francisca;” while in the gulf behind Newfoundland, called “Cortereali,” is a broad river like the St. Lawrence, extending into the continent.
Nevertheless, at this period many of the maps and globes bore no recognition of Cartier. A Spanish globe, for instance, of about 1540 shows no trace of Cartier, though behind Newfoundland—reduced to a collection of small islands—is a great gulf indented with deep bays, one being marked “Rio de Penico,” which may stand for the St. Lawrence, and thus represent the alleged Portuguese exploration of the Gulf by Alvarez Fagundes anterior to Cartier.[285]
ALLEFONSCE, FOL. 62A.
The map of Mercator published at Louvain in 1541 indicates no new discovery of the French. Newfoundland appears as in the sketch of 1538, but in the Gulf, represented by a broad strait, we find, “C. das paras,” “R. compredo,” and “R. da Baia.” The island of Cape Breton bears the legend, “C. de teenedus bretoys.”
Next in order, perhaps, come the sketches of Jean Allefonsce, pilot of Roberval, who sailed with him for Canada, Aug. 22, 1541. Of his maps we have four examples relating to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the North. Like the rest of his sketches, they are intercalated in his manuscript. These particular sketches are found on folios 62, 179, 181, 183. Folio 62 represents Labrador and the regions to the north, with Iceland; folio 179 shows “La Terra Neufe,” the southern part being an island, and Labrador cut in two by a broad channel marked “La Bay d’au vennent les glaces,” which Allefonsce thought came out of a fresh-water sea. Folio 181 has the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with Assumption Island[75] marked “L’Ascention.” He invariably makes this mistake.
ALLEFONSCE, FOL. 179.
The Gulf is called the Sea of Canada (Mer de Canada). There are three inlets without names, representing Miramichi, Chaleur, and Gaspé. The Gaspé region is called “Terre Unguedor.” The mouth of the St. Lawrence is shown; and near the entrance, on the Labrador side, we find “La Terre de Sept Isles.” There is an opening intended for Cartier’s Bay of St. Lawrence; and farther eastward is “Cap de Thienot,” so named by Cartier on his first voyage, after the Indian chief found there. Folio 183 indicates the Gulf again, as part of the Sea of Canada (Partie de la Mer de Canada), together with a portion of the St. Lawrence, marked “Riviere du Canada.” Where the sketch of folio 181 properly shows “Unguedor,” we find “La Terre Franciscaine.” The Saguenay is represented as a broad strait leading into a great sea, “La Mer du Saguenay,” in which are three islands. These sketches, though rude, possess considerable interest, as being the first known delineations of the region made on the spot by an actual navigator; but the Saguenay region is sketched fancifully from hearsay.
ALLEFONSCE, FOL 181A.
In this connection we may mention Allefonsce’s sketches of the Atlantic coast on folios 184, 186, 187 of his Cosmographie. The first includes the entrance to the Gulf and the southern part of Newfoundland. The entrance is marked “Entree des Bretons.” The Island of Cape Breton bears its proper name, with the Straits of Canso clearly defined. Near its true locality in the Gulf, but on too small a scale, we discover the “Isla de Saint-Jean,” the “Isle Gazeas” of the map of Du Testu. The New Brunswick section is styled, “One part of the Land of the Laborer” (Une partje de la Coaste du Laboureur).[286] Cape Race, Newfoundland, is called “Cap de Rat.” Folio 186 shows the New England coast proper, with the River of Norumbega, south of which is “Cap de la Franciscaine” and “Terre de la Franciscaine.” The next section (187) includes the coast to Florida, with the West Indies and part of South America.
It would prove interesting if one could establish the priority of Allefonsce in his application of the name “Saint-Jean” to our present Prince Edward Island.[287] The Cosmographie[76] was finished in 1545, while the so-called Cabot map, which uses the same name, was published in 1544. Now did Allefonsce adopt the name from this map of 1544? Clearly the name was not given by Cartier, either on his first or second voyage. On his third voyage he does not appear to have sailed on that side of the Gulf, while we have no details of the fourth voyage. He, however, gave the name of St. John to a cape on the west coast of Newfoundland during his first voyage. Allefonsce called Prince Edward Island by that name. A full discussion of this subject might involve a fresh inquiry into the authenticity of the Cabot map, and expunge “Prima Vista.”
ALLEFONSCE, FOL 183A.
The globe of Ulpius, 1542, does not recognize the voyages of Cartier, showing Canada as the “Baccalearum Regio,” with openings in the coast north and south of Newfoundland, called “Terra Laboratores.” North America appears as a part of Asia.[288] The Nancy globe, which also shows North America as connected with Asia, indicates that the insular character of Newfoundland, called “Corterealis,” was well known at the time of its construction, about 1542. From the gulf behind the island—the southern part of which is much broken—two rivers extend some distance into the continent.[289] These globes are according to the prevailing French idea of the period, making New France, as Francis I. expressed it, a part of Asia. The map of Jean Rotz, 1542, shows the explorations of Cartier, but omits the names that belong on the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence.[290]
The Vallard map 1544 (?) shows very fully the discoveries of Cartier, his French names being corrupted by the Portuguese map-makers, who promptly obtained a report of all that Cartier had done. The Gulf and River of St. Lawrence appear simply as “Rio de Canada.”[291]
In 1544 we reach the famous Cabot map,[292] drawn from French material, fully illustrating[77] the French discoveries in Canada, and practically ignoring the claims of Spain, though the alleged author was in the service of that country. This appears to be the first publication, and in fact the first recognition in a printed form, of the voyages of Cartier and Roberval, the narrative of Cartier’s second voyage not appearing until the following year.
ALLEFONSCE, CAPE BRETON, 1544-1545.
Next, we find in the map of the Dauphin, or Henri II. (1546), that Roberval is recognized standing with his soldiers in martial array on the bank of the Saguenay. Newfoundland is represented as a mass of islands,—an idea not dissipated by the voyages of Cartier; but the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence are well depicted, and show the explorations of the sailor of St. Malo. We see the Island of Assumption (our Anticosti), the Island of St. John (Alezay), Brion’s Island, and the Bird Rocks, with many of the names actually given to points of the coast by Cartier, which shows that he did his work with care, yet without attempting to affix names to either the gulf or the river, giving to the latter in his narrative the Indian name “Hochelaga.” On this map[293] the name of “St. Laurens” stands where Cartier put it on his first voyage, at the St. John’s River, though the name very soon—we cannot say when—was applied to the Gulf, as to-day. Gomara styles it San Lorenço in 1553. The Isolario of Bordone (1549) has no recognition of Roberval or Cartier, repeating the map found in the edition of 1527.
ALLEFONSCE, COAST OF MAINE, 1544-1545.
In this connection the map of Gastaldi (1550) is somewhat remarkable. Publishing it in 1556, in the third volume of his Raccolta in connection with the “Discorso d’vn Gran Capitano,” supposed to have been written in 1539, Ramusio says that he is aware of its deficiencies. This map, as well as the “Discorso,” makes no reference to Cartier, though the country is called “La Nvova Francia.” The map gives a lively picture of the region. Norumbega appears as an island, and Newfoundland as a collection of large islands, with evidences of what may stand for explorations in the Gulf lying behind; but, unlike the globe just mentioned, it shows no names on the coast of the Gulf.[294] The insular character of the Norumbega region is not purely imaginary, but is based upon the fact that the Penobscot region affords almost a continued watercourse to the St. Lawrence, which was travelled by the Maine Indians.
A map of Guillaume le Testu (1555),[295] preserved in the Department of the Marine[78] at Paris, exhibits very fully the work of Cartier. He uses both the names “Francica” and “Le Canada.” To the Island of Prince Edward, one cape of which Cartier called “Alezay,” he calls “Isle Gazees.” The map marked xi. in Kunstmann’s Atlas appears to apply “I: allezai” to the same island.
Diego Homem’s map (1558), in the British Museum, also shows the explorations of Cartier, though, in a poor and disjointed way, representing the Northern Ocean as extending down to the region of the St. Lawrence, and as being connected therewith by several broad passages. Mercator (given by Jomard) reveals the discoveries of Cartier in a more sober way, though he puts “Honguedo” at the Saguenay instead of at Gaspé.
Here some notice should perhaps be taken of a map drawn in the year 1559,—the year 967 of the Hegira,—by the Tunisian, Hagi Ahmed, who was addicted to the study of geography in his youth, and who, while temporarily a slave among Christians, acquired much knowledge which afterwards proved very serviceable. This map is cordiform, and engraved on wood. It is described in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (1865, pp. 686-757). A delineation in outline is also given, though this representation affords only a faint idea of its contents. It was found in the archives of the Council of Ten, and was discussed by the Abbé Assemani in 1795. He was awarded a gold medal by the Prince of Venice, who caused it to be struck in his honor. His treatise was limited to twenty-four copies, which were accompanied by an equal number of copies of the map. The name “Hagi” indicates that Ahmed had made the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. The photograph[296] of it measures 16½ × 16 inches, the representation of the earth’s surface being bordered by descriptive text inclosed in scroll work. Only two and one half inches are devoted to the coast from Labrador to Florida; the work, accordingly, being very minute, is difficult to examine even under a lens. The coast is depicted according to Ribero; the Gulf of St. Lawrence not being shown, though deep indentations mark the two entrances. He does not appear to have had access to any good charts, and shows a poor knowledge of what Cartier had done.
The map of Nicholas des Liens, of Dieppe (1566), which is a map of the world, preserved under glass in the Geographical Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, gives on a small scale a curious representation of Cartier’s exploration; the St. Lawrence as far as Quebec being a broad gulf, one arm of which extends southwest, nearly to what represents the New England coast. Along Lower Canada is spread out the name “Jacques Cartier.”
Mercator’s map of 1569 makes some improvement upon the Dauphin’s map of 1546, showing Cape Breton more in its true relation to the continent; while Newfoundland is comprised in fewer fragments. North America and the lands to the north are dominated by imagination; and in this map we find the source of much of that confusion which the power of Mercator’s name extended far into the seventeenth century.[297] Mercator does not give any additional facts respecting the explorations of Cartier.
The general map in the Ptolemy of 1574, by Ruscelli, shows North America connected with both Asia and Europe, Greenland being joined with the latter. Another map in this volume, showing the coast from Florida to Labrador, presents Newfoundland in the old way as a collection of islands, with three unnamed rivers extending into the main at the westward.[298]
Ortelius, in 1575, fashioned his map of the world after Mercator, and shows “Juan” out in the sea off Cape Breton; while in his special map of America, farther out, we find [79]“Juan de Sumpo” in the place of Mercator’s “Juan Estevan.”[299]
The map of Thevet, given in his Cosmographie Universelle, 1575, adds little to the interest of the discussion, as for the most part he follows Mercator, the master of the period. On reaching the year 1584, the map of Jacques de Vaulx is found to show no improvement over its immediate predecessors. The Gulf of St. Lawrence appears under its present name, and the river, which is very wide, extends to Chilaga. The Penobscot River runs through to the St. Lawrence, while a large island, called “L’Isle St. Jehan,” lies in the sea along the coast which occupies the region where we should look for a definition of the peninsula of Nova Scotia.[300] On Lower Canada we read, “Terre Neufe.” Newfoundland appears almost as a single island.
DES LIENS (1566).
[Sketched from a tracing furnished by Dr. De Costa.—Ed.]
Porcacchi’s work, L’Isole piv Famose del Mondo of 1590 (p. 161), goes backward in a hopeless manner. A river extends from the region of Nova Scotia into a great lake (Lago) near “Ochelaga,” the latter being nearly the only word on the map distinctly recalling the voyages of Cartier.[301]
The map of De Bry, 1596, gives no light; though out at sea, off Cape Breton, is the island “Fagundas.”[302] Wytfliet’s Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ, etc., of 1597, contains the same representations of the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence found in other editions, including the Douay edition of 1611.[303] This author is also dominated by Mercator.
The Molyneux map of 1600, among other points, shows Allefonsce’s Sea of Saguenay, saying, “The Lake of Tadenac [Tadousac?], the boundes whereof are unknown.”[304] On this map Newfoundland appears as one solid island, while the Penobscot extends through to the St. Lawrence, which itself flows westward into the great “Lake of Tadenac, the boundes whereof are unknoune.”[305]
Here we close our brief notice of a few of the representative maps produced prior to the opening of the seventeenth century. A careful examination of these maps would show, that, from the period of the Dauphin Map down to the first voyage of Champlain to Canada, in 1603, no substantial improvement was made by the cartographers of any nation in the geographical delineation of the region opened to France by the enterprise of Cartier and those who followed him. As we have shown (ante, p. 61), the connection with New France was maintained, vast profits being derived from the fisheries and from trade; but scientific exploration appears to have been neglected, while the maps in many cases became hopelessly confused. It was the work of Champlain to bring order out of confusion; and by his well-directed explorations to restore the knowledge which to the world at large had been lost, carrying out at the same time upon a larger scale the arduous enterprises projected by Jacques Cartier.
THE CARTOGRAPHY
OF THE
NORTHEAST COAST OF NORTH AMERICA.
1535-1600.
BY THE EDITOR.
ALONZO DE CHAVES, who was made a royal cosmographer April 4, 1528, and still retained that title, at the age of ninety-two, in 1584,[306] is known to have made in 1536 a chart of the coast from Newfoundland south; and though it is no longer extant, Harrisse[307] thinks its essential parts are given in all probability in a chart of Diego Gutierrez, preserved in the French archives.[308] It is known that Oviedo based his description of the coast upon it; his full text was not generally accessible till the Academy of History at Madrid published its edition of the Historia general de las Indias[309] in 1852.
FROM THE NANCY GLOBE.
The key is as follows: 1. Gronlandia. 2. Corterealis. 3. Baccalearum regio. 4. Anorombega.
During the few years immediately following the explorations of Cartier we find little or no trace of his discoveries. There is scarcely any significance, for instance, in the Agnese map of 1536,[310] the Apianus map of 1540,[311] the Münster of the same year,[312] or in other maps mentioned in connection with the Sea of Verrazano on an earlier page.[313] A little more precision comes with the group of islands standing for the Newfoundland region, which appears in the early Mercator map of 1538 and in the gores of Mercator’s globe of 1541,[314] and in the Nancy globe of about the same date; but the Ulpius globe (1542) is uncertain enough, and has the names confused.
We first begin to trace a sensible effect of Cartier’s voyage in a manuscript in the British Museum[315] indorsed, This Boke of Idrography is made by me, Johne Rotz, Sarvant to the Kinges Mooste Excellent Majestie. The author was a Frenchman of Flemish name, and his treatise is dated 1542. Harrisse[316] thinks that he used the Portuguese-Dieppe authorities; and Kohl thinks that he must have had access to the maps, now lost, which Cartier brought home from his first voyage, while along the Gulf of Maine he depended upon the Spanish accounts.[317] Both of the sketches from Rotz here given follow copies in the Kohl Collection; one is a section from his map of the east coast of North America, and the other is from his Western Hemisphere,—which seems to indicate that he had in the interim between making the two maps got tidings of Cartier’s later voyage.[318]
FROM THE ULPIUS GLOBE, 1542.
The key is as follows: 1. Groestlandia. 2. Islandia. 3. Grovelat. 4. Terra Corterealis. 5. Baccalos. 6. Terra laboratoris. 7. Cavo de Brettoni. Cf. the fac-simile on an earlier page.
Baptista Agnese at Venice seems not to have been as fortunate in getting knowledge of Cartier’s voyages as Rotz in London was; and two or three of his charts, dated 1543, showing this region, are preserved. They give a pretty clear notion of the eastern coast of Newfoundland, with “C. Raso” and “Terra de los Bretones” to the west of it.[319] These Agnese maps are in London,[320] Paris, Florence,[321] and Coburg.[322] Other maps by Agnese of a year or two later date, but preserving much the same characteristics, are in the Royal Library at Dresden,[323] dated 1544, and in the Marciana Collection at Venice, dated 1545.[324]
We get at last, as has been said in the previous chapter, the first recognition in a printed map of the Cartier voyages in the great Cabot map of 1544, of which a section is here reproduced,[325] and a similar section is given by Harrisse in his Cabots, preserving the colors of the original. Harrisse, by collating the references and early descriptions, reaches the conclusion that there may have been three, and perhaps four, editions of this map, of which a single copy of one edition is now known. Of the maps accompanying the manuscript Cosmographie of Allefonsce, in the Paris Library, sufficient has been said in the preceding text.[326]
None of these explorations prevented Münster, however, from neglecting, if he was aware of, the newer views which the Cabot map had made public; and his eagerness for[83] the western passage dictated easily a way to the Moluccas in the “Typus universalis” of his edition of Ptolemy in 1545.
ROTZ, 1542 (East Coast).
In the same year (1545) a map of America appeared in the well-known nautical handbook of the Spaniards, the Arte de navegar of Pedro de Medina, which was repeated in his Libro de grandezas y cosas memorables de España of 1549. A sketch of this part of the coast is annexed, and it will be seen that it betrays no adequate conception of what Cartier had accomplished.
ROTZ, 1542 (Western Hemisphere).
To 1546 we may now assign the French map sometimes cited as that of the Dauphin, and sometimes as of Henri II. It is but a few years since Mr. Major first deciphered the legend: “Faictes a Arques par Pierre Desceliers, presbr, 1546.” Jomard, who gives a fac-simile of it, places it about the middle of the century;[327] D’Avezac put it under 1542;[328] Kohl thought it was finished in 1543.[329]
FROM THE CABOT MAPPEMONDE, 1544.
The annexed sketch will show that the Cartier discoveries are clearly recognized. The Spanish names along the coast seem to indicate that the maker used Spanish charts; and probably in part such as are not now known to exist.[330]
PART OF MÜNSTER’S MAP OF 1545.
This sketch is reduced from a copy in Harvard College Library. This map was re-engraved in the edition of Ptolemy (1552), and on this last plate the names of “Islandia” and “Bacalhos” are omitted, and “Thyle” becomes “Island.”
A different engraving is also found in Münster’s Cosmographia (1554).
Harrisse (nos. 188, 189) refers to unpublished maps of this coast of about this date, which are preserved in the Musée Correr, and in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice, and to accounts of these and others in Matkovic’s Schiffer-Karten in den Bibliotheken zu Venedig, 1863, and in Berchet’s Portolani esistenti nelle principali biblioteche di Venetia, 1866.]
FROM MEDINA, 1545.
This is sketched from the Harvard College copy. The map is repeated in the Seville edition of 1563,—the first edition (1545) having appeared at Valladolid. The Libro, etc., is also in Harvard College Library.
A map preserved in the British Museum belongs to this period. That library acquired it in 1790, and its Catalogue fixes it before 1536; but Harrisse, because it does not give the Saguenay, which Cartier explored in his third voyage, places it after October, 1546. Harrisse thinks it is based on Portuguese sources, with knowledge also of Cartier’s discoveries.[331]
Dr. Kohl, in his Washington Collection, has included a map by Joannes Freire, of which a sketch is annexed. It belonged to a manuscript portolano when Kohl copied it, in the possession of Santarem, which is described by Harrisse in his Cabots (p. 220). Freire was a Portuguese map-maker, who seems to have used Spanish and French sources, besides those of his own countrymen.
The New England coast belongs to a type well known at this time, and earlier; and if the position of the legend about Cortereal has any significance, it places his exploration farther south than is usually supposed. The names along the St. Lawrence are French, with a trace of Portuguese,—“Angoulesme,” for instance, becoming “Golesma.”
HENRI II. MAP, 1546.
The key is as follows: 1. Ochelaga. 2. R. du Saĝnay. 3. Assumption. 4. R. Cartier. 5. Bell isle. 6. Bacalliau. 7. C. de Raz. 8. C. aux Bretons. 9. Encorporada. 10. Ye du Breton. 11. Ye de Jhan estienne. 12. Sete citades. 13. C. des isles. 14. Arcipel de estienne Gomez.
Some of these names not in Ribero, nor in other earlier Spanish charts, indicate that Desceliers had access to maps not now known.
Kohl placed in the same Collection another map of this region from an undated portolano in the British Museum (no. 9,814), which in some parts closely resembles this of[86] Freire; but it is in others so curious as to deserve record in the annexed sketch. Kohl argues, from the absence of the St. Lawrence Gulf, that it records the observations of Denys, of Honfleur, and the early fishermen.
The precise date of the so-called Nicolas Vallard map is not certain; for that name and the date, 1547, may be the designation and time of ownership, rather than of its making. The atlas containing it was once owned by Prince Talleyrand, and belongs to the Sir Thomas Phillipps Collection. Kohl has conjectured that it is of Portuguese origin,[332] and includes it in his Collection, now in the State Department at Washington.
FREIRE, 1546.
Cesáreo Fernandez Duro, in his Arca de Noé; libro sexto de las disquisiciones náuticas, Madrid, 1881, gives a map of the St. Lawrence Gulf and River of the sixteenth century. It was found in a volume relating to the Jesuits in the Library of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, and was produced in fac-simile in connection with Duro’s paper on the discovery of Newfoundland and the early whale and cod fisheries,—particularly by the Basques. The date of the chart is too indefinitely fixed to be of much use in reference to the progress of discovery. Harrisse[333] is inclined to put its date after the close of the century, even so late as 1603.
Intelligence of Cartier’s tracks had hardly spread as yet into Italy, judging from the map of Gastaldi in the Italian Ptolemy of 1548. Mr. Brevoort[334] says of the sketch,—which is annexed,—that it is a “draught entirely different from any previously published. The materials for it were probably derived from Ramusio, who had collected original maps to illustrate his Collection of Voyages, but who published very few of them. In this particular map we find indications of Portuguese and French tracings, with but little from Spanish ones.”
Gastaldi is thought to have made the general map which appears in Ramusio’s third volume (1556), five or six years earlier, or in 1550. All that it shows for the geography of the St. Lawrence Gulf and River is a depression in the coast nearly filled by a large island. In 1550, and again in 1553, the Abbé Desceliers, who has already been shown to[87] be the author of the Henri II. map, made portolanos which are of the same size, and bear similar inscriptions: (1) “Faicte a Arques par Pierres Desceliers, P. Bre: lan 1550; and (2) Faicte a Arques par Pierre Desceliers, Prebstre, 1553.”
BRITISH MUSEUM, NO. 9,814.
No. 1 was in the possession of Professor Negri at Padua, when it was described in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, September, 1852, p. 235. It is now in the British Museum.[335] Harrisse[336] describes it, and says its names are essentially Portuguese. On Labrador we read: Terre de Jhan vaaz and G. de manuel pinho. The St. Lawrence is not named, but the Bay of Chaleur bears its present name.
NIC. VALLARD DE DIEPPE.
No. 2, which is less richly adorned than the other, was intended for Henri II., as would appear from its bearing that monarch’s arms. Some inquiry into the life of its[88] maker is given in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, September, 1876, p. 295, by Malte-Brun. It is owned by the Abbé Sigismond de Bubics, of Vienna. Desceliers was born at Dieppe, and his services to hydrography have been much studied of late.[337]
FROM GASTALDI’S MAP.
A sketch of map no. 56 in the Italian edition of Ptolemy, 1548, entitled, “Della terra nova Bacalaos.” The following key explains it: 1. Orbellande. 2. Tierra del Labrador. 3. Tierra del Bacalaos. 4. Tierra de Nurumberg. 5. C: hermoso. 6. Buena Vista. 7. C: despoir. 8. C: de ras. 9. Breston. 10. C. Breton. 11. Tierra de los broton. 12. Le Paradis. 13. Flora. 14. Angoulesme. 15. Larcadia. 16. C: de. s. maia.
Paul Forlani, of Verona, had scarcely advanced beyond this plot of Gastaldi, when so late as 1565 he published at Venice his Universale descrittione (Thomassy, Les Papes géographes, p. 118).
Harrisse[338] thinks that the praise bestowed upon Desceliers as the creator of French hydrography is undeserved, as the excellence of the maps of his time presupposes a long line of tentative, and even good, work in cartography; and he holds that Portuguese influence is apparent from the early part of the sixteenth century.
Wuttke, in his “Geschichte der Erdkunde,”[339] describes and figures several manuscript American maps from the Collection in the Palazzo Riccardi at Florence, dated 1550 or thereabout; but they add nothing to our knowledge respecting the region we are considering. One makes a large gulf in the northeast of North America, and puts “Terra di la S. Berton” on its east side, and “Ispagna Nova” on the west. This gulf has a different shape in two other of the maps, and disappears in some. In one there is a gulf prolonged to the west in the far north.
At about this date we may place a curious French map, communicated by Jomard to Kohl, and included by the latter in his Washington Collection. A sketch of it is annexed.[340] It is manuscript, and bears neither name nor date. The extreme northeastern part resembles Rotz’s map of 1542, and the explorations of Cartier and Roberval seem to be embodied. The breaking-up of Newfoundland would connect it with Gastaldi’s maps, or the information upon which Gastaldi worked, while the names on its outer coast are of Portuguese origin, with now a Spanish and now a French guise. Farther south the coast seems borrowed from the Spanish maps. The large river emptying into the St. Lawrence from the south is something unusual on maps of a date previous to Champlain. If it is the[89] Sorel, Champlain’s discovery of the lake known by his name was nearly anticipated. If it is the Chaudière, it would seem to indicate at an early day the possibilities of the passage by the portage made famous by Arnold in 1775, and of which some inkling seems to have been had in the union of the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine not infrequently shown in the early maps. The most marked feature of the map, however, is the insularity of the continent, with a connection of the Western Ocean somewhere apparently in the latitude of South Carolina, similar to that shown in John White’s map, as depicted in the preceding chapter. It may, of course, have grown out of a belief in the Sea of Verrazano; or it may have simply been a geographical gloss put upon Indian reports of great waters west of the limit of Cartier’s expedition.
THE JOMARD MAP, 155—(?).
Harrisse[341] puts circa 1553 a fine parchment planisphere, neither signed nor dated, which is preserved in the Archives of the Marine in Paris. It shows the English standard on Labrador (Greenland), the Portuguese on Nova Scotia, and the Spanish at Florida.
PART OF BELLERO’S MAP, 1554.
The whole map is reproduced in Vol. VIII.
Another popular American map by Bellero was used in the Antwerp Gomara of 1554, and in several other publications issuing from that city.[342] It was not more satisfactory, as the annexed sketch shows,—which indicates that even in Antwerp the full extent of Cartier’s explorations was not suspected. Nor had Baptista Agnese divined it in his atlas of the same year, preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice. Our sketch is taken from the fifth sheet as given in a photographic fac-simile[343] issued at Venice in 1881, under the editing of Professor Theodor Fischer, of Kiel.
An elaborate portolano Cosmographie universelle, par Guillaume Le Testu, and dated in 1555, is described by Harrisse[344] as an adaptation of a Portuguese atlas, with the addition of some French names. The northern regions of North America are called Francia.
BAPTISTA AGNESE, 1554.
In 1556, in the third volume of Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi,[345] Gastaldi, excelling a little his Ptolemy map of 1548,—a sketch of which is given on p. 88,—produced his Terra de Labrador et Nova Francia; while for the accounts which Ramusio now printed of Cartier’s voyage, Gastaldi added the Terra de Hochelaga nella Nova Francia,—which was simply a bird’s-eye view of an Indian camp.[346]
In the same year (1556) the map of Volpellio was not less deceptive. Two years later (1558) we find an atlas in the British Museum, the work of Diego Homem, a Portuguese cartographer, which seems to indicate other information than that afforded by Cartier’s voyages. It is not so accurate as regards the St. Lawrence as earlier maps are, but shows additional knowledge of the Bay of Fundy, which comes out for the first time, and is not again so correctly drawn till we get down to Lescarbot, half a century later.
VOPELLIO.
Part of the northern portion of Vopellio’s cordiform mappemonde, which appeared in Girava’s Cosmographia, Milan, 1556; cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 200. The map is very rare; Stevens has issued a fac-simile of it from the British Museum copy.
Girolamo Ruscelli, in the Venice edition of Ptolemy, 1561, gave a map which was evidently derived from the same sources as the Gastaldi, as the annexed sketch will show.
A mere passing mention may be made of a large engraved map of America, of Spanish origin, “Auctore Diego Gutierro, Phillipi regis cosmographo,” dated 1562, because of its curious confusion of names and localities in its Canadian parts.[347]
GASTALDI IN RAMUSIO.
Kohl, Discovery of Maine, p. 226 (who gives a modern rendering of this map), puts the making of it at about 1550,—two years later than the appearance of his Ptolemy map.
The atlas of Baptista Agnese of 1564, preserved in the British Museum,[348] and another of his of the same date in the Biblioteca Marciana, still retain some of the features of his earlier portolanos. He always identifies Greenland with Baccalaos, and still represents Newfoundland as a part of the main. Harrisse holds that he had not advanced beyond the Toreno (Venice) map of 1534, and in 1564 knew little more of the Newfoundland region than was known to Ribero and Chaves thirty-five years earlier.
HOMEM, 1558.
This sketch follows a reproduction in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, p. 377; cf. British Museum Catalogue of Manuscript Maps (1844), i. 27; Harrisse, Cabots, p. 243. Various atlases of Homem are preserved in Europe. This 1558 map (giving both Americas) is included in Kohl’s Collection at Washington, as well as another map of 1568, following a manuscript preserved in the Royal Library at Dresden, purporting to have been made by “Diegus Cosmographus” at Venice. Kohl thinks him the Diego Homem of the 1558 map, which the 1568 map closely resembles, though it makes the northern coast of America more perfect than in the earlier draft.
The Catalogue of the King’s maps in the British Museum puts under 1562 a map entitled, Universale descrittione di tutta la terra cognosciuta da Paulo di Forlani.
RUSCELLI, 1561.
A sketch of his Tierra Nueva. The key is as follows: 1. Lacadia. 2. Angouleme. 3. Flora. 4. Le Paradis. 5. P. Real. 6. Brisa I. 7. Tierra de los Breton. 8. C. Breton. 9. Breston. 10. C. de Ras. 11. C. de Spoir. 12. Buena Vista. 13. Monte de Trigo. 14. Das Chasteaulx. 15. Terra Nova. 16. C. Hermoso. 17. S. Juan. 18. Isola de Demoni. 19. Orbellanda. 20. Y. Verde. 21. Maida.
There are reproductions of this map in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, p. 233, and Lelewel, Géographie du Moyen-Age, p. 170; cf. Harrisse, Cabots, p. 237; and his Notes, pour servir à l’histoire ... de la Nouvelle France, etc., no. 294.
Thomassy,[349] however, cites it as published in Venice in 1565, and says it strongly resembles Gastaldi’s map, and is, perhaps, the same one credited to Forlani under 1570, as showing the recent discoveries in Canada. It is contained in the so-called Roman atlas of Lafreri, Tavole moderne di geografia, Rome and Venice, 1554-1572.[350]
ZALTIERI, 1566.
Next in chronological order comes an engraved map (15½ × 10½) with the following title: Il disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza ... Venetijs aeneis formis Bolognini Zalterij, Anno M.D. LXVI.[351] It gives the whole breadth of the continent, and is very erroneous in the eastern parts. The “R. S. Lorenzo” runs southeast from a large lake into the ocean between Lacadia and Baccalaos, while Ochelaga and Stadaconi[352] are on a river running east farther to the north, whose headwaters are in a region called “Canada.” The island C. Berton, as well as Sable Island (Y. Darena), would seem to indicate that the coast to the north of them is intended for the modern Nova Scotia, which would make the river running from the lake the Penobscot, and the group of islands east of Baccalaos a disjointed Newfoundland, compelling the river rising near Canada to do duty for the St. Lawrence. The large island, “Gamas,” is perhaps a reminiscence of Gomez.[353] The map in these parts is so confused, however, that its chief interest is to illustrate the strange commingling of error and truth, “which we have received lately,” as the inscription reads, “from the latest explorations of the French,”—which must, if it means anything, refer to Roberval. The map has signs neither of latitude nor longitude. In general contour it[94] resembles other Italian maps of this time, like those of Forlani, Porcacchi, etc. Zaltieri differs from Forlani, however, in separating America from Asia.
The great mappemonde of Gerard Mercator, introducing his well-known projection, followed in 1569. The annexed sketch indicates its important bearing on a portion of North American cartography. The St. Lawrence is extended much farther inland than ever before, with no signs of the Great Lakes, and it is made to rise in the southerly part of the region, put in modern maps west of the Mississippi, among mountains which also form a watershed westerly to the Gulf of California and southerly to the Gulf of Mexico.
MERCATOR, 1569.
The key is as follows: 1. Hic mare est dulcium aquarum, cujus terminum ignorari Canadenses ex relatu Saguenaiesium aiunt. 2. Hoc fluvio facilior est navigatio in Saguenai. 3. Hochelaga. 4. Po de Jacques Cartier. 5. Belle ysle. 6. C. de Razo. 7. C. de Breton. 8. Y. della Assumptione. 9. G. de Chaleur.
A fac-simile of this map is given on a later page.
Kohl[354] sums up his essay on this map as follows: “It is a remarkable fact, that while the icy seas and coasts of Greenland, Labrador, Newfoundland, and Canada were depicted on the maps of the sixteenth century with a high degree of truth, our coasts of New England and New York were badly drawn so late as 1569; and their cartography remained very defective through nearly the whole of the sixteenth century.”
A close resemblance to Mercator is seen in the rendering of Ortelius in the first (1570) edition of his Theatrum orbis terrarum.[355] The contour and general details of North[95] America, as established by Mercator and Ortelius, became a type much copied in the later years of the sixteenth century. The woodcut map in Thevet’s Cosmographie universelle (1575), for instance, is chiefly based on Ortelius, though Thevet claimed to have based it on personal observation in 1556.[356]
ORTELIUS, 1570.
The maps in De la Popellinière’s Les trois mondes (1582), that of Cornelius Judæus (1589), those in Maffeius’s Historiarum Indicarum libri xvi. (1593), in Magninus’s Geographia (1597), and in Münster’s Cosmographia (1598),—all follow this type. Reference may also be made to a Spanish mappemonde of 1573 which is figured in Lelewel,[357] an engraved Spanish map in the British Museum, evidently based on Ortelius, and assigned by the Museum authorities to 1600; but Kohl, who has a copy in his Washington Collection, thinks it is probably earlier. A similar westward prolongation of the St. Lawrence River is found in a “Typus orbis terrarum,” dated 1574, which, with a smaller map of similar character, appeared in the Enchiridion Philippi Gallæi, per Hugonem Favolium, Antwerp, 1585. Quite another view prevailed at the same time with other geographers, and also became a type, as seen in the map given by Porcacchi as “Mondo nuovo” in his L’ isole piu famose del mondo, published at Venice in 1572, in which he mixes geographical traits and names in a curious manner. It is not easy to trace the origin of some of this cartographer’s points.
A theory of connecting the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence on the line of what is apparently the Hudson River, which had been advanced by Ruscelli in the general map of the world in the 1561 edition of Ptolemy, was developed in 1578 by Martines in his map of[96] the world in the British Museum, from a copy of which in the Kohl Collection the accompanied sketch is taken.[358]
What is known as Dr. Dee’s map was presented by him to Queen Elizabeth in 1580, and was made for him, if not by him. It is preserved in the British Museum, and the sketch here given follows Dr. Kohl’s copy in his Washington Collection. Dee used mainly Spanish authorities, as many of his names signify; and though he was a little too early to recognize Drake’s New Albion, he was able to depict Frobisher’s Straits.[359]
PORCACCHI, 1572.
This is sketched from the copy in the Harvard College Library. The book has a somewhat similar delineation in an elliptical mappemonde, of which a fac-simile is given in Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes. The bibliography of Porcacchi is examined in another volume.
The peculiarities of three engraved English maps of about this time are not easy to trace. The first map is that in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Discourse;[360] the second is the rude drawing which accompanied Beste’s True Discourse relating to Frobisher;[361] the third, that of Michael Lok,[362] in Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages. Hakluyt, in the map which he added to the edition of Peter Martyr published in Paris in 1587, conformed much more nearly to the latest knowledge.[363]
We find what is perhaps the latest instance of New France being made to constitute the eastern part of Asia, in the map (1587) given in Myritius’s Opusculum geographicum rarum, published at Ingoldstadt in 1590.[364] A group of small islands stands in a depression[97] of the coast, and they are marked “Insulæ Corterealis.” It carries back the geographical views more than half a century.
Illustration: MARTINES, 1578.
In the Molineaux globe of 1592,[365] preserved in London, we find a small rudimentary lake, which seems to be the beginning of the cartographical history of the great inland seas,—a germ expanded in his map of 1600[366] into his large “Lacke of Tadenac.” Meanwhile Peter Plancius embodied current knowledge in his well-known map of the world. So far as the St. Lawrence Valley goes, it was not much different from the type which Ortelius had established in 1570. Blundeville, in his Exercises (1622, p. 523), describing Plancius’ map, speaks of it as “lately put forth in the yeere of our Lord 1592;” but in the Dutch edition of Linschoten in 1596 it is inscribed: Orbis terrarum ... auctore Petro Plancio, 1594.
JUDÆIS, 1593.
It appeared re-engraved in the Latin Linschoten of 1599; but in this plate it is not credited to Plancius. The map which took its place in the English Linschoten, edited by Wolfe, in 1598, was the same recut Ortelius map which Hakluyt had used in his 1589 edition. This was the work of Arnoldus Florentius à Langren, though Wolfe omits the author’s name.[367]
JOHN DEE, 1580.
In the map, “Americæ pars borealis, Florida, Baccalaos, Canada, Corterealis, a Cornelio de Judæis in lucem edita, 1593,” which appeared in that year in his Speculum orbis terrarum, Mercator and Ortelius seem to be the source of much of its Arctic geography; but its Lake Conibas, with its fresh water, records very likely some Indian story of the Great Lakes lying away up the Ottawa,—which is presumably the river rising in the Saguenay country. A legend on the map says that its fresh water is of an extent unknown to the Canadians, who are, as another legend says, the nations filling up the country from Baccalaos to Florida.
DE BRY, 1596.
It will be observed that to the northwest the Zeno map[368] has been made tributary, while one name, “Golfo quarré,” is not in the place usually given to it, since it is generally the alternative name of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The nomenclature of the coast from Cape Breton south follows the Spanish names; and though Virginia is recognized by name, there is no indication of the new geography of that region.[369]
FROM WYTFLIET.
De Bry in 1596 added little that was new; and much the same may be said of the maps in the edition of Ptolemy published at Cologne in 1597, and numbered 2, 29, 34, and 35.[370]
New France is also shown in the “Nova Francia et Canada, 1597,” which is no. 18 of the series of maps in Wytfliet’s Continuation of Ptolemy. Others in the same work show contiguous regions:—
No. 15. “Conibas regio cum vicinis gentibus,”—Hudson’s Bay and the region south of it.
No. 17. “Norumbega et Virginia,”—from 37° to 47° north latitude.
No. 19. “Estotilandia et Laboratoris,”—Labrador and Greenland, mixed with the Zeni geography.
QUADUS, 1600.
The map by Mathias Quaden, or Quadus, in the Geographisches Handbuch, was published at Cologne in 1600, bearing the title, “Novi orbis pars borealis.” The northeastern parts seem to be based on Mercator and Ortelius. A marginal note at “Corterealis” defines that navigator’s explorations as extending north to the point of what is called Estotilant. In its Lake Conibas it follows the 1593 map of Judæis.
In this enumeration of the maps showing the Gulf and River St. Lawrence down to the close of the seventeenth century, by no means all of the reduplications have been mentioned; but enough has been indicated to trace the somewhat unstable development of hydrographical knowledge in this part of North America. Most interesting, among the maps of the latter part of the century which have been omitted, are, perhaps, the Erdglobus of Philip Apian (1576), given in Wieser, Magalhâes-Strasse, p. 72; the mappemonde in Cellarius’ Speculum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1578); the map of the world in Apian’s Cosmographie augmentée, par Gemma Frison (Antwerp, 1581, 1584, and the Dutch edition of 1598); the map of the world by A. Millo (1582), as noted in the British Museum Manuscripts, no. 27,470; that in the Relationi universali di Giovanni Botero,[102] Venice (1595, 1597, 1598, 1603); the earliest English copperplate map in Broughton’s Concent of Scripture (1596); the Caert-Thresoor of Langennes, Amsterdam, 1598; and, in addition, the early editions of the atlases of Mercator, Hondius, Jannsen, and Conrad Loew, with the globes of Blaeuw.
The maps in Langenes were engraved by Kærius, and they were repeated in the French editions of 1602 and 1610 (?). They were also reproduced in the Tabularum geographicarum contractarum libri of Bertius, Amsterdam, 1606, whose text was used, with the same maps, in Langenes’ Handboek van alle landen, edited by Viverius, published at Amsterdam in 1609. In 1618 a French edition of Bertius was issued by Hondius at Amsterdam with an entirely new set of maps, including a general map of America and one of “Nova Francia et Virginia.”
CHAPTER III.
CHAMPLAIN.
BY THE REV. EDMUND F. SLAFTER.
FROM 1603 to 1635 the ruling spirit and prominent figure in French exploration and colonization in America was Samuel de Champlain. His temperament and character, as well as his education and early associations, fitted him for his destined career. His home in the little town of Brouage, in Saintonge, offered to his early years more or less acquaintance with military and commercial life. He acquired a mastery of the science of navigation and cartography according to the best methods of that period. His knowledge of the art of pictorial representation was imperfect, but nevertheless useful to him in the construction of his numerous maps and topographical illustrations. He wrote the French language with clearness, and without provincial disfigurement. Several years in the army as quartermaster gave him valuable lessons and rich experience in many departments of business. Two years in the West Indies, visiting not only its numerous Spanish settlements, including the City of Mexico on the northern and New Grenada on the southern continent, gave him an intimate and thorough knowledge of Spanish colonization.
With such a preparation as this, at the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, Champlain entered, in a subordinate position, upon his earliest voyage to the Atlantic coast of North America. During the preceding sixty years the French had taken little interest in discovery, and had made no progress in colonization, though their trade on the coast may have been kept up.[371]
In 1603, Amyar de Chastes, a venerable governor of Dieppe, conceived the idea of planting a colony in the New World, of removing thither his family, and of finishing there his earthly career. He accordingly obtained from Henry IV. a commission; and, associating with himself in the enterprise several merchants, he sent out an expedition to make a general survey, to fix upon a suitable place for a settlement, and to determine what provision would be necessary for the accommodation of his colony. De Chastes invited Champlain to accompany this expedition. No proposition[104] could have been more agreeable to his tastes. He accepted it with alacrity, provided, however, the assent of the King should first be obtained. This permission was readily accorded by Henry IV., but was coupled with the command that he should bring back a careful and detailed report of his explorations. Champlain was thus made the geographer of the King. It is doubtless from this appointment, unsought, unexpected, and almost accidental, that we are favored with Champlain’s unparalleled journals, which have come down to us rich in incident, prolific in important information, and covering nearly the whole period of his subsequent career.
The expedition set on foot by Amyar de Chastes left Honfleur on the 15th of March, 1603. It consisted of two vessels, one commanded by Pont Gravé, a distinguished fur-trader and merchant, who had previously made several voyages to the New World, and the other by Sieur Prevert, both of them from the city of St. Malo. Two Indians, who had been brought to France by Pont Gravé on a former voyage, accompanied the expedition, and made themselves useful in the investigation which ensued. Delayed by gales lasting many days, and by floating fields of ice sometimes fifteen or twenty miles in extent, the company were forty days in reaching the harbor of Tadoussac. Here, a short distance from their anchorage, they found encamped a large number of savages, estimated at a thousand, who were celebrating a recent victory. These savages were representatives from the three great allied northern families or tribes,—the Etechemins of New Brunswick and Maine, the Montagnais of the northern banks of the St. Lawrence about Tadoussac, and the Algonquins, coming from the vast region watered by the Ottawa and its tributaries. They had just returned from a conflict with the Iroquois near the mouth of the Richelieu. War between these tribes was of long standing. All traditions as to its beginning are shadowy and obscure; but it had clearly been in progress several generations, and probably several centuries, renewing its horrors in unceasing revenge and in constantly recurring cruelties. For the thirty years which Champlain was yet to spend as the neighbor of these tribes such hostile encounters were, as we shall see, a continual obstacle to his plans and a steady source of anxiety.
On the arrival at Tadoussac, preparations were at once made for an exploration of the St. Lawrence. While these were in progress, Champlain explored the Saguenay for the distance of thirty or forty miles, noting its extraordinary character, its profound depth, its rapid current, and impressed with the lofty and sterile mountains between whose perpendicular walls its pent-up waters had forced their way, moving down to the ocean with a heavy and irresistible flood. This survey of the Saguenay was probably the first ever made by a European explorer. At all events, Champlain’s description is the earliest which has come down to us.
On the 18th of June, leaving Tadoussac in a barque, and taking with them a skiff made expressly for ascending rapids and penetrating shallow streams, Champlain, Pont Gravé, and a complement of sailors, with several[105] Indians as guides and assistants, proceeded up the St. Lawrence. From Tadoussac to Montreal they explored the bays and tributary rivers, observing the character of the soil, the forests, the animal and vegetable products, including all the elements of present and prospective wealth. On reaching the Lachine Rapids above Montreal, their progress was abruptly terminated. Neither their barque nor their skiff could stem the current. They continued on foot along the shore for several miles, but soon found it inexpedient with their present equipment to proceed farther. Having obtained from the Indians important, if not very definite, information concerning the country, rivers, and lakes above the falls, and having likewise learned from them that in the lake region far to the north native copper existed and had been fabricated into articles of ornament, they returned to Tadoussac.
Champlain immediately organized another party to examine the southern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Skirting along the coast, they touched at Gaspé, Mal-Bay, and Isle Percée, which were at that time (1603) important stations, annually visited by fishermen of different nations. Soon after reaching the southern coast they met a troop of savages who were transporting arrows and moose-meat to exchange for the skins of the beaver and marten with the more northern tribes whom they expected to find at Tadoussac. Having obtained such information as they desired of the country still farther south, and of the copper mines in the region about the Bay of Fundy, Champlain’s party passed directly from Gaspé to the northern side of the Gulf, touching somewhere near the Seven Islands, and thence coasted along the inhospitable shores of the northern side till they reached the harbor of Tadoussac. Having completed their explorations and secured a valuable cargo of furs, which was a subordinate purpose of the expedition, they returned to France, arriving at Havre de Grâce on the 20th of September, 1603.
On their arrival Champlain received the painful news of the death of Amyar de Chastes, under whose auspices the expedition had been sent out. This put an end to the present scheme of a colonial plantation.
Champlain applied himself immediately to the preparation of an elaborate report of his explorations, and in a few months it was printed under the sanction of the King and given to the public. This book proved of importance at that early stage of French colonization in America; it covered, indeed, nearly the same ground which had been gone over by Cartier sixty years before. But the survey had been more exact and thorough; for he had observed more of the harbors and penetrated more of the tributaries both of the river and of the gulf. The pictures which he presented were more completely drawn, and detailed more accurately the sources of wealth, while they conveyed the practical information which was needed by those who were about to embark in the colonization of the New World. This fresh statement of Champlain, virtually with the royal commendation, awakened in the public mind, as might well be expected, a[106] new interest, and enterprising merchants in different cities of France were not wanting who were ready to invest their means in the new undertaking.
This union of colonization and mercantile adventure was incongruous in itself, and proved a constant impediment to settlements. The merchant made his investments for no reason but to obtain immediate returns in large dividends. On such conditions of profit, money for the necessary outlays could be obtained, but upon no other. This put into the hand of the merchant or adventurer a power which he exercised almost entirely for his own advantage. What was necessary for the prosperity of the colony which he seemed to be founding, he absorbed in frequent and excessive dividends. The avarice of the merchant thus hampered the true colonial spirit, and his demands consumed the profits which should have given solid strength and expansion to the colony. This condition was a constant source of annoyance and discouragement to Champlain, and against it he found it necessary to contend throughout his whole career, but with not very satisfactory results.[372]
It was two months after the return of this first Canadian voyage of Champlain when the commission was granted to the Sieur de Monts of which an account is given in the following chapter. De Monts had succeeded in forming an association of merchants, who were lured by the prospects of the profits of the fur-trade. Taking himself the charge of one of his vessels, of one hundred and fifty tons, and putting Pont Gravé over the other, of one hundred and twenty tons, accompanied by several noblemen, among whom was Poutrincourt, and with Champlain still in the capacity of geographer of the King, they led forth their company of one hundred and twenty men,—laborers, artisans, and soldiers,—of whom about two thirds were to remain as colonists.
De Monts, who had been in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with De Chauvin several years before, decided to seek out a suitable location for his colony in a milder climate, which he could well do without going beyond the limits of his grant. The expedition reached the shores of Nova Scotia early in May, where they captured and confiscated several vessels engaged in a contraband fur-trade. Pont Gravé proceeded through the Strait of Canseau to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in order to prosecute more successfully the fur-trade, by which the expenses of the outfit were to be met.
Champlain’s duties as an explorer and geographer began at once. He proceeded in a barque of about eight tons, accompanied by several gentlemen, sailing in advance of the vessel, exploring the southern coast of the peninsula of Nova Scotia, touching at numerous points, visiting the harbors and headlands, giving them names, and making drawings, until he reached St. Mary’s Bay, within the opening of the Bay of Fundy, where he discovered several mines of silver and iron. Subsequently having been joined by De Monts, continuing his examinations, he entered Annapolis Harbor,[107] crept along the western shore of Nova Scotia, and passing over to New Brunswick, skirted the whole of its southern coast, and entered the Harbor of St. John; then exploring Passamaquoddy Bay as far as the mouth of the River St. Croix, he finally reached the island which the patentee selected as the seat of his new colony.
Champlain—undoubtedly the best engineer in the party—was immediately directed to lay out the grounds and fix upon the situation and arrangement of the buildings, which were forthwith erected.[373]
This settlement, here and at Port Royal,[374] under the charter of De Monts, continued for three years, making, as might well be expected, but little progress as a colony, the principal achievement being the cultivation of some small patches of ground, the raising of a few specimens of European grains, and of garden vegetables for its own use. It has consequently very little historical significance in itself. But it served in the mean time a very important purpose as a base, necessary and convenient, for the extensive explorations made by Champlain on the Atlantic coast, stretching from Canseau, at the eastern extremity of Nova Scotia, to the Vineyard Sound, on the southern shores of Massachusetts. These geographical surveys occupied him three summers, while the intervening winters were employed in executing a general chart of the whole region, together with many local maps of the numerous bays, harbors, and rivers along the coast.[375]
The first of these surveys was made during the month of September, 1604. This expedition was under the sole direction of Champlain, and was made in a barque of seventeen or eighteen tons, manned by twelve sailors, and with two Indians as guides. He examined the coast from the mouth of the St. Croix to the Penobscot. He was especially interested in the beautiful islands which fringe the coast, particularly in Mount Desert and Isle Haute, to which he gave the names which they still bear. Sailing up the Penobscot, called by the Indians the Pentegöet, and by Europeans who had passed along the coast the Norumbegue, he explored this river to the head of tide-water, at the site of the present city of Bangor, where a fall in the river intercepted his progress. In the interior, along the shores of the river, he saw scarcely any inhabitants; and by a very careful examination he was satisfied beyond a doubt that the story, which had gained currency from a period as far back as the time of Alfonse, about a large native town in the vicinity, whose inhabitants had attained to some of the higher arts of civilization, was wholly without foundation. He not only saw no such town, but could find no remains or other evidence that one had ever existed. Having spent nearly a month in his explorations, he[108] obtained a good knowledge of the country and much information as to the inhabitants, when having exhausted his provisions, he returned to his winter quarters at De Monts’ Island.
The next expedition was made early in the following summer, after it had been decided to abandon the island. Accordingly, on the 18th of June, 1605, De Monts himself, with Champlain as geographer, several gentlemen and twenty sailors, together with an Indian and his wife, necessary guides and interpreters, set sail for the purpose of finding a more eligible situation somewhere on the shores of the present New England. Passing along the coast which had been explored the preceding autumn, they soon came to the mouth of the Kennebec. Entering this river, and bearing to the easterly side, they sailed through a tidal creek, now called Back River, into the waters of the Sheepscot, and passing round the southern point of Westport Island, skirting its eastern shore, they came to the site of the present town of Wiscasset. Lingering a short time, exchanging courtesies with a band of Indians assembled there, and entering into a friendly alliance with them, they proceeded down the western shores of Westport, and passing through the Sasanoa, again entered the Kennebec, and sailed up as far as Merrymeeting Bay, where, by their conference with the Indians whom they met in the Sheepscot, they were led to believe they should meet Marchin and Sasinou, two famous chiefs of that region, whose friendship it was good policy to secure. Failing of this interview, they returned by a direct course to the mouth of the Kennebec.
Champlain having made a sketch of the mouth of the river, the islands and sandbars, with the course and depth of the main channel, the party moved on towards the west. Examining the coast as they proceeded, they passed without observing the excellent harbor of Portland, concealed as it is by the beautiful islands clustering about it, and next entered the bay of the Saco, which stretches from Cape Elizabeth to Fletcher’s Neck. Here they observed strong contrasts between the natives and those of the coast farther east. Their habits, mode of life, and language were all different. Hitherto the Indians whom they had seen were nomadic, living wholly by fishing and the chase. Here they were sedentary, and subsisted mainly on the products of the soil. Their settlement was surrounded by fine fields of Indian corn, gardens of squashes, beans, and pumpkins, and ample patches of tobacco. They observed also on the bank of the river a fort, which was made of lofty palisades. After tarrying two days in this bay, making ample sketches of the whole, including the islands, the place now known as Old Orchard Beach, and the dwellings on the shore, and having bestowed on the natives some small presents as tokens of gratitude for cordial and friendly entertainment, the French, on the 12th July, once more weighed anchor. Keeping close in, following the sinuosities of the shore, and lingering here and there, they observed everything as they passed, and on the morning of the 16th arrived at Cape Anne.
PORT ST. LOUIS.
[From the edition of 1613. Key: A, anchoring-place. B, channel. C, two islands (the left-hand one seems to be what is now known as Saquish, a peninsula connected at present with the Gurnet Head, here marked H; the right-hand one is the present Clark’s Island). D, sand-hills (apparently the low sand-hills of Duxbury beach). E, shoals. F, cabins and tillage ground of the natives. G, beaching-place of our barque (apparently the present Powder Point). H, land like an island, covered with wood (the present Gurnet Head). I, high promontory, seen four or five leagues at sea. This promontory has usually been called Manomet, and if the right-hand of the map is north, it has the correct bearing from the Gurnet; but it is in that case very strange that so marked a feature as the sand-spit known as Plymouth Beach is not indicated, and no sign is given of the conspicuous eminence known as Captain’s Hill. If, however, we consider the top of the map north (and the engraver may be accountable for the erroneous fashioning of the points of the compass), it becomes at once perfectly comprehensible as a sketch of that part of the bay known as Duxbury Harbor, and would not, accordingly, show that part of the shore on which the Pilgrims landed. In this view the hill I becomes Captain’s Hill, and the rest of the plan, though but rudely conforming to the lines of Duxbury Harbor, is much more satisfactory in its topographical correspondences than the other theory would allow. See the modern map of the harbor in Vol. III. chap. viii. Cf. further Davis’s Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth, p. 35, and the papers in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., December, 1882.
It will be remembered that the French found in all this region populous communities, which had been greatly reduced or destroyed by a plague in 1616 and 1617, before the English made their settlements. Mr. Adams has grouped the authorities on this point in his Morton’s New English Canaan, p. 133.
The French accounts of these Massachusetts Indians may be compared with the later English descriptions of Smith, Winslow, Wood, Morton, Williams, Lechford, Josselyn, and Gookin.
The French continued to frequent the Massachusetts coast for some years. We have accounts of two of their ships, at least, which were lost there between 1614 and 1619,—one on Cape Cod, two of whose crew were reclaimed by Dermer (Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, 98), and the other in Boston Harbor, whose crew were killed. Cf. 4 Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., iv. 479, 489, in Phinehas Pratt’s narrative; Morton’s New English Canaan, Adams’s edition, p. 131; Mather’s Magnalia, book i. chap. ii.—Ed.]
Their stay here was brief, its chief feature being an interview with the natives, whom they found cordial and highly intelligent. The Indians made an accurate drawing, with a crayon furnished by Champlain, of the outline of Massachusetts Bay, and indicated correctly their six tribes and chiefs by as many pebbles, which they skilfully arranged for the purpose.
Holding short interviews with the natives at different points, threading their way among the islands which besprinkle the bay, many of which, as well as ample fields on the mainland, were covered with waving corn, they sailed into Boston Harbor. The next day they proceeded along the south shore, and on the 19th entered and made such survey as they could of the little bay of Plymouth, destined a few years later to become the seat of the first permanent English settlement in New England. Besides a description of the Indian methods and implements of fishing, in which vocation he found them engaged, and of the harbor and its surroundings, Champlain has left us a sketch of the bay, to which he gave the name of Port St. Louis. This sketch is certainly creditable, when we bear in mind that it was made without surveys or measurements of any kind, and during a hasty visit of a few hours. Leaving Plymouth Harbor, and keeping along the coast, they made the complete circuit of the bay, and rounding the point of Cape Cod they sailed in a southerly direction, and entered an insignificant tidal inlet now known as Nauset Harbor. Here they lingered several days, making inland excursions, gathering much valuable information relating to the Indians, their mode of dress, ornamentation, the structure of their dwellings, the preparation of their food, and the cultivation of the soil. These particulars did not differ essentially from what they had observed at Saco, on the coast of Maine, and indicated clearly that the people belonged to the same great family.
Their provisions being nearly exhausted, it now became necessary to turn back. On reaching the mouth of the Kennebec, they learned that an English ship had been anchored at the island of Monhegan, which proved to be the “Archangel,” in command of Captain George Weymouth, who was making an exploration on the coast at that time, under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton. The conflicting claims of the French and English to the territory which Champlain was now exploring will come into[111] prominence later in our story. On arriving at De Monts Island, it became necessary to hasten arrangements for the removal of the colony to a situation less exposed; but in all the explorations thus far made they had found no location which was in all respects satisfactory for a permanent settlement. They determined, therefore, to transfer the colony at once to Annapolis Basin, where the climate was milder and the situation better protected. The buildings were forthwith taken down and transported to the new site. De Monts, the governor, soon after departed for France, in order to obtain from the King assistance in establishing and enlarging the domain of his colony. The command in his absence was placed in the hands of Pont Gravé. Champlain determined also to remain, in the hope of “making new explorations towards Florida.”
During the early autumn Champlain made an excursion across the bay to St. John, whence, piloted by an Indian chief of that place, he visited Advocate’s Harbor, near the head of the Bay of Fundy, in search of a copper mine. A few small bits of that metal, which was all he found, offered little inducement for further search.
The colony, in their new quarters at Port Royal, suffered less from the severity of the climate during the winter than they had done on the preceding one at De Monts Island. Nevertheless the dreaded mal de la terre, or scurvy, made its appearance, and twelve out of the forty-five settlers died of that disease. Early in the spring several attempts were made to continue their explorations along the southern coast; but, much to their disappointment, they were as often driven back by disastrous storms. The supplies needed for the succeeding winter were much delayed, and did not come till late in July, when De Poutrincourt arrived as lieutenant of De Monts, and took command at Port Royal.
On the 5th of September an expedition under De Poutrincourt, together with Champlain as geographer, departed to continue their explorations.[376] It was Champlain’s opinion that they should sail directly for Nauset Harbor, where their previous examinations had terminated, and from that point make a careful survey of the coast farther south. Had his counsels prevailed, they might, during the season, have completed the exploration of the whole New England coast. But De Poutrincourt desired to examine personally what had already been explored by previous expeditions. In this re-survey they discovered Gloucester Harbor, which they had not seen before. They found it spacious, well protected, with good depth of water, surrounded by attractive scenery, and therefore named it Le Beauport, the beautiful harbor. It was fringed with the dwellings and gardens of two hundred natives. In their mode of life they were sedentary, like those at Saco and at Boston, and they gave their guests a friendly welcome, offering them the products of the soil,—grapes just from the[112] vines, squashes of different varieties, the trailing-bean which is still cultivated in New England, and the Jerusalem artichoke, fresh and crisp, the product of their industry and care. After several days at Gloucester, the voyagers proceeded on their course, and finally rounded Cape Cod, touched again at Nauset, and after infinite trouble and no less danger crept round Monomoy Point and entered Chatham Harbor, where they found it necessary to remain some days for the repair of their disabled barque. From Chatham as a base they made numerous inland excursions, and also sailed along the shore as far as the Vineyard Sound, which was the southern terminus of Champlain’s explorations on the coast of New England. The work of exploration having thus been completed, spreading their sails for the homeward voyage, touching at many points on their way, they reached Annapolis Harbor on the 14th of November.
The winter that followed was employed by the colonists in such minor enterprises as might seem to bear on their future prospects. Near the end of the following May a ship arrived from France bringing a letter from De Monts, the patentee, stating that by order of the King his monopoly of the fur-trade had been abolished, and directing the immediate return of the colony to France. The cause of this sudden reverse of fortune to De Monts, of this withdrawal of his exclusive right to the fur-trade, is easily explained. The seizure and confiscation of several ships and their valuable cargoes on the coast of Nova Scotia had awakened a personal hostility in influential circles, and they easily represented that the monopoly of De Monts was destroying an important branch of national commerce, and diverting to the emolument of a private gentleman revenues which belonged to the State.
Preparations for the return to France were undertaken without delay. Meanwhile two excursions were made, one, accompanied by Lescarbot the historian, to St. John and to the seat of the first settlement at De Monts Island; another, under De Poutrincourt, accompanied by Champlain, to the head of the Bay of Fundy. The bulk of the colonists left near the end of July, in several barques, to rendezvous at Canseau, while De Poutrincourt and Champlain remained till the 11th of August, when they followed in a shallop, keeping close to the shore, which gave Champlain an opportunity to examine the coast from La Hève to Canseau,—the last of his explorations on the Atlantic coast.
As the geographer of the King, Champlain had been engaged in his specific duties three years and nearly four months. His was altogether pioneer work. At this time there was not a European settlement of any kind on the eastern borders of North America, from Newfoundland on the north to Mexico on the south. No exploration of any significance of the vast region traversed by him had then been made. Gosnold and Pring had touched the coast; but their brief stay and imperfect and shadowy notes are to the historian tantalizing and only faintly instructive.[377] Other navigators[113] had indeed passed along the shore, sighting the headlands of Cape Anne and Cape Cod, and had observed some of the wide-stretching bays and the outflow of the larger rivers;[378] but none of them had attempted even a hasty exploration. Champlain’s surveys, stretching over more than a thousand miles of sea-coast, are ample, and approximately accurate. It would seem that his local as well as his general maps depended simply on the observations of a careful eye; of necessity they lacked the measurements of an elaborate survey. Of their kind they are creditable examples, and evince a certain ready skill. The nature and products of the soil, the wild, teeming life of forest and field, are pictured in his text with minuteness and conscientious care. His descriptions of the natives, their mode of life, their dress, their occupations, their homes, their intercourse with each other, their domestic and civil institutions as far as they had any, are clear and well defined, and as the earliest on record, having been made before Indian life became modified by intercourse with Europeans, will always be regarded by the historian as of the highest importance.
On the 3d of September, 1607, the colonists, having assembled by agreement at Canseau, embarked for France, and arrived at St. Malo early in October. Champlain hastened to lay before De Monts the results of his explorations, together with his maps and drawings. The zeal of De Monts was rekindled by the recital, notwithstanding the losses he had sustained and the disappointments he had encountered. Specimens of grain, corn, wheat, rye, barley, and oats, together with two or three braces of the beautiful brant goose, which had been bred from the shell, were presented to the King as products of New France and as an earnest of its future wealth. Henry IV. was not insensible to the merits of the faithful De Monts, and he granted him a renewal of his monopoly of the fur-trade, but only for a single year. With this limitation of his privilege, stimulated by the futile hope of getting it extended at its expiration, De Monts fitted out two vessels,—one to be commanded by Pont Gravé, and devoted exclusively to the fur-trade, while the other was to be employed in transporting men and material for a settlement or plantation on the River St. Lawrence. Of this expedition Champlain was constituted lieutenant-governor,—an office which he subsequently continued to hold in New France, with little interruption, till his death in 1635.
On the 13th of April, 1608, he left Honfleur, and arrived at Tadoussac on the 3d of June. Here he found Pont Gravé, who had preceded him, in serious trouble. A Basque fur-trader and whale-fisherman, who did not choose to be restrained in his trade, had attacked him, killed one of his men, severely wounded Pont Gravé himself, and taken possession of his armament. The illegal character of this proceeding and its utter disregard of the King’s commission clearly merited immediate and severe punishment. While the Governor was greatly annoyed, he did not, however, allow passion to warp his judgment or overcome the dictates of[114] reason. The punishment, so richly deserved, could not be administered without the sacrifice of all his plans for the present year. With a characteristic prudence he therefore decided, “in order not to make a bad cause out of a just one,” to use his own expression, upon a compromise, by referring the final settlement to the authorities in France, with the assurance, in the mean time, that there should be no further interference by either party with the other.
TADOUSSAC.
Champlain’s plan in the edition of 1613. Key: A, Round Mountain. B, harbor. C, fresh-water brook. D, camp of natives coming to traffic. E, peninsula. F, Point of all Devils. G, Saguenay River. H, Point aux Alouettes. I, very rough mountain covered with firs and beeches. L, the mill Bode. M, roadstead. N, pond. O, brook. P, grass-land.
Having constructed a small barque of about fourteen tons, and taken on board a complement of men and such material as was needed for his settlement, he proceeded up the River St. Lawrence. On the fourth day the French approached the lofty headland jutting out upon the river and forcing it into a narrow channel, to which, on account of this narrowing, the Algonquins had given the significant name of Quebec.[379] Here on a belt of land at the base of a lofty precipice, along the water’s edge, on the 3d day of July, 1608, Champlain laid the foundations of the city which still bears the name of Quebec.
QUEBEC, 1613.
[A fac-simile of Champlain’s plan in the edition of 1613. Key: A, Our habitation, now the Point; B, cleared ground for grain, later, the Esplanade, or Grande Place; C, gardens; D, small brook; E, river where Cartier wintered, called by him St. Croix, now the St. Charles; F, river of the marshes; G, grass-land; H, Montmorency Falls, twenty-five fathoms high (really forty fathoms high); I, end of Falls of Montmorency, now Lake of the Snows; R, Bear Brook, now La Rivière de Beauport; S, Brook du Gendre, now Rivière des Fons; T, meadows overflowed; V, Mont du Gas, very high, now the bastion Roi à la Citadelle; X, swift mill-brooks; Y, gravelly shore, where diamonds are found; Z, Point of Diamonds; 9, sites of Isle d’Orléans; L, very narrow point, afterward known as Cap de Lévis; M, Roaring River, which extends to the Etechemins; N, St. Lawrence River; O, lake in the Roaring River; P, mountains and “bay which I named New Biscay;” Q, lake of the natives’ cabins. Cf. Slafter’s edition, ii. 175. This map is often wanting in copies of this edition; cf. Menzies Catalogue, no. 368. There is another fac-simile of it in the Voyages de Découverte au Canada, published by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in 1843.—Ed.]
The remaining part of the season was employed in establishing his colony, in felling the forest trees, in excavating cellars, erecting buildings, in laying out and preparing gardens, and in the necessary preparations for the coming winter. Among the events to occupy the attention of the Governor early after their arrival was the suppression of a conspiracy among his men which aimed at his assassination, the[116] seizure of the property of the settlement, and the conversion of it to their own use. Proceeding cautiously in eliciting all the facts, Champlain got the approbation of the officers of the vessels and others, and condemned four of the men to be hanged. The sentence was executed upon the leader at once, while the other three were sent back to France for a review and confirmation of their sentence in the courts. This prompt exercise of authority had a salutary effect, and good order was permanently established. The winter was severe and trying, especially to the constitutions of men unaccustomed to the intense cold of that region, and disease setting in, twenty of the twenty-eight which comprised their whole number died before the middle of April. The suffering of the sick, the mortality which followed, the starving savages who dragged their famishing and feeble bodies about the settlement, and whose wants could be but partially supplied, produced a depression and gloom which can hardly be adequately pictured.
Early in June, 1609, Pont Gravé returned from France with supplies and men for the settlement. The colony, even thus augmented, was small; and under the system on which it was established and was to be maintained, there was little assurance that it would be greatly enlarged. During the first twenty-five years its whole number did not probably at any time much exceed one hundred persons. While there was a constant struggle to enlarge its borders and increase its numbers, it was in fact only a respectable trading-post, maintained at a limited expense for the economical and successful conduct of the fur-trade. The responsibility of the Lieutenant-Governor was mostly confined to maintaining order in this little community, and in giving the men occupation in the gardens and small fields which were put under cultivation, and in packing and shipping peltry during the season of trade. For a man of the character, capacity, and practical sense of Champlain, this was a mere bagatelle. He naturally and properly looked forward to the time when New France should become a strong and populous nation. Its territorial extent was at present unknown. The channel only of the St. Lawrence, including the narrow margin that could be seen from the prow of the barque as it sailed along its shore from Tadoussac to the Lachine Rapids, had been explored. A vast continent stretched away in the distance, shrouded in dark forests, diversified with deep rivers and broad lakes, concerning which nothing whatever was known, except that which might be gathered from the shadowy representations of the wild men roaming in its solitudes. To know the capabilities of this[117] mysterious, unmeasured domain; to learn the history, character, and relations of the differing tribes by whom it was inhabited,—was the day-dream of Champlain’s vigorous and active mind. But to attain this was not an easy task. It required patience, discretion, endurance of hardship and danger, a brave spirit, and an indomitable will. With these qualities Champlain was richly endowed, and from his natural love of useful adventure, and his experience in exploration, he was at all times ready and eager to push his investigations into these new regions and among these pre-historic tribes.
THE ST. LAWRENCE, 1609.
[From Lescarbot’s map, showing Quebec (Kebec) and Tadoussac at the mouth of the Saguenay.—Ed.]
During the winter Champlain had learned from the Indians who came to the settlement that far to the southwest there existed a large lake, whose waters were dotted with beautiful islands, and whose shores were surrounded by lofty mountains and fertile valleys. An opportunity to explore this lake and the river by which its waters were drained into the St. Lawrence was eagerly coveted by Champlain. This region occupied a peculiar relation to the hostile tribes on the north and those on the[118] south of the St. Lawrence. It was the battle-field, or war-path, where they had for many generations, on each returning summer, met in bloody conflict. The territory between these contending tribes was neutral ground. Mutual fear had kept it open and uninhabited. The Montagnais in the neighborhood of Quebec were quite ready to conduct Champlain on this exploration, but it was nevertheless on the condition that he should assist them in an attack upon these enemies if encountered on the lake. To this he acceded without hesitation. It is possible that he did not appreciate the consequences of assuming such a hostile attitude toward the Iroquois; but it is probable that he was influenced by a broad national policy, to which we shall revert in the sequel.
VIEW OF QUEBEC.
[Champlain’s, in his edition of 1613. Key: A, storehouse; B, dovecote; C, armory and workmen’s lodging; D, workmen’s lodging; E, dial; F, blacksmith shop and mechanics’ lodging; G, galleries all about the dwellings; H, Champlain’s house; I, gate and drawbridge; L, promenade, ten feet wide; M, moat; N, platform for cannon; O, Champlain’s garden; P, kitchen; Q, open space; R, St. Lawrence River. This print is also reproduced in Lemoine’s Quebec Past and Present, Quebec, 1876, and in Voyages de Découverte au Canada, published by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in 1843.—Ed.]
On the 18th day of June Champlain left Quebec for this exploration. His escort of Montagnais was subsequently augmented by delegations from their allies, the Hurons and the Algonquins.
[This follows the Hamel painting after the Moncornet portrait, as given in Dr. Shea’s _Charlevoix_, vol. ii., and _Le Clercq_, i. 65. Cf. Slafter’s _Champlain_, vol. i., for a statement regarding the portraits of Champlain. Mr. Slafter prefers a woodcut by Roujat, and thinks that Hamel worked upon a sketch made from the Moncornet picture, which failed to preserve the strength of the original. The autograph of Champlain is rare. Dufossé in 1883 advertised a manuscript contract signed by him and his wife for 190 francs.—Ed.]
After numerous delays and adjustments and readjustments of plans, when the expedition was fairly afloat on the River Richelieu it consisted of sixty warriors in bark canoes, clad in their usual armor, accompanied by Champlain and two French arquebusiers. Proceeding up the river, they entered the lake, coursed its western shore, and moved tardily along. At the expiration of nearly three weeks,—on the 29th of July, 1609,—in the shade of the evening, they discovered a flotilla of bark canoes containing about two hundred Iroquois warriors of the Mohawk tribe, who were searching for their enemies, the tribes of the north, whom they hoped to find on this old war-path. Early the next morning, on the present site of Ticonderoga, near where the French subsequently erected Fort Carillon, whose ruins are still visible, the two parties met.[380]
DEFEAT OF IROQUOIS AT LAKE CHAMPLAIN.
[A fac-simile of Champlain’s engraving in his edition of 1613. Key: A (wanting), the fort; B, enemy; C, oak-bark canoes of the enemy, holding ten, fifteen, or eighteen men each; D, two chiefs, who were killed; E, an enemy wounded by Champlain’s musket; F (wanting), Champlain; G (wanting), two musketeers; H, canoes of the allies, Montagnais, Ochastaiguins, and Algonquins, who are above; I (also on the), birch-bark canoes of our allies; K (wanting), woods.—Ed.]
It was the first exhibition of firearms which the savages had ever witnessed. Champlain, moving at the head of his allies, discharged his[121] arquebus, and by it two chiefs were instantly killed, and another savage fell mortally wounded. The two French arquebusiers, attacking in flank, poured also a deadly fire upon the astonished Mohawks. The strange noise of the musketry, their comrades falling dead or wounded, and the deafening shout of the victors, carried dismay into the Mohawk ranks. In utter consternation they fled into the forest, abandoning their canoes, arms, provisions, and implements of every sort. The joy of the victors was unbounded. In three hours after the fight they had gathered up their booty, placed the ten captives whom they had taken in their canoes, performed the customary dance of victory, and were sailing down the lake on their homeward voyage. They soon reached their destination, having lingered here and there to inflict the usual inhuman punishments upon their poor prisoners of war. The cruelties which they practised in the presence of Champlain were abhorrent to his generous nature, and he used his utmost influence to mitigate and soften the sufferings which he could not wholly avert.
The exploration which Champlain had thus conducted was interesting and geographically important. He had made a hurried survey of the lake extending nearly its whole length, and had observed its beautiful islands, with its wooded shores flanked by the Adirondacks on the west and by the Green Mountains on the east. From the mouth of the Richelieu he had penetrated inland a hundred and fifty miles, and as the discoverer he might justly claim that the whole domain, of which this line was the radius, had by him been added to French dominion. To this exquisitely fine expanse of water he gave his own name; and now, after the lapse of two hundred and seventy-five years, it still bears the appellation of Lake Champlain.
Soon after arriving at Quebec, Champlain made preparations to return to France. Leaving the settlement in charge of a deputy, he arrived at Honfleur on the 13th of October. He immediately laid before De Monts and the King a full report of his discoveries and observations during the past year, and to both of them it was gratifying and satisfactory. The monopoly of the fur-trade which had been granted to De Monts had expired by limitation, and he now sought for its renewal. The opposition, however, was too powerful, and his efforts were fruitless. Nevertheless, De Monts did not abandon his undertaking, but with a commendable resolution and courage he renewed his contracts with the merchants of Rouen, and in the spring of 1610 sent out two vessels to transport artisans and supplies for the settlement, and to carry on the fur-trade. Champlain was again appointed lieutenant for the government of the colony at Quebec.
During this summer he was unable to undertake any explorations, although two important ones had been projected the year before. One of them was in the direction of Lake St. John and the headwaters of the Saguenay, the other up the Ottawa and to the region of Lake Superior. The importance of an early survey of these distant regions was obvious; but the[122] Indians were not ready for the undertaking, and without their friendly guidance and assistance it was plainly impracticable. Early in the season the Montagnais were on their way to the mouth of the Richelieu, where they were to meet their allies, the Hurons and Algonquins, and proceed up the river to Lake Champlain, and engage in their usual summer’s entertainment of war with the Mohawks. Sending forward several barques for trading purposes, Champlain repaired to the rendezvous, where he learned that the Iroquois or Mohawks, nothing daunted by the experiences of the previous year, had already arrived, and had thrown up a hasty intrenchment on the shore, and were impatiently awaiting the fight. There was no delay; the conflict was terrific. By the aid and advice of Champlain the rude fort was demolished. Fifteen of the Mohawks were taken prisoners, others plunged into the river and were drowned, and the rest perished by the arquebus and the savage implements of war. Not one of the Mohawks escaped to tell the story of their disaster.
Before the Algonquins from the Ottawa returned to their homes, Champlain began a practice which proved of great value in after years. He placed in the custody of the Indians a young man to accompany them to their homes, pass the winter, learn their language, their mode of life, and the numberless other things which can only be fully understood and appreciated by an actual residence. On the other hand, a young savage was taken to France and made familiar with the forms of civilized life. These delegates of both parties became interpreters, and thus intercourse between the French and Indians became easy and intelligent.
During the summer information was received of the assassination of Henry IV. This was regarded as a great calamity. He had from the first been friendly to those engaged in colonial enterprise, and they could fully rely upon his sympathy, although his impoverished treasury did not permit him to give that substantial aid which was really needed.
Champlain returned to France in the autumn of 1610, but again visited Quebec in 1611, though only for the summer, which was devoted almost exclusively to the management of the fur-trade. This trade was at best limited and desultory. The French did not obtain their peltry by trapping, snaring, or the chase, but by traffic with the savage tribes, who every summer visited the St. Lawrence for this purpose. A small number of them appeared each spring at Tadoussac, and a much larger number at Montreal, with their bark canoes loaded with skins of the beaver and of other valuable fur-bearing animals. Having no use for money or for such fabrics as are useful and necessary in civilized life, the savages gladly exchanged the accumulations of the winter, sometimes not reserving enough for their own clothing, for such glittering trifles as were offered to their choice. To facilitate these exchanges a rendezvous was established at Montreal, and when the flotilla of canoes appeared in the river, the trade was completed in an incredibly short time. As it was absolutely free and unrestricted, the competition became excessive, and the balance-sheet of the merchants usually presented[123] an exceedingly small net profit, if not a considerable loss. This competition was so disastrous, that the associates of De Monts decided to withdraw from the enterprise, and sold to him their interest in the establishment at Quebec. The formation of a new company was forthwith committed to Champlain. He accordingly drew up a scheme, embracing, besides others, these two important features: First, that the association should be presided over by a viceroy of high position and commanding influence; this was supposed to be important in settling any complications that might arise in France. Second, that membership should be open to all merchants who might desire to engage in trade in New France, sharing equally all profits and losses. This was supposed to remove all objections to the association as a monopoly, since membership was free to all. The Count de Soissons was appointed viceroy. He died, however, a few weeks later, in the autumn of 1612, and the Prince de Condé, Henry de Bourbon II., was chosen his successor. The organization of the Company, under many embarrassments, notwithstanding the precautions which had been taken by Champlain, occupied him during the whole of the year 1612. Having been appointed lieutenant, he returned to New France in 1613, arriving at Quebec on the 7th of May of that year.
It had been from the beginning an ulterior object of the French in making a settlement in North America to discover a northwest passage by water to the Pacific Ocean. Whoever should make this discovery would, by diminishing the distance to the markets of the East Indies, confer a boon of untold commercial value upon his country, and earn for himself an imperishable fame. This day-dream of all the old navigators had haunted the mind of Champlain from the first. Every indication which pointed in that direction was carefully considered. Nicholas de Vignau, one of the interpreters who had passed a winter with the Algonquins on the upper waters of the Ottawa, returned to France in 1613. Having heard doubtless something of the disastrous voyage of Henry Hudson to the bay which bears his name, he manufactured a fine story, all of which was spun from his own brain, but was nevertheless well adapted to make a strong impression on the mind of Champlain and others interested in this question. This bold impostor stated that while with the Algonquins he had made an excursion to the north, and had discovered a sea of salt water; that he had seen on its shores the wreck of an English ship from which eighty men had been taken and slain by the savages, and that the Indians had retained an English boy to present to Champlain when he should visit them. Although the story was plausible, Vignau was cross-examined, and put to various tests, and finally made to certify to the truth of his statement before notaries at La Rochelle. Champlain laid the statement before the Chancellor de Sillery, the President Jeannin, and the Marshal de Brissac, and by them was strongly advised to ascertain the truth of the story by a personal exploration. He therefore resolved to make this a prominent feature of the summer’s work.
Accordingly, with two bark canoes, provisions and arms, an Indian guide and four Frenchmen, including De Vignau, Champlain proceeded up the Ottawa. This river is distinguished by its numerous rapids and falls, many of them impassable even by the light canoe;[381] and at that time the shores were lined with dense and tangled forests, which could only be penetrated with the utmost difficulty. After incredible fatigue and hunger, the party at length arrived at Alumet Island, where they were kindly received by the chief of the Indian settlement. Here De Vignau had passed a previous winter, and was now obliged to confess his base and shameless falsehood. The indignation of Champlain, as well as his disappointment, can well be comprehended. He bore himself, however, with calmness, and restrained the savages from taking the life of De Vignau, which they were anxious to do for his audacious mendacity.
Although Champlain did not attain the object for which the journey was undertaken, he had nevertheless explored an important river for more than two hundred miles, and had made a favorable impression upon the savages. On his return he was accompanied by a large number of them, with eighty canoes loaded with valuable peltry for exchanges at the rendezvous near Montreal. Having placed everything in order at Quebec, he returned to France, where he remained during the whole of the year 1614, occupied largely in adding new members to his company of associates, and in perfecting such plans as were necessary for the success of the colony. Among the rest he secured several missionaries to accompany him to New France, with the purpose of converting the Indians to the Christian faith. These were Denis Jamay, Jean d’Olbeau, Joseph le Caron, and the lay brother Pacifique du Plessis, Recollects of the Franciscan order.
On his return in 1615, Champlain immediately erected a chapel at Quebec, which was placed in charge of Denis Jamay and Pacifique du Plessis, while Jean d’Olbeau assumed the mission of the Montagnais, and Joseph le Caron that of the Hurons. Hastening to the rendezvous for trade at Montreal, Champlain found the allied tribes awaiting him, and anxious to engage him in a grand campaign against the Iroquois. It was to be on a much more comprehensive scale than anything that had preceded it, and was to be an attack on a large fort situated in the heart of the present State of New York. This was distant not less than eight hundred or a thousand miles by the circuitous journey which it was necessary to make in reaching it. The warriors were to be collected and marshalled from the various tribes whose homes were along the route. The undertaking[125] was not a small one. A journey, including the return, of fifteen hundred or two thousand miles, by river and lake, through swamps and tangled forests, with the incumbrance of necessary baggage and a motley crowd of several hundred savages to be daily fed by the chance of fishing and hunting, demanded a brave heart and a strong will.
CHAMPLAIN’S ROUTE, 1615.
[This sketch-map follows one given by Mr. O. H. Marshall in connection with a paper on “Champlain’s Expedition of 1615” in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., August, 1878. It shows the route believed by Mr. Marshall to be that of Champlain from Quinté Bay, and the route suggested by General John S. Clark, which is in the main accepted by Dr. Shea.
The route of Champlain and the site of the fort attacked by him has occasioned a diversity of views. Champlain’s own narrative, besides making part of the English translation of his works, is also translated in the Doc. Hist. of New York, vol. iii., and in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., September, 1877, p. 561. Fac-similes of the print of the fort, besides being in the works, are also in the Doc. Hist. of New York, iii. 9; Shea’s Le Clercq, i. 104; Mag. of Amer. Hist., September, 1877; Watson’s History of Essex County, N. Y., p. 22.
Mr. Marshall began the discussion of these questions as early as 1849 in the New York Hist. Soc. Proc. for March of the same year, p. 96; but gave the riper results of his study in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., vol. i., January, 1877, with a fac-simile of Champlain’s 1632 map. His views here were controverted in the same, September, 1877, by George Geddes, who placed the fort on Onondaga Creek, and by Dr. J. G. Shea in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, ii. 103, who substantially agreed with an address by General J. S. Clark, which has not yet been printed, but whose views are shared by Mr. L. W. Ledyard, who in an address, Jan. 9, 1883, at Cazenovia, N. Y., tells the story of his own and General Clark’s investigation of the site of the fort, and places it near Perryville, N. Y. Dr. Shea, in his Le Clercq, i. 100, has since gone over the authorities. It was in reply to Geddes, Shea, and Clark that Mr. Marshall wrote the paper from which the above sketch-map is taken. Dr. O’Callaghan, in his Documentary History of New York, iii. 16, had advanced the theory that the fort was on Lake Canandaigua: and to this view Mr. Parkman guardedly assented in his Pioneers, and so marked the fort on his map. Brodhead, History of New York, i. 69, and Clark in his History of Onondaga, placed it on Onondaga Lake. Cf. the Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, New Series, part ii., and the notes in the Quebec and Prince Society editions of Champlain’s Voyages.—Ed.]
But it offered an opportunity for exploring unknown regions which Champlain could not bring himself to decline. Accordingly, on the 9th of July, 1615, Champlain embarked with an interpreter, a French servant, and ten savages, in two birch-bark canoes. They ascended the Ottawa, entered the Mattawan, and by other waters reached Lake Nipissing. Crossing this lake and following the channel of French River, they entered Lake Huron, or the Georgian Bay, and coasted along until they reached the present county of Simcoe. Here they found the missionary Le Caron, who had preceded them. Eight Frenchmen belonging to his company joined that of Champlain. The mustering hosts of the savage warriors came in from every direction. At[126] length, crossing Lake Simcoe, by rivers and lakes and frequent portages they reached Lake Ontario just as it merges into the River St. Lawrence, and passing over to the New York side, they concealed their canoes in a thicket near the shore, and proceeded by land; striking inland, crossing the stream now known as Oneida River, they finally, on the 10th of October, reached the great Iroquois fortress, situated a few miles south of the eastern end of Oneida Lake. This fort was hexagonal in form, constructed of four rows of palisades thirty feet in height, with a gallery near the top, and water-spouts for the extinguishing of fire. It inclosed several acres, and was a strong work of its kind. The attack of the allies was fierce and desultory, without plan or system, notwithstanding Champlain’s efforts to direct it. A considerable number of the Iroquois were killed by the French firearms, and many were wounded; but no effective impression was made upon the fortress. After lingering before the fort some days, the allies began their retreat. Champlain, having been wounded, was transported in a basket made for the purpose. Returning to the other side of Lake Ontario, to a famous hunting-ground,—probably north of the present town of Kingston,—they remained several weeks, capturing a large number of deer. When the frosts of December had sealed up the ground, the streams, and lakes, they returned to the home of the Hurons in Simcoe, dragging with incredible labor their stores of venison through bog and fen and pathless forest. Here Champlain passed the winter, making excursions to neighboring Indian tribes, and studying their habits and character from his personal observation, and writing out the results with great minuteness and detail. As soon as the season was sufficiently advanced, Champlain began his journey homeward by the circuitous route of his advance, and arrived safely after an absence of nearly a year. Having put in execution plans for the repair and enlargement of the buildings at Quebec, he returned to France.
For several years the trade in furs was conducted as usual, with occasional changes both in the Company in France and in local management. These, however, were of no very essential importance, and the details must be passed by in this brief narrative. The ceaseless struggle for large dividends and small expenditures on the part of the company of merchants did not permit any considerable enlargement of the colony, or any improvements which did not promise immediate returns. Repairs upon the buildings and a new fort constructed on the brow of the precipice in the rear of the settlement were carried forward tardily and grudgingly.[382] As a mere[127] trading-post it had undoubtedly been successful. The average number of beaver skins annually purchased of the Indians and transported to France was probably not far from fifteen or twenty thousand, and it sometimes reached twenty-two thousand. The annual dividend of forty per cent on the investment, as intimated by Champlain, must have been highly satisfactory to the Company. The settlement maintained the character of a trading-post, but hardly that of a colonial plantation. After the lapse of nearly twenty years, the average number of colonists did not exceed much more than fifty. This progress was not satisfactory to Champlain, to the Viceroy, or to the Council of State. In 1627 a change became inevitable. Cardinal de Richelieu had become grand master and chief of the navigation and commerce of France. He saw the importance of rendering this colony worthy of the fame and greatness of the nation under whose authority it had been planted. Acting with characteristic promptness and decision, he dissolved the old Company and instituted a new one, denominated La Compagnie de la Nouvelle France, consisting of a hundred or more members, and commonly known as the Company of the Hundred Associates. The constitution of this society possessed several important features, which seemed to assure the solid growth of the colony. Richelieu was its constituted head. Its authority was to extend over the whole territory of New France and Florida. Its capital was three hundred thousand livres. It proposed to send to Canada in 1628 from two hundred to three hundred artisans of all classes, and within the space of fifteen years to transport four thousand colonists to New France. These were to be wholly supported by the Company for three years, and after that they were to have assigned to them as much land as was needed for cultivation. The settlers were to be natives of France and exclusively of the Catholic faith, and no Huguenot was to be allowed to enter the country. The Company was to have exclusive control of trade, and all goods manufactured in New France were to be free of imposts on exportation. Such were the more general and prominent features of the association. In the spring of 1628 the Company, thus organized, despatched four armed vessels to convoy a fleet of eighteen transports, laden with emigrants and stores, together with one hundred and thirty-five pieces of ordnance to fortify the settlement at Quebec.
War existing at that time between England and France, an English fleet was already on its way to destroy the French colony at Quebec. The transports and convoy sent out by the Company of the Hundred Associates were intercepted on their way, carried into England, and confiscated. On the arrival of the English at Tadoussac, David Kirke, the commander, sent up a summons to Champlain at Quebec, demanding the surrender of the town; this Champlain declined to do with such an air of assurance that the English commander did not attempt to enforce his demand. The supplies for the settlement having thus been cut off by the English, before the next spring the colony was on the point of perishing by starvation. Half of them had been billeted on Indian tribes to escape impending death. On the 19th of July, 1629, three English vessels appeared before Quebec, and again demanded its surrender. Destitute of provisions and of all means of defence, with only a handful of famishing men, Champlain delivered up the post without hesitation. All the movable property belonging to the Company at Quebec was surrendered. The whole colony, with the exception of such as preferred to remain, were transported to France by way of England. On their arrival at Plymouth, it was ascertained that the war between the two countries had come to an end, and that the articles of peace provided that all conquests made subsequent to the 24th of April, 1629, were to be restored; and consequently Quebec, and the peltry and other property taken after that date, must be remanded to their former owners. Notwithstanding this, Champlain was taken to London and held as a prisoner of war for several weeks, during which time the base attempt was made to compel him to pay a ransom for his freedom. Such illegal and unjust artifices practised upon a man like Champlain of course came to nothing, except to place upon the pages of history a fresh example of what the avarice of men will lead them to do. After having been detained a month, Champlain was permitted to depart for France.
CAPTURE OF QUEBEC, 1629.
Fac-simile of the engraving in Hennepin’s New Discovery, 1698, p. 161. Of this capture (during which not a gun was fired, notwithstanding Hennepin’s dramatic picture) see an enumeration of contemporary authorities in the notes to Shea’s Charlevoix, ii. 44, et seq., principally Champlain, Sagard, and Creuxius. It is the subject of special treatment in H. Kirke’s Conquest of Canada, with help from papers in the English Record Office. In the same year (1629) there was a seizure on the part of the French of James Stuart’s post at Cape Breton, commemorated in La Prise d’un Seigneur Écossois, etc. Par Monsieur Daniel de Dieppe. Rouen, 1630. Cf. Champlain, 1632 ed., p. 272; and Harrisse, no. 45.
The breaking-up of the settlement at Quebec just on the eve of the new arrangement under the administration of the Hundred Associates, and with greater prospect of success than had existed at any former period, involved a loss which can hardly be estimated, and retarded for several years the progress of the colony. The return of the property which had been illegally seized and carried away gave infinite trouble and anxiety to Champlain; and it was not until 1633 that he left France again, with a large number of colonists, re-commissioned as governor, to join his little colony at Quebec.[383] He was accompanied by the Jesuit Fathers Enemond Massé and Jean de Brébeuf. The Governor and his associates received at Quebec from the remnant of the colony a most hearty welcome. The memory of what good he had done in the past awakened in them fresh gratitude and a new zeal in his service. He addressed himself with his old energy, but nevertheless with declining strength, to the duties of the hour,—to the renovation and improvement of the habitation and fort, to the holding of numerous councils with the Indians in the neighborhood, and to the execution of plans for winning back the traffic of allied tribes. The building of a chapel, named, in memory of the recovery of Quebec,[130] Notre Dame de Recouvrance, and such other kindred duties as sprang out of the responsibilities of his charge, engaged his attention. In these occupations two years soon passed.
During the summer of 1635 Champlain addressed a letter to Cardinal de Richelieu, soliciting the means, and setting forth the importance of subduing the hostile tribes known as the Five Nations, and bringing them into sympathy and friendship with the French.[384] This in his opinion was necessary for the proper enlargement of the French domain and for the opening of the whole continent to the influence of the Christian faith,—two objects which seemed to him of paramount importance. This was probably the last letter written by Champlain, and contains the key to the motives which had influenced him from the beginning in joining the northern tribes in their wars with the Iroquois.[385] On Christmas Day, the 25th of December, 1635, Champlain died in the little fort which he had erected on the rocky promontory at Quebec, amid the tears and sorrows of the colony to which for twenty-seven years he had devoted his strength and thought with rare generosity and devotion.[386] In the following June, Montmagny, a Knight of Malta, arrived as the successor of Champlain.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
THE richest source of information relating to Champlain’s achievements as a navigator, explorer, and the founder of the French settlement in Canada is found in his own writings. It was his habit to keep a journal of his observations, which he began even on his voyage to the West Indies in 1599. Of his first voyage to Canada, in 1603, his Journal appears to have been put to press in the last part of the same year. This little book of eighty pages is entitled: Des Savvages; ov, Voyage de Samvel Champlain, de Brovage, faict en la France Nouuelle, l’an mil six cens trois. A Paris, chez Clavde de Monstr’oeil, tenant sa boutique en la Cour du Palais, au nom de Jesus, 1604. Auec priuilege du Roy. This Journal contains a valuable narrative of the incidents of the voyage across the Atlantic, and likewise a description of the Gulf and River St. Lawrence,[131] and enters fully into details touching the tributaries of the great river, the bays, harbors, forests, and scenery along the shore, as well as the animals and birds with which the islands and borders of the river were swarming at that period. It contains a discriminating account of the character and habits of the savages as he saw them.[387]
In 1613 Champlain published a second volume, embracing the events which had occurred from 1603 to that date. The following is its title: Les Voyages dv Sievr de Champlain Xaintongeois, Capitaine ordinaire pour le Roy, en la marine, divisez en devx livres; ou, jovrnal tres-fidele des observations faites és descouuertures de la Nouuelle France: tant en la descriptiô des terres, costes, riuieres, ports, haures, leurs hauteurs, et plusieurs delinaisons de la guide-aymant; qu’en la creâce des peuples, leur superstition, façon de viure et de guerroyer: enrichi de quantité de figures. A Paris, chez Jean Berjon, rue S. Jean de Beauuais, au Cheual volant, et en sa boutique au Palais, à la gallerie des prisonniers, M.DC.XIII. Avec privilege dv Roy. 4to.[388] It contains a full description of the coast-line westerly from Canseau, including Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, and New England as far as the Vineyard Sound. It deals not only with the natural history, the fauna and flora, but with the character of the soil, its numerous products, as well as the sinuosities and conformation of the shore, and is unusually minute in details touching the natives. In this last respect it is especially valuable, as at that period neither their manners, customs, nor mode of life had been modified by intercourse with Europeans. The volume is illustrated by twenty-two local maps and drawings, and a large map representing the territory which he had personally surveyed, and concerning which he had obtained information from the natives and from other sources. This is the first map to delineate the coast-line of New England with approximate correctness. The volume contains likewise what he calls a “geographical map,” constructed with the degrees of latitude and longitude numerically indicated. In this respect it is, of course, inexact, as the instruments then in use were very imperfect, and it is doubtful whether his surveys had been sufficiently extensive to furnish the proper and adequate data for these complicated calculations. It was the first attempt to lay down the latitude and longitude on any map of the coast.[389]
In 1619 Champlain published a third work, describing the events from 1615 to that date. It was reissued in 1620 and in 1627. The following is its title, as given in the issue of 1627:[390] Voyages et Descovvertvres faites en la Novvelle France, depuis l’année 1615 iusques à la fin de l’année 1618. Par le Sieur de Champlain, Cappitaine ordinaire pour le Roy en la Mer du Ponant. Seconde Edition. A Paris, chez Clavde Collet, au Palais, en la gallerie des Prisonniers, M.D.C. XXVII. Avec privilege dv Roy. The previous issue contained the occurrences of 1613. The year 1614 he passed in France. The present volume continues his observations in New France from his return in 1615. It describes his introduction of the Recollect Fathers as missionaries to the Indians, his exploration of the Ottawa, Lake Nipissing, Lake Huron, and Ontario; the attack on the Iroquois fort in the State of New York; his winter among the Hurons; and it contains his incomparable essay on the Hurons and other neighboring tribes. It has Brûlé’s narrative of his experiences among the savages on the southern borders of the State of New York, near the Pennsylvania line, and that of the events which occurred in the settlement at Quebec; it contains illustrations of the dress of the savages in their wars and feasts, of their monuments for the dead, their funeral processions, of the famous fort of the Iroquois in the State of New York, and of the deer-trap.
In 1632 Champlain published his last work, under the following title: Les Voyages de la Novvelle France occidentale, dicte Canada, faits par le Sr de Champlain Xainctongeois, Capitaine pour le Roy en la Marine du Ponant, et toutes les Descouuertes qu’il a faites en ce pais depuis l’an 1603 iusques en l’an 1629. Où se voit comme ce pays a esté premierement descouuert par les François, sous l’authorité de nos Roys tres-Chrestiens, iusques au regne de sa Majesté à present regnante Lovis XIII. Roy de France et de Navarre. A Paris, chez Clavde Collet, au Palais, en la Gallerie des Prisonniers, à l’ Estoille d’Or, M.DC.XXXII. Auec Priuilege du Roy.[391] A sub-title accompanies this and the other[133] works, which we have omitted as unnecessary for our present purpose. This volume is divided into two parts. The first part is an abridgment of what had already been published up to this date, and omits much that is valuable in the preceding publications. It preserves the general outline and narrative, but drops many personal details and descriptions which are of great historical importance, and can be supplied only by reference to his earlier publications. The second part is a continuation of his journals from 1620 to 1631 inclusive. Champlain’s personal explorations were completed in 1615-1616, and consequently this second part relates mostly to affairs transacted at Quebec and on the River St. Lawrence. It contains an ample and authentic account of the taking of Quebec by the English in 1629. The volume is supplemented by Champlain’s treatise on navigation, a brief work on Christian doctrine translated into the language of the Montagnais by Brebeuf, and the Lord’s Prayer, Apostles’ Creed, etc., rendered into the same language by Masse.
Reprints.—In 1830 the first reprint of any of Champlain’s works was made at Paris, where the issue of 1632 was printed in two volumes. It was done by order of the French Government, to give work to the printers thrown out of employment by the Revolution of July, and is without note or comment.[392] In 1870 a complete edition of Champlain’s works was issued at Quebec, under the editorial supervision of the Abbé Laverdière, who gave a summary of Champlain’s career with luminous annotations. It was called Œuvres de Champlain, publiées sous le Patronage de l’Université Laval. Par l’Abbé C. H. Laverdière, M. A. Seconde Édition.[393] 6 tomes, 4to. Québec: Imprimé au Séminaire par Geo. E. Desbarats, 1870. This edition includes the Brief Discourse or Voyage to the West Indies in 1599, which had never before been printed in the original French. The manuscript had been almost miraculously preserved, and at the time it was used by Laverdière it belonged to M. Féret of Dieppe.[394] The edition of Laverdière is an[134] exact reprint, most carefully done, and entirely trustworthy, while its notes are full and exceedingly accurate.[395]
Translations.—The “Savages” was printed in an English translation by Samuel Purchas in his Pilgrimes, London, 1625, vol. iv. pp. 1605-1619.
In 1859 the Brief Discourse, or Voyage to the West Indies, translated by Alice Wilmere and edited by Norton Shaw, was published at London by the Hakluyt Society.
In 1878, 1880, and 1882, an English translation of the Voyages was printed by the Prince Society, in three volumes, comprising the Journals issued in 1604, 1613, and 1619, as Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, translated from the French by Charles Pomeroy Otis, Ph.D., with Historical Illustrations, and a Memoir by the Rev. Edmund F. Slafter, A. M. The Memoir occupies the greater part of vol. i., and both the Memoir and the Voyages are heavily annotated. It contains heliotype copies of all the local and general maps and drawings in the early French editions,—in all thirty-one illustrations; besides a new outline map showing the explorations and journeyings of Champlain, together with two portraits,—one engraved by Ronjat after an old engraving by Moncornet; the other is from a painting by Th. Hamel, likewise after the engraving by Moncornet.[396]
The Mercure François, a journal of current events, contains several narratives relating to New France during the administration of Champlain.[397]
In vol. xiii. pp. 12-34, is a letter of Charles Lalemant, a Jesuit missionary (Aug. 1, 1626), about the extent of the country, method of travelling, character, manners, and customs of the natives, and the work of the mission.[398] In vol. xiv. pp. 232-267, for 1628, is a full narrative of the Compagnie de la Nouvelle France, or the Company of the Hundred Associates, which was under the direction of Cardinal Richelieu, setting forth its origin, design, and constitution.[399] In vol. xviii., for 1632, pp. 56-74, there is again much about the Indians, and the delivery in that year of Quebec to the French by the English. In vol. xix., for 1633, pp. 771-867, are further accounts of the savages, and of the return of Champlain as governor in 1633, with the events which followed, particularly his dealings with the Indian tribes.
CHAPTER IV.
ACADIA.
BY CHARLES C. SMITH,
Treasurer of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
ACADIA is the designation of a territory of uncertain and disputed extent. Though its sovereignty passed more than once from France to England, and from England to France, its limits were never exactly defined. But in this chapter it will be used to denote that part of America claimed by Great Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, as bounded on the south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by a line drawn due north from the mouth of the Penobscot River, on the north by the River St. Lawrence, and on the east by the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Strait of Canso. Within these bounds were minor divisions vaguely designated by French or Indian names; and the larger part of this region was also called by the English Nova Scotia, or New Scotland.
SIEUR DE MONTS.
[This follows a copy of a water-color drawing in the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, i. 441, called a portrait of De Monts from an original at Versailles. Mr. Parkman tells me that he was misled by this reference of Mr. Poore in stating that a portrait of De Monts existed at Versailles (Pioneers, p. 222); since a later examination has not revealed such a canvas, and the picture may be considered as displaying the costume of the gentleman of the period, if there is doubt concerning its connection with De Monts. There is another engraving of it in Drake’s Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast.—Ed.]
So large a tract of country naturally presents great varieties of soil and climate and of other physical characteristics; but for the most part it is fertile, and it abounds in mineral resources, the extent and value of which were long unsuspected even by such eager seekers for mines as the early voyagers. It was often the theatre of sanguinary conflicts on a small scale, and its early history, which is closely connected with that of the New England colonies, includes more than one episode of tragic interest. Yet it has never filled an important place in the history of civilization in America, and it was a mere make-weight in adjusting the balance of losses and acquisitions by the two great European powers which for a century and a half contended here for colonial supremacy.
Acadia seems to have been known to the French very soon after the voyages of Cabot, and to have been visited occasionally by Breton fishermen almost from the beginning of the sixteenth century. For nearly a hundred years these adventurous toilers of the sea prosecuted their dangerous calling on the Banks of Newfoundland and the near shores before any effective attempt at colonization was made. It was not until 1540 that a Picard gentleman, Jean François de Roberval, was appointed[136] viceroy of Canada, and attempted to establish a colony within the St. Lawrence.[400]
Owing to the unexpected severity of the climate and the want of support from France, the enterprise failed, and, with the exception of the abortive efforts of De la Roche in 1584 and in 1598,[401] no new attempt at French colonization was made for more than half a century afterward, when the accession of Henry IV. gave a new impulse to the latent spirit of adventure. In 1603 Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, was named lieutenant-general of Acadia, with powers extending over all the inhabitable shores of America north of the latitude of Philadelphia.[402] Vast as was this domain, his real authority was confined to very narrow limits. Setting sail from France in the early part of April, 1604, De Monts, accompanied by Champlain, came in sight of Sable Island on the 1st of May, and a week later made the mainland at Cape La Hêve.
ISLE DE SAINTE CROIX.
[This is a fac-simile of Champlain’s engraving in his edition of 1613. The key is as follows: A, Habitation. B, Gardens. C, Isles with cannon. D, Platform for cannon. E, Burial-place. F, Chapel. G, Rocky shoals. H, Islet. I, De Mont’s water-mill begun here. L, Place for making coal. M and N, Gardens. O, Mountains (Chamcook Hill, 627 feet high). P, River of the Etechemins (called later Schoodic River, till the name St. Croix was restored). Slafter describes the island as about 540 feet wide at the broadest part, and it contains now six or seven acres. Five small cannon-balls, two and one-quarter inches in diameter, were dug up at the southern end some years ago. Slafter’s edition, ii. 33.—Ed.]
Subsequently he doubled the southwestern point of the peninsula of Nova Scotia, and coasting along the shore of what is now known as the Bay of Fundy, he finally determined to effect a settlement on a little island[403] just within the mouth of the St. Croix River. Here several small[138] buildings were erected, and the little company of seventy-nine in all prepared to pass the winter. Before spring nearly one half of their number died; and in the following summer, after the arrival of a small reinforcement, it was decided to abandon the place. The coast was carefully explored as far south as Cape Cod, but without finding any spot which satisfied their fastidious tastes;[404] and the settlement was then transferred to the other side of the bay, to what is now called Annapolis Basin, but which De Monts had designated the year before as Port Royal. Here a portion of the company was left to pass a second winter, while De Monts returned to France, to prevent, if possible, the withdrawal of any part of the monopoly granted him by the Crown.
Nearly a year elapsed before he again reached his settlement,—only to find it reduced to two individuals. After a winter of great suffering, Pontgravé, who had been left in command during the absence of De Monts, weary with waiting for succor, had determined to sail for France, leaving these two brave men to guard the buildings and other property. He had but just sailed when Jean de Poutrincourt, the lieutenant of De Monts, arrived with the long-expected help. Measures were immediately taken to recall Pontgravé, if he could be found on the coast, and these were fortunately successful. He was discovered at Cape Sable, and at once returned; but soon afterward he sailed again for France.[405] Another winter was passed at Port Royal, pleasantly enough according to the accounts of Champlain and Lescarbot; but in the early summer, orders to abandon the settlement were received from De Monts, whose monopoly of the trade with the Indians had been rescinded. The settlers reluctantly left their new home, and the greater part of them reached St. Malo, in Brittany, in October, 1607. The first attempt at French colonization in Acadia was as abortive as Popham’s English colony at the mouth of the Sagadahock in the following year.[406]
BUILDINGS ON ST. CROIX ISLAND.
[This cut follows Champlain’s in the 1613 edition. It represents,—A, De Monts’s house. B, Common building, for rainy days. C, Storehouse. D, Building for the guard. E, Blacksmith’s shop. F, Carpenter’s house. G, Well. H, Oven. I, Kitchen. L and M, Gardens. N, Open square. O, Palisade. P, Houses of D’Orville, Champlain, and Champdoré. Q, Houses of Boulay and artisans. R, houses of Genestou, Sourin, and artisans. T, Houses of Beaumont, la Motte Bourioli, and Fougeray. V, Curate’s house. X, Gardens. Y, River.—Ed.]
Three years later, Poutrincourt, to whom De Monts had granted Port Royal, set sail from Dieppe to found a new colony on the site of the abandoned settlement. The deserted houses were again occupied, and a brighter future seemed to await the new enterprise. But this expectation was doomed to a speedy disappointment.
PORT ROYAL, OR ANNAPOLIS BASIN (after Lescarbot).
After a few years of struggling existence, the English colonists determined to expel the French as intruders on the territory belonging to them. In 1613 an English ship, under the command of Captain Samuel Argall, appeared off Mount Desert, where a little company of the French, under the patronage of the Comtesse de Guercheville,[407] had established themselves for the conversion of the Indians.
PORT ROYAL (after Champlain).
[This is Champlain’s plan (edition of 1613) a little reduced. The letters can be thus interpreted: A, Our habitation. B, Champlain’s garden. C, Road made by Poutrincourt. D, Island. E, Entrance. F, Shoals, dry at low water. G, St. Antoine river. H, Wheat-field (Annapolis). I, Poutrincourt’s mill. L, Meadows under water at highest tides. M, Equille River. N, Coast (Bay of Fundy). O, Mountains. P, Island. Q, Rocky Brook. R, Brook. S, Mill River. T, Lake. V, Herring-fishing by the natives. X, Trout-brook. Y, Passage made by Champlain. Harrisse (nos. 245-246) cites two plans of Port Royal in the French Archives.—Ed.]
The French were too few to offer even a show of resistance, and[142] the landing of the English was not disputed. By an unworthy trick, and without the knowledge of the French, Argall obtained possession of the royal commission; and then, dismissing half of his prisoners to seek in an open boat for succor from any fishing vessel of their own country they might chance to meet, he carried the others with him to Virginia. The same year Argall was sent back by the governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale, to finish the work of expelling the French. With three vessels he visited successively Mount Desert and St. Croix, where he destroyed the French buildings, and then, crossing to Port Royal, seized whatever he could carry away, killed the cattle, and burned the houses to the ground. Having done this, he sailed for Virginia, leaving the colonists to support themselves as they best could. Port Royal was not, however, abandoned by them, and it continued to drag out a precarious existence. Seventy-five years later, its entire population did not exceed six hundred, and in the whole peninsula there were not more than nine hundred inhabitants.[408]
Meanwhile, in 1621, Sir William Alexander, a Scotchman of some literary pretensions, had obtained from King James a charter (dated Sept. 10, 1621) for the lordship and barony of New Scotland, comprising the territory now known as the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Under this grant he made several unsuccessful attempts at colonization; and in 1625 he undertook to infuse fresh life into his enterprise by parcelling out the territory into baronetcies.[409] Nothing came of the scheme, and by the treaty of St. Germains, in 1632, Great Britain surrendered to France all the places occupied by the English within these limits. Two years before this, however, Alexander’s rights in a part of the territory had been purchased by Claude and Charles de la Tour;[410] and shortly after the peace, the Chevalier Razilly was appointed by Louis XIII. governor of the[143] whole of Acadia.[411] He designated as his lieutenants Charles de la Tour for the portion east of the St. Croix, and Charles de Menou, Sieur d’Aulnay-Charnisé, for the portion west of that river.
The former established himself on the River St. John where the city of St. John now stands, and the latter at Castine, on the eastern shore of Penobscot Bay. Shortly after his appointment, La Tour attacked and drove away a small party of Plymouth men who had set up a trading-post at Machias; and in 1635 D’Aulnay treated another party of the Plymouth colonists in a similar way.[412]
MAP OF ABOUT 1610.
[This follows a fac-simile in the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, i. 345, where it is called “Carte pour servir à l’intelligence du mémoire sur la Pesche de moluës, par Jean Michel, en 1510. Copie de l’original (Dépôt des Cartes).” The date is clearly wrong, as copied. It cannot be earlier than Champlain’s time, a hundred years later than the date given.—Ed.]
In retaliation for this attack, Plymouth hired and despatched a vessel commanded by one Girling, in company with their own barque, with twenty men under Miles Standish, to dispossess the French; but the expedition failed to accomplish anything.
PORT ROYAL.
[This is Champlain’s drawing in his edition of 1613. Key: A, House of artisans. B, Platform for cannon. C, Storehouse. D, Pontgravé and Champlain. E, Blacksmith. F, Palisade. G, Bakery. H, Kitchen. I, Gardens. K, Burial-place. L, River. M, Moat. N, Dwelling, probably of De Monts and others. O, Storehouse for ships’ equipments, rebuilt and used as a dwelling by Boulay later. P, Gate. These buildings were at the present Lower Granville.—Ed.]
Subsequently the two French commanders quarrelled, and, engaging in active hostilities, made efforts (not altogether unsuccessful) to enlist Massachusetts in their quarrel. For this purpose La Tour visited Boston in person in the summer[145] of 1643, and was hospitably entertained.[413] He was not able to secure the direct co-operation of Massachusetts, but he was permitted to hire four vessels and a pinnace to aid him in his attack on D’Aulnay.[414] The expedition was so far successful as to destroy a mill and some standing corn, belonging to his rival. In the following year La Tour made a second visit to Boston for further help; but he was able only to procure the writing of threatening letters from the Massachusetts authorities to D’Aulnay. Not long after La Tour’s departure from Boston, envoys from D’Aulnay arrived here; and after considerable delay a treaty was signed pledging the colonists to neutrality, which was ratified by the Commissioners of the United Colonies in the following year; but it was not until two years later that it was ratified by new envoys from the crafty Frenchman.[415]
In this interval D’Aulnay captured by assault La Tour’s fort at St. John, securing booty to a large amount; and a few weeks afterward Madame la Tour, who seems to have been of a not less warlike turn than her husband, and who had bravely defended the fort, died of shame and mortification. La Tour was reduced to the last extremities; but he finally made good his losses, and in 1653 he married the widow of his rival, who had died two or three years before.[416]
PENTAGÖET (CASTINE)
[The site of the old fort was on the shore, at a point just below the letter i in the name Castine on the peninsula. Harrisse (no. 198) cites a plan of 1670 in the French Archives.—Ed.]
In 1654, in accordance with secret instructions from Cromwell, the whole of Acadia was subjugated by an English force from Boston under the command of Major Robert Sedgwick, of Charlestown, and Captain John Leverett, of Boston. To the latter the temporary government of the country was intrusted. Ineffectual complaints of this aggression were made to the British Government; but by the treaty of Westminster in the following year England was left in possession, and the question of title was referred to commissioners. In 1656 it was made a province by Cromwell, who appointed Sir Thomas Temple governor, and granted the whole territory to Temple and to one William Crown and Stephen de la Tour, son of the late governor. The rights of the latter were purchased by the other two proprietors, and[146] Acadia remained in possession of the English until the treaty of Breda, in 1667, when it was ceded to France with undefined limits.[417]
Very little was done by the French to settle and improve the country; and on the breaking out of war between France and England after the accession of William III., it was again conquered by an expedition fitted out at Boston under Sir William Phips. He sailed from Boston on the 28th of April, 1690, with a frigate of forty guns, two sloops, one of sixteen guns and the other of eight guns, and with four smaller vessels; and after reducing St. John, Port Royal, and other French settlements, and appointing an English governor, he returned, with a booty sufficient, it was thought, to defray the whole cost of the expedition.[418]
SIR WILLIAM PHIPS.
[This likeness is accepted, but lacks undoubted verification; cf. Mem. Hist. of Boston, ii. 36.—Ed.]
This result was a signal triumph for the New England colonies, and when Phips became, in 1692, the first royal governor of Massachusetts under the provincial charter, Acadia was made a part of the domain included in it. At a later day it was with no little indignation and mortification that New England saw the conquered territory relinquished to the French by the Treaty of Ryswick, in 1697; but the story of the later period belongs to a subsequent volume.
ACADIE, 1663.
[In the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, ii. 147, is a fac-simile of a map, “Tabula Novæ Franciæ,” which is thus described by Mr. Poore: “A fac-simile of one in a manuscript atlas purchased by M. Estancelin at a book-stall in Paris soon after the destruction of the archbishop’s palace in 183-, the library of which contained several boxes of manuscripts labelled Canada, and probably sent from the missionaries there. The signs [church symbol] undoubtedly were used to denote Jesuit churches or missions; the [dotted lines] the English boundary; and the marks + the English settlements. The atlas is dated 1663.”—Ed.]
Acadia had been the home of civilized men for nearly a hundred years; but there was almost nothing to show as the fruits of this long occupation of a virgin soil. It had produced no men of marked character, and its history was little more than the record of feuds between petty chiefs, and of feeble resistance to the attacks of more powerful neighbors. Madame la Tour alone exhibits the courage and energy naturally to be looked for under the circumstances in which three generations of settlers were placed. At the end of a century there were only a few scattered settlements spread along the coast, passing tranquilly from allegiance to one European sovereign to allegiance to another of different speech and religion. A few hundred miles away, another colony founded sixteen years after the first venture of De Monts, and with scarcely a larger number of settlers, waged a successful war with sickness, poverty, and neglect, and made a slow and steady progress, until, with its own consent, it was united with a still more prosperous colony founded twenty-three years after the first settlement at Port Royal. There are few more suggestive contrasts than that which the history of Acadia presents when set side by side with the history of Plymouth and Massachusetts; and what is true of its early is not less true of its later history.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
THE original authorities for the early history of the French settlements in Acadia[419] are the contemporaneous narratives of Samuel de Champlain and Marc Lescarbot. Though Champlain comes within our observation as a companion of De Monts, a separate chapter in this volume is given to his personal history and his writings.
Of the personal history of Marc Lescarbot we know much less than of that of Champlain. He was born at Vervins, probably between 1580 and 1590, and was a lawyer in Paris, where he had an extensive practice, and was the author of several works; only one, or rather a part of one, concerns our present inquiry.[420]
This was an account of the[150] settlement of De Monts in Acadia, which was translated into English by a Protestant clergyman named Pierre Erondelle, and which gives a very vivid picture of the life at Port[151] Royal.[421] He appears to have been a man of more than ordinary ability, with not a little of the French vivacity, and altogether well suited to be a pioneer in Western civilization. His narrative covers only a brief period, and after the failure of the colony under De Monts, he ceased to have any relations with Acadia. He is supposed to have died about 1630.
The advent of the Jesuits in 1611 introduces the Relations of their order as a source of the first importance; but a detailed account of these documents belongs to another chapter.[422] From the first of the series, by Father Biard, and from his letters in Carayon’s Première Mission des Jésuites au Canada, a collection published in Paris in 1864, and drawn from the archives of the Order at Rome, we have the sufferers’ side of the story of Argall’s incursion; while from the English marauder’s letters, published in Purchas, vol. iv., we get the other side.[423]
PART OF LESCARBOT’S MAP, 1609.
There is a modern reproduction of Lescarbot’s entire map in Faillon, Colonie Française, i. 85.
ACADIE.
[This is a section of La Hontan’s map, Carte Generale de Canada, which appeared in his La Haye edition, 1709, vol. ii. p. 5; and was re-engraved in the Mémoires, vol. iii. Amsterdam, 1741. La Hontan was in the country from 1683 till after 1690. The double-dotted line indicates the southern limits of the French claim.—Ed.]
Another of these early adventurers who has left a personal account of his long-continued but fruitless attempts at American colonization is Nicolas Denys, a native of Tours. So early as 1632 he was appointed by the French king governor of the territory between Cape Canso and Cape Rosier. Forty years later, when he must have been well advanced in life, though he had lost none of his early enthusiasm, he published an historical and geographical description of this part of North America.[424] The work shows that he was a careful and observant navigator; but in its historical part it is confused and perplexing. The second volume is largely devoted to an account of the cod-fishery, and treats generally of the natural history of the places with which he was familiar, and of the manners and life of the Indians. It has a different titlepage from the first volume.
Abundant details as to the quarrels of D’Aulnay and La Tour are in Winthrop’s History of New England; and many of the original documents, most of them in contemporaneous translations, are in the seventh volume of the third series of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. From the first of[154] these sources Hutchinson, in his History of Massachusetts Bay, drew largely, as did Williamson in his History of Maine, both of whom devoted considerable space to Acadian affairs. For some of the later transactions Hutchinson is an original authority of unimpeachable weight.[425] The Massachusetts writers are also naturally the sources of most of our information regarding the expedition of 1654, though Denys and Charlevoix touch upon it, and the modern historians of Nova Scotia treat it in an episodical way. The articles of capitulation of Port Royal are in Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, ii. 107.
Among the later French writers the pre-eminence belongs to the Jesuit Father, Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, who had access to contemporaneous materials, of which he made careful use; and his statements have great weight, though he wrote many years after the events he describes. His Histoire de la Nouvelle France follows the course of the French throughout the continent, and scattered through it are many notices of the course of events in Acadia, but its more particular characterization belongs to another chapter.
The papers drawn up by the French and English commissioners to determine the intent of the treaty of Utrecht have a controversial purpose, and on each side are colored and distorted to make out a case. In them are many statements of facts which need only to be disentangled from the arguments by which they are obscured to have a high value. No one, indeed, can have a thorough and accurate knowledge of Acadian history who does not make constant reference to these memorials and to the justificatory pieces cited on the one side or the other. They stand, when properly sifted and weighed, among the most important sources for tracing the history of the province.[426]
The episode of Sir William Alexander and his futile schemes of colonization is treated exhaustively by Mr. Slafter in a monograph on Sir William Alexander and American Colonization, which reproduces all the original charters and other documents bearing on his inquiry, and apparently leaves nothing for any future gleaner in that field.[427] But, like many other persons who have conducted similar investigations, it must be conceded that Mr. Slafter attaches more importance to Sir William Alexander’s somewhat visionary plans than they really merit. They were ill adapted to promote the great object of western colonization, and they left no permanent trace behind them.
Whipple’s brief account of Nova Scotia in his Geographical View of the District of Maine should not be overlooked; but it was written at a time when historical students were less exacting than they now are, and its details are meagre and unsatisfactory.[428]
Haliburton’s History of Nova Scotia is a work of conscientious and faithful labor, but in its preparation the author was under serious disadvantages from his inability to consult many of the books on which such a history must be based; and as he was not able to[156] correct the proofs, his volumes are disfigured by the grossest typographical blunders. No one without some previous familiarity with the subject can safely read it; but such a reader will find in it much of value.[429]
SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER.
[Slafter, p. 124, gives an account of the engraving by Marshall, published in 1635, of which the above is a reproduction following Richardson’s engraving of 1795. It represents Alexander at fifty-seven.—Ed.]
A work of far higher authority, much fuller on the earlier periods, and one which is generally marked by great thoroughness and accuracy, is Murdoch’s History of Nova Scotia. Written in the form of annals, it lacks every grace of style; and in a few instances the author has overlooked important sources of information,—such as Winthrop’s History of New England,[430] which is not named in his list of authorities (p. 533), and which he seems to have known only at second-hand through the citations of Hutchinson and of Ferland; and the original papers connected with La Tour and D’Aulnay in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. On the other hand, he had access for the first time[157] to very valuable manuscript materials, which greatly enlarge our knowledge on not a few points previously obscure.[431]
The Cours d’Histoire du Canada of the Abbé Ferland is mainly devoted to what is now known as Canada; but there are several chapters in it on Acadian affairs. By birth and choice a Canadian, “and above all a Catholic,” as he himself avows, his statements and inferences need to be scrutinized carefully. He had, however, gathered considerable new material, his narrative is clearly and compactly written, and his work must rank among the best of the modern compilations.[432]
The same, or nearly the same, may be said of Garneau’s Histoire du Canada. The chapters on Acadia are based on materials easily accessible, and they add no new facts to those given by the earlier writers; but his narrative is clear and exact, and not much colored by the writer’s point of view. He had not, however, so firm a grasp of his subject as had Ferland; and for the period covered by this inquiry the latter may be read with much greater pleasure and profit.[433]
An English translation of Garneau’s work was published some years after its first appearance, with omissions and alterations by the translator, who regarded the subject from an entirely different point of view, and who did not hesitate to modify occasionally the statements of the author, besides adding a great body of valuable notes.[434]
Another recent work which may be profitably consulted on the early history of Acadia is Henry Kirke’s First English Conquest of Canada.[435] This work deals mainly with the lives of Sir David Kirke and his brothers, and its chief value is biographical; but it comprises some hitherto unpublished documents from the Record Office, and throws considerable light on obscure portions of the early history of Canada and Acadia.
Among these more recent writers the highest place belongs to Francis Parkman. In his Pioneers of France in the New World[436] he has given an account of the first settlement of the French in Acadia which is not less accurate in its minutest details than it is picturesque in style and comprehensive in its grasp of the subject. Mr. Parkman needed only a story of wider relations and more continuous influence to secure for his book a foremost place among American histories. In his Frontenac[437] he has told with equal vividness the story of the marauding warfare which devastated the coast of Acadia and the contiguous English settlements from 1689 to 1697. No one of our historians has been more unwearied in research, as no one has been more skilful in handling his materials. Based in great part on original manuscripts from the French archives and on contemporaneous narratives, his volumes leave nothing to be desired for the period which they cover.
EDITORIAL NOTES.
A. A Commissioner of Public Records of Nova Scotia was appointed in 1857, and by his list, printed in 1864, it appears that but one of the two hundred and four volumes in which the archives were arranged had papers of a date earlier than 1700, and that this volume contained copies of copies from the archives in Paris made for the Canadian Government, and covered the years 1632-1699. The Library of Parliament Catalogue, p. 1538, shows that vol. i. of the third series of manuscripts (1654-1699) is devoted to Acadia. A Nova Scotia Historical Society, instituted a few years ago, has as yet published but one volume of Reports and Collections for 1878, but it contains contributions to a later period in the history of Acadia than that now under consideration.
B. The War in Maine and Acadia.—The revolution which deposed Andros in Boston was also the occasion of withdrawing the garrisons from the English posts toward Acadia; and this invited in turn the onsets of the enemy. It was calculated in 1690 that there were between Boston and Canso four thousand two hundred and ten Indians,—a census destined to be diminished, indeed, so that in 1726 the savages were only rated for the same territory at five hundred and six (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1866, p. 9). But this diminution meant a process of appalling war. In the spring of 1689 came the catastrophe at Choceco (now Dover). Belknap, in his New Hampshire, gives a sufficient narrative; and Dr. Quint, in his notes to Pike’s Journal (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 124), indicates the manuscript sources. For the capture of the stockade at Pemaquid, which quickly followed, we have the French side in the Relation of Father Thury, the priest of the mission to the Penobscot Indians, who was in the action, and La Motte-Cadillac’s Mémoire sur l’Acadie, 1692. Cf. the references in Shea’s Charlevoix, iv. 42. The English side can be gathered from Mather’s Magnalia; Andros Tracts, vol. iii.; 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. vol. i.; Hough’s “Pemaquid Papers,” in Maine Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. v.; Hubbard’s Indian Wars, and John Gyles’s Memoirs, Boston, 1736 (see Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 336). The story, more or less colored, under new lights or local associations, is told in Hutchinson’s Massachusetts, Thornton’s Ancient Pemaquid, Johnston’s Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid (p. 170), and of course in Williamson and Parkman.
The Relation of Monseignat (N. Y. Col. Doc., vol. ix.) and La Potherie are the chief French accounts on the surprise at Salmon Falls, in March, 1690, and according to Parkman, “Charlevoix adds various embellishments not to be found in the original sources.” On the English side, it is still Mather’s Magnalia upon which we must depend, and, as a secondary authority, upon Belknap’s New Hampshire and Williamson’s Maine. Parkman points out the help which sundry papers in the Massachusetts Archives afford; and Dr. Quint, in his notes to Pike’s Journal (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 125), has indicated other similar sources.
POSITION OF FORT LOYAL.
The attack on Fort Loyal (Portland), in May, 1690, is studied likewise from Monseignat, La Potherie, Mather, with some fresh light out of the “Declaration” of Sylvanus Davis, in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., i. 101, and Bradstreet’s letter to Governor Leisler, in Doc. Hist. N. Y., ii. 259. Le Clercq gives the French view; cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, iv. 133, and Le Clercq, ii. 295; Willis’s Portland, p. 284, and N. Y. Col. Doc., ix. 472.
Meanwhile Phips had sailed from Boston in April to attack Port Royal. He anchored before its defences on the 10th of May. The place was quickly surrendered to Phips, on the[160] 11th of May, by De Meneval, its governor, who did not escape the imputation of treachery at the time. Parkman (Frontenac, pp. 237,) and Shea (Charlevoix, iv. 155) give the authorities. Parkman says Charlevoix’s own narrative is erroneous; but on the French side we still have Monseignat and Potherie, though both are brief; the Relation de la prise du Port Royal par les Anglois de Baston, May 27, 1690; the official Lettre au Ministre of Meneval, and the Rapport de Champigny, of October, 1690. Cf. N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 720; ix. 474, 475.
On the English side we have Governor Bradstreet’s instructions to Phips and an invoice of the plunder, in the Mass. Archives; a Journal of the Expedition from Boston to Port Royal, among George Chalmers’ papers in the Sparks Manuscripts at Harvard College, perhaps the document referred to by Hutchinson, in speaking of Phips, as “his Journal;” the unhistoric overflow of Cotton Mather’s Life of Phips, and sundry extracts embodied in Bowen’s Life of Phips. Murdoch, in his Nova Scotia, ch. xxii., gives a summarized account.
During Phips’s ill-starred expedition to Quebec in the autumn of the same year, Colonel Benjamin Church was ineffectually employed in creating diversions in Phips’s favor in this lower region. See Dr. Henry M. Dexter’s edition of Church’s History of the Expedition to the East, and additional letters of Church in Drake’s additions to Baylies’ Old Colony, pt. v.; and in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., v. 271. Williamson (Maine, i. 624) summarizes the authorities.
Two years later the rapine began afresh. York in Maine was captured and burned in 1692 by the Abenakis, one of whose chiefs gave to Champigny the narrative which he sent to the Minister, Oct. 5, 1692, which Parkman calls the best French account. The Indians also gave Villebon the exaggerated story which he gives in his Journal de ce qui s’est passé à l’Acadie, 1691-1692. On the English side, we have the account in Mather’s Magnalia, and the later summaries of Williamson and of the general historians.
In June, Portneuf and St. Castin, with their savage followers, left Pentagöet to attack the frontier post of Wells, but they were foiled, and retreated. Villebon is here the principal French authority; and on the English side, to the more general accounts of Mather, Hutchinson, Williamson, and to the eclectic summary of Niles’s Indian and French Wars, we must add the local historian Bourne’s History of Wells.
PEMAQUID.
The reader can best follow Parkman (Frontenac, p. 357, etc.), who carefully notes the authorities for the way in which Frontenac was foiled in 1693 in an attempt to capture the English post at Pemaquid; and for the attack on Oyster River the next year (1694), Parkman’s references may be collated with Shea’s (Charlevoix, iv. 256). The expedition was under the conduct of Villieu and the Jesuit Thury, and what was then known as Oyster River is now Durham, about twenty miles from Portsmouth. Villieu’s own Journal is preserved: Relation du Voyage fait par le Sieur de Villieu ... pour faire la Guerre aux Anglois au printemps de l’an 1694, and Parkman says Champigny, Frontenac, and Callières in their reports adopt Villieu’s statements. Belknap’s New Hampshire has the best English account, which may be supplemented by[161] various papers in the Provincial Records of New Hampshire, and the Journal of Pike in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 128, with Dr. Quint’s notes. The Mass. Archives have depositions and letters.
In 1696 Iberville, in charge of two war-ships which had come from France, uniting with such forces and savage allies as Villebon, Villieu, St. Castin, and Thury could gather, appeared on the 14th of August before the English fort at Pemaquid, which quickly surrendered. Pemaquid is a peninsula on the Maine coast between the mouths of the Kennebec and Penobscot, and the fort was situated as shown in the accompanying sketch. It was the most easterly of the English posts in this debatable territory, as the French fort at Biguyduce (Pentagöet or Castine) was the most westerly of the enemy’s. The fort at Pemaquid had been rebuilt of stone by Phips in 1692. (Mather’s Magnalia, Johnston’s Bristol and Bremen.) Baudoin, an Acadian priest, accompanied the expedition, and wrote a Journal d’une voyage fait avec M. d’Iberville, and Parkman also cites as contemporary French authorities the Relation de ce qui s’est passé, etc., of 1695-1696, and Des Goutin’s letter to the Minister of Sept. 23, 1696; cf. N. Y. Col. Docs., vol. ix.
Mather and Hutchinson are still the chief writers on the English side, while everything of local interest is gathered in Johnston’s History of Bristol and Bremen, in Maine, including Pemaquid, Albany, 1873.
The immediate result of the capture of Pemaquid was to release D’Iberville for an attempt to drive the English from the east coast of Newfoundland in 1697. Parkman tells the story in his Frontenac, p. 391, and by him and by Shea in his Charlevoix, v. 46, the original sources are traced.
Mr. Parkman (Frontenac, p. 408) has an important note on the military insufficiency of the English colonies at this time.
C. Threatened French Attacks upon Boston.—Ever after the surrender of the region east of the Penobscot to the French in 1670, there were recurrent hopes of the French to make reprisals on the English by an attack on Boston, and emissaries of the French occasionally reported upon the condition of that town. Grandfontaine, on being empowered to receive the posts of Acadia from the English (Massachusetts Archives: Documents Collected in France, ii. 209, 211), had been instructed, March 5, 1670, to make Pentagöet his seat of government; and it was at Boston, July 7, 1670, that he and Temple concluded terms of peace; and we have (Ibid., ii. 227) a statement of the condition of the fort at Pentagöet when it was turned over. Talon (Ibid., ii. 247) shortly after informed the King of his intention to go to Acadia (Nov. 2, 1671), hoping for a conference with Temple, whom he reports as disgusted with the government at Boston, “which is more republican than monarchical;” and the Minister, in response, June 4, 1672 (Ibid., ii. 265), intimates that it might do to give naturalization papers and other favors to Temple, if he could be induced to come over to the French side. In 1678 new hopes were entertained, and under date of March 21, we find (Ibid., ii. 359) the French had procured a description of Boston and its shipping. Frontenac and Duchesneau were each representing to the Court the disadvantages Canada was under in relation to the trade of the eastern Indians, with Boston offering such rivalry (Ibid., ii. 363; iii. 12); and Duchesneau, Nov. 14, 1679, enlarges upon a description of Boston and its defenceless condition (Ibid., ii. 371). When the English made peace with the Abenakis in 1681, Frontenac reported it to the Court, with his grievances at the aggressions of the Boston people, to whom he had sent De la Vallière to demand redress (Ibid., iii. 29, 31); and to end the matter, Duchesneau, Nov. 13, 1681, proposed to the Minister the purchase of the English colonies. “It is true,” he says, “that Boston, which is an English town, does not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Duke of York at all, and very little the authority of the English King” (Ibid., iii. 35). The French meanwhile had assumed a right to Pemaquid, and Governor Dongan of New York had ordered them to withdraw (Ibid., iii. 81), while complications with the “Bastonnais” increased rapidly (Ibid., iii. 49). De Grosellier sent to the Minister new accounts of the Puritan town and its situation (Ibid., iii. 450); and the Bishop of Quebec remonstrated with the King for his permitting Huguenots to settle in Acadie, since they held communication with the people of Boston, and increased the danger (Ibid., iii. 95). The King in turn addressed himself rather to demanding of the Duke of York that he should see the English at Boston did not aid the savages of Acadia. In 1690 more active measures were proposed. On the day before Phips anchored at Port Royal, a “Projet” was drawn up at Versailles for an attack on Boston, in which its defenceless state was described:—
“La costé de Baston est peuplée, mais il n’y à aucun poste qui veille. Baston mesme est sans palissades à moins qu’on n’en ait mis depuis six mois. Il y a bien du peuple en cette colonie, mais assez difficile à rassembler. Monsieur Perrot connoist cette coste, et le Sieur de Villebon qui est à la Rochelle à present,[162] avec le nommé La Motte,—tous le trois ont souvent esté à Baston et à Manat.... Par la carte suivante, on peut voir comme ce pays se trouve situé,” etc.
The capture of Pemaquid in 1696 revived hopes in the French of making a successful descent upon Boston, and even upon New York.
Several documents in reference to the scheme, and respecting in part Franquelin’s map of Boston, are in the Mass. Archives; Documents Collected in France, iv. 467, etc. This map is given in the Memorial History of Boston, vol. ii. p. li, from a copy made by Mr. Poore, and in Mr. Parkman’s manuscript collections. In the same place will be found accounts of earlier French maps of Boston (1692-1693), one of them by Franquelin, but both very inexact. The references on this projected inroad of the French are given by Parkman (Frontenac, p. 384), Shea (Charlevoix, v. 70), and Barry (Massachusetts, ii. 89, etc.).
CHAPTER V.
DISCOVERY ALONG THE GREAT LAKES.
BY THE REV. EDWARD D. NEILL, A.B., ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA.
Corresponding Member Massachusetts Historical Society; Hon. Vice-President New England Historic Genealogical Society.
PURCHAS in his Pilgrimage quaintly writes, that “the great river Canada hath, like an insatiable merchant, engrossed all these water commodities, so that other streames are in a manner but meere pedlers.”[438]
This river of Canada, the Hochelaga of the natives, now known as the St. Lawrence, is the most wonderful of all the streams of North America which find their way into the Atlantic Ocean. Its extreme headwaters are on the elevated plateau of the continent, near the birthplace of the Mississippi, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and the Red River of the North, which empties into Hudson’s Bay. Expanding into the interior sea, Lake Superior, after rippling and foaming over the rocks at Sault Ste. Marie it divides into Lake Michigan and Lake Huron; and passing through the latter and Lake St. Claire[439] and Lake Erie, with the energy of an infuriated Titan it dashes itself into foam and mist at Niagara. After recovering composure, it becomes Ontario, the “beautiful lake,”[440] and then, hedged in by scenery varied, sublime, and picturesque, and winding through a thousand isles, it becomes the wide and noble river which admits vessels of large burden to the wharves of the cities of Montreal and Quebec; and until lost in the Atlantic, “many islands are before it, offering their good-nature to be mediators between this haughty stream and the angry ocean.”[441] The aborigines, who dwelt in rude lodges near its banks, chiefly belonged to the Huron or Algonquin family; and although there were variations in dialect, they found no difficulty in understanding one another, and in their light canoes they made long journeys, on which they exchanged the copper implements and agate arrow-heads of the far West for the shells and commodities of the sea-shore.[442]
Cartier, born at the time that the discoveries of Columbus were being discussed throughout Europe, who had toughened into a daring navigator, sailed in 1535 up the St. Lawrence, giving the river its present name, and on the 2d of October he reached the site now occupied by the city of Montreal. Escorted by wondering and excited savages, he went to the top of the hill behind the Indian village, and listened to descriptions of the country from whence they obtained caignetdaze, or red copper, which was reached by the River Utawas, which then glittered like a silver thread amid the scarlet leaves of the autumnal forest.[443] The explorations of the French and English in the western world led the merchants of both countries to seek for its furs, and to hope for a shorter passage through it to “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.” Apsley, a London dealer in beads, playing-cards, and gewgaws in the days of Queen Elizabeth, wrote that he expected to live long enough to see a letter in three months carried to China by a route that would be discovered across the American continent, between the forty-third and forty-sixth parallel of north latitude.[444] The explorations of Champlain have been sketched in an earlier chapter.[445] To the incentive of the fur-trade a new impulse was added when, in the spring of 1609, some Algonquins visited the trading-post, and one of the chiefs brought from his sack a piece of copper a foot in length, a fine and pure specimen. He said that it came from the banks of a tributary of a great lake, and that it was their custom to melt the copper lumps which they found, and roll them into sheets with stones.
It was in 1611, when returning from one of his visits to France, where he had become betrothed to a twelve-year-old maiden, Helen, the daughter of a Huguenot, Nicholas Boullé, secretary of the King’s Chamber, that Champlain pushed forward his western occupation by establishing a frontier trading-post where now is the city of Montreal, and arranging for trade with the distant Hurons, who were assembled at Sault St. Louis.
Again in 1615, as we have seen, he extended his observations to Lake Huron, while on his expedition against the Iroquois. With the Hurons he passed the following winter, and visited neighboring tribes, but in the spring of 1616 returned to Quebec; and although nearly twenty years elapsed before his remains were placed in a grave in that city, he appears to have been contented as the discoverer of Lakes Champlain, Huron, and Ontario, and relinquished farther westward exploration to his subordinates.
The fur-trade of Canada produced a class of men hardy, agile, fearless, and in habits approximating to the savage.[446] Inured to toil, the voyageurs arose in the morning, “when it was yet dark,” and pushing their birch-bark canoes into the water, swiftly glided away, “like the shade of a cloud on the prairie,” and often did not break fast until the sun had been for hours above[165] the horizon. Halting for a short period, they partook of their coarse fare, then re-embarking they pursued their voyage to the land of the beaver and buffalo, the woods echoing their chansons until the “shades of night began to fall,” when,
“Worn with the long day’s march and the chase of the deer and the bison,
Stretched themselves on the ground, and slept where the quivering firelight
Flashed on their swarthy cheeks, and their forms wrapped up in their blankets.”
Among the pioneers of these wanderers in the American forests was Étienne (Anglicized, Stephen) Brulé, of Champigny.[447] It has been mentioned that he went with Champlain to the Huron villages near Georgian Bay, but did not with his Superior cross Lake Ontario. After three years of roaming, he came back to Montreal, and told Champlain that he had found a river which he descended until it flowed into a sea,—the river by some supposed to be the Susquehanna, and the sea Chesapeake Bay.[448] While in this declaration he may have depended upon his imagination, yet to him belongs the undisputed honor of being the first white man to give the world a knowledge of the region beyond Lake Huron.
Sagard[449] mentions that this bold voyageur, with a Frenchman named Grenolle, made a long journey, and returned with a “lingot” of red copper and with a description of Lake Superior which defined it as very large, requiring nine days to reach its upper extremity, and discharging itself into Lake Huron by a fall, first called Saut de Gaston, afterward Sault Ste. Marie. Upon the surrender of Quebec, in 1629, to the English, Étienne Brulé chose to cast in his lot with the conquerors.[450] During the occupation of nearly three years the English heard many stories of the region of the Great Lakes, and they encouraged the aborigines of the Hudson and Susquehanna to purchase English wares.
The very year that the English occupied Quebec, Ferdinando Gorges and associates, who had employed men to search for a great lake, received a patent for the province of Laconia, and the governor thereof arrived in June, 1630, in the ship “Warwick,” at Piscataway, New Hampshire.[451] Early in June, 1632, Captain Henry Fleet, in the “Warwick,” visited the Anacostans, whose village stood on the shores of the Potomac where now is seen the lofty dome of the Capitol of the Republic. These Indians told Fleet that they traded with the Canada Indians; and on the 27th of the month, at the Great Falls of the Potomac, he saw two axes of the pattern brought over by the brothers Kyrcke to Quebec.[452]
About the time Quebec was restored to the French, on the 23d of September, 1633,[453] Captain Thomas Young received a commission from the King[166] of England to make certain explorations in America.[454] The next spring he sailed, and among his officers was a “cosmographer, skilful in mines and trying of metals.” Entering Delaware Bay on the 24th of July, 1634, he sailed up the river, which he named Charles, in honor of the King, and by the 1st of September had reached the vicinity of the falls, above Trenton, the capital of New Jersey. In a report from this river, dated the 20th of October, he writes: “I passed up this great river, with purpose to have pursued the discovery thereof till I had found the great lake[455] from which the great river issues, and from thence I have particular reason to believe there doth also issue some branches, one or more, by which I might have passed into that Mediterranean Sea which the Indian relateth to be four days’ journey beyond the mountains; but having passed near fifty leagues up the river, I was stopped from further proceedings by a ledge of rocks which crosseth the river.”
He then expresses a determination the next summer to build a vessel above the falls, from whence he hoped to find “a way that leadeth into that mediterranean sea,” and from the lake. He continues: “I judge that it cannot be less than one hundred and fifty or two hundred leagues in length to our North Ocean; and from thence I purpose to discover the mouths thereof, which discharge both into the North and South Sea.”[456] The same month that Captain Young was exploring the Valley of the Delaware, an expedition left Quebec which was not so barren of results.
The year that Étienne Brulé came back from his wandering in the far West, in 1618, Jean Nicolet, the son of poor parents at Cherbourg, came from France, and entered the service of the fur company known as the “Hundred Associates,” under Champlain. For several years he lived among the Algonquins of the Ottawa Valley, and traded with the Hurons; and because of his knowledge of the language of these people, he was valued as an interpreter by the trading company. On the 4th day of July, 1634, on his eventful journey to distant nations, he was at Three Rivers, a trading post just begun. Threading his way in a frail canoe among the isles which extend from Georgian Bay to the extremity of Lake Huron, he, through the Straits of Mackinaw, discovered Lake Michigan, and turning southward found its Grand Bay, an inlet of the western shore, and impressive by its length and vastness.
Here were the Gens de Mer,[457] or Ochunkgraw, called by the Algonquins[167] Ouinipegous or Ouinipegouek,—people of the salt or bad-smelling water; and the traders gave them the name of Puants.
Calling a council of these Winnebagoes and the neighboring tribes, and knowing the power of display upon the savage, he appeared before them in a grand robe of the damask of China, on which was worked flowers and birds of different colors, and holding a pistol in each hand,—a somewhat amusing reminder of the Jove of mythology, with his variegated mantle and thunderbolts. To many he seemed a messenger from the spirit-land; and the women and children, on account of his pistols, called him the man who bore thunder in his hands.[458]
Nicolet announced that he was a peacemaker, and that he desired that they should settle their quarrels and be on friendly terms with the French at Quebec. His words were well received, and one chief, at the conclusion of the conference, invited him to a feast, at which one hundred and twenty beaver were served. He came back to Three Rivers during the next summer, and renewed the interest in the discovery of a route to the Western Ocean, by the declaration that if he had paddled three days more on a large river (probably the Wisconsin), he would have found the sea. There was no design to deceive; but the great water at that distance was what has been called “the father of waters,” the Mississippi. Before December, 1635, he was appointed interpreter at the new trading-post of Three Rivers, and was there when, on Christmas Day, at the age of sixty-eight years, one who had been the life of the fur-trade and the Governor of New France, Samuel de Champlain, expired at Quebec. After the death of the fearless and enterprising Champlain, there was a lull in the zest for discovery, and then difficulties arose which for a time led to the abandonment of all the French trading-posts on the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
The Iroquois had for years longed to be revenged upon those who, with the aid of French arquebuses, had defeated them in battle. Friendly relations were established between them and the Dutch traders on the banks of the Hudson River; and for beaver skins, powder and firearms were received. With these they gratified their desire for revenge. They became a terror to the savage and civilized in Canada; and traders and missionaries, women and infants, fled from their scalping-knives.
The following graphic description of affairs was penned in 1653:—
“The war with the Iroquois has dried up all sources of prosperity. The beaver are allowed to build their dams in peace, none being able or willing to molest them. Crowds of Hurons no longer descend from their country with furs for trading. The Algonquin country is depopulated, and the nations beyond it are retiring farther away, fearing the musketry of the Iroquois. The keeper of the Company’s store here in[168] Montreal has not bought a single beaver-skin for a year. At Three Rivers, the small means in hand have been used in fortifying the place, from fear of an inroad upon it. In the Quebec storehouse all is emptiness.”
At length, in the year 1654, peace was effected between the French and Iroquois, and traders again appeared on the upper lakes, and Indians from thence appeared at Montreal. In August, two Frenchmen accompanied some Ottawas to the region of the upper lakes; and in the latter part of August, 1656, these traders came back to Quebec with a party of Ottawas,[459] whose canoes were loaded with peltries; and about this time a trader told a Jesuit missionary that “he had seen three thousand men together, for the purpose of making a treaty of peace, in the country of the Gens de Mer.”
In 1659, while the new governor Argenson was experiencing the perplexities of administration at Quebec, the extremity of Lake Superior was reached by two energetic and intelligent traders,—Medard Chouart, known in history as Sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre d’Esprit or Sieur Radisson. Chouart was born a few miles east of Meaux, and left France when he was about sixteen years of age, and became a trader among the Hurons. In 1647 he married the widow Étienne, of Quebec, the father of whom was the pilot Abraham Martin, whose baptismal name was given to the suburb of that city, the Plains of Abraham. She gave birth to a son in 1651, named after his father, and soon after died. Chouart, the Sieur des Groseilliers, then married Marguérite Hayet Radisson, and through her he became a sympathizer with the Huguenots.[460] His brother-in-law, Sieur Radisson, was born at St. Malo, France, and in 1656 married at Three Rivers, Canada, Elizabeth Herault; and after her death he espoused a daughter of the zealous Protestant, Sir David Kyrcke, to whose brothers Champlain had surrendered Quebec.
Pushing beyond Lake Superior, after travelling six days in a southwesterly direction, these traders found the Tionnotantés, a band incorporated with the Hurons, called by the French Petuns, because they had raised tobacco. These people dwelt in the country between the sources of the Black and Chippeway Rivers in Wisconsin, where they had been wanderers for several years. Driven from their homes by the Iroquois,[169] they migrated with the Ottawas to the isles of Lake Michigan, at the entrance of Green Bay. Hearing that the Iroquois had learned where they had retreated, they descended the Wisconsin River until they found the Mississippi, and, ascending this twelve leagues, they came to the Ayoes (Ioway) River, now known as the Upper Iowa, and followed it to its source, being kindly treated by the tribes. Although buffaloes were in abundance, they were disappointed when they found no forests, and retracing their steps to the Mississippi, ascended to a prairie island above Lake Pepin, about nine miles below the mouth of the River St. Croix, and here they often received friendly visits from the Sioux. Confident through the possession of firearms, the Ottawas and Hurons conspired to drive the Sioux away, and occupy their country. The attack was unsuccessful, and they were forced to look for another residence. Going down the Mississippi, they entered one of the mouths of the Black River, near the modern city La Crosse, and the Hurons established themselves about its sources, while their allies, the Ottawas, continued their journey to Lake Superior, and stopped at a point jutting out like a bone needle,—hence called Chagouamikon.
Groseilliers and Radisson, while sojourning with the Hurons, learned much of the deep, wide, and beautiful river, comparable in its grandeur to the St. Lawrence,[461] on an isle of which they had for a time resided. Proceeding northward, these explorers wintered with the Nadouechiouec, who hunted and fished among the “Mille Lacs” of Minnesota, between the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers. The Sioux, as these people were called by traders, were found to speak a language different from the Huron and Algonquin, and to have many strange customs. Women, for instance, were seen whose noses had been cut off as a penalty for adultery, giving them a ghastly look. Beyond, upon the northwest shore of Lake Superior, about the Grand Portage, and at the mouth of a river which upon early maps was called Groseilliers, there was met a separated warlike band of Sioux, called Poualak, who, as wood was scarce in the prairie region, made fire with coal (charbon de terre), and lived in skin lodges, although some of the more industrious built cabins of mud (terre grasse), as the swallows build their nests. The Assinepoualacs, or Assineboines, were feared by the Upper, as the Iroquois were dreaded by the Lower, Algonquins.
After an absence of about a year, these traders, about the 19th of August, 1660, returned to Montreal with three hundred Indians and sixty canoes laden with a “wealth of skins,”—
“Furs of bison and of beaver,
Furs of sable and of ermine.”
The settlers there, and at Three Rivers, and at Quebec, were deeply interested by the tales of the vastness and richness of the new-found land[170] and the peculiarities of the wild Sioux. As soon as the furs were sold and a new outfit obtained, Groseilliers, on the 28th of August, again took his way to the westward, accompanied by six Frenchmen, besides the aged Jesuit missionary René Menard and his servant Guérin.
Just beyond the Huron Isles and Huron Bay, which still retain their name, on the southern shore of Lake Superior, is Keweenaw Bay; and on the 15th of October, Saint Theresa’s Day in the calendar of the Church of Rome, the traders and René Menard, with the returning Indians, stopped, and here some traders and the missionary passed the winter among the Outaouaks.[462] Father Menard, discouraged by the indifference of these Indians, resolved to go to the retreat of the Hurons among the marshes of what is now the State of Wisconsin. He sent three Frenchmen who had been engaged in the fur-trade to inform them of his intention; but after journeying for some days they were appalled by the bogs, rapids, and long portages, and returned. Undaunted by their tale of the difficulties of the way, and some Hurons having come to visit the Outaouaks, he resolved to return with them. On the 13th of June, 1661, Menard and his servant, Jean Guérin, by trade a gunsmith, followed in the footsteps of their Indian guides, who, however, soon forsook them in the wilderness. For fifteen days they remained by a lake, and finding a small canoe in the bushes, they embarked with their packs; and week after week in midsummer, annoyed by myriads of mosquitoes, and suffering from heat, hunger, and bruised feet, they advanced toward their destination, and about the 7th of August, while Guérin was making a portage around a rapid in a river, Menard lost the trail. His servant, becoming anxious, called for him, yet there was no answer; and then he five times fired his gun, in the hope of directing him to the right path, but it was of no avail. Two days after, Guérin reached the Huron village, and endeavored without success to employ some of the tribe to go in search of the aged missionary.
Afterward Guérin met a Sauk Indian with Menard’s kettle, which he said he found in the woods, near footprints going in the direction of the Sioux country.[463] His breviary and cassock were said to have been found among the Sioux, and it is supposed that he was either killed, or died from exposure, and that his effects were taken by wandering Indians.[464] Perrot writes: “The Father followed the Ottawas to the Lake of the Illinois [Michigan], and in their flight to Louisiana [Mississippi] as far as the upper part of Black River.” Upon a map prepared by Franquelin, in 1688,[465] for Louis[171] XIV., there is a route marked by a dotted line from the vicinity of Keweenaw Bay to the upper part of Green Bay. If Perrot’s statement is correct, Menard and his devoted attendant Guérin saw the Mississippi twelve years before Joliet and his companion looked upon the great river. The reports of Nicolet and Groseilliers led to a correction and enlargement of the charts of New France. On a map[466] accompanying the Historia Canadensis, by Creuxius, Lake Michigan is marked as “Magnus Lacus Algonquinorum, seu Lacus Fœtetium,” and a lake intended for Nepigon is called “Assineboines,” near which appear the nations Kilistinus and Alimibegôecus. The lake of the Assineboines is connected by a river with an arm of Hudson’s Bay called “Kilistonum Sinus;” and west of this is Jametus Sinus, or James’s Bay.
Pierre Boucher, an estimable man, sent by the inhabitants of Canada to present their grievances to the King of France, in a little book which in 1663 he published at Paris,[467] wrote: “In Lake Superior there is a great island which is fifty leagues in circumference, in which there is a very beautiful mine of copper.” He also stated that he had heard of other mines from five Frenchmen lately returned, who had been absent three years, and that they had seen an ingot of copper which they thought weighed more than eight hundred pounds, and that Indians after making a fire thereon would cut off pieces with their axes.
Groseilliers[468] returned to Canada, and on the 2d of May, 1662, again left Quebec, with ten men, for the North Sea, or Hudson’s Bay. His journey satisfied him that it was easy to secure the trade of the North by way of Lake Superior; but the Company of Canada, which had the monopoly of the fur traffic, looked upon Groseilliers’ plans for securing the peltries of distant tribes as chimerical. Thus disappointed and chagrined, Groseilliers next went to Boston, and presented his schemes to its merchants.
The Reverend Mother of the Incarnation, Superior of the Ursulines at Quebec, in allusion to him, wrote: “As he had not been successful in making a fortune, he was seized with a fancy to go to New England to better his condition. He excited a hope among the English that he had found a passage to the Sea of the North.” Passing from Boston to France, and securing the influence of the English ambassador at Paris, he went to London, and became acquainted with Prince Rupert, nephew of Charles I., who led the cavalry charge against Fairfax and Cromwell at Naseby. This brilliant man was now devoted to study and to the exhibition of the philosophical toy known to chemists as “Rupert’s drops;” but he was ready to indorse the project for extending the fur-trade, and seeking a northwestern passage to Asia. Men of science also showed interest in explorations which would enlarge the sphere of[172] knowledge. The Secretary of the Royal Society wrote a too sanguine letter to Robert Boyle, the distinguished philosopher, and friend of the apostle Eliot. His words were: “Surely I need not tell you, from hence, what is said here with great joy of the discovery of a northwest passage, and by two Englishmen and one Frenchman, lately represented by them to his Majesty at Oxford, and answered by the grant of a vessel to sail into Hudson’s Bay and channel into the South Sea.” The ship “Nonsuch” was fitted out in charge of Captain Zachary Gillam, a son of one of the early settlers of Boston, and in this vessel Groseilliers and Radisson left the Thames in June, 1668, and the next September reached a tributary of Hudson’s Bay, which in honor of their chief patron was called Rupert’s River. The next year, by way of Boston, they returned to England, where their success was applauded; and in 1670 the trading company was chartered,—still in existence, and among the most venerable of English corporations,—known as “The Hudson’s Bay Company.”
While the Canadian Fur Company did not respond to the proposals of Groseilliers for the extension of commerce, the French Government, in view of the fact that the Dutch on the south side of the St. Lawrence and in the valley of the Hudson River had acknowledged allegiance to England, determined to show more interest in the administration of Canadian affairs, and Mézy having been recalled, hardly before his death, Daniel de Remi, Seigneur de Courcelles, was sent as provincial governor. They also created the new office of Intendant of Justice, Police, and Finance, and made Talon—a person of talent, experience, and great energy—the first incumbent. Arriving at Quebec in 1665, Talon took decided steps for the promotion of agriculture, tanneries, and fisheries, and was enthusiastic in the desire to see the white banner of France, with its fleur-de-lis, floating in the far West.[469]
In the autumn of 1668 he took with him to France one of the hardy voyageurs who had lived in the region of the lakes, and on the 24th of the next February he writes to Colbert, the Colonial Minister, that this man “had penetrated among the western nations farther than any other Frenchman,[173] and had seen the copper mine on Lake Huron. The man offers to go to that mine and explore, either by sea, or by the lake and river, the communication supposed to exist between Canada and the South Sea, or to the region of Hudson’s Bay.”
During the summer of 1669 the active and intelligent Louis Joliet, with an outfit of four hundred livres, and one Peré, perhaps the same person who gave his name to a river leading from Lake Nepigon to Hudson’s Bay,[470] with an outfit of one thousand livres, went to search for copper on the shores of Lake Superior, and to discover a more direct route from the upper lakes to Montreal. Joliet went as far as Sault Ste. Marie, where he did not long remain; but in the place of a mine found an Iroquois prisoner among the Ottawas at that point, and obtained permission to take him back to Canada. In company with another Frenchman, he was led by the Iroquois from Lake Erie through the valley of the Grand River to Lake Ontario, and on the 24th of September, at an Iroquois village between this river and the head of Burlington Bay, he met La Salle with four canoes and fifteen men, and the Sulpitian priests, Galinée and De Casson, who on the 6th of July had left the post at La Chine.
La Salle, alleging ill health, at this point separated from the missionaries, and Joliet, before proceeding toward Montreal, drew a chart of the upper lakes for the guidance of the Sulpitians. By the aid of this the priests reached Lake Erie through a direct river, and near the lake they erected a hut and passed the winter. On the 23d of March, 1670, they resumed their voyage, and on the 25th of May reached Sault Ste. Marie, where there were about twenty-five Frenchmen trading with the Indians. Here was also the mission of the Jesuits among the Ottawas,—a square enclosure defended by cedar pickets twelve feet high, and within were a small house and chapel which had recently been built. Remaining but three days, they returned to Montreal by the old route along the French River of Lake Huron to Lake Nipissing, and thence by portage to the Ottawa River.
About the time of their arrival Talon had learned from some Algonquins that two European vessels had been seen in Hudson’s Bay, and he wrote to Colbert,—
“After reflecting on all the nations that might have penetrated as far north as that, I can fall back only on the English, who under the conduct of one named Desgrozeliers, in former times an inhabitant of Canada, might possibly have attempted that navigation, of itself not much known, and not less dangerous. I design to send by land some men of resolution to invite the Kilistinons, who are in great numbers in the vicinity of that bay, to come down to see us as the Ottawas do, in order that we may have the first handling of what the latter savages bring us, who, acting as retail dealers between us and those natives, make us pay for the roundabout way of three or four hundred leagues.”
To draw the trade from the English, it was determined to make an alliance of friendship with all the nations around Lake Superior. One of the Frenchmen[471] who roved among the tribes west of Lake Michigan, and in the valley of the Fox River, was Nicholas Perrot. Accustomed from boyhood to the scenes and excitements of frontier life, quick-witted, with some education, a leading spirit among coureurs des bois, and looked upon with respect by the Indians, he was an intelligent explorer of the interior of the continent. In the spring of 1670, when twenty-six years of age, Perrot left Green Bay with a flotilla of canoes filled with peltries and paddled by Indians. By way of Lake Nipissing he reached the Ottawa River, and descended to Montreal, and in July he visited Quebec. By the Intendant Talon he was invited to act as guide and interpreter to his deputy, Simon François Daumont, the Sieur Saint Lusson, who on the 3d of September was commissioned to go to Lake Superior to search for copper mines and confer with the tribes.
It was not until October that Perrot and Saint Lusson left Montreal. When Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron was reached, it was decided that Saint Lusson should here remain for the winter hunting and trading, while Perrot went on and visited the tribes of the Green Bay region. On the 5th of May, 1671, he met Saint Lusson at Sault Ste. Marie, accompanied by the principal chiefs of the Sauks, Menomonees, Pottawattamies, and Winnebagoes. After the delegates of fourteen tribes had arrived, a council was held, on the 14th of June, by Saint Lusson, in the presence of the Jesuits André, Claude Allouez, Gabriel Dreuilletes, and the head of the mission Claude d’Ablon, Nicholas Perrot the interpreter, Louis Joliet, and some fur-traders;[472] and a treaty of friendship was formed, and the countries around Lakes Huron and Superior were taken possession of in the name of Louis XIV., King of France. Talon announces the result of the expedition in these words:—
“Sieur de Saint Lusson is returned, after having advanced as far as five hundred leagues from here, and planted the cross and set up the King’s arms in presence of seventeen Indian nations,[473] assembled on this occasion from all parts, all of whom voluntarily submitted themselves to the dominion of his Majesty, whom alone they regard as their sovereign protector. This was effected, according to the account of the Jesuit Fathers, who assisted at the ceremony, with all the formality and display the country could afford. I shall carry with me the record of taking possession prepared by Sieur de Saint Lusson for securing those countries to his Majesty.
“The place to which the said Sieur de Saint Lusson has penetrated is supposed to be no more than three hundred leagues from the extremities of the countries bordering on the Vermillion or South Sea. Those bordering on the West Sea appear to be no farther from those discovered by the French. According to the calculation made from the reports of the Indians and from maps, there seems to remain not more than fifteen hundred leagues of navigation to Tartary, China, and Japan. Such discoveries must be the work of either time or of the King. It can be said that the Spaniards have hardly penetrated farther into the interior of South, than the French have done up to the present time into the interior of North, America.
“Sieur de Lusson’s voyage to discover the South Sea and the copper mine will not cost the King anything. I make no account of it in my statements, because, having made presents to the savages of the countries of which he took possession, he has reciprocally received from them in beaver that which replaces his outlay.”
The Hurons and Ottawas did not arrive in time to witness the formal taking possession of the country by the representative of France, having been detained by difficulty with the Sioux. About the year 1662, the Hurons, who had lingered about the sources of the Black River of Wisconsin, joined again their old allies, the Ottawas, who were clustered at the end of the beautiful Chegoimegon Bay of Lake Superior. The Ottawas lived in one village, made up of three bands,—the Sinagos, Kenonché, and Kiskakon. After this union, a party of Saulteurs, Ottawas, Nipissings, and Amikoués were securing white-fish not far from Sault Ste. Marie, when they discovered the smoke of an encampment of about one hundred Iroquois. Cautiously approaching, they surprised and defeated their dreaded foes, at a place to this day known as Iroquois Point, just above the entrance of Lake Superior.
After this, the Hurons, Ottawas, and Saulteurs returned in triumph to Keweenaw and Chegoimegon, and remained in quietness until a number of Hurons went to hunt west of Lake Superior, and were captured by some of the Sioux. While in captivity they were treated with kindness, asked to come again, and sent away with presents. Accepting the invitation, the Sinagos chief, with some warriors and four French traders, visited the Sioux,[176] and were received with honor and cordiality. Again, a few Hurons went into the Sioux country, and some of the young warriors made them prisoners; but the Sioux chief, who had smoked the calumet with the Sinagos chief, insisted upon their release, and journeyed to Chegoimegon Bay to make an apology. Upon his arrival, the Hurons proved tricky, and persuaded the Ottawas to put to death their visitor. It was not strange that the Sioux were surprised and enraged when they received the intelligence, and panted for revenge. Marquette, who had succeeded Allouez at the mission which was between the Huron and Ottawa villages, in allusion to this disturbance, wrote:—
“Our Outaouacs and Hurons, of the Point of the Holy Ghost, had to the present time kept up a kind of peace with them [the Sioux], but matters having become embroiled during last winter, and some murders having been committed on both sides, our savages had reason to apprehend that the storm would soon burst on them, and they deemed it was safer for them to leave the place, which they did in the spring.”
The Jesuits retired with the Hurons and Ottawas, and more than one hundred and fifty years elapsed before another Christian mission was attempted in this vicinity, under the “American Board of Foreign Missions.” The retreating Ottawas did not halt until they reached an old hunting-ground, the Manitoulin Island of Lake Huron, and the Hurons stopped at Mackinaw. From time to time they formed war-parties with other tribes, against the Sioux. In 1674 some Sioux warriors arrived at Sault Ste. Marie to smoke the pipe of peace with adjacent tribes. At a grand council the Sioux sent twelve delegates, and the others forty. During the conference one of the opposite side drew near and brandished his knife in the face of a Sioux, and called him a coward. The Sioux replied he was not afraid, when the knife was plunged into his heart, and he died. A fight immediately began, and the Sioux bravely defended themselves, although nine were killed. The two survivors fled to the rude log chapel of the Jesuit mission, and closed the door, and finding there some weapons they opened fire upon their enemies. Their assailants wished to burn down the chapel, which the Jesuits would not allow, as they had beaver skins stored in the loft. In the extremity a lay brother of the mission, named Louis Le Boeme, advised the firing of a cannon shot at the cabin’s door. The discharge killed the last two of the Sioux.[474] Governor Frontenac made complaint against Le Boeme for this conduct, in a letter to Colbert.[475]
After the Iroquois had made a treaty of peace with the French, they did not cease to lurk and watch for the Ottawas as they descended to trade at Montreal, Three Rivers, or Quebec, and, as occasion offered, rob them of[177] their peltries and tear their scalps from their heads. Governor Courcelles, in 1671, determined to establish a post on Lake Ontario which would act as a barrier between the Ottawas and Iroquois, and at the same time draw off the trade from the Hudson River.
Before entering upon his journey he had constructed a large plank flat-boat to ascend the streams,—a novelty which was a surprise. It was of two or three tons burden, and provided with a strong rope to haul it over the rapids and shoal places. On the morning of the 3d of June the expedition left Montreal, consisting of the flat-boat, filled with supplies and manned by a sergeant and eight soldiers, and thirteen bark canoes. The party numbered fifty-six persons, who were active and willing to endure the hardships of the journey. At night, with axe in hand, the men cut poles for a lodge frame, which they covered with bark stripped from the trees. The Governor, to protect himself from mosquitoes, had a little arbor made on the ground, about two feet high, and covered with a sheet, which touched the ground on all sides, and prevented the approach of the insects which disturb sleep and irritate the flesh. The second day of the voyage the flat-boat found difficulty in passing the first rapids, and Courcelles plunged into the water, and with the aid of the hardy voyageurs pushed the boat into smooth water. On the 10th of June the first flat-boat reached the vicinity of Lake Ontario, and the Governor two days after, in a canoe, reached the entrance of the lake. Here he found a stream with sufficient water to float a large boat, and bordered by fine land, which would serve as a site for a post. On the 14th, at the time that the deputy Saint Lusson, at Sault Ste. Marie, was taking possession of the region of Lake Superior, Courcelles was descending the rapids of the St. Lawrence on his return to Montreal.[476]
The report of this expedition was sent to Louis XIV., and it met with his approval; but for the benefit of his health Courcelles was permitted to return to France, and on the 9th of April, 1672, Louis de Buade, Count de Frontenac, was appointed Governor and Lieutenant-General in Canada and other parts belonging to New France. It was not until the leaves began to grow old that Frontenac arrived in Quebec, and, full of energy, was ready to push on the work of exploration which had been initiated by his predecessor. Upon the advice of the Intendant Talon, he soon despatched Louis Joliet to go to the Grand River, which the Indians alleged flowed southward to the sea. Joliet (often spelled[178] Jolliet) was born in Canada, the son of a wagon-maker. In boyhood he had been a promising scholar in the Jesuits’ school at Quebec, but, imbibing the spirit of the times, while a young man he became a rover in the wilderness and a trader among Indians. Three years before his appointment to explore the great river beyond the lakes, he had been sent with Peré to search for a copper-mine on Lake Superior, and the year before he stood by the side of Saint Lusson as he planted the arms of France at Sault Ste. Marie.
It was not until Dec. 8, 1672, that he reached the Straits of Mackinaw, and as the rivers between that point and the Mississippi were by this time frozen, he remained there during the winter and following spring, busy in questioning the Indians who had seen the great river as to its course, and as to the nations on its shores. On May 17, 1673, he began his journey toward a distant sea. At Mackinaw he found Marquette, who became his companion, but had no official connection with the expedition, as erroneously mentioned by Charlevoix. With five voyageurs and two birch-bark canoes, Joliet and Marquette, by the 7th of June, had reached a settlement of Kikapous, Miamis, and Mascoutens, in the valley of the Fox River, and three leagues beyond they found a short portage by which they reached the Wisconsin River, and following its tortuous course amid sandbars and islands dense with bushes, on the 17th of June they entered the broad great river called the Mississippi, walled in by picturesque bluffs, with lofty limestone escarpment, whose irregular outline looked like a succession of the ruined castles and towers of the Rhine. In honor of his patron, Governor Frontenac, Joliet called it Buade, the Governor’s family name. Passing one great river flowing from the west, he learned that through its valley there was a route to the Vermeille Sea [Gulf of California], and he saw a village (which was about five days’ journey from another) which traded with the people of California.[477]
This river is without name on his map,[478] but on its banks he places villages of the Missouri, Kansa, Osages, and Pawnee tribes. The River Ohio he marked with the Indian name Ouabouskigou; and the Arkansas, beyond which he did not descend, and which was reached about the middle of July, he named Bazire, after a prominent merchant of Quebec interested in the fur-trade. After ascending the stream, he entered the Illinois River, which he designated as the Divine, or Outrelaise, in compliment, it is supposed, to Frontenac’s wife, a daughter of Lagrange Trianon, noted for her beauty, and Mademoiselle Outrelaise, her fascinating friend, who were called in Court circles “les divines.”[479] Upon the west bank of one of its tributaries, the Des Plaine River, there stands above the prairie a remarkable elevation of clay, sand, and gravel, a lonely monument which has withstood the erosion of a former geologic age. It was a noted landmark to the Indians in their hunting, and to the French voyageurs on their trading expeditions.[179] By this Joliet was impressed, and he gave the elevation his own name, Mont Joliet, which it has retained, while all the others he marked on his map have been forgotten.[480] It was not until about the middle of August, 1674, that he returned to Quebec, and Governor Frontenac, on the 14th of November, writes to the French Government,—
“Sieur Joliet, whom Monsieur Talon advised me, on my arrival from France, to despatch for the discovery of the South Sea, returned three months ago, and found some very fine countries, and a navigation so easy through the beautiful rivers, that a person can go from Lake Ontario and Fort Frontenac in a bark to the Gulf of Mexico, there being only one carrying place, half a league in length, where Lake Ontario communicates with Lake Erie. A settlement could be made at this post, and another bark built on Lake Erie.... He has been within ten days’ journey of the Gulf of Mexico, and believes that water communication could be found leading to the Vermillion and California Seas, by means of the river that flows from the west, with the Grand River that he discovered, which rises from north to south, and is as large as the St. Lawrence opposite Quebec.
“I send you, by my secretary, the map[481] he has made of it, and the observations he has been able to recollect, as he lost all his minutes and journals in the wreck he suffered within sight of Montreal, where, after having completed a voyage of twelve hundred leagues, he was near being drowned, and lost all his papers, and a little Indian whom he brought from those countries.”
Governor Frontenac was satisfied with the importance of establishing a post on Lake Ontario, as Courcelles had suggested, and in the summer of 1673 visited the region. On the 3d of June he departed from Quebec, and at five o’clock in the afternoon of the 15th was received at Montreal amid the roar of cannon and the discharge of musketry. On the 9th of July he had reached a point supposed to be in the present town of Lisbon, in St. Lawrence County, New York, at the head of all the rapids of the St. Lawrence; and while sojourning there, at six o’clock in the evening two Iroquois canoes arrived with letters from La Salle, who two months before went into their country.
After exchanging civilities with the Iroquois, and guided by them, Frontenac was led into a beautiful bay about a cannon-shot from the River Katarakoui, which so pleased him as a site for a post, that he stayed until sunset examining the situation. The next day his engineer, Sieur Raudin, was ordered to trace out the plan of a fort, and on the morning of the 14th, at daybreak, soldiers and officers with alacrity began to clear the ground, and in four days the fort was finished, with the exception of the abatis. After designating the garrison and workmen who were to remain at the post, and making La Salle the commandant, on the 27th Frontenac began his homeward voyage, about the time that Joliet began to ascend the Mississippi from the mouth of the Arkansas.[482]
The reports of Joliet led to the formation of plans for the occupation of the valley of the Mississippi by the leading merchants and officers of Canada; and the application of Joliet, its first explorer, to go with twenty persons and establish a post among the Illinois, was refused by the French Government.[483]
Frontenac, in the fall of 1674,[484] sent La Salle to France. Under the date of the 14th of November, he wrote to Minister Colbert that La Salle was a man of character and intelligence, adapted to exploration, and asking him to listen to his plans. A few weeks before La Salle’s arrival in Paris, the Prince of Condé had fought a battle at Seneffe, and obtained a victory over the Prince of Orange and the allied generals, and every one was full of the praise of the King’s household guards, who without flinching remained eight hours under the fire of the enemy. La Salle could hardly have thought at that moment that the future was yet to reveal as his associates in the exploration of the distant valley of the Mississippi a gend’arme of his Majesty’s guard and a field chaplain of that bloody day.[485] In a memorial to the King, he asked for the grant of Fort Frontenac and lands adjacent, agreeing to repay Frontenac the money he had expended in establishing the post, to repair it, and keep a garrison therein at his own expense. He further asked, in consideration of the voyages he had made at his own expense during the seven years of his residence in Canada, that he might receive letters of nobility.[486] The King, upon the report of Colbert, accepted the offer, and on the 13th of May, 1675, conferred upon La Salle the rank of esquire, with power to attain all grades of knighthood and gendarmerie.[487] This year he came back to Canada in the same ship with Louis Hennepin, and going to Fort Frontenac in August, 1676, he increased the buildings, erected a strong wall on the land side, and strengthened the palisades toward the water. From time to time he had cattle brought thither from Montreal, and constructed barks to navigate the lake, keep the Iroquois in check, and deter the English from trading in the region of the upper lakes.[488] In November, 1677, he[181] made another visit to France,[489] and obtained a permit, dated the 12th of May, 1678, allowing him to explore the western part of New France, with the prospect of penetrating as far as Mexico.[490] The expedition was to be at the expense of himself and associates, with the privilege of trade in buffalo skins, but with the express condition that he should not trade with the Ottawas and other Indians who brought their beavers to Montreal.
Frontenac was not only in full sympathy with La Salle, but with other enterprising adventurers, and there is but little doubt that he shared the profits of the fur-traders. About the time that La Salle was improving Fort Frontenac as a trading-post, Raudin,[491] the engineer who had laid out the plan of that fort, was sent by Frontenac with presents to the Ojibways and Sioux, at the extremity of Lake Superior.[492] A nephew of Patron, named Daniel Greysolon du Lhut,[493] and who had made two voyages from France before 1674, had then entered the army as squire of Marquis de Lassay, was in the campaign of Franche-Comté and at Seneffe, having now returned to Quebec was permitted to go on a voyage of discovery in the then unknown region where dwelt the Sioux and Assineboines.
On the 1st of September, 1678, with three Indians and three Frenchmen, Du Lhut left Montreal for Lake Superior, and wintered at some point on the shore of, or in the vicinity of, Lake Huron. On the 5th of April, 1679, he was in the woods, three leagues from Sault Ste. Marie, when he wrote in the third person to Governor Frontenac: “He will not stir from the Nadoussioux until further orders; and peace being concluded he will set up the King’s arms, lest the English and other Europeans settled toward California take possession of the country.”[494] On the 2d of July, 1679, Du Lhut planted the arms of France beyond Lake Superior, among the Isanti Sioux,[495] who dwelt at Mille Lacs, in what is now the State of Minnesota, and then visited the Songaskitons (Sissetons) and Houetbatons, bands of the Sioux, whose villages were one hundred and twenty leagues beyond. Entering by way of the St. Louis River, it would be easy, by a slight portage, to reach the Sioux village, which was at that time on the shores of the Sandy Lake of the Upper Mississippi.
Among those who went to the Lake Superior region at the same time as Du Lhut, were Dupuy, Lamonde, and Pierre Moreau, alias La Taupine, who had been with Saint Lusson at the planting of the French arms in 1671 at Sault Ste. Marie, and was trading among the Illinois when Joliet was in that country. In the summer of 1679 La Taupine returned, and it was rumored that he had obtained among the Ottawas in two days nine hundred beavers. Duchesneau, Intendant of Justice, feeling that Moreau had violated the law forbidding coureurs des bois to trade with the Indians, had him, in September,[182] arrested at Quebec; but Moreau produced a license from Governor Frontenac, permitting him, with his two comrades, to go to the Ottawas, to execute his secret orders, and so was liberated. He had not left the prison but a short time when an officer and some soldiers came with an order from Frontenac to force the prison, in case he were still there. In a letter to Seignelay he writes: “It is certain, my Lord, that the said La Taupine carried goods to the Ottawas, that his two comrades remained in the country, apparently near Du Lhut, and that he traded there.”[496]
On the 15th of September Du Lhut had returned to Lake Superior, and at Camanistigoya, or the Three Rivers, the site of Fort William of the old Northwest Company, he held a conference with the Assineboines, an alienated band of the Sioux, and other northern tribes, and persuaded them to be at peace, and to intermarry with the Sioux. The next winter he remained in the region near the northern boundary of Minnesota; but in June, 1680, he determined to visit the Issati Sioux by water, as he had before gone to their villages by land.[497] With two canoes, an Indian as an interpreter, and four Frenchmen,—one of whom was Faffart, who had been in the employ of La Salle at Fort Frontenac,[498]—he entered a river eight leagues from the extremity of Lake Superior, now called Bois Brulé, a narrow, rapid stream, then much obstructed by fallen trees and beaver-dams. After reaching its upper waters a short portage was made to Upper Lake St. Croix, the outlet of which was a river, which, descending, led him to the Mississippi.
Two weeks after Du Lhut left Montreal to explore the extremity of Lake Superior, La Salle returned from France, accompanied by the brave officer Henry Tonty, who had lost one hand in battle, but who, with an iron substitute for the lost member, could still be efficient in case of a conflict. He also brought with him, beside thirty persons, a supply of cordage, anchors, and other material to be used at Fort Frontenac and on his proposed journey toward the Gulf of Mexico.
After reaching Frontenac, La Motte, who had been a captain in a French regiment, was sent in advance, with the Franciscan Hennepin and sixteen men, to select a site for building a vessel to navigate the upper lakes. On the 8th of January, 1679, La Salle and Tonty, late at night, reached La Motte’s encampment at the rapids below the Falls of Niagara, only to find him absent on a visit to the Senecas. The next day La Salle climbed the heights, and following the portage road round the cataract he found at the entrance of Cayuga Creek an admirable place for a ship-yard. La Motte having returned to his encampment, with La Salle and Tonty he[183] visited the selected site, and Tonty was charged with the supervision of the ship-builders.
Four days later, the keel of the projected vessel was laid, and in May it was launched with appropriate ceremonies, and named after the fabulous animal—the symbol of strength and swiftness,—the “Griffin,” two of which were the supporters of the escutcheon of Count Frontenac. Tonty, on the 22d of July, was sent forward with five men to join fourteen others who had been ordered by La Salle to stop at the mouth of the Detroit River. On the 7th day of August the “Griffin” spread her sails upon her voyage to unknown waters whose depths had never been sounded, and early on the morning of the 10th reached Tonty and his party, who had anxiously awaited its coming, and received them on board. On the 10th of August, the day in the calendar of the Church of Rome devoted to the memory of the virgin Saint Clare, foundress of the Franciscan Order of Poor Clares, the vessel entered the lake called by the Franciscan priests after her, although now written St. Clair. On the 27th they reached the harbor of Mackinaw,—a point on the mainland south of the straits; and upon his landing La Salle was greatly surprised to find there a number of those whom he had sent, at the close of the last year, to trade for his benefit with the Illinois. Their excuse for their unfaithfulness was credence in a report that La Salle was a visionary, and that his vessel would never arrive at Mackinaw. Four of the deserters were arrested. La Salle, learning that two more—Hemant and Roussel, or Roussellière—were at Sault Ste. Marie, sent Tonty on the 29th with six men to take them into custody. While the lieutenant was absent on this errand, La Salle lifted his anchor and set sail for the Grand Bay, now Green Bay, where he found among the Pottawattamies still others of those whom he had sent to the Illinois, and who had collected furs to the value of twelve thousand livres. From this point he determined to pursue his journey southward in a canoe, and to send back the “Griffin” with the peltries here collected. On the 18th of September the ship—in charge of the pilot, a supercargo, and five sailors—sailed for the magazine at the end of Lake Erie, but it never came to Mackinaw. Some Indians said it had been wrecked, but there was never any certain information obtained. A Pawnee lad, fourteen or fifteen years of age, who was a prisoner among the Indians near a post established among the Illinois, reported that the pilot of the “Griffin” had been seen among the Missouri tribes, and that he had ascended the Mississippi, with four others, in two canoes, with goods stolen from the ship, and some hand-grenades. It was the intention of this party to join Du Lhut, and if they could not find him, to push on to the English on Hudson’s Bay. Meeting some hostile Indians, a fight occurred, and all the Frenchmen were killed but the pilot and another, who were sold as prisoners to the Missouri Indians. In the chapter on the exploration of the lakes, it is only necessary to allude to that portion of La Salle’s expedition which pertains to this region.
After La Salle had established Fort Crèvecœur among the Illinois, on the 29th of February, 1680, he sent Michel Accault (often spelt Ako) on a trading and exploring expedition to the Upper Mississippi. He took with him Anthony Augelle, called the Picard, and the Franciscan priest Louis Hennepin, in a canoe, with goods valued at about a thousand livres. In ascending the Mississippi the party was hindered by ice near the mouth of the Illinois River until the 12th of March, when they resumed their voyage. Following the windings of the Mississippi, La Salle mentions in a letter written on the 22d of August, 1682, at Fort Frontenac,[499] that they passed a tributary from the east called by the Sioux Meschetz Odéba,[500] now called Wisconsin, and twenty-three or twenty-four leagues above they saw the Black River, called by the Sioux Chabadeba.[501] About the 11th of April, at three o’clock in the afternoon, a war-party of Sioux going south was met, and Accault, as the leader, presented the calumet,[502] and gave them some tobacco and twenty knives. The Sioux gave up their expedition, and conducted Accault and his companions to their villages. On the 22d of April the isles in the Mississippi were reached, where two Sioux had been killed by the Maskoutens, and they stopped to weep over their death, while Accault, to assuage their grief, gave them in trade a box of goods and twenty-four hatchets. Arriving at an enlargement of the river, about three miles below the modern city of St. Paul, the canoes were hidden in the marshes, and the rest of the journey to the villages of Mille Lacs was made by land. Six weeks after they reached the villages, the Sioux determined to descend the Mississippi on a buffalo hunt, and Hennepin and Augelle went with the party.
When Du Lhut reached the Mississippi from Lake Superior, he found eight cabins of Sioux, and learned that some Frenchmen were with the party hunting below the St. Croix River. Surprised by the intelligence, leaving two Frenchmen to guard his goods, he descended in a canoe with his interpreter and his other two men, and on the morning of the third day he found the hunting camp and the Franciscan Hennepin. In a letter to Seignelay, written while on a visit in France, Du Lhut writes:—
“The want of respect which they showed to the said Reverend Father provoked me, and this I showed them, telling them he was my brother. And I had him placed in my canoe to come with me into the villages of the said Nadouecioux, whither I took him; and a week after our arrival I caused a council to be convened, exposing the ill treatment which they had been guilty of, both to the said Reverend Father and to the other two Frenchmen who were with him, having robbed them and carried them off as slaves,[503] and even taken the priestly vestments of said Reverend Father.[185]
“I had two calumets, which they had danced to, returned, on account of the insults which they had offered, being what they hold most in esteem to appease matters, telling them I did not take calumets from the people who, after they had seen me and received my peace presents, and had been for a year always with Frenchmen, robbed them when they went to visit them. Each one in the council endeavored to throw the blame from himself, but their excuses did not prevent my telling the Reverend Father Louis that he would have to come with me towards the Outagamys [Foxes], as he did; showing him that it would strike a blow at the French nation, in a new discovery, to suffer an insult of this nature without manifesting resentment, although my design was to push on to the sea in a west-northwesterly direction, which is that which is believed to be the Red Sea [Gulf of California], whence the Indians who had gone to war on that side gave salt to three Frenchmen whom I had sent exploring, and who brought me said salt, having reported to me that the Indians had told them that it was only twenty days’ journey from where they were to find the great lake, whose waters were worthless to drink. They had made me believe that it would not be absolutely difficult to find it, if permission were given to go there.
“However, I preferred to retrace my steps, exhibiting the just indignation I felt, rather than to remain, after the violence which they had done to the Reverend Father and the other two Frenchmen who were with him, whom I put in my canoes and brought back to Michelimakinak.”
It was not until some time in May, 1681, that Du Lhut arrived at Montreal, and although he protested that his journey had only been in the interest of discovery and of peace-making with the tribes, the Intendant of Justice accused him of violating the King’s edict against trading with the Indians, and Frontenac held him for a time in the castle at Quebec, more as a friend than as a prisoner. It was but a little while before an amnesty came from the King of France to all suspected of being “coureurs des Bois,” and authorizing Governor Frontenac to issue yearly twenty-five licenses to twenty-five canoes, each having three men, to trade among the savages.
Duchesneau, the Intendant of Justice, still complained that the Governor winked at illicit trade, and on the 13th of November, 1681, he wrote to Seignelay, who had succeeded his father as Minister for the Colonies:—
“But not content with the profits to be derived within the countries under the King’s dominion, the desire of making money everywhere has led the Governor, Sieurs Perrot, Boisseau, Du Lhut, and Patron, his uncle, to send canoes loaded with peltries to the English. It is said that sixty thousand livres’ worth has been sent thither; and though proof of this assertion cannot be adduced, it is a notorious report.... Trade with the English is justified every day, and all those who have pursued it agree that beaver carried to them sells for double what it does here, for that worth fifty-two sous, six deniers, the pound, duty paid, brings eight livres there, and the beaver for Russia sells there at ten livres the pound in goods.”
On grounds of public policy Frontenac in 1682 was recalled, and De la Barre, his successor, in October of this year held a conference with the most influential persons, among whom was Du Lhut, who afterward sailed for[186] France, and early in 1683[504] there wrote the letter to Seignelay from which extracts have been made.
The Iroquois having found it profitable to carry the beavers of the northwest to the English at Albany, determined to wage war against the tribes of the upper Lakes, seize Mackinaw, and drive away the French. Governor de la Barre, to thwart this scheme, in May, 1683, sent Oliver Morrel, the Sieur de la Durantaye, with six canoes and thirty good men, to Mackinaw, and the Chevalier de Baugy was ordered to the fort established by La Salle on the Illinois River, in charge of Tonty. As soon as Durantaye reached Mackinaw, he immediately sent parties to Green Bay to take steps to humble the Pottawattamies for the hostility exhibited toward the French. He afterward went down the west side of Lake Michigan, and Chevalier de Baugy proceeded on the other side, hoping to meet La Salle, who was expected to go to Mackinaw by following the eastern shore.
Du Lhut, upon his return from France, obtained a license to trade, and in August arrived at Mackinaw with men and goods for trading in the Sioux country[505] by way of Green Bay. Upon the 8th of the month he left Mackinaw with about thirty persons; and after leaving their goods at the extremity of the Bay, they proceeded, armed for war, to the village of the Pottawattamies, and rebuked them for the bad feelings which they had exhibited. Some Cayuga Iroquois in the vicinity captured five of the Wyandot Hurons that Du Lhut had sent out to reconnoitre, but avoided the French post. “The Sieur du Lhut,” writes the Governor to Seignelay, “who had the honor to see you at Versailles, happening to be at that post when my people arrived, placed himself at their head, and issued such good orders that I do not think it can be seized, as he has employed his forces and some Indians in fortifying and placing himself in a condition of determined defence.” Having been advised of the retreat of the Iroquois, Du Lhut proceeded toward the north to execute his design of stopping English trade in that direction. The project is referred to in a despatch of the Canadian to the Home Government in these words: “The English of Hudson’s Bay have this year attracted many of our northern Indians, who for this reason have not come to trade to Montreal. When they learned by expresses sent them by Du Lhut, on his arrival at Messilimakinak, that he was coming, they sent him word to come quickly, and they would unite with him to prevent all others going thither any more. The English of the Bay excite us against the savages, whom Sieur du Lhut alone can quiet.”
Departing from his first post at Kaministigouia, the site of which is in view of Prince Arthur’s Landing, he found his way between many isles, varied and picturesque, to a river on the north shore of Lake Superior leading to[187] Lake Nepigon (Alepimigon). Passing to the northeastern extremity, he built a post on a stream connecting with the waters of the Hudson’s Bay, called after a family name, La Tourette. He returned the next year, if not to Montreal, certainly to Mackinaw. Keweenaw by this time had become a well-known resort of traders; and in its vicinity, in the summer of 1683, two Frenchmen, Colin Berthot and Jacques Le Maire, had been surprised by Indians, robbed and murdered. While Du Lhut was at Mackinaw, on the 24th of October, he was told that an accomplice, named Folle Avoine, had arrived at Sault Ste. Marie with fifteen Ojibway families who had fled from Chagouamigon Bay, fearing retaliation for an attack which they had made upon the Sioux during the last spring. There were only twelve Frenchmen at the Sault at the time, and they felt too weak, without aid, to make an arrest of Folle Avoine.
At the dawn of the next day after the information was received, Du Lhut embarked with six Frenchmen to seize the murderer, and he also gave a seat in his canoe to the Jesuit missionary, Engelran. When within a league of the post at the Sault, he left the canoe, and with Engelran and the Chevalier de Fourcille, on foot, went through the woods to the mission-house, and the remaining four—Baribaud, Le Mere, La Fortune, and Maçons—proceeded with the canoe.
Du Lhut, upon his arrival, immediately ordered the arrest of the accused, and placed him under a guard of six men; then calling a council, he told the Indians that those guilty of the murder must be punished. But they, hoping to exculpate the prisoner, said that the murder had been committed by one Achiganaga and his sons. Peré had been sent to Keweenaw to find Achiganaga and his children, and when he arrested them they acknowledged their guilt, and told him that the goods they had stolen were hidden in certain places. The powder and tobacco were found soaked in water and useless, and the bodies of the murdered were found in holes in marshy ground, covered with branches of trees to prevent them from floating. The goods not damaged were sold at Keweenaw, to the highest bidder among the traders, for eleven hundred livres, to be paid in beavers to M. de la Chesnaye. On the 24th of November Peré, at ten o’clock at night, came and told Du Lhut that he had found eighteen Frenchmen at Keweenaw, and that he had brought down as prisoners Achiganaga and sons, and had left them under a guard of twelve Frenchmen at a point twelve leagues from the Sault. The next day, at dawn, he went back, and at two o’clock in the afternoon returned with the prisoners, who were placed in a room in the house where Du Lhut was, and watched by a strong guard, and not allowed to converse with each other.
On the 26th a council was held. Folle Avoine was allowed two of his relatives to defend him, and the same privilege was accorded to the others. He was interrogated, and his answers taken in writing, when they were read to him, and inquiry made whether the record was correct. He being removed, Achiganaga was introduced, and in like manner questioned; and[188] then his sons. The Indians watched the judicial examination with silent interest, and the chiefs at length said to the prisoners: “It is enough! You accuse yourselves; the French are masters of your bodies.”
On the 29th all the French at the place were called together. The answers to the interrogatories by the prisoners were read, and then by vote it was unanimously decided that they were guilty and ought to die. As the traders at Keweenaw desired all possible leniency to be shown, Du Lhut decided to execute only two,—man for man, for those murdered; and in this opinion he was sustained by De la Tour, the Superior of the Jesuit missionaries at the Sault. Folle Avoine and the eldest of Achiganaga’s sons were selected. Du Lhut writes: “I then returned to the cabin of Brochet [a chief], with Mess’rs Boisguillot, Peré, De Repentigny, De Manthet, De la Ferte, and Maçons, where were all the chiefs of the Outawas du Sable, Outawas Sinagos, Sauteurs, D’Achiliny, a part of the Hurons, and Oumamens, chief of the Amikoys. I informed them of our decision; ... that the Frenchmen having been killed by the different tribes, one of each must die; and that the same death they had caused the French to suffer they must also suffer.” The Jesuit Fathers then proceeded to baptize the prisoners, in the belief of the Church of Rome that by the external application of water they might become citizens of the kingdom of heaven. One hour later, a procession was formed of forty-two Frenchmen, with Du Lhut at their head, and the prisoners were taken to a hill, and in the sight of four hundred Indians the two murderers were shot.
To Du Lhut must always be given the credit of being the first in the distant West, at the outlet of Lake Superior, to exhibit the majesty of law, under the forms of the French code. While some of the timid and prejudiced, in Canada and France, condemned his course as harsh and impolitic, yet, as the enforcer of a respect for life, he was upheld by the more thoughtful and reasonable.[506]
During the summer of 1683 (Aug. 10), René Le Gardeur, Sieur de Beauvais, with thirteen others who had a permit to trade among the Illinois, departed from Mackinaw, and early in December reached the lower end of Lake Michigan, and wintered in the valley of the Theakiki or Kankakee River. About the 10th of March, 1684, while on their way to Fort St. Louis, on the Illinois River, they were robbed by the Seneca Iroquois of their seven canoes of merchandise, and after nine days sent back to the Chicago River with only two canoes and some powder and lead. The Indians, on the 21st, approached and besieged Fort St. Louis,[507] which was gallantly defended by the Chevalier de Baugy and the brave Henry Tonty, the Bras Coupé (Cut Arm), as he was called by them, because he had lost his hand in battle.[508]
Upon the receipt of the news of this incursion, Governor de la Barre, under a pressure from the merchants of Quebec, whose goods were imperilled, determined to attack the Iroquois in their own country. Orders were sent to the posts of the upper lakes for the commandants to bring down allies to Niagara. While on his way, Du Lhut wrote to De la Barre:—
“As I was leaving Lake Alemepigon [Nepigon], I made in June all the presents necessary to prevent the savages carrying their beavers to the English. I have met the Sieur de la Croix, with his two comrades, who gave me your despatches, in which you demand that I omit no step for the delivery of your letters to the Sieur Chouart at the River Nelson. To carry out your instructions Monsieur Péré will have to go himself,[509] the savages having all at that time gone into the wilderness to gather their blueberries. The Sieur Péré will have left in August, and during that month will have delivered your letters to the said Sieur Chouart.[510]
“It remains for me to assure you that all the savages of the north have great confidence in me, and this makes me promise you that before two years have passed not a single savage will visit the English at Hudson’s Bay. This they have all promised, and have bound themselves thereto by the presents which I have given or caused to be given.
“The Klistinos, Assenepoualacs, Sapiniere, Opemens Dacheliny, Outouloubys, and Tabitibis, who comprise the nations who are west of the Sea of the North, having promised next spring to be at the fort which I have constructed near the River à la Maune, at the end of Lake Alemepigon,[511] and next summer I shall construct one in the country of the Klistinos, which will be an effectual barrier.... It is necessary, to carry out my promises, that my brother[512] should, in the early spring [of 1685], go up again, with two canoes loaded with powder, lead, fusils, hatchets, tobacco, and necessary presents.”
Durantaye, Du Lhut, and Nicholas Perrot left Mackinaw with one hundred and fifty Frenchmen and about five hundred Indians[513] to join De la Barre’s army; and they had not been six hours at Niagara, on the 6th of September, before orders were received that their services were not needed, as the French troops were suffering from sickness, and a truce had been made with the Iroquois.[514] Du Lhut and the other Frenchmen slowly returned to their posts, and when the new governor (Denonville) arrived, he wrote to De la Durantaye at Mackinaw, and sent orders to Du Lhut, who was at a great distance beyond, to inform him of the number of allies he could furnish in case of a war against the Iroquois.
Nicholas Perrot, in the spring of 1685, was commissioned to go to Green Bay and have chief command there, and of any countries he might[190] discover.[515] He left Montreal with twenty men, and arriving at Green Bay, some Indians told him that they had visited countries toward the setting sun, where they obtained the blue and green stones suspended from their ears and noses, and that they saw horses and men like Frenchmen,—probably the Spaniards of New Mexico; and others said that they had obtained hatchets from persons who lived in a house that walked on the water in the Assineboine region,—alluding to the English established at Hudson’s Bay. At the portage between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers thirteen Hurons were met, who were bitterly opposed to the establishment of a post near the Sioux. After reaching the Mississippi, Perrot sent a few Winnebagoes to notify the Aiouez (Ioways) who roamed on the prairies beyond, that the French had ascended the river, and that they would indicate their stopping-place by kindling a fire. A place was found suitable for a post,[516] where there was wood, at the foot of a high hill (au pied d’une montagne), behind which there was a large prairie.[517] In eleven days a number of Ioways arrived at the Mississippi, about twenty-five miles above, and Perrot ascended to meet them; but as he and his men drew near, the Indian women ran up the bluffs and hid in the woods. But twenty of the braves met him and bore him to the chief’s lodge, and he, bending over Perrot, began to weep, and allowed the tears to fall upon his guest. After he had exhausted himself, the principal men continued this wetting process. Buffalo tongues were then boiled in an earthen pot, and after being cut into small pieces, the chief took a piece, and, as a mark of respect, placed it in Perrot’s mouth. During the winter Perrot traded with the Sioux; and by 1686 a post was established on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Pepin, just above its entrance, called “Fort St. Antoine.”[518]
Denonville discovered upon his arrival at Quebec that the policy which De la Barre had pursued in making peace had rendered the Iroquois more insolent, and had made the allies of the French upon the upper lakes discontented, on account of their long and fruitless voyage to Niagara. He therefore determined, as soon as he could gather a sufficient force, to march into the Iroquois country[519] “and not chastise them by halves, but if possible annihilate them.” Orders were again sent to the posts at Mackinaw and Green Bay to prepare for another expedition against the Seneca Iroquois. Perrot at the time he received the order to return was among the Sioux, and his canoes had been broken by the ice. During the summer of 1686 he visited the Miamis, sixty leagues distant. Upon his return he perceived a great smoke, and at first thought it was a war-party going against the Sioux. Fortunately he met a Maskouten chief, who had been at the post to visit him, and from him he learned that the Foxes, Kickapoos,[191] Maskouten, and others had determined to pillage the post, kill its inmates, and then go forward and attack the Sioux. Hurrying on, he reached the post, and was told that on that very day three spies had been there and discovered that there were only six men in charge. The next day two more appeared, but Perrot had taken the precaution to put loaded guns at the door of each hut, and made his men frequently change their clothes. To the query of the savage spies, “How many French were there?” the reply was, “Forty, and that more were daily expected, who had been on a buffalo hunt, and that the guns were loaded and the knives well sharpened.” They were then told to go back to their camp and bring a chief of each tribe; and that if Indians in large numbers came they would be fired at.
In accordance with this message, six chiefs presented themselves, and after their bows and arrows had been taken from them, they were invited to Perrot’s cabin, where he gave them something to eat and tobacco to smoke. Looking at Perrot’s loaded guns, they asked “if he were afraid of his children?” He answered, “No.” They continued, “Are you displeased?” To this he said, “I have good reason to be. The Spirit has warned me of your designs; you will take my things away and put me in the kettle, and proceed against the Nadouaissioux. The Spirit told me to be on my guard, and he would help me.” Astonished at these words, they confessed he had spoken the truth. That night the chiefs slept within the stockade, and early the next morning a part of the hostile force came and wished to trade. Perrot had now only fifteen men, and arresting the chiefs, he told them he would break their heads if they did not make the Indians go away. One of the chiefs, therefore, stood on the gate of the fort and said to the warriors: “Do not advance, young men, the Spirit has warned Metaminens of your designs.” The advice was followed, and the chiefs, receiving some presents, also retired.
A few days after, Perrot returned to Green Bay in accordance with the order of the Governor of Canada. His position toward the Jesuits at this point was different from that of La Salle. This latter explorer had declared that the missionaries were more anxious to convert, at their blacksmith shop, iron into implements, to be exchanged for beaver, than to convert souls.
After being buried in the earth for years, there has been discovered a silver soleil or ostensorium, fifteen inches high, and weighing twenty ounces, intended for the consecrated wafer;[520] around the oval base of the rim is the following inscription in French: “This soleil was given by Mr Nicholas Perrot, to the mission of St. Francis Xavier, at the Bay of Puans, 1686.”[521]
Governor Dongan of New York, although an Irishman and Roman[192] Catholic, was aggressive in the interests of England, and asserted the right of traders from Albany to go among the Indians of the Northwest. As early as 1685 he licensed several persons, among whom was La Fontaine Marion, a Canadian, to trade for beaver in the Ottawas country; and their journey was successful, and created consternation at Quebec. Governor Denonville wrote to Seignelay of the pretences of the English, who claimed the lakes to the South Sea. His language was terse and emphatic: “Missilimakinak is theirs. They have taken its latitude, have been to trade there with our Outawas and Huron Indians, who received them cordially on account of the bargains they gave by selling them merchandise for beaver at a much higher price than we. Unfortunately we had but very few Frenchmen there at that time.”
THE SOLEIL.
A despatch on the 6th of June, 1686, was sent to Du Lhut, that he should go and establish a post at some point on the shore of St. Clair River, between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, which would serve as a protection for friendly Indians, and a barrier to the English traders. After he had built the post he was ordered to leave it in command of a lieutenant and twenty-eight men, return to Mackinaw, and then take thirty men more to the post, which was called Fort St. Joseph. A party of English, under Captain Thomas Roseboome, of Albany, consisting of twenty-nine whites and five Indians, and La Fontaine as interpreter, in the spring of 1687 were arrested by Durantaye on Lake Huron, twenty leagues from Mackinaw, and their eau de vie (brandy) given to the Indians.
In June, Durantaye left Mackinaw with allies for Denonville, and was afterward followed by Perrot; and at Fort St. Joseph he met Du Lhut and Henry Tonty, who had arrived from Fort St. Louis with a few Illinois Indians.[522] After the united company had left this post, they met in St. Clair River a second party of Englishmen, consisting of twenty-one whites, six Indians, and eight prisoners, in charge of Major Patrick Macgregory, of Albany, a native of Scotland. These were also arrested, making about sixty then in the hands of the French.
On the 27th of June, Durantaye and associates, to the number of one hundred and seventy Frenchmen, and about four hundred Indians, arrived at Niagara. Sieur de la Foret, who had been with Tonty at Fort St. Louis, on the 1st of July reported their arrival to Denonville, then at Fort Frontenac. The Governor was pleased to hear of the capture of the English, and in a subsequent despatch wrote: “It is certain that had the two English detachments not been stopped and pillaged, had their brandy and other goods entered Michillimaquina, all our Frenchmen would have had their throats cut by a revolt of all the Hurons and Outaouas, whose example would have been followed by all the other far nations, in consequence of the presents which had been secretly sent to the Indians.”
BOTTOM OF THE SOLEIL.
On the 10th of July, as the Canadian and French troops entered Irondequoit Bay, they were elated by the approach, under sail, of the Indian allies from Mackinaw who on the 6th had left Niagara. On the 12th, the march to the Seneca village was begun; but the story of it has been told elsewhere.[523]
The officers who came from the posts of the upper lakes were well spoken of by Denonville. In one of his despatches he writes: “A half-pay captaincy being vacant, I gave it to Sieur de la Durantaye, who since I have been in this country has done good service among the Outawas, and has been very economical in labor and expense in executing the orders he received from me. He is a man of rank, unfortunate in his affairs, and who,[194] by his great assiduity at Missillimakinak, efficiently carried out the instructions to seize the English; he arrested one of the parties within two days’ journey of Missillimakinak. Sieurs de Tonty and Du Lhut have acquitted themselves very well; all would richly deserve some reward.”
After the allies had left Niagara for the scene of battle, Greysolon de la Tourette, a brother of Du Lhut, described as “an intelligent lad,” arrived there from Lake Nepigon, north of Lake Superior, in a canoe, without an escort. Denonville a few weeks after wrote: “Du Lhut’s brother, who has recently arrived from the rivers above the Lake of the Allemepigons, assures me that he saw more than fifteen hundred persons come to trade with him, and they were very sorry he had not sufficient goods to satisfy them. They are of the tribes accustomed to resort to the English at Port Nelson and River Bourbon.”[524]
The destruction of the Seneca villages having been completed, Du Lhut, with his brave cousin Henry Tonty, returned in September to Fort St. Joseph,[525] near the entrance of Lake Huron, garrisoned at his own charges by coureurs des bois, who had in the spring sown some bushels of Turkey wheat. The next year, to allay the irritation of the Iroquois, Governor Denonville issued an order to abandon the fort, and on the 27th of August the buildings were destroyed by fire.
Perrot, in 1688, was ordered to return to his post on the Upper Mississippi, and take formal possession of the country in the King’s name. With a party of forty men, he left Montreal to trade with the Sioux, who, according to La Potherie, “were very distant, and could not trade with us easily, as the other tribes and the Outagamis [Foxes] boasted of having cut off the passage thereto.” Reaching Green Bay in the fall of the year, Perrot was met by a deputation of Foxes, and afterward visited their village. In the chief’s lodge there was placed before him broiled venison, and for the rest of the French raw meat was served; but he refused to eat, because, he said, “meat did not give him any spirit. But he would take some when they were more reasonable.” He then chided them for not having gone, as requested by the Governor of Canada, on the expedition against the Senecas. Urging them to proceed on the beaver hunt, and to fight only the Iroquois, and leaving a few Frenchmen to trade, he proceeded toward the Sioux country. Arriving at the portage, the ice formed some impediment, but, aided by Pottawattamies, his men transported their goods to the Wisconsin River, which was not frozen. Ascending the Mississippi, he proceeded to the post which he occupied before he was summoned to fight the Senecas.
As soon as the ice left the river, in the spring of 1689, the Sioux came down and escorted Perrot to one of their villages, where he was received[195] with much enthusiasm. He was carried around upon a beaver robe, followed by a long line of warriors, each bearing a pipe and singing. Then, taking him to the chief’s lodge, several wept over his head, as the Ioways had done when he first visited the Upper Mississippi. After he had left, in 1686, a Sioux chief, knowing that few Frenchmen were at the fort, had come down with one hundred warriors to pillage it. Of this, complaint was made by Perrot, and the guilty leader came near being put to death by his tribe. As they were about to leave the Sioux village, one of his men told Perrot that a box of goods had been stolen, and he ordered a cup of water to be brought, into which he poured some brandy. He then addressed the Indians, and told them he would dry up their marshes if the goods were not restored, at the same time setting on fire the brandy in the cup. The savages, astonished, and supposing that he possessed supernatural powers, soon detected the thief, and the goods were returned.
On the 8th of May, 1689, at the post St. Antoine, on the Wisconsin side of Lake Pepin, a short distance above the Chippewa River, in the presence of the Jesuit missionary, Joseph J. Marest, Boisguillot,[526] a trader near the mouth of the Wisconsin River, Pierre Le Sueur, whose name was afterward identified with the exploration of the Minnesota, and a few others, Perrot took possession of the country of the rivers St. Croix, St. Pierre, and the region of Mille Lacs, in the name of the King of France.
When he returned to Montreal, he found a great change had occurred in political affairs. It had become evident that the Iroquois were mere agents of the English. The Albany traders had searched the land between the Hudson River and Lake Erie, and had made a report that the Valley of the Genesee was fertile and beautiful to behold, and every year an increasing number of pale-faces wandered among the Indian villages toward Lake Ontario. Old officers in Canada saw that their only hope was to destroy the source of supply to the Iroquois. The question to be determined was whether the King of France or the King of England should control the region of the Great Lakes. Chevalier de Callières, who had seen much service in Europe, and was in command of the troops in Canada, insisted that decisive steps should be taken. The crisis was hastened by the arrival of the intelligence that a revolution had occurred in England, and that William and Mary had been acknowledged. Callières wrote to Seignelay relative to the condition of affairs: “It would be idle to flatter ourselves with the hope to find them improved since the usurpation of the Prince of Orange, who will be assuredly acknowledged by Sir Andros,[527] who is a Protestant, born in the Island of Jersey, and by New York, the inhabitants[196] whereof are mostly Dutch, who planted this colony under the name of New Netherland, all of whom are Protestant.”
He urged that the war should be carried into New York, and that a force be sent strong enough to seize Albany, and then to move down and capture Manhattan. “It will give his Majesty,” he said, “one of the finest harbors in America, accessible at almost all seasons, and it will give one of the finest countries of America, in a milder and more fertile climate than that of Canada.” The sequel was a conflict of drilled troops under European officers upon the borders of New England and New York.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
1609-1640.—The Voyages of Champlain, as published in 1632 at Paris, are valuable in facts pertaining to discovery along the shores of Lake Champlain and Lake Huron; but the book is the subject of special treatment in another chapter.[528] The Grand Voyage of Sagard[529] contains little more than what may be found in Champlain and the Relations of the Jesuit missionaries. Charlevoix mentions that Sagard passed “some time among the Hurons, but had not time to see things well enough, still less to verify all that was told him.”
1640-1660.—Benjamin Sulté, in his “Notes on Jean Nicolet,” printed in the Wisconsin Historical Society Collections, viii. 188-194,[530] shows that Nicolet, the trader, must have visited Green Bay between July, 1634, and July, 1635, because this interval is the only period of his life when he cannot be found on the shores of the St. Lawrence. The recently published History of the Discovery of the Northwest in 1634 by Jean Nicolet, with a Sketch of his Life by C. W. Butterfield, Cincinnati, 1881, is a useful book, and gives evidence that Nicolet did not descend the Wisconsin River.
The Relations des Jésuites (of which a full bibliographical account is appended to the following chapter) are important sources for the tracing of these western explorations.
The Relation of 1640 has an extract from a letter of Paul Le Jeune, in which, after giving the names of the tribes of the region of the Lakes, he adds that “the Sieur Nicolet, interpreter of the Algonquin and Huron languages for Messieurs de la Nouvelle France, has given me the names of these natives he has visited, for the most part in their country.” This Relation shows how near an approach Nicolet made to discovering the Mississippi. See in this connection Margry’s “Les Normands dans l’Ohio et le Mississippi,” in the Journal général de l’Instruction publique, 30 Juillet, 1862. Shea, Mississippi Valley, p. xx, contends that Nicolet reached the river or its affluents. The Relation of 1643 records the death of Nicolet, with some particulars of his life.
For slight notices of the period, with dates of the departure and arrival of traders and missionaries, there is serviceable aid to be had from Le Journal des Jésuites publié d’après le Manuscrit original conservé aux Archives du Séminaire de Québec. Par MM. les Abbés Laverdière et Casgrain. Quebec, 1871.[531] Under date of Aug. 21, 1660, is noted the arrival of a party of Ottawas at Montreal, who departed the next day, and arrived at Three[197] Rivers on the 24th, and on the 27th left. It adds: “They were in number three hundred. Des Grosilleres was in their company, who had gone to them the year before. They had departed from Lake Superior with one hundred canoes; forty turned back, and sixty arrived, loaded with peltry to the value of 200,000 livres. At Montreal they left to the value of 50,000 livres, and brought the rest to Three Rivers. They come in twenty-six days, but are two months in going back. Des Grosillers wintered with the Bœuf tribe, who were about four thousand, and belonged to the sedentary Nadouesseronons [Dakotahs]. The Father Menar, the Father Albanel, and six other Frenchmen went back with them.”
There appears to be no uniformity in the spelling of the name of Groseilliers. Under May, 1662, is this entry: “I departed from Quebek on the 3d for Three Rivers; there met Des Grosillers, who was going to the Sea of the North. He left Quebek the night before with ten men.” Under August, 1663, is the following: “The 5th returned those who had been three years among the Outaoouac; nine Frenchmen went, and seven returned. The Father Menar and his man, Jean Guerin, one of our donnés, had died,—the Father Menar the 7th or 8th of August, 1661, and Jean Guerin in September, 1662. The party arrived at Montreal on the 25th of July, with thirty-five canoes and one hundred and fifty men.” Of Creuxius’ Historia and its relations to the missionaries’ reports, there is an account in the next chapter.
1660-1680.—The documents from the French archives in the Parliament Library at Ottawa, Canada (copies in manuscript), and those translated and printed in the New York Col. Docs., vol. ix., give much information on this period; and so do the Jesuit Relations, and the first volume of the Collections edited by Margry and published at Paris in 1875.[532]
The Mémoire sur les Mœurs, Coustumes, et Réligion des Sauvages de l’Amérique septentrionale, par Nicolas Perrot, publié pour la première fois par le R. P. J. Tailhan, de la Compagnie de Jésus, Leipsic and Paris, 1864,[533] was examined by Charlevoix one hundred and fifty years ago, when it was in manuscript, and afforded him useful information. It is the only work referring to the traders at the extremity of Lake Superior between 1660 and 1670, and to the migrations of the Hurons from the Mississippi to the Black River, and from thence to Lake Superior. Much of interest is also derived from the Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale. Par M. de Bacqueville de la Potherie, Paris, 1722, 4 vols.[534]
1680-1690.—There are differences of statements regarding the Upper Mississippi Valley, but nevertheless much information of importance, in the letter of La Salle from Fort Frontenac, in August, 1682,[535] in Du Lhut’s Mémoire of 1683, as printed by Harrisse,[536] and in Hennepin’s Description de la Louisiane.[537]
Perrot, in the work already quoted, gives the best account of this region from 1683 to 1690.
For the whole period of the exploration of the Great Lakes, the works among the secondary authorities of the chief value are Charlevoix in the last century, and Parkman in the present; but their labors are commemorated elsewhere.
EDITORIAL NOTE.
THE local historical work of the Northwest has been done in part under the auspices of various State and sectional historical societies. The Ohio Society, organized in 1831, became later inanimate, but was revived in 1868, and ought to hold a more important position among kindred bodies than it does. Mr. Baldwin has given an account of the historical and pioneer societies of Ohio in the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society’s Tracts, no. 27; and this latter Society, organized in 1867, with the Licking County Pioneer Historical Society, organized the same year, and the Firelands Historical Society, organized in 1857, have increased the historical literature of the State by various publications elucidating in the main the settlements of the last century. The youngest of the kindred associations, the Historical and Geographical Society of Toledo, was begun in 1871. The State, however, is fortunate in having an excellent Bibliography of Ohio (1880), embracing fourteen hundred titles, exclusive of public documents, which was compiled by Peter G. Thomson; while the Americana Catalogues of Robert Clarke & Co., of Cincinnati, are the completest booksellers’ lists of that kind which are published in America. The Ohio Valley Historical Series, published by the same house, has not as yet included any publication relating to the period of the French claims to its territory. The earliest History of Ohio is by Caleb Atwater, published in 1838; but the History by James W. Taylor—“First Period, 1650-1787”—is wholly confined to the Jesuits’ missions, the wars of the Eries and Iroquois, and the later border warfare. (Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,535.) Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of Ohio, originally issued in 1848, and again in 1875, is a repository of facts pertaining for the most part to later times.
The Historical Society of Indiana, founded in 1831, hardly justifies its name, so far as appears from any publications. The chief History of Indiana is that by John B. Dillon, which, as originally issued in 1843, came down to 1816; but the edition of 1859 continues the record to 1856. The first three chapters are given to the French missionaries and the natives. (Field, Indian Bibliography, nos. 429, 430; Sabin, vol. v. no. 20,172.) A popular conglomerate work is The Illustrated History of Indiana, 1876, by Goodrich and Tuttle. A few local histories touch the early period, like John Law’s Colonial History of Vincennes, 1858; Wallace A. Brice’s History of Fort Wayne, 1868; H. L. Hosmer’s Early History of the Maumee Valley, Toledo, 1858; and H. S. Knapp’s History of the Maumee Valley from 1680, Toledo, 1872, which is, however, very scant on the early history.
In Illinois there is no historical association to represent the State; but the Historical Society of Chicago (begun in 1856), though suffering the loss of its collections of seventeen thousand volumes in the great fire of 1871, still survives.
The principal histories of the State touching the French occupation are Henry Brown’s History of Illinois, New York, 1844; John Reynolds’s Pioneer History of Illinois, Belleville, 1852, now become scarce; and Davidson and Stuvé’s Complete History of Illinois, 1673-1873, Springfield, 1874. The Historical Series issued by Robert Fergus pertain in large measure to Chicago, and, except J. D. Caton’s “Last of the Illinois, and Sketch of the Potawatomies,” has, so far as printed, little of interest earlier than the English occupation. H. H. Hurlbut’s Chicago Antiquities, 1881, has an account of the early discovery of the portage.
The Michigan Pioneer Society was founded in 1874, and has printed three volumes of Pioneer Collections, 1877-1880. The Houghton County Historical Society, devoting itself to the history of the region near Lake Superior,[538] dates from 1866. It has published nothing of importance. The State of Michigan secured, through General Cass, while he was the minister of the United States at Paris, transcripts of a large number of documents relating to its early history. The Historical Society of Michigan was begun in 1828, and during the few years following it printed several Annual Addresses and a volume of Transactions. Every trace of the Society had nearly vanished, when in 1857 it was revived. (Historical Magazine, i. 353.) The principal histories of the State are James H. Lanman’s History of Michigan, New York, 1839; Electra M. Sheldon’s Early History of Michigan, from the First Settlement to 1815, New York,[199] 1856, which is largely given to an account of the Jesuit missions;[539] Charles R. Tuttle’s General History of Michigan, Detroit, 1874; James Valentine Campbell’s Outlines of the Political History of Michigan, Detroit, 1876. (Cf. Clarke’s Bibliotheca Americana, 1878, p. 92; 1883, p. 169; Sabin, Dictionary, vol. xii. p. 141.) A few of the sectional histories, like W. P. Strickland’s Old Mackinaw, Philadelphia, 1860, touch slightly the French period. A brief sketch of Mackinaw Island by Lieutenant Dwight H. Kelton, U. S. A., includes extracts from the registers of the Catholic Church at Mackinaw, and a list of the French commanders at that post during the eighteenth century.
The Historical Society of Wisconsin was founded in 1849, and reorganized in 1854. It has devoted itself to forming a large library, and has published nine volumes of Collections, etc. (Joseph Sabin in American Bibliopolist, vi. 158; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,688). Mr. D. S. Durrie published a bibliography of Wisconsin in Historical Magazine, xvi. 29, and a tract on the Early Outposts of Wisconsin in 1873. A paper on the “First Page of the History of Wisconsin” is in the American Antiquarian, April, 1878. The principal histories of the State are I. A. Lapham’s Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1846, which lightly touches the earliest period; William R. Smith’s Wisconsin (vol. i., historical; vol. ii., not published; vol. iii., documentary, translating in part the Jesuit Relations from the set in Harvard College Library), Madison, 1854; and Charles R. Tuttle’s Illustrated History of Wisconsin, Madison and Boston, 1875.
The Minnesota Historical Society was organized in 1849, and began the publication of its Annals in 1850, completing a volume in 1856. This volume was reissued in 1872 as vol. i. of its Collections, and includes papers on the origin of the name of Minnesota and the early nomenclature of the region, and papers by Mr. Neill on the French Voyageurs, the early Indian trade and traders,[540] and early notices of the Dakotas. In vol. ii. Mr. Neill has a paper on “The Early French Forts and Footprints in the Valley of the Upper Mississippi;”[541] and Mr. A. J. Hill has examined the geography of Perrot so far as it relates to Minnesota territory. In vol. iii. there is a bibliography of the State; in vol. iv., a History of St. Paul, by John Fletcher Williams, which but briefly touches the period of exploration. The State Historical Society of Minnesota lost a considerable part of its collections in the fire of March 11, 1881, which burned the State capitol,—as detailed in its Report for 1883.
The principal and sufficient account of the State’s history is Edward D. Neill’s History of Minnesota from the Earliest French Explorations, Philadelphia, 1858, which in 1883 reached an improved fifth edition, and is supplemented by his Minnesota Explorers and Pioneers, 1659-1858, published in 1881. In 1858 an edition was also issued, of one hundred copies, on large paper, illustrated with forty-five quarto steel plates, engraved from paintings chiefly by Captain Seth Eastman, U. S. Army.
The Historical Society of Iowa was founded in 1857, and began the publication of its Annals in 1863. The principal account of the State is C. R. Tuttle and D. S. Durrie’s Illustrated History of Iowa, Chicago, 1876.
There are a few more general works to be noted: John W. Monette’s History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi, New York, 1846-1848;[542] S. P. Hildreth’s Pioneer History of the Ohio Valley, Cincinnati, 1848, which but cursorily touches the French period; James H. Perkins’s Annals of the West, Cincinnati, 1846, which brought ripe scholarship to the task at a time before the scholar could have the benefit of much information now accessible;[543] Adolphus M. Hart’s History of the Discovery of the Valley of the Mississippi, Cincinnati, 1852,—a slight sketch, as we now should deem it, but followed soon after by a more scholarly treatment in J. G. Shea’s Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley, New York, 1852, to which a sequel, Early Voyages up and down the Mississippi, was published in 1861, containing the voyages of Cavelier, Saint Cosme, Le Sueur, Gravier, and Guignas, during the last[200] years of the century; George Gale’s Upper Mississippi, Chicago, 1867,—a topical treatment of the subject; and Rufus Blanchard’s Discovery and Conquests of the Northwest, Chicago, 1880—the latest general survey of the subject. Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, under the names of these several States, can often be usefully consulted.
THE ROUTES OF EARLY FRENCH EXPLORATIONS.
This sketch follows a modern map given by Parkman. There is a similar route-map given in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog., November, 1880, accompanying a paper by M. J. Thoulet. In the above sketch the portages are marked by dotted lines.
JOLIET, MARQUETTE, AND LA SALLE.
HISTORICAL SOURCES AND ATTENDANT CARTOGRAPHY.
BY THE EDITOR.
THE principal sources for the cartographical part of this study are as follows: The collection of manuscript copies[544] of maps in the French Archives which was formed by Mr. Parkman, and which he has described in his La Salle (p. 449), and which is now in Harvard College Library; a collection of manuscript and printed maps called Cartographie du Canada, formed by Henry Harrisse in Paris, and which in 1872 passed into the hands of Samuel L. M. Barlow, Esq., of New York, by whose favor the Editor has had it in his possession for study; the collection of copies made by Dr. J. G. Kohl which is now in the Library of the State Department at Washington, and which through the kind offices of Theodore F. Dwight, Esq., of that department, and by permission of the Secretary of State, have been intrusted to the Editor’s temporary care; and the collection of printed maps now in Harvard College Library, formed mainly by Professor Ebeling nearly a hundred years ago, and which came to that library, with all of Ebeling’s books, as a gift from the late Colonel Israel Thorndike, in 1818.[545]
The completest printed enumeration of maps is in the section on “Cartographie” in Harrisse’s Notes pour servir à l’histoire ... de la Nouvelle France, 1545-1700, Paris, 1872, and this has served the Editor as a convenient check-list. A special paper on “Early Maps of Ohio and the West” constitutes no. 25 of the Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society. It was issued in 1875, and has been published separately, and is the work of Mr. C. C. Baldwin, secretary of that Society, whose own collection of maps is described by S. D. Peet in the American Antiquarian, i. 21. See also the Transactions (1879) of the Minnesota Historical Society.
The main guide for the historical portion of this essay has been the La Salle of Parkman.[546]
There are in the Dépôt de la Marine in Paris two copies of a rough sketch on parchment, showing the Great Lakes, which were apparently made between 1640 and 1650. They have neither maker’s name nor date, but clearly indicate a state of knowledge derived from the early discovery of the Upper Lakes by way of the Ottawa, and before the southern part[202] of Lake Huron had been explored, and found to connect with Lake Erie. The maker must have been ignorant of the knowledge, or discredited it, which Champlain possessed in 1632 when he connected Ontario and Huron. Indications of settlements at Montreal would place the date of this map after 1642; and it may have embodied the current traditions of the explorations of Brulé and Nicolet, though it omits all indications of Lake Michigan, which Nicolet had discovered. Though rude in many ways, it gives one of the earliest sketches of the Bras d’Or in Cape Breton. The channel connecting the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence, if standing for anything, must represent the Connecticut and the Chaudière. Dr. Kohl, in a marginal note on a copy of this map in his Washington Collection, while referring to the uninterrupted water-way by the Ottawa, remarks on a custom, not uncommon on the early maps, of leaving out the portages; and the same suspicion may attach to the New England water-way here given. A note on the map gives the distance as three hundred leagues from Gaspé to the extremity of Lake Ontario; two hundred more to the land of the buffaloes; two hundred additional to the region of apes and parrots; then four hundred to the Sea of New Spain; and thence fifteen or sixteen hundred more to the Indies. A legend in the neighborhood of Lake Superior confirms other mention of the early discovery of copper in that region: “In the little lake near the mountains are found pieces of copper of five and six hundred pounds’ weight.”
THE OTTAWA ROUTE, 1640-1650.
At a later day La Salle had learned, from some Senecas who visited his post at Lachine, of a great river, rising in their country and flowing to the sea; and, with many geographers of his day, captivated with a promised passage to India, he preferred to believe that it emptied into the Gulf of California.[547]
DOLLIER AND GALLINÉE’S EXPLORATIONS.
This is a reduced sketch of no. 1 of Mr. Parkman’s maps, which measures 30 × 50 inches. It has two titles: Carte du Lac Ontario et des habitations qui l’environne, ensemble les pays que Messrs Dolier et Galiné, missionnaires du séminaire de St. Sulpice, ont parcouru, and Carte du Canada et des terres decouvertes vers le lac Derié. Voir la lettre du M. Talon du 10 9bre, 1670. The figures stand for the following names and legends:—
1. C’est ici qu’ils ont un fort Bel Establissement, une belle maison, et de grands dezerts semés de bled francois et de bled d’inde, pois et autres graines [referring to 70].
2. Baye des Puteotamites. Il y a dix Journées de Chemin du Sault ou sont les RR. S. PP. JJ. aux puteotamites, c’est a dire environ 150 lieues. Je n’ay entré dans cette Baye que jusques a ces Iles que J’ay marquées.
3. Ce lac est le plus grand de tous ceux du pays.
4. C’est icy qu’estoit une pierre qu’avoit tres peu de figures d’hommes, qui les Iroquois tenoient pour un grand Capne, et a qui ils faisoient des sacrifices lorsqu’ils passoient par icy pour aller en guerre. Nous l’avons mis en pieces et jetté à l’eau.
5. Lac Derié, je non marque que ce que j’en ay veu en attendant que je voie le reste.
6. Grandes prairies.
7. Presqu’isle du lac D’Erie.
8. Prairies. Terres excellentes.
9. C’est icy que nous avons hyverne en le plus beau lieu que j’aye yen en Canada, pour l’abondance des arbres, fruittiers, aces, raisins, qui sy grande qu’on en pourroit vivre en faisant provision, grand chasse de serfs, Bisches, Ours, Schenontons, Chats, Sauvages, et Castors.
10. Grand chasse a ce petit misseau.
11. Toutes ces costes sont extremt pierreuses et ne laissent pas d’y avoir des bestes.
12. C’est dans cette Baye que estoit autrefois le pays de Hurons lorsqu’ils furent defaits par les Iroquois, et ou les RR. PP. Jesuites estoient fort bien establis.
13. Je n’ay point vu cette ance ou estoit autrefois le pays des Hurons, mais je vois qu’elle est encore plus profonde que je ne la desseins, et c’est icy apparamment qu’aboutit le chemin par ou Mr. Perray a passé.
14. L’embouchure de cette rivière fort difficile a trouver a neanmoins la petite isle qui la precede est fort remarquable par la grande quantité de ces isles de roche dont elle est composée qui deboutent fort loin au large.
17. Chasse d’originaux Bans ces isles.
18. Amikoue.
20. Portage trainage.
21. Sault. C’est dans cette Ance que les Nipissiriniens placent pour l’ordinaire leur village. Portage, 600 pas.
22. Lac des Nipissiriniens ou des Sorciers.
24. Rivier des vases.
24-25. In this space various portages are marked.
26. On entre icy dans la grande Riviere.
27. Mataouan.
28. C’est d’icy que Mr. Perray et sa Compagnie ont campé pour entrer dans le lac des Hurons, quand j’aurray vu le passage je le donneray mais toujours dit-on que le chemin est fort beau, et c’est icy que s’establiront les missionnaires de St. Sulpice.
29. Ganatse kiagourif.
30. Village de tanaouaoua.
31. C’est a ce village qu’estoit autrefois Neutre. Grand partie sesche par tout icy et tout le long de la R. rapide.
32. Bonne Terre.
33. Grand chasse. Prairies siches.
34. R. Rapide ou de Tinaatoua.
35. Il y a le long de ces ances quantité de petits lacs separés seulement du grand par des Chaussées de Sable. C’est dans ces lacs que les Sanountounans prennent quantité de poisson.
36. Sault qui tombe au rapport des Sauvages de plus de 200 pieds de haut.
37. Excellente terre.
38. Petit lac d’Erie.
39. Sault ou il y a grande pesche de barbues.
40. Gaskounchiakons.
41. Excellente terre. Village du R. P. Fremin. 4 villages des Sonountouans, les des grands sont chacun de 100 Cabannes et les autres d’environ 20 a 25 sans aucune fortification non pas mesme naturelle; il faut mesme qu’ils aillent chercher l’eau fort loing.
42. Il y a de l’alun au pied de cette montagne fortaine de bitume. Excellente terre.
43. R. des Amandes et doneiout. R. des Oiogouins.
44. Abondance de gibier dans cette riviere. Quoyqu’il ne paroisse icy que des Sables sur le bord du lac. Ces terres ne laissent pas d’etre bonnes dans la profondeur. R. Denon taché.
45. Kahengouetta. Kaouemounioun.
46. Otondiata.
47. Pesche d’anguille tout au travers de la riviere.
48. Islets de roches.
49. Depuis icy Jusques a Otondiata il y a de forts rapides a toutes les pointes, et des remouils dans toutes les ances.
50. Lac St. Francois.
51. Habitation des RR. PP. Jesuites.
52. La Madelaine.
53. Lac St. Louis.
54. Habitation du Montreal.
55. Lac des 2 montagnes.
56. Belle terre. Terres nayées. Bonnes terres. Il faut faire 5 portages du Costé du Nord portage pour monter au lac St. François, mais du costé du sud on n’en fait qu’un.
57. Long sault.
58. Ces 2 rivieres en tombant dans la grande font 2 belles nappes, portage 50 pas.
59. L’estoit icy qu’estoit autrefois la petite nation Algonquine.
60. Portage du sault de la Chaudiere 300 pas.
61. L’estoit icy ou estoit le fameus Borgne de l’isle dans les relations des RR. PP. Jesuites.
62. Le grand portage du sault des Calumets est de ce costé, pour l’eviter nous prismes de l’autre coste.
63. Il faut faire 5 portages de ce costé icy d’environ 100 pas chacun.
64. Portage apellé des alumettes 200 pas.
65. Tres grande chasse d’originaux autour de ce petit lac.
66. On dit que cette branche de la grande Riviere va aux trois rivières.
67. Grand rapides.
68. Portage 200 pas.
69. Lac Superieur.
70. Fort des S. RRnds PP. Jesuites. Sauteurs.
71. Anipich.
72. R. de Tessalon. Mississague.
There are in the Kohl Collection, in the Department of State, two maps of Lake Ontario, of 1666, the original of one of which is credited to the Dépôt de la Marine.
He was determined to track it; and gaining some money by selling his grant at Lachine, and procuring the encouragement of Talon and Courcelles, he formed an alliance for the journey with two priests of the Seminary at Montreal, Dollier de Casson and Galinée, who were about going westward on a missionary undertaking. La Salle started with them on the 6th of July, 1669, with some followers, and a party of Senecas as guides. The savages led them across Lake Ontario to a point on the southern shore nearest to their villages, which the party visited in the hope of securing other guides to the great river of which they were in search. Failing in this, they made their way to the western extremity of the lake, where they fell in with Joliet, as mentioned in the preceding chapter. La Salle now learned Joliet’s route; but he was not convinced that it opened to him the readiest way to the great river of the Indians, though the Sulpitians were resolved to take Joliet’s route north of Lake Erie. When these priests returned to Montreal, in June, 1670, they brought[205] back little of consequence, except the data to make the earliest map which we have of the Upper Lakes, and of which a sketch is given herewith.
This map of Galinée, says Parkman,[548] was the earliest attempt after Champlain to portray the great lakes. Faillon, who gives a reproduction of this map,[549] says it is preserved in the Archives of the Marine at Paris; but Harrisse[550] could not find it there. There is a copy of it, made in 1856 from the original at Paris, in the Library of Parliament at Ottawa.[551] Faillon[552] gives much detail of the journey, for the Sulpitians were his heroes; and Talon made a report;[553] but the main source of our information is Galinée’s Journal, which is printed, with other papers appertaining, by Margry,[554] and by the Abbé Verreau.[555]
The Michigan peninsula, which Galinée had failed to comprehend, is fully brought out in the map of Lake Superior which accompanies the Jesuit Relation of 1670-1671.[556] Mr. Parkman is inclined to consider a manuscript map without title or date, but called in the annexed sketch “The Lakes and the Mississippi” (from a copy in the Parkman Collection), as showing “the earliest representation of the upper Mississippi, based perhaps on the reports of the Indians.”[557] He calls it the work of the Jesuits, whose stations are marked[206] on it by crosses. It seems however to be posterior to the time when Joliet gave the name Colbert to the Mississippi.
THE LAKES AND THE MISSISSIPPI.
This map bears legends or names corresponding to the following key: 1. Les Kilistinouk disent avoir veu un grand naviere qui hiverna à l’embouchure de ce fleuve; ils auroient fait une maison d’un coste et de l’autre un fort de bois. 2. Assinepouelak. 3. Oumounsounick. 4. Ounaouantagouk. 5. Chiligouek. 6. Outilibik. 7. Noupining-dachirinouek. 8. Ouchkioutoulibik. 9. Missisaking-dachiri-nouek. 10. Outaouak. 11. Michilimakinak. 12. Baye des Puans. 13. Oumalouminek. 14. Outagamik. 15. Nadouessi. 16. Icy mourut le P. Meynard. 17. Kikabou. 18. Ouenebegouk. 19. Pouteoutamic. 20. Ousakie. 21. Illinouek Kachkachki. 22. Mouingouea. 23. Ouchachai. 24. Ouemissirita. 25. Chaboussioua. 26. Pelissiak. 27. Monsoupale. 28. Paniassa. 29. Taaleousa. 30. Metchagamea. 31. Akenza. 32. Matorea. 33. Tamikoua. 34. Ganiassa. 35. Minou. 36. Kachkinouba.
What La Salle did after parting with the Sulpitians in 1669 is a question over which there has been much dispute. The absence of any definite knowledge of his movements for the next two years leaves ample room for conjecture, and Margry believes that maps which he made of his wanderings in this interval were in existence up to[207] the middle of the last century. It is from statements regarding such maps given in a letter of an aged niece of La Salle in 1756, as well as from other data, that Margry has endeavored to place within these two years what he supposes to have been a successful attempt on La Salle’s part to reach the Great River of the West. If an anonymous paper (“Histoire de Monsieur de la Salle”) published by Margry[558] is to be believed, La Salle told the writer of it in Paris,—seemingly in 1678,—that after leaving Galinée he went to Onondaga (?), where he got guides, and descending a stream, reached the Ohio (?), and went down that river. How far? Margry thinks that he reached the Mississippi: Parkman demurs, and claims that the story will not bear out the theory that he ever reached the mouth of the Ohio; but it seems probable that he reached the rapids at Louisville, and that from this point he retraced his steps alone, his men having abandoned him to seek the Dutch and English settlements. Parkman finds enough amid the geographical confusions of this “Histoire” to think that upon the whole the paper agrees with La Salle’s memorial to Frontenac in 1677, in which he claimed to have discovered the Ohio and to have coursed it to the rapids, and that it confirms the statements which Joliet has attached to the Ohio in his maps, to the effect that it was by this stream La Salle went, “pour aller dans le Mexique.”[559]
The same “Histoire” also represents that in the following year (1671) La Salle took the course in which he had refused to follow Galinée, and entering Lake Michigan, found the Chicago portage, and descending the Illinois, reached the Mississippi. This descent Parkman is constrained to reject, mainly for the reason that from 1673 to 1678 Joliet’s claim to the discovery of the Mississippi was a notorious one, believed by Frontenac and by all others, and that there was no reason why La Salle for eight years should have concealed any prior knowledge. The discrediting of this claim is made almost, if not quite, conclusive by no mention being made of such discovery in the memorial of La Salle’s kindred to the King for compensation for his services, and by the virtual admission of La Salle’s friends of the priority of Joliet’s discovery in a memorial to Seignelay, which Margry also prints.[560]
In 1672 some Indians from the West had told Marquette at the St. Esprit mission of a great river which they had crossed. Reports of it also came about the same time to Allouez and Dablon, who were at work establishing a mission at Green Bay; and in the Relation of 1672 the hope of being able to reach this Mississippi water is expressed.
Frontenac on his arrival felt that the plan of pushing the actual possession of France beyond the lakes was the first thing to be accomplished, and Talon, as we have seen, on leaving for France recommended Joliet[561] as the man best suited to do it. Jacques Marquette joined him at Point St. Ignace. The Jesuit was eight years the senior of the fur-trader, and of a good family from the North of France.
JOLIET’S MAP, 1673-1674.
Key: 1. Les sauvages habitent cette isle. 2. Sauvages de la mer. 3. Kilistinons. 4. Assiniboels. 5. Madouesseou. 6. Nations du nord. 7. Lac Supérieur. 8. Le Sault St. Marie. 9. Missilimakinak. 10. Kaintotan. 11. Lac Huron. 12. Nipissing. 13. Mataouan. 14. Tous les poincts sont des rapides. 15. Les trois rivieres. 16. Tadoussac. 17. Le Saguenay. 18. Le Fleuve de St. Laurent. 20. Montroyal. 21. Fort de Frontenac. 22. Lac Frontenac ou Ontario. 24. Sault, Portage de demi lieue. 25. Lac Erie. 26. Lac des Illinois ou Missihiganin. 27. Cuivre. 28. Kaure. 29. Baye des Puans. 30. Puans. 31. Maskoutins. 32. Portage. 33. Riviere Miskonsing. 34. Mines de fer. 35. Riviere de Buade. 36. Kitchigamin. 37. Ouaouiatanox. 38. Paoutet, Maha, Pana, Atontanka, Illinois, Peouarea, 300 Cabanes, 180 Canots de bois de 50 pieds de long. 39. Minongio, Pani, Ouchagé, Kansa, Messouni. 40. La Frontenacie. 41. Pierres Sanguines. 42. Kachkachkia. 43. Salpetre. 44. Riviere de la Divine ou l’Outrelaize. 45. Riv. Ouabouskigou. 46. Kaskinanka, Ouabanghihasla, Malohah. 47. Mines de fer; Chouanons, terres eiseléez, Aganatchi. 48. Akansea sauvages. 49. Mounsoupria. 50. Apistonga. 51. Tapensa sauvages. 52 and 53 (going up the stream which is called Riviere Basire). Atatiosi, Matora, Akowita, Imamoueta, Papikaha, Tanikoua, Aiahichi, Pauiassa. 54. Europeans. 55. Cap de la Floride. 56. Mer Vermeille, ou est la Califournie, par ou on peut aller au Perou, au Japon, et à la Chine.
Their course has been sketched in the preceding chapter. They seemed to have reached a conviction that the Great River flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. Their return was by the Illinois River and the Chicag[209] portage.[562] During the four months of their absence, says Parkman, they had paddled their canoes somewhat more than two thousand five hundred miles.
While Marquette remained at the mission Joliet returned to Quebec. What Joliet contributed to the history of this discovery can be found in a letter on his map, later to be given in fac-simile; a letter dated Oct. 10, 1674, given by Harrisse;[563] the letter of Frontenac announcing the discovery, which must have been derived from Joliet,[564] and the oral accounts which Joliet gave to the writer of the “Détails sur le voyage de Louis Joliet; and a Relation de la descouverte de plusieurs pays situez au midi de la Nouvelle France, faite en 1673,” both of which are printed by Margry.[565]
Within a few years there has been produced a map which seems to have been made by Joliet immediately after his return to Montreal. This would make it the earliest map of the Mississippi based on actual knowledge, and the first of a series accredited to Joliet. It is called Nouvelle découverte de plusieurs nations dans la Nouvelle France en l’année 1673 et 1674. Gabriel Gravier first made this map known through an Étude sur une carte inconnue; la première dressée par L. Joliet en 1674, après son exploration du Mississippi auec Jacques Marquette en 1673.[566] A sketch of it, with a key, is given herewith. The tablet in the sketch marks the position of Joliet’s letter to Frontenac, of which a reduced fac-simile is also annexed.
“In this epistle,” says Mr. Neill, “Joliet mentions that he had presented a map showing the situation of the Lakes upon which there is navigation for more than 1,200 leagues from east to west, and that he had given to the great river beyond the Lakes, which he had discovered in the years 1673-1674, the designation of Buade, the family name of Frontenac.[567] He adds a glowing description of the prairies, the groves, and the forests,” and writes of the quail (cailles) in the fields and the parrot (perroquet) in the woods. He concludes his communication as follows: “By one of the large rivers which comes from the west and empties into the River Buade, one will find a route to the Red Sea” [Mer vermeille, i. e. Gulf of California].
“I saw a village which was not more than five days’ journey from a tribe which traded with the tribes of California;[568] if I had arrived two days before, I could have conversed with those who had come from thence, and had brought four hatchets as a present. You would have seen a description of these things in my Journal, if the success which had accompanied me during the voyage had not failed me a quarter of an hour before arriving at the place from which I had departed. I had escaped the dangers from savages, I had passed forty-two rapids, and was about to land with complete joy at the success of so long and difficult an enterprise, when, after all dangers seemed past, my canoe turned over. I lost two men and my box in sight of the first French settlement, which I had left almost two years before. Nothing remains to me but my life, and the wish to employ it in any service you may please.” This Report was sent to France in November, 1674.
There is in Mr. Barlow’s Collection a large map (27 × 40 inches), which is held by Dr. Shea and General Clarke to be a copy of the original Joliet Map, with the Ohio marked in by a later and less skilful hand. A sketch of it is annexed as “Joliet’s Larger Map.”
A copy of what is known as “Joliet’s Smaller Map” is also in the Barlow Collection, and from it the annexed sketch has been made. This map is called Carte de la descouverte du Sr Jolliet, ou l’on voit la communication du Fleuve St. Laurens avec les Lacs Frontenac, Erie, Lac des Hurons, et Illinois ... au bout duquel on va joindre la Rivière divine par un portage de mille pas qui tombe dans la Rivière Colbert et se descharge dans le Sein Mexique. Though evidently founded in part on the Jesuits’ map of Lake Superior, it was an improvement upon it, and was inscribed with a letter addressed to Frontenac. The Valley of the Mississippi is called Colbertie; the Ohio is marked as the course of La Salle’s route to the Gulf;[569] the Wisconsin is made the route of Joliet.
Mr. Parkman describes another map, anonymous, but “indicating a greatly increased knowledge of the country.” It marks the Ohio as a river descended by La Salle, but it does not give the Mississippi.[570] Harrisse found in the Archives of the Marine a map which he thought to be a part of the same described by Parkman, and this was made by Joliet himself later than 1674.
There is in the Parkman Collection another map ascribed to Joliet, and called in the sketch given herewith “Joliet’s carte générale,” which Parkman thinks was an early work (in the drafting, at least) of the engineer Franquelin. It is signed Johannes Ludovicus Franquelin pinxit; but it is a question what this implies. Harrisse[571] thinks that Franquelin is the author, and places it under 1681. Gravier holds it to imply simply Franquelin’s drafting, and affirms that it corresponds closely with a map signed by Joliet, which has already been mentioned as his earliest. Mr. Neill says of this map that it “is the first attempt to fix the position of the nations north of the Wisconsin and west of Lake Superior. The Wisconsin is called Miskous, perhaps intended for Miskons; and the Ohio is marked ‘Ouaboustikou.’ On the upper Mississippi are the names of the following tribes: The ‘Siou,’ around what is now called the Mille Lacs region, the original home of the Sioux of the Lakes, or Eastern Sioux; the Ihanctoua, Pintoüa, Napapatou, Ouapikouti, Chaiena, Agatomitou, Ousilloua, Alimouspigoiak. The Ihanctoua and Ouapikouti are two divisions of the Sioux, now known as Yanktons and Wahpekootays. The Chaiena were allies of the Sioux, and hunted at that time in the valley of the Red River of the North. The word in the Sioux means ‘people of another language,’ and the voyageurs called them Cheyennes.”
WESTERN PORTION OF JOLIET’S LARGER MAP (1674).
A reduced sketch of the copy in the Barlow Collection. The river marked “Route du Sieur de la Salle” is seemingly drawn in by a later hand, and the stream is without the coloring given to the other rivers. In its course, too, it runs athwart the vignette surrounding the scale at the bottom of the map, as if added after that was made. It is Harrisse’s no. 203.
EASTERN PORTION OF JOLIET’S LARGER MAP (1674).
Mention may be made in passing of a small map within an ornamented border, and detailing the results of these explorations, which bears a Dutch title in the vignette, and another along the bottom in French, as follows: Pays et peuple decouverts en 1673 dans la partie septentrionale de l’Amerique par P. Marquette et Joliet, suivant la description qu’ils en ont faite, rectifiée sur diverses observations posterieures de nouveau mis en jour par Pierre Vander Aa à Leide.
JOLIET’S SMALLER MAP.
This is Harrisse’s no. 204. The original is in the Archives of the Marine at Paris; cf. Library of Parliament Catalogue, 1858, p. 1615; Parkman’s La Salle, p. 453.
BASIN OF THE GREAT LAKES.
A reduced sketch of no. 3 of the Parkman maps, which measures 30 × 44 inches. It is without title or maker’s name, and the figures stand for the names and legends as given below:
1. Pays des Outaouacs qui habitent dans les forets.
2. Par cette riviere on va aus assinepoüalac a 150 lieues vers le Noreouest ou il y a beaucoup de Castor.
3. Isle Minong ou l’on croyoit que fust la mine de Cuivre.
4. Par cette riviere on va pays des nadouessien a 60 lieues au couchant. Ils ont 15 villages et sont fort belligueux et la terreur de ces contrées.
5. Pointe du St. Esprit.
6. R. Nantounagan.
7. Autrefois les restes de la Nation Huronne sestoient refugiez icy et les Jesuites y avoient une mission. Maintenant les Nadouessien ostants aus Hurons la liberté de chasser aus castors, ses sauvages ont quitté et les Jesuites les ont suivie.
8. Toutes ses nations qui se sont retirées en ces pays par terreur des Iroquois ont une tres grande quantité de Castors.
9. Nation et riviere des Oumalouminec, ou de la folle auoine.
10. Outagamis.
11. R. Mataban.
12. Isles ou les Hurons se refugierent apres la destruction de leur nation par les Iroquois.
13. Les pp. Jesuites ont icy une mission.
14. Kakaling rapide de trois lieues de longuerer.
15. Kitchigamenqué, ou lac St. Francois.
16. Pouteatamis.
17. Oumanis.
18. Maskoutens ou Nation du feu.
19. Riviere de la Divine.
20. Les plus grands navires peuvent venir de la decharge du lac Erie dans le lac frontenac jusques icy et de ce marais ou ils peuvent entrer il n y a que mille pas de distance jusqu’a la riviere de la Divine qui les peut porter jusqu’a la riviere Colbert et de la golfe de Mexique.
21. Riviere Ohio ainsy apellée par les Iroquois a cause de sa beauté par ou le Sr. de la Salle est descendu.
22. Les Illinois.
23. Raye des Kentayentoga.
24. Les Chaoüenons.
25. Cette riviere baigne un fort beau pays ou l’on trouvé des pommes, des grenades, des raisins et d’autres fruits sauvages. Le Pays est decouvert pour la plus part, y ayant seulement des bois d’espace en espace. Les Iroquois ont détruit la plus grande partie des habitans dont on voit encore quelques restes.
26. Tout ce pays est celuy qui est aus Environs du lac Teiochariontiong est decouvert. L’hiver y est moderé et court; les fruits y viennent en abondance; les bœufs sauvages, poules dinde et toute sorte de gibier s’y trouvent en quantité et il y a encore force castor.
27. Baye de Sikonam.
28. Les Tionontateronons.
29. Detroit de Missilimakinac.
30. Missilimakinac mission des Jesuites. Detroit par ou le lac des Illinois communique avec celuy des Hurons, par ou passent les sauvages du midy quand ils vont au Montreal chargez de Castors.
31. Sault de Ste. Marie. Ce sault est un Canal de demie lieue de largeur par lequel le lac Superieur se decharge dans le lac Huron.
32. Dans ce lac on trouve plusieurs morceaux de cuivre rouge de rozette tres pure. Outakouaminan.
33. Sauteurs. Sauvages qui habitent aus environs du Sault Ste. Marie.
34. Bagonache.
35. Gens des Torres. Toutes ces nations vivent de chasse dans les bois sans villages, et la plus part sans cultivee la terre, se trouvans seulement a de certains rendezvous de festes et de foire de temps en temps.
36. Kilistinons.
37. Les Alemepigon.
38. Ekaentoton Isle.
39. Lieu de l’assemblée de tous les sauvages allans en traitte a Montreal.
40. Les Kreiss.
41. Cette riviere vient du lac Nipissing. R. des Francois.
42. Les Amicoue.
43. Les Missisaghé.
44. Lac Skekoven ou Nipissing.
45. Sorciers.
46. A cet endroit il y a plusieurs petits marais par ou l’on va dans le lac Nipissing en portant plusieurs fois les canots.
47. Nipissiens.
48. Sault au talc Mataouan.
49. Sault au lieure. Sault aux Allumettes. Isle du Borgne.
50. Sault des Calumets.
51. Riviere des Outaouacs ou des Hurons.
52. Les Sauvages Loups et Iroquois tirent d’icy la plus grande partie du Castor qu’ils portent aus Anglois et aus Hollandois.
53. Cette rivière sort du lac Taronto et se jette dans le lac Huron.
54. Chemin par ou les Iroquois vont aus Outaoüacs, qu’ils auroient mené trafiquer a la Nouvelle Hollande si le fort de Frontenac n’eust ésté basti sur leur route.
55, 56. Villages des Iroquois dont quantité s’habituent de ce côté depuis peu. Teyoyagon, Ganatchekiagon, Ganevaské, Kentsio.
57. Canal par ou le lac des Hurons se decharge dans le lac Erie.
58. Tsiketo ou lac de la Chaudiere.
59. Atiragenrega, nation detruite.
60. Antouaronons, nation detruite.
61. Niagagarega, nation detruite. Chute haute de 120 toises par ou le lac Erie tombe dans le lac Frontenac.
62. Les Iroquois font leurs pesches dans tous les marais ou etangs qui bordent ce lac, d’ou ils tirent leur principale subsistance.
63. Ka Kouagoga, nation detruite.
64. Negateca fontaine.
65. Tsonontouaeronons.
66. Goyogouenronons.
67. Les environs de ce lac et l’extremité occidentale du lac Frontenac sont infestes de gantastogeronons, ce qui en eloigne les Iroquois.
68. Ce lac n’est pas le lac Erie, comme on le nomme ordinnairement. Erie est une partie de la Baye de Chesapeack dans la Virginie, ou les Eriechronons ont toujours demeuré.
69. Riviere Ohio, ainsy dite a cause de sa beauté.
70. Lac Onia-sont.
71. Les Oniasont-Keronons.
72. Riviere qui se rend dans la baye de Chesapeack.
73. Cahihonoüaghé, lieu on la plus part des Iroquois et des Loups debarquent pour aller en traitte du Castor a la Nouvelle York par les chemins marques de double rangs de points.
74. Les plus grands bastimens peuvent naviguer d’icy jusque au bout du lac Frontenac.
75. Korlar.
76. Albanie, ci-devant Fort d’Orange.
77. Riviere du nord, ou des traittes ou Maurice.
78. Otondiata.
79. Tout ce qui est depuis la Nouvelle Hollande jusques icy et le long du fleuve St. Laurent est convert de bois. La terre y est bonne pour la plus part et produit de fort beau blé.
80. Riviere Onondkouy.
81. Lac Tontiarenhé.
82. Ohaté.
83. Lac et riviere de Tanouate Kenté.
84. En cet endroit la grande riviere se précipite dans un puis dont on ne voit pas sortir.
85. Sault des chats.
86. Petite nation.
87. Long sault.
88. R. et I. Jesus, Montreal, etc.
89. Lac Champlain.
90. Lac du St. Sacrement.
91. Montagnes ou l’on trouve des veines de plomb, mais peu abondante.
92. St. Jean rapide.
93. Riviere de Richelieu.
94. Sorel.
95. Sauvages apelles Mahingans, ou Socoquis.
96. Socoquois, Goutsagans, Loups.
97. Vershe Riviere [Connecticut].
Dr. Shea places this map after La Salle’s descent of the Mississippi, “as the Ohio at its mouth was not recognized at that time as the Ohio of the Iroquois.” See Margry, ii. 191.
Something now needs to be said regarding Marquette’s contribution to our knowledge of this expedition of 1673. He seems to have prepared from memory a narrative for Frontenac, which is printed in two different forms in Margry.[572] Dablon used this account in his Relation, and sent a copy of the manuscript to Paris;[573] but he seems also to have prepared another copy, which was, with the original map, confided finally to the Archives of the Collége Ste. Marie at Montreal, where Shea found it, and translated it for his Discovery of the Mississippi,[574] in 1853, giving with it a fac-simile of the map.[575]
Mr. Neill, in comparing this map with the earliest of Joliet’s, as reproduced by Gravier says: “Joliet marks the large island toward the extremity of Lake Superior known as Isle Royale; but he gives no name, and he indicates four other islands on the north shore.”
JOLIET’S CARTE GÉNÉRALE.
“This is a sketch reduced from the Parkman copy of the map, which measures 36 × 30 inches, and is called Carte genlle de la France septle contenant la descouverte du Pays des Illinois, faite par le Sr Jolliet; and is dedicated “A Monseigneur, Monseigneur Colbert, Conseiller du Roy en son Conseil Royal, Ministre et Sécrétaire d’Estat, Commandeur et Grand Trésorier des Ordes de sa Majesté, par son tres humble, tres obeisst, et tres fidelle serviteur, Duchesnau, Intendant de la Nouvelle France.” The figures stand for the following names and legends: 1. Alimouspigoiak. 2. Oussiloua. 3. Agatomitou. 4. Chaiena. 5. Ouapikouti. 6. Napapatou. 7. Pintoüa. 8. Ihanctoua. 9. Paoutek. 10. Maha. 11. Oloutanta. 12. Moengouena. 13. Ouatoutatoüaoü. 14. Grand Village. 15. Tanikoüa. 16. Acahichi. 17. Minouk. 18. Emmamoüata. 19. Akoraa. 20. Ototehiahi. 21. Tahenfa. 22. Europeans [sic]. 23. Mine de fer, Sable doré, Terre rouge ou siselée, Gouza. 24. R. Ouaboustikou. 25. Mataholi et Apistanga, 18 villages. 26. Chaoüanone, 15 villages. 27. Chaboüafioüa. 28. Mine de cuivre rouge. 29. Ilinois. 30. Riviere Miskous. 31. Mine de fer. 32. Maskoutens. 33. Outagami. 34. Puans. 35. Chaoüamigon. 36. Siou. 37. Assinibouels. 38. Lac des Assinibouels. 39. Minonk I. 40. Miscillimakinac. 41. Saut. 42. Missaské. 43. Amikoue. 44. Nipissink. 45. Mataouan. 46. Riviere des Outaouacks. 47. Kinté. 48. Ganateliftiagon. 49. Ganerafké. 50. I. Caiu-toton. 51. Fort Frontenac. 52. Teiaiagon. 53. Saût. 54. Sonontouans. 55. Oioguens. 56. Noutahe. 57. Onéoioutes. 58. Agnez. 59. Orange. 60. Hope. 61. Manate. 62. Lac St. Sacrémt. 63. Lac Champlain. 64. Ste. Terese. 65. Sorel. 66. Montreal. 67. Trois Rivieres. 68. Quebec. 69. Tadoussac. 70. R. St. Jean. 71. Ketsicagouesse. 72. Baye des Espagnols. 73. Terre Neuve. 74. Cape de Raze. 75. Plaisance. 76. I. la Magdelaine. 77. I. Brion. 78. I. aux oiseaux. 79. Cap Breton. 80. Canceaux. 81. Acadie. 82. Port Royal. 83. Baye des Chaleurs. 84. I. Bonventure. 85. I. Percée. 86. R. St. Jean. 87. R. Ste. Croix. 88. R. Etchemins. 89. R. Pintagouete. 90. Baston. 91. Miskoutenagach. 92. Ouabakounagon.
Marquette shows the large island only, but without a name. Joliet on the north shore of Lake Huron has three large islands,—one marked Kaintoton; Marquette has the same number, but without names. Parallel columns will show some other names of the two maps; the last three of each column referring to tribes between Green Bay and the Mississippi:—
| Joliet’s Map. | Marquette’s Map. |
| 1. Lac Superieur. 2. Lac des Illinois, ou Missihiganin. 3. Baye des Puans. 4. Puans. 5. Outagami. 6. Maskoutens. |
|
| 07. Lac Superieur, ov De Tracy. 08. Lac des Illinois. 09. No name. 10. Pouteoutami. 11. Outagami. 12. Maskoutens. |
Joliet gives the name Miskonsing to the river, and marks the portage; while Marquette gives no names. The country south of Lake Superior and west of Lake Michigan in Marquette is blank. In Joliet it is marked ‘La Frontenacie.’ West of Lake Superior in Marquette is a blank; in Joliet are several lakes and the tribe of Madouesseou. Joliet calls the Mississippi, Rivière de Buade, and Marquette names it R. de la Conception.”
The original French of the narrative as Shea found it at Montreal was printed for Mr. Lenox in 1855,[576] and bears the following title: Récit des voyages et des découvertes du P. J. Marquette en l’année 1673, et aux suivantes;[577] and the copy being defective in two leaves, this matter was supplied from the print of Thevenot, next to be mentioned.
The copy which Dablon sent to Paris was used by Thevenot, who gives it, with some curtailment, in his Recueil de voyages, published in Paris in 1681,[578] with the caption: “Voyage et découverte de quelques pays et nations de l’Amérique septentrionale par le P. Marquette et Sr. Joliet.”[579]
The Jesuits about this time made a map, which, from having been given in Thevenot as Marquette’s, passed as the work of that missionary till Shea found the genuine one in Canada. What was apparently the original of this in Thevenot is a manuscript which Harrisse[580] says was formerly in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, but cannot now be found. Mr. Parkman has a copy of it, and calls it “so crude and careless, and based on information so inexact, that it is of little interest.”[581]
MARQUETTE’S GENUINE MAP.
As engraved in Thevenot, this map differs a little, and bears the title: “Carte de la découverte faite l’an 1673, dans l’Amérique septentrionale. Liebaux fecit.” Sparks followed this engraving in the map in his Life of Marquette, and calls it, with the knowledge then current, “the first that was ever published of the Mississippi River.”[582]
Marquette’s later history is but brief. In the autumn of the next year (1674) he started to found a mission among the Illinois; but being detained by illness near Chicago, he did not reach the Indian town of Kaskaskia till the spring of 1675. His strength was ebbing, and he started with his companions to return to St. Ignace, but had only reached a point on the easterly shore of Lake Michigan, when he died, and his companions buried him beside their temporary hut. The next year some Ottawas who had been of his flock unearthed the bones and carried them to Michillimackinac, where they were buried beneath the floor of the little mission chapel.[583]
MISSISSIPPI VALLEY, 1672-1673.
This is a reduction of a manuscript map placed by Mr. Parkman in Harvard College Library, no. 5 of the series, entitled: Carte de la nouvelle decouverte que les péres Jesuites ont fait en l’année 1672, et continnuée par le P. Iacques Marquette de la mesme compagnie, accompagné de quelques françois en l’année 1673, qu’on pourra nommer en françois La Manitoumie a cause de la statue qui s’est trouvée dans une belle vallée, et que les sauvages vont reconnoistre pour leur divinitè, qu’ils appellent Manitou qui signifie esprit ou génie. A rude figure of this statue is placed on the map at 4, with this legend: “Manitou statue ou les sauvages font faire leurs adorations.” The other longer legends are: 1. “Nations qui ont des chevaux et des chameaux.” 2. “On est venu jusques icy a la hauteur de 33 deg.” 3. “Monsoupena, ils ont des fusila.” It will be seen that the return route of Marquette and Joliet is incorrectly laid down. Parkman’s La Salle, p. 65.
Thirty years ago there were statements made by M. Noiseux, late vicar-general of Quebec, to the effect that Marquette was not the first priest to visit the Illinois; but the matter was set at rest by Dr. Shea.[584] A renewed interest came in 1873 with the bicentennial of the discovery. Dr. Shea delivered an address on the occasion of the celebration,[585] and he also made an Address on the same theme before the Missouri Historical Society, July 19, 1878.[586] At the Laval University in Quebec the anniversary was also observed on the 17th of June, 1873, when a discourse was delivered by the Abbé Verreau.[587]
FORT FRONTENAC.
This sketch follows a plan sent by Denonville in 1685 to Paris, which is engraved in Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française, iii. 467. The key is as follows: 1. Four à chaux. 2. Grange. 3. Etable. 4. Logis. 5. Corps de garde. 6. Guerite sur la porte. 7. Boulangerie. 8. Palissade. 9. Moulin. 10. Mortier sans chaux. 11. Fondement bâti. 12. Haut de 4 pieds. 13. Haut de 12 pis. 14. A chaux et sable. 15. Puits. 16. Magasin à poudre. The peninsula extended into Lake Ontario. It is the fort as rebuilt of stone by La Salle. Cf. the paper on La Salle’s expenses on this fort, etc., in 2 Pennsylvania Archives, vi. 14, of which the original and other papers are given in Margry (i. 291).
New complications were now forming. The new governor, Frontenac, was needy in purse, expedient in devices, and on terms of confidence with a man destined to gain a name in this western discovery.[588] This was La Salle. Parkman pictures him with having a certain robust ambition to conquer the great valley for France and himself, and to outdo the Jesuits. Shea sees in him little of the hero, and few traces of a powerful purpose.[589] Whatever his character, he was soon embarked with Frontenac on a far-reaching scheme. It has been explained in the preceding chapter how the erection of a fort had been begun by Frontenac near the present town of Kingston on Lake Ontario. By means of such a post he hoped to intercept the trafficking of the Dutch and English, and turn an uninterrupted peltry trade to the French. The Jesuits at least neglected the scheme, but[223] neither Frontenac nor La Salle cared much for them.[590] Fort Frontenac was the first stage in La Salle’s westward progress, and he was politic enough to espouse the Governor’s side in all things when disputes occasionally ran high. His becoming the proprietor of the seigniory, which included the new fort, meant the exclusion of others from the trade in furs, and such exclusion made enemies of the merchants. It meant also colonization and settlements; and that interfered with the labors of the Jesuits among the savages, and made them look to the great western valley, of which so much had been said; but La Salle was looking there too.[591]
In the first place he had strengthened his fort. He had pulled down the wooden structure, and built another of stones and palisades, of which a plan is preserved to us. He had drawn communities of French and natives about him, and maintained a mission, with which Louis Hennepin was connected. We have seen how in the autumn of 1677[592] he went once more to France, securing the right of seigniory over other posts as he might establish them south and west during the next five years. This was by a patent dated at St. Germain-en-Laye, May 12, 1678.[593] With dreams of Mexico and of a clime sunnier than that of Canada, La Salle returned to Quebec to make new leagues with the merchants, and to listen to Hennepin, who had come down from Fort Frontenac to meet him.[594] Mr. Neill (in the previous chapter) has followed his fortunes from this point, and we have seen him laying the keel of a vessel above the cataract.[595]
While this was going on La Salle returned below the Falls, and having begun two blockhouses on the site of the later Fort Niagara,[596] proceeded to Fort Frontenac. By spring Tonty had the “Griffin” ready for launching. She was of forty-five or fifty tons, and when she had her equipment on board, five cannon looked from her port-holes. The builders made all ready for a voyage in her, but grew weary in waiting for La Salle, who did not return till August, when he brought with him Membré the priest, whose Journal we are to depend on later, and the vessel departed on the voyage which Mr. Neill has sketched.[597]
After the “Griffin” had departed homeward from this region, La Salle and his canoes followed up the western shores of the lake, while Tonty and another party took the eastern. The two finally met at the Miamis, or St. Joseph River, near the southeastern corner of Lake Michigan.
They now together went up the St. Joseph, and crossing the portage[598] launched their canoes on the Kankakee, an upper tributary of the Illinois River, and passed on to the great town of the tribe of that name, where Marquette had been before them, near the present town of Utica.[599] They found the place deserted, for the people were on their winter hunt. They discovered, however, pits of corn, and got much-needed food. Passing on, a little distance below Peoria Lake they came upon some inhabited wigwams. Among these people La Salle learned how his enemies in Canada were inciting them to thwart his progress; and there were those under this incitement who pictured so vividly the terrors of the southern regions, that several of La Salle’s men deserted.
In January (1680) La Salle began a fortified camp near at hand, and called it Fort Crèvecœur,[600] and soon after he was at work building another vessel of forty tons. He also sent off Michel Accau, or Accault, and Hennepin on the expedition, of which some account is given by Mr. Neill, and also by the Editor in a subsequent note. Leaving Tonty in command of the fort, La Salle, in March, started to return to Fort Frontenac, his object being to get equipments for his vessel; for he had by this time made up his mind that nothing more would be seen of the “Griffin” and her return lading of anchors and supplies. For sixty-five days he coursed a wild country and braved floods. He made, however, the passage of a thousand miles in safety to Fort Frontenac, only to become aware of the disastrous state of his affairs,—the loss of supplies.[601] A little later the same sort of news followed him from Tonty, whose men had mutinied and scattered. His first thought was to succor Tonty and the faithful few who remained with him; and accordingly he started again for the Illinois country, which he found desolate and terrible with[225] the devastations of the Iroquois. He passed the ruins of Crèvecœur, and went even to the mouth of the Illinois; and under these distressing circumstances he saw the Mississippi for the first time. Then he retraced his way, and was once again at Fort Miami. Not a sign had been seen of Tonty, who had escaped from the feud of the Iroquois and Illinois, not knowing which side to trust, and had made his way down the western side of Lake Michigan toward Green Bay.
La Salle meanwhile at Fort Miami was making new plans and resolutions. He had an idea of banding together under his leadership all the western tribes, and by this means to keep the Iroquois in check while he perfected his explorations southward. So in the spring (1681) he returned to the Illinois country to try to form the league; and while there first heard from some wandering Outagamies of the safe arrival of Tonty at Green Bay, and of the passage through that region of Hennepin eastward. Among the Illinois and on the St. Joseph he was listened to, and everything promised well for his intended league. In May he went to Michillimackinac, where he found Tonty and Membré, and with them he proceeded to Fort Frontenac. Here once more his address got him new supplies, and in the autumn (1681) he was again on his westward way. In the latter part of December, with a company of fifty-four souls,—French and savage, including some squaws,—he crossed the Chicago portage; and sledding and floating down the Illinois, on the 6th of February he and his companions glided out upon the Mississippi among cakes of swimming ice. On they went.[602] Stopping at one of the Chickasaw bluffs, they built a small stockade and called it after Prudhomme, who was left in charge of it. Again they stopped for a conference of three days with a band of Indians near the mouth of the Arkansas, where, on the 14th of March, in due form, La Salle took possession of the neighboring country in the name of his King.[603] On still they went, stopping at various villages and towns, securing a welcome by the peace-pipe, and erecting crosses bearing the arms of France in the open squares of the Indian settlements. On the 6th of April La Salle divided his party into three, and each took one of the three arms which led to the Gulf. On the 9th they reunited, and erecting a column just within one of the mouths of the river, La Salle formally took possession of the great Mississippi basin in the name of the French monarch, whom he commemorated in applying the name of Louisiana to the valley.[604]
Up the stream their canoes were now turned. On reaching Fort Prudhomme La Salle was prostrated with a fever. Here he stayed, nursed by Membré,[605] while Tonty went on to carry the news of their success to Michillimackinac, whence to despatch messengers to the lower settlements. At St. Ignace La Salle joined his lieutenant.
For the events of these two years we have two main sources of information. First, the “Relation de la descouverte de l’embouchure de la Rivière Mississipi dans le Golfe de Mexique, faite par le Sieur de la Salle, l’année passée, 1682,” which was first published by Thomassy;[606] the original is preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine, and though written in the third person it is held to constitute La Salle’s Official Report, though perhaps written for him by Membré.[607] Second, the narrative ascribed to Membré which[226] is printed in Le Clercq’s Établissement de la Foi, ii. 214, and which seems to be based on the document already named.[608]
In addition to this there is the paper of Nicolas de la Salle (no kinsman of the explorer), who wrote for Iberville’s guidance, in 1699, his Récit de la découverte que M. de la Salle a faite de la Rivière de Mississipi en 1682.[609]
La Salle’s future plans were now clearly fixed in his own mind, which were to reach from Europe the Mississippi by sea, and to make it the avenue of approach to the destined colonies, which he now sent Tonty to establish on the Illinois. With as little delay as possible, he went himself to join his deputy. In December they selected the level summit of the scarped rock (Starved Rock), on the river near the great Illinois town, and there intrenched themselves, calling their fort “St. Louis.” Around it were the villages and lodges of near twenty thousand savages, including, it is estimated, about four thousand warriors. To this projected colony La Salle was under the necessity of trying to bring his supplies from Canada till the route by the Gulf could be secured,—that Canada in which he had many enemies, and whose new governor, De la Barre, was hostile to him, writing letters of disparagement respecting him to the Court in Paris,[610] and seizing his seigniory at Fort Frontenac on shallow pretexts. Thwarted in all efforts for succor from below, La Salle left Tonty in charge of the new fort,[611] and started for Quebec, meeting on the way an officer sent to supersede him in command. From Quebec La Salle sailed for France.[612]
At this time the young French engineer, Franquelin, was in Quebec making record as best he could, from such information as reached headquarters, of the progress of the various discoverers. There are maps of his as early as 1679 and 1681 which are enumerated by Harrisse.[613] Parkman is also inclined to ascribe to Franquelin a map with neither[227] date nor author, but of superior skill in drafting, which is called Carte de l’Amérique septentrionale et partie de la meridionale ... avec les nouvelles decouvertes de la Rivière Mississipi, ou Colbert. It records an event of 1679 in a legend, and omits the lower Mississippi; which would indicate that the record was made before the results of La Salle’s explorations were known.[614] A sketch of the Map of 1682 is given herewith from a copy in the Barlow Collection.
MAP OF 1682.
From La Salle, on his arrival in Quebec late in 1683, Franquelin undoubtedly got new and trustworthy information of that explorer’s expedition down the Mississippi; and this he embodied in what is usually known as Franquelin’s Great Map of 1684. It professed to have been made in Paris, and as Franquelin was not in that city in 1684, Harrisse contends that it was the work of De la Croix upon Franquelin’s material. It is called Carte de la Louisiane, ou des voyages du Sieur de la Salle et des pays qu’il a découverts depuis[228] la Nouvelle-France jusqu’au Golfe de Mexique, les années 1679-80-81 et 82, par Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin, l’an 1684, Paris. It was formerly in the Archives du Dépôt de la Marine; but Harrisse[615] reports it as missing from that repository, and describes it from the accounts given by Parkman and by Thomassy.[616] A manuscript copy of this map was made for Mr. Parkman, which is now in Harvard College Library, and from this copy another copy was made in 1856, which is now in the Library of Parliament at Ottawa. Mr. Parkman’s copy has been used in the annexed sketch.
FRANQUELIN’S 1684 MAP.
Harrisse says that De la Croix made the Carte de l’Amérique septentle,[617] which also purports to be Franquelin’s, and shows the observations of “douze années.” Harrisse places this map also in 1684, for the reason that a third map by Franquelin, Carte de la Amérique septentrionale,[618] is dated 1688, and claims to embody the observations of “plus de 16 années,” giving names and legends not in the earlier ones.[619]
“It indicates,” says Mr. Neill, “the post which had been recently established by Du Lhut near the lower extremity of Lake Huron, and gives the present name, Manitoulin, to the large island of Lake Huron, and marks on the west shore a Baye de Saginnam. It places the mission on the south shore of Sault Ste. Marie, and names the rivers and points on the north and south shores of Lake Superior. A stream near the present northern boundary-line of the United States is called ‘R. des Grossillers,’ after the first explorer of Minnesota. The river entering Lake Superior at the present Fort William is ‘Kamanistigouian, ou Les Trois Rivières.’ Isle Royale is called ‘Minong;’ upon the northeast part of ‘Lac Alepimigon’ is Du Lhut’s post, ‘Fort La Tourette.’ At the portage between the sources of the St. Croix and a stream entering Lake Superior is ‘Fort St. Croix,’ which Bellin says was afterward abandoned. The St. Croix River is called ‘R. de la Magdelaine.’ At the lower extremity of Lake Pepin is ‘Fort St. Antoine;’ and the site of the present town of Prairie du Chien, near the mouth of the Wisconsin, appears as ‘Fort St. Nicolas,’ named in compliment to the baptismal name of Perrot. The Minnesota River is marked ‘Les Mascoutens Nadouescioux,’ indicating that it ran through the country of the Prairie Sioux. After Pierre Le Sueur had explored this river, De l’Isle, in his map of 1703, gives it the name of St. Pierre, as it is supposed in compliment to Le Sueur.”
A map of the next year (1689), also in the Archives, claims to be based on “Mémoires et relations qu’il a eu soin de recueillir pendant pres de 17 années.” Harrisse thinks this also a copy by De la Croix, and notes others of the probable dates of 1692 and 1699 respectively.[620] Harrisse also records[621] a manuscript map, “composée, corrigée, et augmentée sur les journaux, mémoires, et observations les plus justes qui en ont été ftes. en l’année 1685 et 1686,” which is also preserved in the French Archives; and a Carte Gēralle du voyage que Monsr De Meulles ... a fait; ... commencé le 9e Novembre et finy le 6e Juillet, 1686,[622] which was dedicated to Seignelay in the same year.
Parkman[623] says of the maps of Franquelin subsequent to his Great Map of 1684, that they all have more or less of its features, but that the 1684 map surpasses them all in interest and completeness.
It is convenient to complete here this enumeration of the maps of the western lakes and the Mississippi basin before we turn to La Salle’s explorations from the Gulf side.
One of the earliest of the printed maps is that called Partie occidentale du Canada, ou de la Nouvelle France, ou sont les nations des Ilinois, de Tracy, les Iroquois, et plusieurs autres peuples, avec la Louisiane nouvellement découverte, ... par le P. Coronelli, corrigée et augmentée par le Sr. Tillemon à Paris, 1688, of which the annexed sketch follows a copy in Harvard College Library. This was united with the Partie orientale in 1689 in a single smaller map.[624]
FRANQUELIN’S 1688 MAP.
CORONELLI ET TILLEMON, 1688.
The routes of several of the early explorers, like those of Du Lhut, Joliet, and Marquette (1672), and La Salle (1679-1680), are laid down on a manuscript map, Carte des parties les plus occidentales du Canada, par le Père Pierre Raffeix, S. J.,[625] which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and of which a sketch as “Raffeix, 1688,” is given on the next page.
A map of Lakes Ontario and Erie, by the Père Raffeix, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris;[626] and from a copy in the Kohl Collection at Washington the sketch on page 234 is taken. It is called, Le Lac Ontario avec les lieux circonvoisins et particulierment les cinq Nations Iroquoises.
Another map, thought to be the work of Raudin, Frontenac’s engineer,[627] should be found in the Archives of the Marine, but according to Harrisse it is not there.[628] The Barlow Collection, however, has a map which Harrisse believes to be the lost original; a sketch of the western part is given herewith.[629] It also gives the eastern seaboard with approximate accuracy, but represents Lake Champlain as lying along the headwaters of[233] the Connecticut and the Hudson. Lake Erie is a squarish oblong, larger than Ontario, and of a shape rarely found in these early maps. In the upper lakes it resembles the map of 1672-1673, which Harrisse[630] also found missing from the Bibliothèque Nationale.
The maps which pertain to Hennepin and Lahontan are separately treated on a later page.
RAFFEIX, 1688.
This sketch is from a copy in the Kohl Washington Collection. There is another copy in the Barlow Collection. The original is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. (Harrisse, Notes, etc., no. 238.) It is marked, Parties les plus occidentales du Canada, Pierre Raffeix, Jesuite. Harrisse puts it under 1688; Kohl says between 1681 and 1688. The lines of exploration, as indicated on it, are explained in the marginal inscriptions as follows:—
Voyage et premiere descouverte de la riviere de Mississipi faite par le P. Marquette, Jesuitte, et Mr. Jolliet, en 1672.
(—.—.) signifie l’allée.
(.....), le retour.
Ils furent jusques pres du 32 degré d’elevation. (.——.) Mr. du Lude, qui le premier a esté ches les Sious ou Nadouesiou en 1678, et qui a esté proche la source du Mississipi, et qui ensuitte vint retirer le p. Louis [Hennepin], qui avoit esté fait prisonnier ches les Sious au P., et sen reviendre finir leur descouverte par ou le P. Marquette et Mr. Jolliet commencer la leur.
(..—..—) Voyage de Mr. de la Salle en 1679, qui ariva au fond du lac des Illinois et qui voula commencer un petit fort, et une barque a Crevecoeur, d’ou le Pere Louis [Hennepin] partit pour aller en haut a la descouverte. Mr. de la Salle escrit qu’en 1681 il descendit sur le Mississipi, et qu’il a esté jusqua la mer.
(E) Voyage a faire et plus facile pour descouvrir tout le Missĩpi en venant du lac Ontario au bourg des Senontonans et de la en E.
(F) 1. De l’Embouchure de cette petite riviere jusqu’aux Assinipouals et aleurs lacs Ilne a que 100 lieues.
2. Le pais des Assinipouals qui est le plus a l’ouest est un pais de continuelles prairies cõme tout le long du Missĩpi, et l’on y voit quelque fois passer dans un jour plus de 2 a 3,000 beufs sauvages. Il faut remarquer que osté la forme exacte de lacs que le peu de temps na pas permis de rechercher et que l’on trouve dans d’autres cartes; les rivieres y sont marques avec beaucoup de soin.
Pierre Raffæix, Jesuitte.
La Salle once in Paris (1684) succeeded in obtaining an interview with the King, to whom he then and subsequently in Memorials,[631] which have been saved to us, presented an ambitious scheme of fortifying the Mississippi near its mouths, and of subjugating the neighboring Spanish colonies, of whose propinquity he had very confused notions, as Franquelin’s map showed.
ONTARIO AND ERIE, BY RAFFEIX, 1688.
Peñalosa was at the same time pressing on the Court a plan for establishing a French colony at the mouth of the Rio Bravo. La Salle’s personal address, too, turned the scales against La Barre.
Accordingly, La Forest, the rejected commander of Fort Frontenac, was sent back to Canada with letters from the King commanding the Governor to make restitution to La Salle’s lieutenant both of Fort Frontenac and of Fort St. Louis. La Salle’s shining promises so affected Louis, that the King gave him more vessels than he asked for; and of these one, the “Joly,” carried thirty-six guns, and another six.[632] Among his company were his brother Cavelier and two other Sulpitian priests, and three Recollects, Membré, Douay, and Le Clercq.
A captain of the royal navy, Beaujeu, was detailed to navigate the “Joly,” but under the direction of La Salle, who was to be supreme. La Salle’s distrust and vacillation, and Beaujeu’s jealousy and assumptions boded no good, and a dozen warm quarrels between them were patched up before they got to sea.[633]
PART OF RAUDIN’S MAP.
Harrisse says: “This is the only map in which the name Bazire is given to the Arkansas River. Bazire was a merchant of Canada who in 1673 supported Frontenac in his design of building Fort Frontenac, with which Raudin had also a great deal to do.” This follows the Barlow original. There is in the Parkman Collection a copy of a part of it by Harrisse.
There was not a little in all this to point to a state of mental unsoundness in La Salle. At a late day Joutel, a fellow-townsman of La Salle, destined to become the expedition’s historian, joined the fleet at Rochelle, and on the 24th of July (1684) it sailed, only to put back, four days later, to repair a broken bowsprit of the “Joly.” Once again they put to sea.
LA SALLE’S CAMP.
This is a reduced sketch from a copy in the Barlow collection of a Plan de l’entrée du lac ou l’on a laissé Monr de la Salle, which is preserved in the Archives of the Marine. It is Harrisse’s no. 226. The key is as follows: 1. Le camp de M. de la Salle. 2. Endroit ou la flutte c’est perdue. 3. La frigatte la “Belle” mouillée. 4 and 5. Cabannes des sauvages.
Everything still went wrong. The leaders chafed and quarrelled as on land.[634] The Spaniards captured their smallest vessel.[635] At Santo Domingo the Governor of the island and his officers joined in the quarrel on the side of La Salle, who now fell prostrate with disease. When he recovered he set sail again with his three remaining ships on the 25th of November, coasted the southern shore of Cuba, and on New Year’s Day (1685) sighted land somewhere near the River Sabine. He supposed himself east of the Mississippi mouths, when in fact he was far to the west of them. He knew their latitude, for he had taken the sun when there on his canoe voyage in 1682; but he had at that time no means of ascertaining their longitude. The “Joly” next disappeared in a fog, and La Salle waited for her four or five days, but in vain. So he sailed on farther till he found the coast trending southerly, when he turned, and shortly after met the “Joly.” Passages of crimination and recrimination between the leaders of course followed.[636] La Salle all the while was trying to make out that the numerous lagoons along the coast were somehow connected with the mouths of the Mississippi, while Beaujeu, vexed at the confusion and indecision of La Salle’s mind, did little to make matters clearer. They were in reality at Matagorda Bay. Trying to make an anchorage within, one of the vessels struck a reef and became a total wreck, and only a small part of her cargo was saved.[637] La Salle suspected it was done to embarrass him; and landing his men, he barricaded himself on the unhealthy ground, amid a confusion of camp equipage, including what was saved from the wreck. A swarm of squalid savages looked on, and saw a half-dozen of the Frenchmen buried daily. The Indians contrived to pilfer some blankets, and when a force[237] was sent to punish them they killed several of the French. Beaujeu offered some good advice, but La Salle rejected it; and finally, on the 12th of March the “Joly” sailed, and La Salle was left with his forlorn colony.[638] Beaujeu steered, as he thought, for the Baye du St. Esprit (Mobile Bay [?]); but his belief that he was leaving the mouths of the Mississippi made him miss that harbor, and after various adventures he bore away for France, and reached Rochelle about the 1st of July. With him returned the engineer, Minet, who made on the voyage a map of the mouths of the Mississippi doubly interpreted,—one sketch being based on the Franquelin map of 1684, as La Salle had found it in 1682; and the other conformed to their recent observations about Matagorda, into whose lagoons he made this great river discharge.[639]
CARTE DE LA LOUISIANE, BY MINET, 1685.
This is a reduced sketch from a copy (Barlow Collection) of the original in the Archives of the Marine, giving two plans of the mouth of the river,—the one in the body of the map as “La Salle le marque dans sa carte,” and the other (here put in the small square), “Comme nous les avons trouvez.” It is Harrisse’s no. 225.
It soon dawned upon La Salle that he was not at the Mississippi delta; and it was imperative that he should establish a base for future movements. So he projected a settlement on the Lavaca River, which flowed into the head of the bay; and thither all went, and essayed the rough beginnings of a post, which he called Fort St. Louis.[640] He was also constrained to lay out a graveyard, which received its tenants rapidly. As soon as housing and stockades were finished, La Salle, on the last day of October (1685), leaving Joutel in command, started with fifty men to search for the Mississippi.
The first tidings Joutel got of his absent chief was in January (1686), when a straggler from La Salle’s party appeared, and told a woeful story of his mishaps. By the end of March La Salle himself returned with some of his companions; others he had left in a palisaded fort which he had built on a great river somewhere away. While on his return he detached some of his men to find his little frigate, the “Belle,” which he had left at a certain place on the coast. These men also soon appeared, but they brought no tidings of the vessel. The loss of her and of what she had on board made matters very desperate, and La Salle determined on another expedition, this time to the Illinois country and to Canada, whence he could send word to France for succor. On the 22d of April they started,—La Salle, his brother Cavelier, the Friar Douay, and a score or so others.
Joutel was still left in command; and a few days later the appearance of six men, who alone had been saved from the wreck of the “Belle,” and reached the fort, confirmed the worst fears of that vessel’s fate. Meanwhile La Salle was experiencing dangers and evils of all kinds,—the desertion and death of his men, and delays by sickness, and the spending of ammunition. Once again there was nothing for him to do but to return to Joutel, and so with eight out of his twenty men he came back to the fort. The colony had dwindled from one hundred and eighty to forty-five souls, and another attempt to secure succor was imperative. So in January (1687) a new cheerless party set out, Joutel this time accompanying La Salle; and with the rest were Duhaut, a sinister man, and Liotot the surgeon. For two months it was the same story of suffering on the march and of danger in the camp. Then quarrels ensued; and the murder of La Salle’s nephew and two others who were devoted to him compelled the assassins to save themselves by killing La Salle himself; and from an ambuscade Duhaut and Liotot shot their chief. The party now succumbed to the rule of Duhaut. They ranged aimlessly among the Indians for a while, and fell in with some deserters of La Salle’s former expedition now living among the savages. One of these conspired with Hiens, one of those privy to La Salle’s death, and killed the assassins Duhaut and Liotot. Joutel with the few who were left now parted amicably with Hiens and the savage Frenchmen, and pushed their way to find the Great River. At a point on the Arkansas not far from its confluence with the Mississippi, they were rejoiced to find the abode of two of Tonty’s men. This sturdy adherent of La Salle’s fortunes had been reinstated, as we have seen, by the King’s order, in the command of the fortified rock on the Illinois, and had in due time, after the return of Beaujeu to Rochelle, got the news of La Salle’s landing on the Gulf. In February, 1686, he had started down the river with a band of French and Indians to join his old commander. He reached the Gulf,[641] but of course failed to find La Salle; and returning, had left several men in the villages of the Arkansas, of whom Couture and another now welcomed Joutel and his weary companions. After some delay the wanderers floated their wooden canoe down the Arkansas, and then began their weary journey up the Great River, and by the middle of September they reached the Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. They found Tonty absent, and Bellefontaine in command. They foolishly thought to increase their welcome by presenting themselves as the forerunners of La Salle, who was on the way,—tidings which kept all in good spirits except the Jesuit Allouez, who happened to be in the fort, and was ill, for he was conscious of his machinations against La Salle, and dreaded to encounter[239] him.[642] Cavelier and Joutel soon started for the Chicago portage. A storm on the lake impeded them subsequently, and they came back to the fort to find Tonty returned from Denonville’s campaign against the Senecas.[643] The same deceit regarding La Salle’s fate was practised on Tonty, and he gave them money and supplies as to La Salle’s representatives, only to learn a few months later, when Couture came up from the Arkansas, of La Salle’s murder. The wanderers, however, had now passed on, had reached Quebec in safety, still concealing what they knew, and not disclosing it till they reached France; and even in France there is a suspicion that Cavelier held his peace till he had secured some property against the seizure of La Salle’s creditors. Why Joutel connived at the deception is less comprehensible, for otherwise he bears a fair name. No representations of his, however, could induce the King to send succor to the hapless colony; and all the result, so far as known, of the tardy acknowledgment of La Salle’s death was an order sent to Canada for the arrest of his murderers.
The story which Couture told to Tonty in September inspired that hero with a determination to try to rescue La Salle’s colony on the Gulf. So in December he left his fortified rock, with five Frenchmen and three others. Late in March he was on the Red River, where all but two of his companions deserted him. He was himself finally, by the loss of his ammunition, compelled to turn back, but not till he had learned of the probable death of Heins.[644] In September he reached his fort on the Illinois; and here, with La Forest, he continued to live, holding the seigniory jointly under a royal patent, and trading in furs, till 1702, when the establishment was broken up.[645] Tonty now joined D’Iberville in Louisiana, and of his subsequent years nothing is known. The French again occupied his rocky fastness; but when Charlevoix saw it, in 1721, it was only a ruin.
The fate of the Texan colony is soon told. The Spaniards who had searched for it by sea had always missed it, though they had found the wrecked vessels.[646] A Frenchman, probably a deserter from La Salle, fell into the Spaniards’ hands in New Leon. From him they learned its position, and despatched under the Frenchman’s guidance a force to capture it. They found the fort deserted, and three dead bodies a little distance off. From the Indians they learned of two Frenchmen who were living with a distant tribe. They sent for them under a pledge of good treatment; and when they came, they proved to be L’Archevêque, one of Duhaut’s accomplices, and one of the stray deserters whom Joutel had discovered after the murder. They told a story of ravages from the small-pox and of slaughter by the savages. A few of the colonists had been saved by the Indian women; but these were subsequently given up to the Spaniards, and they added their testimony to the sad and ignominious end of the colony.
It is necessary to define the historical sources regarding this hapless Texan expedition, about the purpose of which there have been some diverse views lately expressed. It is clear that under cover of a grand plan of Spanish conquest, La Salle had dazed the imagination of the King in memorials,[647] which may possibly have been only meant to induce the royal espousal of his more personal schemes. Shea contends that La Salle’s real object was not to settle in Louisiana, but to conquer Santa Barbara and the mining regions in Mexico, and to pave the way for Peñalosa’s expedition.[648]
For the broader relations of the expedition to the earlier explorations of 1682, we must go to a source of the first importance preserved in the Archives of the Marine. It is entitled Mémoire envoyé en 1693 sur la découverte du Mississipi et des nations voisines par le Sieur de la Salle, en 1678, et depuis sa mort par le Sieur de Tonty, and is printed by Margry;[649] and Parkman calls it excellent authority. Out of this and an earlier paper, written in Quebec in 1684,[650] a book, disowned by Tonty, as Charlevoix tells us, was in part fabricated, and appeared at Paris in 1697 under the title of Dernières découvertes dans l’Amérique septentrionale de M. de la Salle, mises au jour par M. le Chevalier Tonti, gouverneur du Fort St. Louis, aux Islinois.[651] Parkman[652] calls it “a compilation full of errors,” and does not rely upon it. Shea says of it that, “although repudiated by Tonti, it must have been based on papers of his.” It has been held apocryphal by Iberville and Margry; but Falconer, La Harpe, Boimare, and Gravier put trust in it.
It is thought that a Journal by Joutel was written in part to counteract the statements of the Dernières découvertes. This Joutel paper was given first in full by Margry,[653] and Parkman[654] says of it that it seems to be “the work of an honest and intelligent man.”[655] It was printed in Paris in 1713, but abridged and changed in a way which Joutel complained of, and bore the title, Journal historique du dernier voyage que feu M. de la Salle fit dans le Golfe du Mexique, pour trouver l’embouchure du Mississipi. Par M. Joutel.[656]
To these there are various supplemental narratives, with their interest centring in the death of La Salle.[657] Joutel gives an account of the scene as he learned it at the time.[658] Tonty’s account was at second hand. Douay saw the deed, and what he reported is given in Le Clercq’s Établissement de la Foi.[659] A document in the Archives of the Marine—Relation de la mort du Sr. de la Salle, suivant le rapport d’un nommé Couture, à qui M. Cavelier l’apprit en passant au pays des Akansa—is given by Margry;[660] and Harrisse thinks that it merits little confidence.
Cavelier is known to have made a report to Seignelay; and his rough draft of this was recovered in 1854 by Parkman,[661] who calls it “confused and unsatisfactory in its statements, and all the latter part has been lost,” the fragment closing several weeks before the death of his brother.[662]
The character of Beaujeu has certainly been put in a more favorable light by the publication of Margry, and the old belief in his treachery has been somewhat modified.[663]
The Spanish account of the fate of the colony is translated from Barcia’s Ensayo cronologico de la Florida,[664] in Shea’s Discovery of the Mississippi;[665] and Margry[666] adds to our knowledge, as does Buckingham Smith in his Coleccion.[667]
It remains now to speak of the Collections which have been formed, and the theories regarding these Western explorations which have been maintained, by M. Pierre Margry, who has occupied till within a few years the office of archivist of the Marine and Colonies in Paris, having been for a long period assistant and principal. Margry may be said[242] to have discovered what that department contained in manuscripts relating to the explorations of the Mississippi Valley and River, particularly as regards La Salle’s agency. On more than one occasion he has done good service in helping to enrich the archives of New York[668] and Canada with copies of documents known to him,—so far, apparently, as they did not interfere with his own projects of publication. His position created relations for him with other departments of the French Government, and his eager discernment found an abundance of manuscript treasures even in private hands. These he assiduously gathered, and on a few occasions he published papers[669] which seemed to indicate more than he chose to disclose explicitly; for his fellow-students were not quite satisfied, and longed for the documents which had yielded so much. As the guardian of the public archives, he was by office the agent and servant of the public; but other investigators, it is feared, failed, through obstacles thrown in their way, to profit as they might by what that office contained. There is in the Sparks Collection of Manuscripts in Harvard College Library a volume of copies of such documents as could be found in the Paris Archives which that historian intended to use in another edition of his Life of La Salle. While Mr. Sparks was regretting that not a single document or letter in the hand of the great explorer had come down to us, enough to fill a large volume was immured in these Paris Archives. At a later day Mr. Parkman, in turn, failed of access to documents which were of the first importance to him, and he was obliged to make the best use he could of what it was possible to obtain. Environed by these disadvantages Mr. Parkman published, in 1869, his Discovery of the Great West. In his Preface, speaking of the obscurity which had enshrouded the whole subject, he referred to the “indefatigable research of M. Pierre Margry, Assistant-Custodian of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at Paris, whose labors as an investigator of the maritime and colonial history of France can be appreciated only by those who have seen their results.”
Gravier about the same time referred to the twenty years of study which had made M. Margry the most learned of students of La Salle’s history.
It was evident that investigators could not profit by this accumulation of material, unless M. Margry’s hopes of publication were realized. He refused offers to purchase. In conjunction with M. Harrisse, an effort was made by him in 1870-1871 to enlist the aid of the United States Congress; but a vote which passed the Senate failed in the House. The great fire at Boston in 1872 stayed the progress which, under Mr. Parkman’s instigation, had been made to insure a private publication. At last, by Mr. Parkman’s assiduous labors in the East, and by those of Colonel Whittlesey, Mr. O. H. Marshall, and others in the West, and with the active sympathy of the Hon. George F. Hoar, a bill was passed Congress in 1873, making a subscription for five hundred copies of the intended work.[670]
With this guaranty M. Margry put to press the series of volumes entitled Mémoires et documents pour servir à l’histoire des origines Françaises de pays d’outre-mer: découvertes et établissements des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud d’Amérique septentrionale. The first volume appeared in 1876. It contained an Introduction by M. Margry, and was prefixed by a very questionable likeness of La Salle,—the picture (of which nothing was said by the editor) having no better foundation than the improbable figure of the explorer in a copperplate, published some years after his death, representing the scene of his murder, and of which a fac-simile is annexed.[671] Of the intended volumes, three are devoted to La Salle, and appeared between 1876 and 1878: vol. i., Voyages des[243] Français sur les grands lacs, et découvertes de l’Ohio et du Mississippi, 1614-1684; vol. ii., Lettres de La Salle, et correspondance relative à ses entreprises, 1678-1685 (these include letters also preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale); vol. iii., Recherche des bouches du Mississipi et voyage à travers le continent depuis les côtes du Texas jusqu’à Québec.
The later volumes (the Editor has seen in Mr. Parkman’s hands the proofs of vols. iv. and v., and there is to be one more) pertain to Iberville and the following century; but a volume of the early cartography is promised as a completion of the publication. On the issue of these three volumes Mr. Parkman in considerable part rewrote his Discovery of[244] the Great West, and republished it in 1879 as La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. In his Preface he speaks of the collection of documents in Margry’s keeping “to which he had not succeeded in gaining access,” and which, besides the papers in his official charge, included others added by him from other public archives and from private collections in France. “In the course of my inquiries,” says Mr. Parkman, “I owed much to [M. Margry’s] friendly aid; but his collections as a whole remained inaccessible, since he naturally wished to be the first to make known the results of his labors.”
LA SALLE.
This follows a design given in Gravier (pp. 1, 202), which is said to be based on an engraving preserved in the Bibliothèque de Rouen, entitled Cavilli de la Salle François,—and is the only picture meriting notice, except possibly a small vignette of which Gravier gives a fac-simile in his Cavelier de la Salle. Mr. Parkman has a photograph, given to him by Gravier, of a modern painting drawn from the first of these two pictures. In the Magazine of American History, May, 1882, there is an engraving, “after a photograph of the original painting,” leading the reader to suppose a veritable original likeness to have been followed, instead of this photograph of a made-up picture.
It was fortunate that in regard to one point only this deprivation had led Mr. Parkman astray in his earlier edition; and that was upon La Salle’s failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi in 1684, and the conduct therewith of Beaujeu. Mr. Parkman has testified to the authenticity of the La Salle letters in the North American Review, December, 1877, where (p. 428) he says: “The contents of these letters were in good measure known through a long narrative compiled from them by one of the writer’s friends, who[245] took excellent care to put nothing into it which could compromise him. All personalities are suppressed. These letters of La Salle have never been used by any historical writer.” Margry’s publication has been reviewed by J. Thoulet in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, November and December, 1880, where a modern map enables the reader to track the explorer’s course. A sketch of this map is given on an earlier page.
The severest criticism of Margry’s publication has come from Dr. Shea, in a tract entitled The Bursting of Pierre Margry’s La Salle Bubble, New York, 1879,—a paper which first appeared in the New York Freeman’s Journal. Margry is judged by his critic to have unwarrantably extended the collection by repeating what had already elsewhere been printed, sometimes at greater length.[672] The “bubble” in question is the view long entertained by Margry that La Salle was the real discoverer of the Mississippi, and which he has set forth at different times in the following places:—
1. “Les Normands dans les vallées de l’Ohio et du Mississippi,” in the Journal general de l’instruction publique, July-September, 1862, placing the event in 1670-1671.
2. Revue maritime et colonial, Paris (1872), xxxiii. 555.
3. La priorité de La Salle sur le Mississipi, Paris, 1873,—a pamphlet.
4. The preface to his Découvertes, etc., 1876.
5. A letter in the American Antiquarian (Chicago, 1880), ii. 206, which was addressed to the Wisconsin Historical Society (Collections, ix. 108), and which first appeared in J. D. Butler’s translation in the State Journal, Madison, Wisconsin, July 30, 1879.
Margry, who has wavered somewhat, first claimed that La Salle reached the Mississippi by the Ohio in 1670; and later he has contended for the route by the Illinois in 1671. He bases his claim upon four grounds:—
First, upon a Récit d’un ami de l’Abbé de Galinée, 1666-1678 (printed in the Découvertes, etc., i. 342, 378),[673] which is without date, but which Margry holds to be the work of Abbé Renaudot, derived from La Salle in Paris in 1678, wherein it is stated that La Salle, after parting with Dollier and Galinée, made a first expedition to the Ohio, and a second by the Illinois to the Mississippi.
Second, upon a letter of La Salle’s niece, dated 1756 (i. 379), which affirms that the writer of it possessed maps which had belonged to La Salle in 1676, and that such maps showed that previous to that date he had made two voyages of discovery, and that upon these maps the Colbert (Mississippi) is put down.
Third, upon a letter of Frontenac in 1677 to Colbert (i. 324), which places, as is alleged, the voyage of Joliet after that of La Salle; but at the same time (ii. 285) he prints a paper of La Salle virtually admitting Joliet’s priority.
Fourth, upon the general antagonism between the Jesuits, who espoused Joliet’s claim, and the merchants, who were, with La Salle, the adherents of the Sulpitians and Recollects.
Sides have been taken among scholars in regard to the irrefragability of these evidences, but with a great preponderance of testimony against their validity.
The principal supporter of Margry’s view (though Henri Martin has adopted it) has been Gabriel Gravier in the following publications:—
1. Découvertes et établissements de la Cavelier de la Salle de Rouen dans l’Amérique du nord, Paris, 1870.
2. Cavelier de la Salle de Rouen, Paris, 1871, p. 23. This work is in good part a commentary on Parkman, to whom it is dedicated.
3. “La route du Mississipi,” in the Compte rendu, Congrès des Américanistes, Nancy, 1878, placing it in 1666.
4. In Magazine of American History, viii. 305 (May, 1882).
Views in support of the prior discovery of Joliet and Marquette, and opposed to the claim for La Salle, are given in the following places, without enumerating Charlevoix, Sparks, and the other upholders of the Joliet discovery, before Margry’s theory was advanced:—
1. Tailhan, as editor of Perrot’s Sauvages, Paris, 1864, p. 279.
2. Verreau, Voyage de MM. Dollier et Galinée, p. 59.
3. Parkman, La Salle.
4. Faillon, in his Colonie Française en Canada, iii. 312; while at the same time he testifies to Margry’s labors in vol i. p. 24.
5. Harrisse, Notes, etc., sur la Nouvelle France, 1872, p. 125, where he reviews the controversy; and again in the Revue maritime et coloniale (1872), xxxii. 642.
6. J. Brucker, Jacques Marquette et la découverte de la vallée du Mississipi, Lyons, 1880, taken from Les études réligieuses, vol. iv.
7. H. H. Hurlbut, in Magazine of American History, September, 1882.
8. John G. Shea, in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Collections, vii. 111; and in the Bursting of the La Salle Bubble, already referred to. In his edition of Le Clercq, ii. 89, he speaks of the theory as “utterly absurd.”
FATHER LOUIS HENNEPIN
AND HIS REAL OR DISPUTED DISCOVERIES.
BY THE EDITOR.
THE life of this Recollect missionary is derived in its particulars mainly from his own writings; and the details had never been set forth in an orderly way till Dr. J. G. Shea in 1880 prefixed to a new translation of Hennepin’s first book a satisfactory sketch. He seems to have been born in Hainault, though precisely when does not appear. Felix Van Hulst, in the title of his tract, gives the date approximately: Notice sur le Père Louis Hennepin, né à Ath (Belgique) vers 1640. Liege, 1845. He early joined the Franciscans, served the Order in various places, travelled as he could, was inspired with a desire to see the world, and felt the impulse strongest when, at Calais, he listened to the narratives of sea-captains who had returned from long voyages. This inclination prompted him to continued missionary expeditions, and to attendance upon armies in their campaigns. In 1675 Frontenac succeeded in his attempt to recall to Canada the Recollects, as a foil to the Jesuits; and among the first of that Order to go was Hennepin, who crossed the ocean in the same ship with La Salle, the ambitious explorer, and De Laval, the new Bishop of Quebec. According to his own account, Hennepin had his first quarrel with La Salle about some girls who were on their way to reinforce the family life of the new colony.[674]
La Salle enjoyed their dances, and Hennepin, as their spiritual guide, kept them under restraint. This, at least, is the Recollect story of the origin of La Salle’s enmity for the missionary.
From Quebec Hennepin continued his missionary wanderings, sometimes to remote stations, and at one time, in the spring of 1677, among the Iroquois,—not going, however, to Albany, as has been sometimes asserted. (Cf. Brodhead’s New York, ii. 307; Hist. Mag. x. 268.) Next he accompanied La Salle in his explorations west. Of Niagara he offers us the earliest picture in his 1697 publication,—of which a reduced fac-simile is here given. Others are in Gay’s Pop. Hist. U. S., ii. 511; Shea’s Hennepin, p. 379, and in his Le Clercq, ii. 112; and in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 561. The original cut was repeated in the later editions and translations of Hennepin. These Falls had been indicated on Champlain’s map, in 1632, with the following note: “Sault d’eau au bout du Sault [Lac] Sainct Louis fort hault, où plusiers sortes de poissons descendans s’estourdissent.” This was from the natives’ accounts. Ragueneau, in the Relation of 1648, was the first to describe them, though they had been known by report to the Jesuits some years earlier (Parkman’s Jesuits, p. 142). Lalemant, in 1641, called them Onguiaahra. Ragueneau gave them no definite altitude, but called them of “frightful height.” Hennepin, in his 1683 book, calls them five hundred feet, and in 1697 six hundred feet high, and describes a side-shoot on their western verge which does not now exist. Sanson, in his map of 1657, had somewhat simplified Ragueneau’s name into Ongiara; but Hennepin gives the name in its present form. There is a great variety in the early spelling of the name. (See Canadian Journal, 1870, p. 385.) The word is of Iroquois origin, and its proper phonetic spelling is very like the form now in use (Parkman, La Salle, p. 126; O’Callaghan, Col. Doc., index, 465). Hennepin had also been anticipated in a brief notice by Gendron, in his Quelques Particularites, etc., 1659. Hennepin’s account is also translated[248] in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., v. 47. His engraving was reproduced, in 1702, in Campanius’ work on New Sweden.
Hennepin accompanied La Salle to the point where Fort Crèvecœur was built, on the Illinois, and parting from La Salle here in February, 1680, he pursued his further wandering down the Illinois to the Mississippi, and thence up to the Falls of St. Anthony, which were named by him in reference to his being a Recollect of the province of St. Anthony in Artois. On the 3d of July, 1880, the bi-centenary of the discovery of these Falls was observed, when C. K. Davis delivered an historical address. Thence, after being captured by the Sioux and rescued by a party under Du Lhut,[675] Hennepin made his way to the Wisconsin, passed by Green Bay, and reached Quebec. He soon after returned to France, where, on the 3d of September, 1682, he obtained the royal permission to print his first book, which was issued from the press Jan. 5, 1683.
From this point his story[676] can be best followed in connection with the history of his books, and as they are rare and curious, it has been thought worth while to point out a few of the repositories of copies, which are indicated by the following heavy-faced letters:—
| BA. | Boston Athenæum. |
| BPL. | Boston Public Library. |
| C. | Library of Congress. |
| CB. | Carter-Brown Library, Providence. |
| HC. | Harvard College Library. |
| HCM. | Henry C. Murphy. |
| L. | Lenox Library, New York. |
For full titles, see the Bibliography in Shea’s edition of the Description of Louisiana, and the article “Hennepin,” in Sabin’s Dictionary. Cf. also Brunet, Supplément, 598.
I. DESCRIPTION DE LA LOUISIANE.
This first book was entitled Description de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte au Sud-Oüest de la Nouvelle France. Les Mœurs des Sauvages. Par le R. P. Louis Hennepin, Paris, 1683. Pages 12, 312, 107. Some copies are dated 1684.
Copies: BA., C., CB., HC., L. (both dates).
References: Shea (ed. of Hennepin), nos. 1, 2; Sabin, Dictionary, no. 31,347; Ternaux, Bibliothèque Amér. no. 985; Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouv. France, nos. 150, 352; Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,266, with fac-simile of title; Hist. Mag., vol. ii. no. 24 (by Mr. Lenox), 346; Dufossé, Americana, 70 francs, with genuine map, and 40 or 50 francs with fac-simile; Leclerc, Bibl. Americana, nos. 897, 898 at 90 and 150 francs; Rich, Catalogue (1832), no. 402, 12s.
The map, of which a section is herewith given in fac-simile, measures 10.2 X 17.2, “Guerard[249] inven. et fecit. Roussel sculpsit,” and is often wanting. Cf. Harrisse, no. 352; Hist. Mag., vol. ii. 24.
Harrisse (no. 219; also see no. 238) cites a map preserved in the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine, which seems to embody the results of Hennepin’s discoveries.
The next edition (Paris, 1688) shows the same pagination, with some verbal changes in the text, and is accompanied by the same map.
Copies: B.A., CB., HC.
References: Shea, no. 3; Sabin, no. 31,348; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,354; Hist. Mag. vol. ii. p. 346; Harrisse, no. 160; O’Callaghan, Catalogue, no. 1,068; Beckford, Catalogue, no. 674, bought by Quaritch, who advertised it at £3 3s.
HENNEPIN, 1683.
An extract from the Carte de la Nouvelle France et de la Louisiane, nouvellement découverte, dediée au Roy l’an 1683. Par le Révérend Père Louis Hennepin, Missionaire Recollect et Notaire Apostolique, belonging to the Description de la Louisiane, 1683. There is a full fac-simile in Shea’s translation of this book, and another one was made in 1876 by Pilinski, in Paris (36 copies). The letter A near a tree signifies “Armes du Roy telle qu’elle sont gravée sur l’escorce d’un chesne.” This map (Harrisse, no. 352) seems to resemble closely a map described by Harrisse (no. 219), as indicating the discoveries of Du Lhut, of which there is a copy in the Barlow Collection.
The following translations may be noted:—
English.—Some portions of Hennepin’s first work had been translated in Shea’s Discovery of the Mississippi, pp. 107-145; but no English translation of the whole work appeared till Dr. Shea edited a version in 1880, comparing Hennepin’s text with the second publication of that missionary (issued in 1697) with the La Salle documents, published by Margry, and with other contemporaneous papers.
Dutch.—The engraved title, Ontdekking van Louisania; the printed title, Beschryving van Louisania. It appeared at Amsterdam in 1688, under the same covers with a Dutch version of Denys’ Coast of North America, accompanied by a map which is a reduction of the map of the 1683 edition, and is called “Kaart van nieuw Vrankrijk en van Louisania;” together with four plates.
Copies: CB., HC., L.
References: Shea, no. 5; Sabin, no. 31,357; Harrisse, no. 161; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,355, with fac-simile of title; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 24; O’Callaghan, no. 1,069; Stevens, Historical Collections, vol. i. no. 1,433; Muller, Books on America, 1870, no. 908, and 1877, no. 1,395.
It is usually priced at from $8 to $10.
German.—There were two editions,—Beschreibung der Landschaft Louisiana, to which was appended a German version of Marquette’s and Joliet’s exploration, published at Nuremberg in 1689. It should have two maps.
Copies: CB., L.
References: Shea, no. 6; Ternaux, no. 1,041; Carter-Brown, vol. ii no. 1,379; O’Callaghan, no. 1,071; Muller, 1877, no. 1,399.
The other German edition of the same title appeared at Nuremberg in 1692.
Copies: CB., L.
References: Shea, no. 7; Harrisse, no. 163; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 24; Sabin, no. 31,364.
Italian.—Descrizione della Luigiana. Rendered by Casimiro Freschot, and published at Bologna in 1686, with a map.
Copies: CB.
References: Shea, no. 4; Harrisse, no. 157; Sabin, no. 31,356; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 346; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,326; Ternaux, no. 1,012; Leclerc, no. 900; 60 francs.
An abridgment was printed in Il Genio Vagante, Parma, 1691, with a map, “Nuova Francia e Luigiana.” Cf. Harrisse, no. 365.
In this earliest work of Hennepin the Mississippi, it will be seen by the map, forms no certain connection with the Gulf of Mexico, but is connected by a dotted line, and there is no claim for explorations further south than the map indicates. Hennepin’s later publications have raised doubts as to the good faith of his narrative of discoveries on the Upper Mississippi. Harrisse (no. 150), for instance, says “Cette Relation de 1683 n’est en réalité qu’une pâle copie d’un des mémoires de Cavelier de la Salle;” and goes on to deny to Hennepin the priority of giving the name of Louisiana to the country. La Salle and others of his contemporaries threw out insinuations as to his veracity, or at least cautioned others against his tendency to exaggerate. (Cf. Neill, Writings of Hennepin.) The publication of an anonymous account of La Salle’s whole expedition in Margry’s Découvertes et Établissements des Français, has enabled Dr. Shea, in his edition of Hennepin, to contest Margry’s views of Hennepin’s plagiarism, and to compare the two narratives critically; and he comes to the conclusion that probably Hennepin was La Salle’s scribe before they parted, and that he certainly contributed directly or indirectly to La Salle’s despatches what pertains to Hennepin’s subsequent independent exploration,—thus making the borrowing to be on the part of the anonymous writer, who, if he were La Salle, did certainly no more than was becoming in the master of the expedition to combine the narratives of his subordinates. It is Shea’s opinion, however, that the Margry document was not written by La Salle, but by some compiler in Paris, who used Hennepin’s printed book rather than his notes or manuscript reports. Margry claims that this Relation officielle de l’enterprise de La Salle, de 1678 à 1681, was compiled by Bernou for presentation to Colbert. Parkman thinks, as opposed to Shea’s view, that Hennepin knew of the document, and incorporated many passages from it into his book (La Salle, pp. 150, 262). Dr. Shea sided with the detractors of Hennepin in his earlier Discovery of the Mississippi; but in this later book he makes fair amends for what he now considers his hasty conclusions then. Cf. further Sparks’s Life of La Salle, and the North American Review, January, 1845. Mr. Parkman’s conclusion is that this early book of Hennepin is “comparatively truthful.”
II. NOUVELLE DÉCOUVERTE.
According to Hennepin’s own story, some time after his first book was published, he incurred the displeasure of the Provincial of his Order by refusing to return to America, and was in more ways than one so pursued by his superior that in the end he threw himself on the favor of William III. of England, whom he had met at the Hague. Hennepin searched Amsterdam for a publisher of his new venture, but had to take it to Utrecht, where it came out, in 1697, with a fulsome dedication to the English king. It is called in the printed title (the engraved title is abridged): Nouvelle Découverte d’un très[251] grand Pays, situé dans l’Amérique, entre le Nouveau Mexique et la Mer glaciale, Utrecht, 1797, pp. 70, 506, with two maps and two plates, one being the earliest view of Niagara Falls, as given on p. 86.
HENNEPIN, 1697.
This is an extract from the second of Hennepin’s maps, Carte d’un très grand pays entre le Nouveau Mexique et la Mer glaciale, dediée à Guillaume III.... à Utreght. The same plate was used in later editions (1698, 1704, 1711, etc.), with additions of many names, and some topographical changes, and alterations of place of publication. Those of 1698 have à Utreght in some cases, and in others à Amsterdam.
HENNEPIN, 1697.
Extract from Carte d’un très grand pais nouvellement découvert dans l’Amérique septentrionale, entre le Nouveau Mexique et la Mer glaciale, avec le Cours du Grand Fleuve Meschasipi ... à Utreght. The same plate was used for the editions, à Leiden, 1704, etc. The plate was re-engraved with English names for the English editions.
Copies: BA., CB., HC.
References: Shea, no. 1; Sabin, no. 31,349; Ternaux, no. 1,095; Harrisse, no. 175; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,513; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 346; Beckford, no. 675, bought by Quaritch, and advertised by him at £4 4s.; Stevens, vol. i. no. 1,434; Leclerc, no. 902, 80 francs; Harrassowitz, Catalogue, 1883, no. 58, 50 marks; Brinley, Catalogue, no. 4,491. It is usually priced in English catalogues at two or three guineas.
The portions repeated in this book from the Description de la Louisiane are enlarged, and the “Mœurs des Sauvages” is omitted.
It will be observed that in both of the maps of 1697, extracts from which are given herewith, the Mississippi River is marked as continuing its course to the Gulf. This change is made to illustrate an interpolation in the text (pp. 249-312), borrowed from Father Membré’s Journal of La Salle’s descent of the river, as given in Le Clercq’s Premier Établissement de la Foi, p. 153. Sparks, in his Life of La Salle, was the first to point out this correspondence. Mr. J. H. Perkins, reviewing Sparks’s book in the North American Review in January, 1839 (reprinted in his Memoir and Writings, vol. ii.), on the “Early French Travellers in the West,” referring to the partial statements of the distrust of Hennepin in Andrew Ellicott’s Journal, and in Stoddard’s Sketches of Louisiana, makes, for the first time, as he thinks, a thorough critical statement of the grounds “for thinking the Reverend Father so great a liar.” Further elucidation of the supposed theft was made by Dr. Shea in his Discovery of the Mississippi, etc., p. 105, where, p. 83, he translated for the first time into English Membré’s Journal. The Membré narrative is much the same as a Relation de la Découverte de l’Embouchure de la Rivière Mississippi, faite par le Sieur de la Salle, l’année passée, 1682, preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine, and printed in Thomassy’s Géologie pratique de la Louisiane. Gravier, p. 180, holds it to be the work of La Salle himself (Boimare, Text explicatif pour accompagner la première planche historique relative à la Louisiane, Paris, 1868; cf. Gravier’s Appendix, no. viii). That there was a fraud on Hennepin’s part has been generally held ever since Sparks made his representations. Bancroft calls Hennepin’s journal “a lie.” Brodhead calls it an audacious falsehood. Parkman (La Salle, p. 226) deems it a fabrication, and has critically examined Hennepin’s inconsistencies. Gravier classes his narrative with Gulliver’s.
The excuse given in the Nouvelle Découverte for the tardy appearance of this Journal is, that fear of the hostility of La Salle having prevented its appearance in the Description de la Louisiane, that explorer’s death rendered the suppression of it no longer necessary. It is, moreover, proved that passages from Le Clercq are also appropriated in describing the natives and the capture of Quebec in 1628. The reply to this was that Le Clercq stole from a copy of Hennepin’s Journal, which had been lent to Le Roux in Quebec. These revelations led Shea seriously to question in his Mississippi if Hennepin had ever seen the upper parts of that river, and to suspect that Hennepin may have learned what he wrote from Du Lhut. Harrisse, p. 176, brings forward some new particulars about Hennepin’s relations with Du Lhut.
Dr. Shea’s later views, as expressed in his English translation (1880) of the Description de la Louisiane (1683), is that Hennepin’s manuscript or revamped copy of his earlier book, as prepared for the printer by himself, was subjected to the manipulations of an ignorant and treacherous editor, who made these insertions to produce a more salable book, and that Hennepin was not responsible for it in the form in which it appeared. Shea’s arguments to prove this opposite of the generally received opinion are based on inherent evidence in the insertions that Hennepin could not have written them, and on the material evidences of these questionable portions of the book having been printed at a later time than the rest of it, and in different type. The only rejoinder yet made to this exculpation is by Mr. E. D. Neill, in a tract on The Writings of Louis Hennepin, read before the Minnesota Historical Society in November, 1880, in which the conclusion is reached that “nothing has been discovered to change the verdict of two centuries, that Louis Hennepin, Recollect Franciscan, was deficient in Christian manhood.”
The Nouvelle Découverte was reset and reissued in 1698 at Amsterdam, with the same maps and a new title.
Copies: CB., L.
References: Shea, no. 2; Sabin, no. 31,350; Harrisse, no. 176; Ternaux, no. 1,110; O’Callaghan, no. 1,073; Muller, 1877, no. 3,666; Sparks, Catalogue, no. 1,211; Rich, 1832, 12s.; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. 1,538; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. pp. 24,346.
There was another edition, Voyage ou Nouvelle Découverte, at Amsterdam in 1704, with the same maps and additional plates, to which was appended La Borde’s Voyage.
Copies: BA., CB.
References: Shea, no. 3; Sabin, no. 31,352; Rich, 1830, no. 8; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 347; Beckford, no. 676; Leclerc, no. 905, 60 francs; Stevens, vol. i. no. 1,436; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 52.
The Hague and Leyden editions of the same year (1704) had an engraved title, Voyage curieux [255]... qui contient une Nouvelle Découverte, but were evidently from the same type, and also have the La Borde appended.
Copies: CB., L., HCM.
References: Shea, nos. 4, 5; Sabin, no. 31,353; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. 25.
The Amsterdam edition of 1711 was called Voyages curieux et nouveaux de Messieurs Hennepin et de la Borde, with oblong title, folded in, which seems to be the only difference from the 1704 editions.
Copies: BA., CB., HC.
References: Shea, no. 6; Sabin, no. 31,354; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 153.
In 1712 another Amsterdam edition was called Voyage ou Nouvelle Découverte.
Copy: CB.
References: Shea, no. 7; Sabin, no. 31,355; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 347; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 168; Stevens, vol. i. no. 1,438.
Hennepin’s book also appeared in the third edition, at Amsterdam (1737), of Bernard’s Recueil de Voyages au Nord, vol. ix., with a map called “Le Cours du fleuve Mississipi, 1737.” Cf. Shea, no. 8; Sabin, no. 4,936; Historical Magazine, ii. 25. It also appeared at Amsterdam in 1720, in Relations de la Louisiane et du Fleuve Mississippi (Dufossé, 1878, no. 4,577), and again in 1737 in connection with a translation of Garcilasso de la Vega (Dr. O’Callaghan in Historical Magazine, ii. 24). An abridgment appeared in Paris, in 1720, under the title, Description de la Louisiane, par le Chevalier Bonrepos, pp. 45 (Lenox in Historical Magazine, ii. 25).
The following translations may be noted:—
Dutch.—1. Nieuwe Ontdekkinge, etc., Amsterdam, 1699.
Copy: CB.
References: Shea, no. 9; Sabin, no. 31,359; Harrisse, no. 183.
2. Nieuwe Entdekkinge, etc., Amsterdam, 1702. It follows the 1697 French edition, with the same maps and plates, and has Capiné’s book on the Spanish West Indies appended.
Copies: BA., CB., L.
References: Shea, no. 10; Sabin, no. 31,360; Lenox in Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 25; Muller, 1870, no. 912, and 1877, no. 1,397; Brinley, no. 4,493; O’Callaghan, no. 1,076; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 23.
3. Aenmerkelyke Voyagie, etc., Leyden, 1704.
Copy: CB.
References: Shea, no. 11; Sabin, no. 31,361; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 53, 54; Stevens, vol. i. no. 1,437; Muller, 1870, no. 913, and 1877, no. 1,398.
4. Aanmerkkelyke Voyagie, etc., Rotterdam, 1704. It is usually found with Benzoni’s West-Indise Voyagien, and also in Van der Aa’s Collection of Voyages, 1704.
Copies: C., CB., L.
References: Shea, nos. 12, 13; Sabin, no. 31,362; Lenox in Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 25.
5. Nieuwe Ontdekkinge, etc. Amsterdam, 1722.
Copy: CB.
References: Shea, no. 14; Sabin, no. 31,363.
English.—Discovery of a Large, Rich, and Plentiful Country, etc., London, 1720.
Copies: BA., CB., HC.
References: Shea, no. 2; Sabin, nos. 20,247, 31,373; Historical Magazine, vol. i. p. 347; Rich, no. 12; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 267.
This is an abridgment.
German.—1. Neue Entdeckung, etc. Bremen, 1699.
Copies: CB., L.
References: Shea, no. 15; Historical Magazine, vol. i. p. 347, vol. ii. p. 25; Sabin, no. 31,367; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,572; Harrisse, no. 185; Stevens, vol. i. no. 1,435.
2. Beschreibung der Grosser Flusse Mississipi. Dritte Auflage, Leipzig, 1720.
Copy: L.
References: Lenox in Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 25.
3. Neue Reise Beschreibung, etc., Nürnberg, 1739.
Copy: CB.
References: Shea, no. 16; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 604.
4. Neue Entdeckung, etc., Bremen, 1742.
Copy: CB.
Reference: Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 708.
Spanish.—Relaçion, etc., Brusselas, 1699.
Copies: HC., CB., L. An abridgment by Sebastian Fernandez de Medrano.
References: Shea, no. 1; Sabin, no. 31,374; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,573; Lenox in Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 25; Ternaux, no. 1,126.
It has the same map with the 1697 French edition, with an Italian label, “Carta geografica de un Pais,” etc., pasted over the French title.
III. NOUVEAU VOYAGE.
It has been customary to bestow upon this volume a similar distrust as upon the preceding; but Dr. Shea contends that the luckless treatment of the Nouvelle Découverte by a presumptuous editor was also repeated with this. It was entitled, Nouveau Voyage d’un Pais plus grand que l’Europe, Utrecht, 1698. The work was made up from Le Clercq, and included the treatise on the Indians which had been omitted in the Nouvelle Découverte, of which this volume may be considered the supplement.
Copies: BA., CB.
References: Shea, no. 1; Sabin, no. 31,351; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,537; Harrisse, no. 177; Beckford,[256] no. 677, bought by Quaritch, who priced it at £4 4s.; Leclerc, no. 904, 70 francs; Rich, no. 455; Ternaux. no. 1,111.
The Nouveau Voyage was also included in an abridged form in the second (1720) and third (1734) editions of the Recueil de Voyages au Nord, published by Bernard at Amsterdam. Cf. Shea, 2 and 3.
It was also issued in the following translations:—
Dutch.—Engraved title, Reyse door nieuwe Ondekte Landen. Printed title, Aenmerckelycke Historische Reijs Beschryvinge, Utrecht, 1698. The map reads, “Carte d’un Nouveau Monde entre Le Nouveau Mexique et la Mer glaciale. Gasp. Bouttals fecit.”
Copies: BA., CB.
References: Shea, no. 4; Sabin, no. 31,358; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,539, with fac-simile of title; Historical Magazine, vol. ii. p. 347; Harrisse, no. 179; Trömel, no. 425; O’Callaghan, no. 1,075; Muller, 1877, no. 1,396.
English.—In the Archæologia Americana, vol. i.
German, I.—Neue Reise Beschreibung, übersetzt durch M. J. G. Langen, Bremen, 1698.
Copy: CB.
References: Shea, no. 5.; Sabin, no. 31,365; Ternaux, no. 1,049, of doubtful date; Harrisse, no. 165; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,540.
2. Reisen und seltsehme Begebenheiten, etc., Bremen, 1742.
References: Shea, no. 6; Sabin, no. 31,369.
IV. COMBINATION.
The Nouvelle Découverte and the Nouveau Voyage were combined in an English translation issued under the following title: A new Discovery of a Vast Country in America, extending above four thousand miles between New France and New Mexico, etc., London, 1698. It contains—part i., a translation of the Nouvelle Découverte; part ii., in smaller type and new paging, a version of the Nouveau Voyage; the rest of the volume in the type of part i. and continuing its paging, being an account of Marquette’s voyages. Another edition of the same year shows a slight change of title, with alterations in part i. and part ii. rewritten. Still another issue conforms in title to the earliest, but in body, with a slight correction, to the second edition. The engraved title of the first edition is given herewith. This picture is a re-engraving reversed of the one on the title of the Nouvelle Découverte of 1697.
Copies: BPL., CB., HC.
References: Shea, nos. 1, 2, 3; Sabin, nos. 31,370, 31,371; Ternaux, nos. 1,010, 1,119; Historical Magazine, vol. i. p. 347; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 685; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. nos. 1,535, 1,536; Rich, no. 456; Brinley, no. 4,492; Harrisse, no. 181; Menzies Catalogue, no. 915.
In the next year (1699) there was a reprint of the second issue of the preceding year.
Copy: BA.
References: Shea, no. 4; Sabin, no. 31,372; O’Callaghan, no. 1,074; and Historical Magazine, vol. ii p. 74; Menzies, no. 916.
BARON LA HONTAN.
A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL NOTE BY THE EDITOR.
LA HONTAN, a young Gascon, born about 1667, had come to Canada in 1683, and from being a common soldier, had by his ability risen to an officer’s position. He became a favorite of Frontenac, and was selected by him to bear the despatch to Paris which conveyed an account of Phips’s failure before Quebec in 1690. He was not long after made deputy-governor of Placentia, where he quarrelled with his superior and fled to France; and here, fearing arrest, he was obliged to escape beyond its boundaries. After the Peace of Ryswick he sought reinstatement, but was not successful; and it is alleged that his book, which he now published, was in some measure the venting of his spleen. It appeared in 1703, at La Haye, as Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale, qui contiennent une Relation des différens Peuples que y habitent, in two volumes (the second entitled Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale, ou la suite des Voyages), with twenty-six maps and plates (Sabin, vol. x. nos. 38,635-38,638; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 36; Quaritch, 25 shillings; Leclerc, no. 737, 40 francs). Another edition, in somewhat larger type and better engravings, with a vignette in place of the sphere on the title, appeared the same year. Dr. Shea is inclined to think this the authorized edition, and the other a pirated one, with reversed cuts. La Hontan, being in London, superintended an edition published there the same year in English, called New Voyages to North America (in Harvard College Library; cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 101; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 852; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 39), likewise in two volumes, but containing in addition a Dialogue between La Hontan and a Huron Indian (the Rat), which had not been included in the Hague edition, and which was the vehicle of some religious scepticism. There were thirteen plates in vol. i., and eleven in vol. ii., and La Hontan speaks of them as being much better than those of the Holland edition (Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,644). This same Dialogue was issued separately the next year (1704) at Amsterdam in French,—Dialogue du Baron de La Hontan et d’un Sauvage dans l’Amérique; and also, with a changed title (Supplément aux Voyages du Baron La Hontan), as the third volume or “suite” of the Voyages, and sometimes with added pages devoted to travels in Portugal and Denmark (Sabin, vol. x. nos. 38,633, 38,634, 38,637; Field, no. 853; Leclerc, nos. 738, 739; Muller, Books on America, 1872, no. 864). These editions are found with the dates also of 1704 and 1705. What is called a “seconde Édition, revue, corrigée, et augmentée,” with twenty-seven plates (but not from the same coppers, however, with the earlier issues), and omitting the “Carte générale,” appeared likewise at La Haye in 1705 and 1706. This is professedly “almost recast, to make the style more pure, concise, and simple, with the Dialogues rewritten.” The Denmark and Portugal voyage being omitted, it is brought within two volumes, the second of which is still called Mémoires, etc. (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 68). There were later French editions in 1707, 1709, and 1715, and at Amsterdam in 1721, with the “suite,” dated 1728, three volumes in all, and sometimes all three are dated 1728; and still other editions are dated 1731 and 1741 (Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,640, who says it is quite impossible to make a clear statement of all the varieties of these several editions; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 689). The English version appeared again at London in 1735 (Menzies, no. 1,178; Brinley, no. 101; Sabin, vol. x. nos. 38,645, 38,646, who says there are various imprints; and it is also included in Pinkerton’s Voyages, vol. xiii.). There are also a German edition, Des beruhmten Herrn Baron de La Hontan Neueste Reisen, 1709 (Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,647; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 123; Stevens, Bibl. Hist., no. 2,505), and a Dutch, Reizen van den Baron van La Hontan, 1739 (Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,648; Stevens, no. 2,506).
PART OF LA HONTAN’S MAP.
This is the western part of the Carte Générale de Canada, which appeared in the Nouveaux Voyages, La Haye, 1709, vol. ii., and was re-engraved in his Mémoires, Amsterdam, 1741, vol. iii.
PART OF LA HONTAN’S MAP.
A middle section from his “Carte Générale de Canada,” in his Nouveaux Voyages, La Haye, 1709, vol. ii.; re-engraved in the Amsterdam, 1741, edition of the Mémoires, vol. iii.
LA HONTAN’S MAP.
A fac-simile of the frontispiece to La Hontan’s New Voyages, London, 1703. It was less carefully drawn in the re-engraving of smaller size for the Mémoires de l’Amérique, vol. ii., Amsterdam; and still another plate of the same map will be found in the 1709 and 1715 La Haye editions.
The book is thought to have been edited by Nicolas Gueudeville; or at least his hand is usually recognized in the customary third volume of some of the editions. Faribault (p. 76) says that a bookseller in Amsterdam knew that the Dialogue was added by Gueudeville, in whose Atlas, Amsterdam, 1719, as well as in Corneille’s Geographical Dictionary, the accounts given of La Hontan’s Rivière Longue are incorporated.
LA HONTAN’S RIVIERE LONGUE.
Fac-simile of the map in the Nouveaux Voyages, La Haye, 1709, i. 136. He reports that the river was called by some the Dead River, because of its sluggish current.
As early as 1715-1716 there was a general discrediting of the story of La Hontan, as will be seen by letters addressed by Bobé to De l’Isle, the French geographer, and printed in the Historical Magazine, iii. 231, 232; but the English geographer, Herman Moll, in his maps between 1710 and 1720, was under La Hontan’s influence. Another English cartographer, John Senex (1710), accepted the La Hontan story with considerable hesitation, and later rejected it. Daniel Coxe, in his Carolana (1727), quite unreservedly accepted it; and the Long River appears as Moingona in Popple’s Atlas, in 1733.
The German geographer, Homann, of Nuremberg, was in some degree influenced; and the French cartographer De l’Isle sometimes accepted these alleged discoveries, and again discarded them; but the careful work of Bellin, in Charlevoix’s Nouvelle France, did much to relegate La Hontan to oblivion. Charlevoix himself says: “The great liberty which La Hontan gives his pen has contributed greatly to make his book read by people not informed to separate truth from falsehood. It fails to teach the well-informed, and confuses others. The episode of the voyage up the Long River is as fabulous as the Barataria of Sancho Panza.” (Cf. Shea’s ed., i. 86, with Shea’s note, iii. 286.) The Long River some years later, however, figured in the map which illustrates Samuel Engel’s Extraits raisonnés des Voyages faits dans les parties septentrionales, published at Lausanne, and again in 1765, and again in 1779, and of which there is also a German translation. At a later date Carver accepted the accounts of this western river as genuine, and identified it with the St. Peter’s,—a belief which Long again, in his Expedition to St. Peter’s River, wholly rejected. (Cf. also J. H. Perkins in the North American Review (1839), vol. xlviii. no. 98, where it is thought possible; and the paper by H. Scadding in the Canadian Journal, 2d series, vol. xiii. pp. 240, 396.) Parkman expresses the present view of scholars when he says (La Salle, p. 458) that La Hontan’s account of the Long River is a sheer fabrication; but he did not, like Hennepin, add slander and plagiarism to mendacity. Again, in his Frontenac (p. 105), he calls La Hontan “a man in advance of his time, for he had the caustic, sceptical, and mocking spirit which a century later marked the approach of the great Revolution. He usually told the truth when he had no motive to do otherwise, and yet was capable at times of prodigious mendacity,” for his account of what “he saw in the colony is commonly in accord with the best contemporary evidence.” There are some exceptions to this view. Gravier speaks of La Hontan as “de bonne foi et de jugement sain”!
CHAPTER VI.
THE JESUITS, RECOLLECTS, AND THE INDIANS.
BY JOHN GILMARY SHEA, LL.D.
AT the time of the discovery of this portion of the northern continent, the missionary spirit was active in the Catholic Church. The labors of the earlier monks had been revived and continued in the East by the new zeal of the orders of friars, especially of the Franciscan and Dominican Fathers. The earlier voyages of explorations from Cabot’s day were accompanied by priests; and as soon as the condition and character of the inhabitants were known, projects were formed for their conversion. This work was looked upon as a duty by the kings of Spain, Portugal, and France, as well as by the hierarchy and religious orders. Coeval with the Spanish and French attempts to settle on the coast, were missionary efforts, often pushed with wonderful zeal and courage far into the interior by intrepid apostles, who, trusting their lives to Indian guides, sought fields of labor.
The mission lines on the map meet and cross, as, undeterred by the death of pioneers, others took up the task. In 1526, Dominicans reared a chapel on the banks of the James in Virginia; in 1539, the Italian Franciscan Mark, from Nice, penetrated to New Mexico; and soon after, Father Padilla, of the same order, died by the hands of the Indians near the waters of the Missouri. By 1559 Dominicans were traversing the territories of the Mobilian tribes from Pensacola to the Mississippi; and when Melendez founded St. Augustine, it became a mission centre whence the Jesuit missionaries threaded the Atlantic coast to Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the Rappahannock, before they left that field to the Franciscans, who dotted Florida and Georgia with their mission chapels.
The same spirit was seen pervading France, where the conversion of the Indians of the New World was regarded as a duty of the highest order. One of the first traces that we find of French voyages to the northern coast is the mention in an early edition of the Chronicle of Eusebius, in 1508, that Indians who had been brought from the new-found land received baptism within the walls of a cathedral in France.
Though the introduction of Calvinism led to the destruction of many a convent and shrine, and thinned by death the ranks of the mission orders,[264] the zeal for the conversion of the Indians survived the wars of religion. Soon after Poutrincourt began his settlement in Acadia, it was made a reproach to him that nothing had been done for the conversion of the natives. He addressed a letter to the Pope, as if to put the fact of his orthodoxy beyond all question; and when it was proposed to send out Jesuit missionaries to labor among the Indians, he caused twenty-five of the natives to be baptized in token of his zeal for their spiritual welfare.
The establishment of a Jesuit mission was, however, decided upon. On the 12th of June, 1611, Fathers Peter Biard and Enemond Masse reached Port Royal. Some difficulties had been thrown in their way, and others met them in the petty settlement. They turned at once to study the Micmac language, so as to begin their mission labors among that nation of Algonquins. The aged Membertou, who had acquired some French, was their interpreter and first convert. Biard visited all the coast as far as the Kennebec, and tried to give some ideas of Christianity to the Abenakis on that river. Finding that little could be done at Port Royal, where the settlers hampered rather than aided their efforts, the Jesuits projected an independent mission settlement elsewhere. Their protector, Madame de Guercheville, obtained from the French king a grant of all the coast from the St. Lawrence to Florida. A vessel was sent out, the missionaries were taken on board, and a settlement was begun on Mount Desert Island. There a cross was planted, and Mass said at a rustic altar. But the Jesuits were not to carry out their mission projects. English vessels under Argall, from Virginia, attacked the ship and settlement of St. Savior; a Jesuit laybrother was killed; the rest of the settlers were sent to France or carried prisoners to Virginia. Thus ended the first Jesuit mission begun under French auspices.[677]
Meanwhile Champlain had succeeded in establishing a settlement on the St. Lawrence, and had penetrated to Lake Champlain and the rapids of the Ottawa. On all sides were tribes “living like brute beasts, without law, without religion, without God.” His religious zeal was quickened; for Quebec itself was destitute of ministers of religion. The Recollects, a reformed branch of the Franciscan order, were invited to enter the field. They accepted the mission, and in May, 1615, four of the Gray Friars landed at Quebec. Father John Dolbeau at once began a mission among the Montagnais,—the tribe occupying that portion of the St. Lawrence valley,—and wintered with them in their wandering hunter life, enduring all its hardships, and learning their language and ideas. The friendly Wyandots, from the shores of a far distant lake, were the tribe assigned to Father Joseph le Caron, and to the palisaded towns of this more civilized race he boldly ventured, without waiting for Champlain. In the summer of 1615 he set up his altar in a new bark lodge in the Huron town of Caragouha, near Thunder Bay, and began to learn a new strange tongue, so as to teach the flock around him.
The Recollects had thus undertaken to evangelize two races, who, with their kindred, extended from the ocean to the Mississippi, from the Chesapeake and Ohio to the frozen lands of the Esquimaux. Their languages, differing from all known to European scholars in vocabulary, forms, and the construction of sentences, offered incredible difficulties. The ideas these Indians held of a future state were so obscure, that it was not easy to find enough of natural religion by which to lead them to the revealed. Progress was naturally slow,—there was more to discourage than to cheer. Still the Franciscans labored on; and though their number was limited to six, they had in 1625 five missions at Tadousac, Quebec, Three Rivers, among the Nipissings, and in the Huron country.
Finding that the mission field in New France required an order bound to less scrupulous poverty than their own, the Recollects of Paris invited the Jesuits to aid them. Enemond Masse, of the unfortunate Acadian mission, with Charles Lalemant and John de Brebeuf, came over in 1625. The old opposition to the order was renewed. The Jesuits were homeless, till the Recollects opened the doors of their convent to them. Commanding resources from influential friends, they soon began to build, and brought over men to swell the settlement and cultivate the ground. They joined the Recollects in the missions already founded, profiting by their experience. This enabled the Church to extend its missions. Father Joseph de la Roche d’Aillon, leaving the Hurons, struck southwesterly, and founded a mission among the Neutral Nation, apparently on the eastern bank of the Niagara, and urged his countrymen to open direct communication by way of Lake Ontario with that fertile part of the country.
The little colony at Quebec was, however, on the verge of starvation; and after once baffling the English, Champlain surrendered in 1629, and the missions of the Recollects and Jesuits came to a close. A mere handful of converts was all the reward of their long and zealous labors, and these they were compelled to leave exposed to the danger of lapsing back into their original heathendom.
We cannot trace very distinctly the system adopted by the Recollects and their Jesuit auxiliaries during this first period of mission labor in Canada. Their usual course was to remain during the pleasant months at the French posts,—Quebec, Three Rivers, and Tadousac,—attending to the spiritual wants of the French and of the Indians who encamped near by for trade, and then to follow an Indian band on its winter hunt. The Recollects spoke despondingly. Some young men were taken to France and instructed there,—one, Peter Anthony, having the Prince de Guimené as his sponsor in baptism. But they found it almost impossible to keep the young for any prolonged instruction, and they hesitated to baptize adults, except in case of danger of death.
In the Huron country Father Nicholas Viel succeeded Le Caron, and had his little chapel at Quieunonascaran, cultivating a small patch of ground[266] around his bark lodge. His success does not seem to have exceeded that of his fellow religious in the more nomadic tribes. While on his way to Quebec in 1625 he was treacherously hurled from his canoe by a Huron guide, and perished in the rapid waters near Montreal that still bear the name of Sault au Récollet.
Another Recollect, Father William Poullain, while on his way with some Frenchmen from Quebec to Sault St. Louis, fell into the hands of the Iroquois, who were about to torture him at the stake, when he was saved by an offer of an exchange made by his countrymen.
The Jesuits adopted the system of the Recollects, but we have no details of their labors,—one Huron boy taken to France, where he was baptized by the name of Louis de Sainte Foy, being the result of the joint labors to which most allusion is made.
The Court of France seems to have considered that both Recollect and Jesuit had failed to acquire the languages of the country sufficiently to do the work of God and of his most Christian Majesty. At all events, each order hastened to put in print evidence of its proficiency in American linguistics. The Recollect Sagard published a Huron Dictionary; the Jesuit Brebeuf, a translation of Ledesma’s Catechism into Huron, with the Lord’s Prayer and other devotions rendered into Montagnais by Father Enemond Masse.[678]
When England reluctantly yielded up her Canadian conquest, the all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu seems to have looked with no kindly eye on either of the bodies who had already labored to evangelize New France. He offered the mission to his favorite order, the Capuchins, and only when they declined it did he permit the Jesuits to return.
With the restoration of Canada to France by the treaty of Saint Germain in 1632, the history of the great Jesuit missions begins. For some years the Fathers of the Society of Jesus were, almost without exception, the only clergy in the colony in charge of all the churches of the settlers and the missions to the Indian tribes. When a pious association, under the inspiration of the Venerable Mr. Olier, founded Montreal, members of the Society of Priests which he had formed at Saint Sulpice became the clergy of that town; and they gathered near it a double-tongued Indian mission, which still continues to exist under their care. They made no attempt to extend their labors, except in the missionary voyage of Dollier de Casson and Galinée[267] in the mission of the Abbés Fénelon and Trouvé at Quinté Bay, and the later labors of the Abbé Picquet at Ogdensburg.
When Bishop Laval was appointed for Canada in 1658, he founded a seminary at Quebec, which was aggregated to the Seminary of the Foreign Missions in Paris. The Jesuits then resigned all the parishes which they had directed in the colony, and confined themselves to their college and their Indian missions. The priests of the Seminary of Quebec, beside their parish work, also undertook missions among the Indians in Acadia, Illinois, and on the lower Mississippi.
A collision between the Governor of Canada and the Bishop with his clergy and the Jesuits, in regard to the sale of liquor to the Indians, led the Government to send back the Recollects to resume their early labors. They did not, however, undertake any important missions among the Indian tribes. Their efforts were confined almost exclusively to the period and course of La Salle’s attempts at settlement and exploration, and to a mission at Gaspé and a shorter one on the Penobscot.
When the colony of Louisiana took form, the Indian missions there were confided to the Jesuits, who directed them till the suppression of the order terminated their existence in the dominions of France. Spain, in her colonies, sent other orders to continue the work of the Jesuits, and this was done successfully in some places; but there was no effort made to sustain those of the Jesuits in Canada and Louisiana, and amid the political changes which rapidly ensued the early French missions gradually dwindled away.
These Jesuit missions embraced the labors of the Fathers among the Micmacs, chiefly on Cape Breton Island and at Miscou; the missions among the Montagnais, Bersiamites, Oumamiwek, Porcupine Indians, Papinachois, and other tribes of the lower St. Lawrence and Saguenay, the centre being at Tadousac; the missions of which Quebec was the immediate centre, comprising the work among the Montagnais of that district and Algonquins from the west. Of this Algonquin mission, Sillery soon became the main mission; but as the Algonquins disappeared, Abenakis came to settle there, and remained till the chapel was removed to St. François de Sales. Then Three Rivers was a mission station for the Indians near it, and for the Attikamegues inland, till a separate mission was established for that tribe. Beyond Montreal was the mission to the Nipissings, and the great Huron mission, the scene of the most arduous and continued labors of the Fathers among the palisaded towns of the Wyandots and Dinondadies. After the ruin of these nations, the Jesuits led one part of the survivors to Isle Orleans, and subsequently gathered a remnant of them at Lorette, where their descendants still remain. The rest fled towards the Mississippi, and were zealously followed by the energetic missionaries, who gathered them at Mackinac, whence they removed in time to Detroit, and ultimately to Sandusky, the last point where the Jesuits ministered to them.
Beyond Lake Huron was the great Ottawa mission, embracing the attempts to christianize the Ottawas on Lake Superior, the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie, the Beaver Indians and Crees; at Green Bay was another post for the Menomonees, Pottawatamies, Foxes, and Mascoutens; while south of Lake Michigan came in time Jesuit labors among the Miamis and Illinois. The missions attempted among the Sioux beyond the Mississippi mark the western limit of the old Jesuit efforts to convert the native tribes.
With the establishment of Louisiana came the missions of the Society among the Yazoos, Arkansas, Choctaws, Alibamons, and other tribes.
The Micmac Mission.—The Jesuit missions among the Micmacs never attained any remarkable development, and most of the territory occupied by this branch of the Algonquin family was attended by other bodies of missionaries. Father Julian Perrault began his labors on Cape Breton in 1634; Charles Turgis, with others, was at Miscou in the following years. Most of the Jesuits, however, were compelled to withdraw with shattered health; and Turgis, devoting himself to the care of the sick, died at his post in 1637. Father John Dolebeau became paralyzed, and while returning to France was blown up at sea. At last, however, Father Andrew Richard and Martin de Lyonne succeeded in founding a mission; they learned the language, and extended their labors to Chaleurs Bay, Ile Percée, Miramichi, and Chédabuctou, finding one old woman who had been baptized by Biard at Port Royal. Lyonne died, devotedly attending the sick, in 1661; Richard continued his labors some years later, aided for a time by James Fremin, and cheered by visits from his superior, Jerome Lalemant. They made some converts, although they did not banish the old superstitions and savagery of the tribe; but when Bishop Laval visited Gaspé in 1659, the missionaries presented one hundred and forty Indian Christians for confirmation.
When Richard’s labors ceased, the Recollects took charge of the mission at Isle Percée, where French and Indians were attended from about 1673 by Fathers Hilarion Guesnin and Exuperius Dethune. They were succeeded in 1675 by Father Christian Le Clercq, who took up the Indian mission with zeal, and has left ineffaceable traces of his twelve years’ labor. He acquired the Micmac language; and finding that some Indians, to aid their memory in retaining his instructions, employed a system of hieroglyphics on bits of bark, he studied and improved it, till he had the daily prayers, mass, and catechism in this form. The Indians readily adopted these hieroglyphics, and taught them to their children and later converts. They have been retained in use till the present, and the Rev. Christian Kauder, a Redemptorist, had type cut in Austria, and published a catechism, hymn and prayer book, in them at Vienna in 1866. In 1685 land was given to the priests of the Seminary of Quebec; gentlemen of that[269] body, with some Recollects and occasionally a Jesuit Father, served the coast from Gaspé to Nova Scotia, and all the Micmacs became Catholics. They seem to have been attended with the French, and not as a distinct mission. The Micmac territory included not only the coast, but Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. Of these missionaries, Messrs. Thury and Gaulin and the Recollect Felix Pain seem to have been the most prominent. The Abbé Anthony S. Maillard, who was missionary to the Micmacs in Cape Breton and Acadia till his death in 1768, exercised great influence; and his mastery of the language is shown in his Grammar of the Micmac, which was printed at New York in 1864.
The Montagnais Mission.—Tadousac was from the commencement of French settlement on the St. Lawrence an anchoring-place for vessels and a trading-station which attracted Indians from the west and north. Missionaries made visits to the spot from an early period, but the Jesuit mission there is regarded as having been founded in 1640. It received charitable aid from the Duchess d’Aiguillon, who maintained for a time the Fathers employed there. Father John de Quen may be said to have established the first permanent mission, from which gradually extended efforts for christianizing the tribes on the shores down to Labrador and on the upper waters of the Saguenay.
The first mission was the result of the effort of Charles Meiachkwat, a Montagnais who had visited Sillery and induced the Jesuit Fathers to send one of their number to Tadousac. Charles erected the first chapel; and may be regarded as the first native Christian of that district, and first native catechist, for he visited neighboring tribes to impart what religious knowledge he had learned.
The missionaries encountered the usual difficulties,—great laxity of morals, a deep-rooted belief in dreams, the influence of the medicine-men, and vices introduced by the traders, especially intoxication. Father Buteux, who replaced De Quen for a time, seems to have been the first to give his neophytes the kind of calendar still in use among the wandering Indians, with spaces for each day, to be marked off as it came, and Sundays and holidays so designated by symbols that they could recognize and observe them.
The missionaries at first went down from Quebec in the spring, and continued their labors till autumn, when the Indians scattered for the winter hunt; but as the neophytes felt the want of a regular ministry during the winter, they attempted, in 1645, to supply it by performing some of the priestly functions themselves. This led to fuller instruction; and to impress them, the missionaries left marked pieces of wood of different colors, called massinahigan, a word still in use in all the Catholic missions among Algonquin nations for a book of prayers.
In 1646 De Quen ascended the Saguenay, and penetrated, by way of the Chicoutimi, to Lake St. John, in order to preach to the Porcupine tribe, who[270] had already erected a cross in their village. Three years later, Father Gabriel Druillettes visited the same tribe and reared his bark chapel among them. In 1651 De Quen made another missionary excursion, reaching various villages on the lake, and subsequently, returning to Tadousac, sailed down the St. Lawrence till he reached bands of the Oumamiwek or Bersiamites, among whom he began mission work.
The mission of the Holy Cross at Tadousac was, however, the scene of the most assiduous labors, as often a thousand Indians of different tribes would be encamped there; and though nothing could be done to check the errant life of these Algonquins, ideas of Christian morality and faith were inculcated, and much reformation was effected. In 1660 Father Jerome Lalemant, superior of the missions, continued the labors of his predecessors on Lake St. John, and ascending the Mistassini, reached Nekouba, then a gathering-place for the Algonquin tribes of the interior. Here they hoped to reach several nations who had never seen a missionary, and especially the Ecureuil, or Squirrel tribe; but the Iroquois war-parties had penetrated farther than missionary zeal, and the Jesuits found the Algonquins of these remote cantons fleeing in all directions after sustaining a series of defeats from the fierce men-hunters from the Mohawk and Oswego. The great aim was to reach the Crees, but that nation was subsequently approached by way of the great lakes, when the route in that direction was opened by Menard.
Bailloquet and Nouvel wintered in successive years with bands of Montagnais, travelling in snow-shoes, and drawing their chapel requisites on a sled, as they followed the hunters, pitching their tents on encountering other parties, to enable them to fulfil their religious duties. Then, in the spring of 1664, while Druillettes visited the tribes on the upper waters of the Saguenay, Nouvel ascended the Manicouagan to the lake of that name in the country of the Papinachois, a part yet untrodden by the foot of the white man. Some of the tribe were already Christians, converted at the mission posts; but to most the missionary was an object of wonder, and his rude chapel a never-ceasing marvel to them and to a more northerly tribe, the Ouchestigouetch, who soon came to camp beside the mission cross.
Nouvel cultivated this tribe for several years, wintering among them, or pursuing them in their scattered cabins, till the spring of 1667, when all the Christians of these Montagnais bands gathered at Tadousac to meet Bishop Laval, who, visiting his diocese in his bark canoe, was coming to confer on those deemed sufficiently grounded in the faith the sacrament of confirmation. He reached Tadousac on the 24th of June, and was welcomed by four hundred Christian Indians, who escorted him to the temporary bark chapel, for the church had been totally destroyed by fire. The bishop confirmed one hundred and forty-nine.
Beaulieu, Albanel, and Druillettes labored there in the following years;[271] but small-pox and other diseases, with want caused by the Iroquois driving them from their hunting-grounds, had reduced the Indians, so that, as Albanel states, in 1670 Tadousac was almost deserted,—not more than one hundred Indians assembled there, whereas he remembered the time when one could count a thousand or twelve hundred encamped at the post at once; and of this petty band some were Micmacs from Gaspé, and Algonquins from Sillery.
In 1671, while Father de Crépieul remained in charge of the missions near Tadousac, with which he was for years identified, Albanel, with the Sieur Denys de St. Simon, ascended the Saguenay, and wintering near Lake St. John pushed on by Lake and River Nemiskau, till they reached the shores of Hudson’s Bay, where the Jesuit planted his cross and began a mission. On his way to revisit it in 1674, he was crippled by an accident, and Albanel found him helpless in mid-winter in the woods near Lake St. John. Crépieul then visited the Papinachois in their country, as Father Louis Nicolas did the Oumamis at the Seven Islands. Boucher, a few years later, aided Crépieul, and from their chapels at Chicoutimi and Metabetchouan as centres, missionary excursions were made in all directions.
Dalmas, a later auxiliary of Crépieul, after wintering at Chicoutimi, was killed in the spring of 1694 on the shores of Hudson’s Bay.
De Crépieul clung to his arduous mission till 1702, when, broken by his long and severe labors, he retired to Quebec, where he died soon after.
Peter Michael Laure, who occupied the same field from 1720 to 1737, drew up a Montagnais grammar and dictionary, greatly aided, as his manuscript tells us, by the pious Mary Outchiwanich.
Father John Baptist La Crosse was the last of the old Jesuit missionaries at Tadousac and Chicoutimi, dying at the former post in 1782, after the suppression of his order and the disasters of his countrymen. He taught many of his flock to read and write, and they handed down the knowledge from parent to child, clinging to the religious books and Bible selections made for them by this missionary, of whom they still recount wonderful works.
The Missions at Quebec, Three Rivers, and Sillery.—The Jesuit missionaries on returning to Canada in 1632 resumed the instruction of the wandering Montagnais near Quebec, Father Le Jeune taking the lead; and when a post was established at Three Rivers, Father Buteux began there the devoted labors which ended only with his life. The missionaries during the time of trade when Indians gathered at the French posts endeavored to gain their good-will, and instructed all who evinced any good disposition; during the rest[272] of the year they made visits to wandering bands, often wintering with them, sharing the dangers and privations of their hunting expeditions amid mountains, rapids, and forests.
PAUL LE JEUNE.
From a photograph (lent by Mr. Parkman) of an old print.
It was soon evident that their precarious mode of life, the rapid diminution of game when they began to kill the animals for their furs and not merely for food, small-pox and other diseases introduced by the French, and the slaughters committed by the Iroquois, would soon sweep away the Upper Montagnais, unless they could be made sedentary. A few endeavored to settle near the French and maintain themselves by agriculture, but in 1637 the missionaries began a kind of reduction at a place above Quebec called at first St. Joseph, but soon known as Sillery, from the name of the pious and benevolent Commander de Sillery in France, who gave means for the good work. Two families, comprising twenty souls in all, settled here, in houses built for them, and began to cultivate the ground. Others soon joined them, and plots were allotted to the several families. Of this settlement Noel Negabamat may be regarded as the founder. Though Sillery was ravaged by disease, which soon broke out in the cabins, the project seemed full of promise; the Indians elected chiefs, and a form of government was adopted. The nuns sent out in 1639 to found a hospital, for which the Duchesse d’Aiguillon gave the necessary means, aided the missionaries greatly. From the day they landed, these self-sacrificing nuns opened wards for the reception of sick Indians, and they decided to establish their hospital at Sillery. They carried out this resolution, and opened it on the first of December, 1640, receiving both French and Indian patients. Their services impressed the natives more deeply than did the educational efforts of the Jesuit Fathers and of the Ursuline nuns, who had schools for Indian children of various tribes at Quebec.
This mission was an object of especial care, and great hopes were entertained of its effecting much in civilizing and converting the Montagnais and Algonquins, both of which nations were represented in the first settlers at St. Joseph’s. These Indians were induced to cultivate the ground, but they[273] still depended on their fishing, and the winter hunt carried them off to the woods. This the missionaries could not prevent, as the hunts supplied the furs for the trade of the company which controlled Canada.
The hopes of the Jesuits were not to be realized. Some progress was made, and converts like Noel Negabamat and Charles Meiachkwat exercised great influence; but the Iroquois war-parties soon drove the new agriculturists from their fields, the nuns removed their hospital to Quebec in 1646, and the neophytes were scattered. “We behold ourselves dying, exterminated every day,” wrote Negabamat in 1651. Some years after, an accidental fire destroyed St. Michael’s church with the mission house, and from that time the Indian settlement at Sillery languished. Disease and excess aided the work of war, and the Algonquins and Montagnais dwindled away.
As early as 1643 some Abenakis from the banks of the Kennebec had visited Sillery, and one chief was baptized. Father Druillettes soon after visited their towns, and founded a mission in their country. This was at first continued, but the Christians of the tribe and those seeking instruction visited Sillery from time to time. This was especially the case after 1657, when the Jesuits suspended their labors in Maine, for fear of giving umbrage to the Capuchin Fathers who had missions on the coast.
Sillery revived as an Abenaki mission, but the soil at last proved unfit for longer cultivation by Indians. By this time, Fathers James and Vincent Bigot had been assigned to this tribe. They looked out for a new mission site, and by the aid of the Marchioness de Bauche bought a tract on the Chaudière River, and in 1683 established near the beautiful falls the mission of St. Francis de Sales. Sillery was abandoned, and there was nothing to mark the famous old mission site, till a monument was erected a few years ago to the memory of Masse and De Noue, who lie there.
With the chapel of St. Francis as a base, a new series of missions gradually spread into Maine. The Jesuits resumed their ministry on the banks of the Kennebec; the Bigots, followed by Rale, Lauverjeat, Loyard, and Sirenne, keeping up their work amid great danger, their presence exciting the most fearful animosity in the minds of New Englanders, who ascribed all Indian hostilities to them. Rale was especially marked out. Though a man of cultivation and a scholar,—his Abenaki dictionary being a monument of his mastery of the language,—a price was set on his head, his chapel was pillaged by one expedition, which carried off his manuscript dictionary[679] (now one of the curiosities in[274] Harvard College Library), and in a later expedition he was slain at the foot of his mission cross, August 23, 1724. He knew his danger, and his superior would have withdrawn him, but the Canadian authorities insisted on his remaining.
Besides this Jesuit mission at Norridgewock, the priests of the seminary at Quebec, anxious to do their part in the mission-work of which their parent institution, the Seminary of the Foreign Missions at Paris, did so much, founded a mission on the Penobscot. This was long directed by the Rev. Peter Thury, who acquired great influence over the Indians, accompanying them in peace and war till his death in 1699. A Recollect, Father Simon, had a mission at Medoktek, on the St. John’s, which was subsequently directed by the Jesuits, as well as that on the Penobscot.
Meanwhile the mission on the Chaudière had been transferred to the site still known as St. François, and on the death of Rale bands of the Kennebec Indians emigrated to it, forming a strong Indian village, which sent many a vindictive war-party on the frontiers of New England. This drew on it fierce retaliation from Rogers and his partisan corps, who captured the village, killed many, and fired church and dwellings.[680]
The Missions at Three Rivers and Montreal.—Ascending the St. Lawrence, the next mission centre was Three Rivers, where the Jesuit missionaries Le Jeune and Buteux resumed, in 1633, the labors of the Recollect Brother Du Plessis and Fathers Huet and Poullain. It was a place of trade where Indians gathered, so that the missionaries found constant objects of their care. Many were instructed, and returned to impart to others their newly acquired knowledge of God’s way with man, and the consolations of Christianity.
Gradually the Indians who had settled near Three Rivers were almost entirely won; while the Attikamegues, or White Fish Indians, dwelling far inland, came to ask a missionary to reside among them. They were of the Montagnais tongue, and remarkable for their gentle character. Father Buteux, charmed with their docility, instructed them; and at last, in 1651, ascended the river, and after a toilsome journey of fifty-three days, reached their country. All who had not become Christians already were anxiously awaiting his arrival; a rude chapel was raised, and the neophytes in their fervor crowded to it to listen or to pray. The next year Buteux set out once more to make a missionary visit to this interesting race; but the Iroquois were on their track, and the missionary while making a portage received[275] two fatal wounds, and died amid his arduous duties. The tribe was soon nearly annihilated, the survivors seeking refuge among the remote lodges of the scattered Montagnais.
Among the converts at Three Rivers was Pieskaret, the most famous warrior of the Montagnais or Adirondacks, whose bravery was the terror of the Iroquois. But the Indians of that portion of the St. Lawrence valley were doomed,—nearly all were swept away by the Iroquois; and after the death of Buteux the Montagnais mission at Three Rivers seems to have numbered few Indians, nearly all the survivors having fled to their kindred tribes near Tadousac.
When the settlement at Montreal was formed in 1641 by Maisonneuve acting under the Society of Montreal, the Jesuits were the first clergymen of the new town, and began to labor among the Indians who gathered there from the St. Lawrence and Ottawa. This mission of the Jesuits was not, however, a permanent one. The Sulpitians,—a community of priests established in Paris by the Rev. John James Olier, one of the members of the Montreal society,—became the proprietors of the new settlement, and they continue still in charge of churches, institutions, and missions on or near Montreal island, after a lapse of more than two centuries. An Indian mission for Algonquins was begun on the mountain at a spot now known as the Priests’ Farm, chiefly by the liberality and zeal of the Rev. Mr. Belmont. Iroquois and Hurons also came, and the mission was removed to Sault au Récollet, and then to the Lake of the Two Mountains. Here it still exists, embracing an Iroquois village and one of Algonquin language, made up in no small part of Nipissings from the lake of that name. This is the oldest mission organization in Canada, the Sulpitians having been unmolested by the English Government, which put an end to the communities of the Jesuits and Recollects.
Above Montreal no permanent missions were attempted among the Algonquin bands dotted along the line of the Ottawa,—the Indians seeking instruction on their visits to the French posts and missions, or receiving missionaries from time to time, as their river was the great highway to the West.
The Huron Mission.—The Huron nation in Upper Canada, a confederacy of tribes allied in origin and language to the Iroquois, had been already the field of a mission conducted by Recollects, aided after a time by the Jesuits. When Canada was restored to France by the treaty of St. Germain, Brebeuf penetrated to his old mission, in 1634, accompanied by Fathers Daniel and Davost, and in September erected a log chapel in the town of Ihonatiria. Thus began the greatest of the Jesuit missions in Canada, which called forth the most intrepid courage of the heralds of[276] Christianity, and triumphed over the heathen hostility in the tribes, only to perish at last by the hands of the terrible Iroquois.
The Hurons lived in palisaded towns, their bark cabins clustering within, while the fields where they cultivated corn, beans, pumpkins, and tobacco lay near. Their hunting and fishing excursions were comparatively short, and they laid up stores of provisions for winter. The opportunity for instructing the people was accordingly much greater than among the nomadic tribes of the Algonquin family. Brebeuf, already versed in the language, extended his studies and initiated his associates into its intricate peculiarities. The young were the first care, and catechetical instructions were daily given to all whom they could gather. The Lord’s Prayer and other devotions were taught; but it was not easy to secure continuous attendance. This led to the project of a school at Quebec, to which some of the most promising boys were sent. There, with less to tempt them, more progress was made; yet the result was but temporary, for the pupils on returning to the upper country threw aside their slight civilization.
As other missionaries arrived, the labors of the Fathers in the Huron country extended; but they found that the medicine-men were bitter enemies, foreseeing a loss of all their influence. The march of Europeans through America always spread new diseases. In the Huron country the ravages were severe. The medicine-men ascribed all to the missionaries. Cabins were closed against them; their lives were in constant peril. Their house was set on fire, and a council of the three tribes met to decide whether they should all be put to death. The undaunted missionaries prepared to meet their fate, committing their chapel service and the fruit of their Indian studies to Peter Tsiwendeentaha, their first adult convert. Their fearless conduct at last triumphed. Adults came to solicit instruction; Ossossare and Teananstayae became mission stations, four Fathers laboring in each, while Garnier and Jogues proceeded to the towns of the Tionontates, a kindred tribe, who from their cultivation and sale of tobacco were generally called by the French the Petun, or Tobacco tribe. As new stations were formed and chapels built in the Huron towns, the missionaries in 1639 erected on the River Wye the mission-house of St. Mary’s, to serve as a centre from which priests could be sent to any of the towns, and where they could always find refuge. They extended their labors to the Neutral Nation and to the Algonquin tribes lying near the Huron country, reaching as far as Sault Ste. Marie. The missionaries endured great hardships and sufferings on these journeys from hunger, cold, and accident,—Brebeuf having broken his collar-bone by a fall, and reaching his lodge only by a long and weary progress on his hands and knees. Their efforts seemed almost vain. In 1640 they could claim only one hundred Christians out of sixteen thousand Hurons; a few prominent chiefs had joined them, but the young braves would not submit to the law of the gospel. Christian families, and still more Christians in heathen families,[277] were subjected to much persecution, till the number of catechumens in a town enabled them to take a firm stand.
Meanwhile the Five Nations, freely supplied with firearms by the Dutch, were annihilating the Huron tribes, already weakened by disease. The war interrupted intercourse between the Huron country and Quebec. Father Jogues, sent down in 1642 to obtain supplies for the mission, while journeying back, fell with many Hurons into the hands of the Mohawks, who killed most of the party, and led the rest with the missionary to their towns. The missionary and his attendant, René Goupil, were tortured and mutilated, reduced to the rude slavery of Indian life, and witnessed the execution of most of their Hurons. Full of missionary zeal, they endeavored to impart some ideas of Christianity; but the effort cost Goupil his life, and Jogues was with difficulty rescued by the Dutch, and sent to Europe.
The missionaries in the Huron country, by the loss of the supplies in the Huron flotilla, were reduced to great straits, till Brebeuf reached them with two assistants, Garreau and Chabanel, whom no dangers could deter. Father Bressani, returning to his western labors, was less fortunate; he too was captured, and endured all but death at the hands of the Mohawks. His sufferings led the charitable Dutch to effect his release. Yet neither Jogues nor Bressani faltered; both returned to Canada to continue their perilous work.
When a temporary peace gave the Huron mission a respite, there were five churches in as many towns, and one for Algonquins living in the Huron country. The voice of the missionary seemed to find more hearers, and converts increased; but the end was at hand.
In July, 1648, the Iroquois attacked Teananstayae. As the braves manned the palisades, Father Daniel was among them to give them the consolations of religion, to confess and baptize; then he hurried to the cabins to minister to the sick and aged. He found his chapel full, and urging them to flight from the rear, he closed the front portal behind him, and awaited the Iroquois braves, who had stormed the palisade and were swooping down on the cross-crowned church. Riddled by arrows and balls, he fell dead, and his body was flung into the burning church of St. Joseph.
The capture of this town seemed a death-blow to hope in the bosoms of the Hurons. They abandoned many of their towns, and fled to the islands of Lake Huron or the towns of the Petuns. They could not be aroused to any system of defence or precaution.
On the 16th of the ensuing March, a force of a thousand Iroquois stormed, at daybreak, the Huron town which the missionaries called St. Ignatius. So general and complete was the massacre, that only three escaped to the next large town, St. Louis. Here were stationed the veteran[278] Brebeuf, companion of the early Recollect missioners in the land, friend of Champlain, and with him as associate the young Gabriel Lalemant. The Hurons urged the missionaries to fly; but, like Daniel, they remained, exercising their ministry to the last, and attending to every call of zeal. The Hurons repelled the first assault; but their palisade was carried at last, and the victorious Iroquois fired the cabins. The missionaries, while ministering to the wounded and dying, were captured. They were taken, with other captives, to the ruined town of St. Ignatius, and there a horrible torture began. They were bound to the stake; Brebeuf’s hands were cut off; Lalemant’s body bristled with awls and iron barbs; red-hot hatchets were pressed under their arms and between their legs; and around the neck of Brebeuf a collar of these weapons was placed. But the heroic old missionary denounced God’s vengeance on the savages for their cruelty and hatred of Christianity, till they cut off his nose and lips, and thrust a firebrand into his mouth. They sliced off his flesh and devoured it, and, scalping him, poured boiling water on his head, in mockery of baptism; then they hacked off his feet, clove open his chest, and devoured his heart. Lalemant was wrapped in bark to which fire was applied, and underwent many of the same tortures as the older missionary; he too was baptized in mockery, his eyes torn out and coals forced into the sockets. After torturing him all the night, his tormenters clove his head asunder at dawn.
St Mary’s was menaced; but the Huron fugitives there sent out a party which repulsed the Iroquois, who then retired, sated with their vengeance. The Huron nation was destroyed. Fifteen towns were abandoned. One tribe, the Scanonaenrat, submitted to the Iroquois, and removed to the Seneca country in a body, with many Hurons of other tribes. Some bands fled to the Petuns, Neuters, Eries, or Susquehannas. A part, following the first fugitives to the islands in Lake Huron, roamed to Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. These were in time brought back by later missionaries to Mackinac.
The Huron mission was overthrown. A few of the Jesuit missionaries followed the fugitives to St. Joseph’s Island; others joined Garnier in the Petun mission. But that too was doomed. Echarita was attacked in December, the Iroquois avoiding the Petun braves who had sallied out to meet them. Garnier, a man of singularly attractive character, earnest and devoted, though mortally wounded, dragged himself along on the ground to minister to the wounded, and was tomahawked as he was in the act of absolving one. Another missionary, Chabanel, was killed by an apostate Huron. Their comrades accompanied the fugitive Petuns as they scattered and sought refuge in the islands. The number of the Hurons and Petuns was too great for the limited and hasty agriculture to maintain. Great misery ensued. In June, 1650, the missionaries abandoned the Huron country, and descended to Quebec with a number of[279] the Hurons. This remnant of a once powerful nation were placed on Isle Orleans; but the Iroquois swept many of them off, and the survivors found a home at Lorette, where their descendants still remain.
Thus ended the Huron mission in Upper Canada, which was begun by the Recollect Le Caron in 1615, and which had employed twenty-nine missionaries, seven of whom had yielded up their lives as the best earnest of their sincerity and devotion to the cause of Christian progress.
The Jesuit missions were by this time reduced to a most shadowy state. The Iroquois had almost entirely swept away the Montagnais tribes on the St. Lawrence above the Saguenay; they had cut to pieces most of the bands of Algonquins on the Ottawa, while the country of the Hurons, Petuns, and Neuters was a desert. The trading-posts of the French at Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec were almost forsaken; no longer did flotillas come laden with peltries to gladden the merchants, and give missionaries an opportunity to address distant tribes. Several missionaries returned to Europe, as there seemed no field to be reached in America.
Suddenly, however, such a field presented itself. The Iroquois, who had carried off a missionary—Father Poncet—from near Quebec, proposed peace. They were in a fierce war with the Eries and Susquehannas, and probably found that in their bloodthirsty march they were making the land a desert, cutting off all supplies of furs from Dutch and French alike. At all events, they restored Poncet, and, proposing peace, solicited missionaries.
The Iroquois Mission.—War with the Iroquois had been almost uninterrupted since the settlement of Canada. Champlain found the Canadian tribes of every origin arrayed against the fierce confederation which in their symbolic language “formed a cabin.” The founder of Canada had gone to the very heart of the Iroquois country, and at the head of his swarthy allies had given them battle on the shores of Lake Champlain and on the borders of Lake Oneida. But the war had brought the French colony to the brink of ruin, and swept its allies from the face of the earth.
Now peace was to open to missionary influence the castles of this all-conquering people, and a foothold was to be gained there; and not only this, but, relieved from war, Canada was to open intercourse with the great West, and new missions were to be attempted in the basin of the upper lakes and in the valley of the Mississippi. The missionaries of Canada were thus to extend their labors within the present limits of our republic on the north, as the Franciscans of Spain were doing along the southern part from Florida to New Mexico.
The Recollect Joseph de la Roche d’Allion had already in early days crossed the Niagara from the west; Jogues and Raymbault had planted the cross at Sault Ste. Marie; Father Jogues had attempted to found a mission[280] on the banks of the Mohawk; but his body, with the bodies of Goupil and Lalande, had mouldered to dust in our soil.
Father Simon le Moyne, who had succeeded to the Indian name of Jogues, and who inherited his spirit, was the interpreter in the recent negotiations, and had been invited to Onondaga and the Mohawk. For the former, the seat of the council-fire of the Iroquois league, he set out from Quebec July 2, 1654, and reached Onondaga by a route then new to the French, passing through the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario, and the Oswego. He was favorably received at Onondaga, and the sachems, formally by a wampum belt, invited the French to build a house on Lake Ontario.
There was already a Christian element in the Iroquois cantons. Each of the cantons contained hundreds of Hurons, all instructed in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and not a few openly professing it; while in the Seneca country was a town made up of the Scanonaenrat Hurons, Petuns, and Neuters. Le Moyne found wherever he went Christians eager to enjoy his ministry.
His embassy filled all with hope; and the next year, as the Onondagas, through a Christian chief, solicited the establishment of a mission by the Jesuit Fathers, Peter Joseph Chaumonot and Claude Dablon were selected. They reached Onondaga, and after a formal reception by the sachems with harangues and exchange of wampum belts, the missionaries were escorted to the spot given to them for their house and chapel. Two springs, one salt and one of clear, sparkling fresh water, still known as the Jesuits’ well, mark the knoll where St. Mary’s of Ganentaa was speedily erected. The Canadian missionaries, from their resources and alms contributed in France, spent large amounts to make this new central mission adapted for all the fond hopes planned for its future work in diffusing the gospel.
The missionaries found the greatest encouragement in the interest manifested, and in the numbers who came to solicit instruction. They labored assiduously to gather the unexpected harvest; but mistrust soon came, with reports of hostile action by the French. Dablon returned to Canada, and a party of French under Captain Dupuis set out to begin a settlement at Onondaga, while Fathers Le Mercier and Menard went to extend the missions. They were welcomed with all the formalities of Indian courtesy; and while Dupuis and his men prepared to form the settlement, the missionaries erected a second chapel at the Onondaga castle, which was attended from Ganentaa. Then René Menard began a mission among the Cayugas, and Chaumonot, passing still farther, visited the Seneca town of Gandagare, and that occupied by the Scanonaenrat, many of whom were already Christians, and more ready to embrace the faith. The Senecas themselves showed a disposition to listen to Christian doctrines. Finding[281] the field thus full of promise, Chaumonot and Menard returned to Onondaga, whence they were despatched to Oneida. Here they found less promise, but there were captive Hurons to profit by their ministry.
LAKE ONTARIO AND THE IROQUOIS COUNTRY.
[From the Jesuit Relation of 1662-1663, showing the relative positions of the Five Nations, and Fort d’Orange (Albany).
Cf. this with map Pays des Cinq Nations Iroquoises, preserved in the Archives of the Marine at Paris, and engraved in Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française, iii. 196; and with one cited by Harrisse (no. 239), Le Lac Ontario avec les Lieux circonuoisins, et particulierement les Cinq Nations Iroquoises, l’Année 1688, which he would assign to Franquelin.—Ed.]
Meanwhile Father Le Moyne had visited the Mohawk canton from Canada, and prepared the way for a mission in that tribe.
Thus at the close of 1656 missionaries had visited each of the Five Nations, and all seemed ready for the establishment of new and thriving missions. The next year signs of danger appeared. A party of Hurons compelled to remove to Onondaga were nearly all massacred on the way, the missionaries Ragueneau and Duperon in vain endeavoring to stay the work of[282] slaughter, which was coolly ascribed to them. The Mohawks, though they received Le Moyne, were openly hostile. They attacked a flotilla of Ottawas at Montreal, and slew the missionary Leonard Garreau, who was on his way to the far West, to establish missions on the upper lakes.
The missionaries in the cantons and the little French colony at Onondaga were soon evidently doomed to a like fate. So evident was the hostility of the Five Nations, that Governor d’Ailleboust arrested all the Iroquois in Canada to hold them as hostages. The missionaries at Ganentaa saw their danger, and through the winter formed plans for escape. At last, in March, they prepared for a secret flight, and to cover their design gave a banquet to the Onondagas, adopting the kind in which, according to Indian custom, all the food must be eaten. Dances and games were kept up till a late hour; and when the weary guests at last departed, the French, who had amid the din borne to the water’s edge boats and canoes secretly prepared in their house, embarked, and, plying oar and paddle all night long, reached Lake Ontario unseen and undiscovered even by a wandering hunter. It was not till the following evening that the Onondagas, finding the house at Ganentaa still and quiet, discovered that the French had vanished. But the mode of escape was long a mystery to them, so cautiously and adroitly had all the preparations for flight been made.
Le Moyne, in similar peril on the Mohawk, wrote a farewell letter, which he committed to the Dutch authorities; but the sachems of the tribe suddenly sent him to Montreal in the care of a party, so that in March, 1657, the Jesuit missionaries had all withdrawn from the territory of the Five Nations, after their short but laborious effort to open the eyes of the people to the truths of religion.
The Iroquois then dropped the mask, and war parties swept through the French colony, filling it with fire and blood. Yet the influence of the missionaries had not been in vain. One able man, Garakonthié, had listened and studied, though his unmoved countenance gave no token of interest or assent. He became the protector of the Indian Christians and of French prisoners, as well as an open advocate of peace. Saonchiogwa, the Cayuga sachem, embraced his views, and in the summer of 1660 appeared at Montreal as an envoy of peace, restoring some prisoners and demanding a missionary for Onondaga. The Governor of Canada hesitated to ask any of the Jesuit Fathers to undertake so perilous a duty; but as the lives of the French at Onondaga depended on it, Father Le Moyne intrepidly undertook the mission. He was waylaid by Oneidas, but escaped, and reached Oswego. Garakonthié came out to meet him. Once more peace was ratified. Nine prisoners accompanied Garakonthié to Montreal, Le Moyne remaining; but so frail was the newly established peace, that war parties from Mohawk and Onondaga slew, near Montreal, two zealous Sulpitians,[283] the Rev. Messrs. Vignal and Le Maître. Though aware that any moment might be his last, Le Moyne labored on at Onondaga and Cayuga among Huron captives and native Iroquois, many, especially women, having become Christians, and instructing others whom they brought to the missionary. His labors ended in the spring of 1661, when he returned to Canada with the rest of the French captives.
Again war was resumed, and though there were negotiations for peace, and even applications for missionaries, the French Government, weary of being the sport of Indian treachery, resolved to humble the Iroquois. Regular troops and a body of colonists were sent from Europe, and preparations made for a vigorous war. Forts were erected on the Sorel River and Lake Champlain to cover Canada and aid in operations against the Mohawks and Oneidas. The western cantons, influenced by Garakonthié, proposed peace, and their proposals were accepted. Then, in 1665, De Courcelles led a force, on snow-shoes, to the very castles of the Mohawks, and though the tribe was warned in time to escape, their flight had its effect on the other cantons. The Oneidas asked for peace, and the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas renewed their request. De Tracy, the Viceroy of Canada, led in person a force of twelve hundred French and one hundred Indians to the Mohawk country, and laid it waste, burning all their towns and destroying all their stores of provisions.
This exhibition of strength compelled the Mohawks to sue for peace. All the cantons united in the treaty, and all solicited missionaries. Once more were the Jesuits to undertake to propagate Christianity in the towns of the Iroquois league, which had been so uniformly hostile to the French and their allies. In July, 1667, Fathers Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron set out for the field of their mission work, trusting their lives to a Mohawk party. They reached Gandawagué, and there and elsewhere found Christians. A chapel in honor of St. Mary was raised, and Fremin, sending Bruyas to Oneida, began his labors seriously. Pierron, after visiting Albany, returned to Quebec, and in May, 1668, Onondaga was assigned to Father Julian Garnier. Then De Carheil began St. Joseph’s mission at Cayuga; and Fremin, leaving Pierron on the Mohawk, set out for the Seneca country to establish a mission there.
Missionaries were thus at their labors in all the cantons, reviving the faith of the captive Hurons, and winning the better disposed to the faith. At Onondaga, Garakonthié during his life was the great stay of the missions. He did not at once embrace Christianity; but after mature deliberation was baptized with great solemnity in the cathedral of Quebec in 1669, and persevered to his death, respected by English, Dutch, and French, and by the Indians of the Five Nations, as a man of remarkable ability and virtue. The Mohawk canton gave to the faith Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie captive, who founded subsequently a mission village on the St. Lawrence; Catharine Tehgahkwita, a Mohawk girl whom Canada reveres to this day as a saint; the Chief Assendasé; and subsequently Kryn,[284] known as the Great Mohawk: Oneida gave the Chief Soenrese. Everywhere the missionaries found hearers, and among them many with courage enough to throw off the old ideas and accept Christianity with the strict obligations it imposed. The liquor which was sold without check at Albany made drunkenness prevalent throughout the castles of the Five Nations, brutalizing the braves; and these degraded men became tools of the medicine-men, who, clinging to the old belief, rallied around them the old Pagan party. But it is a remarkable fact that the Jesuit missionaries, while they did not succeed in making the Five Nations Christian, overthrew the worship of Agreskoué, or Tharonhiawagon, their old divinity, so completely that his name disappeared; and even those Iroquois who to this day refuse to accept Christianity, nevertheless worship Niio or Hawenniio, God or the Lord, who is no other than the God preached by the Jesuits in their almost hopeless struggle in the seventeenth century.
The Christians in the cantons were subjected to so many annoyances and petty persecutions, that gradually some sought homes with the Hurons at Lorette; but when, in 1669, the Jesuits offered La Prairie de la Magdelaine, a tract owned by them opposite Montreal, the Iroquois Christians began there the mission of St. Francis Xavier. The opportunity of being free from all molestation, of enjoying their religion in peace, led many to emigrate from the castles in New York, and a considerable village grew up, which the French fostered as a protection to Canada. This mission in time was moved up to Sault St. Louis, and became the present village of Caughnawaga, of which St. Regis is an offshoot. About the same time Iroquois Christians gathered at the Sulpitian Mission of the Mountain formed a village there beside that of the Algonquins, and this, removed to the Lake of the Two Mountains, still subsists, the same church serving for the flock divided in language.
These missions, continually recruited by accessions of converts from New York, afforded the missionaries the best opportunity for improving the Indians, and the spirit of religious fervor prevailed. The daily devotions, the zeal and piety of these new Christians, won encomiums from the bishop and clergy and from the civil authorities.
The sachems of the league saw with no favorable eye this emigration which was building up Iroquois settlements in Canada; for at Quinté Bay, Lake Ontario, was a third, chiefly of Cayugas, among whom the Sulpitians became missionaries. Finding their own efforts to recall the emigrants fruitless, the sachems complained to the English authorities. Dongan, the able governor of New York, whose great object was to exclude the French from the territory south of the great lakes, took up the matter in earnest. He brought over English Jesuits to replace those of France in the missions in the cantons from the Mohawk to Seneca Lake, and offered the Christian Iroquois in Canada a tract at Saratoga, promising them a missionary and special protection. The fall of James II. prevented the successful issue of this plan; but the opposition made manifest in the English policy roused[285] the old feeling in the Iroquois, and when De la Barre, and subsequently Denonville, marched to attack the Iroquois, the missionaries, no longer safe, abandoned their missions. John de Lamberville, at Onondaga, was the last of the missionaries, and he remained in his chapel till news arrived that Denonville had seized many of the Iroquois in order to send them to the galleys in France, and was advancing at the head of an army. His life was forfeited, but the magnanimous sachems would not punish him for the crime of another. They sent him safely back under an escort.
Thus the Jesuit missions in New York ended virtually in 1687. Father Milet, captured at Fort Frontenac, was a prisoner at Oneida from 1689 to 1694; and in spite of a severe law passed by New York in 1700, Bruyas, the very next year, endeavored to revive the Iroquois missions; but they never recovered any of their old importance, and were finally abandoned in 1708, when the last Jesuit missionary retired to Albany. Thenceforth the Jesuits devoted themselves to their mission at Sault St. Louis; though at a later period the Sulpitian Picquet gathered a new mission at the Presentation, now Ogdensburg, in 1748.
During the period of the main missions in the tribes from 1668 to 1687, the baptisms—chiefly of infants, and adults in danger of death—were about two hundred and fifty a year in the Five Nations; no permanent church or mission-house was erected, and the result of their teachings was the only monument. This was not slight: many were sincere Christians, frequenting Montreal and Philadelphia for the practice of their religion, while the Moravian and other later missionaries found these converts, from a knowledge of Christian thought and prayers, valuable auxiliaries in enabling them to reach the heathen Iroquois. Pennsylvania, which had English Jesuit missionaries in her borders, wisely employed their influence to attract Catholic Iroquois to the chapel in Philadelphia, in order to win through them the good-will of the cantons.
Towards the close of the Jesuit missions in New York, the Recollects appeared within the Iroquois limits at Quinté Bay and Niagara, during La Salle’s sway; but they made no serious effort to found a mission, though Father Hennepin obtained Bruyas’ works on the Mohawk language, in order to fit himself for the task. After the extinction of the Jesuits, secular priests continued the missions at Sault St. Louis and St. Regis, which still exist.
The Ottawa Missions.—In the geographical distribution of the country, the district around Lake Superior acquired at an early period the name of the country of the Ottawas, from the first tribe which opened intercourse with the French. The Jesuits, after establishing their missions[286] among the Hurons, soon extended their care to the neighboring Algonquin tribes, and in 1641 Father Jogues and Father Raymbault visited the Chippewas of Sault Ste. Marie. But the overthrow of the Wyandots and the desertion of their country interrupted for years all intercourse between the French on the St. Lawrence and the tribes on the upper lakes. Yet in 1656 an Ottawa flotilla reached the St. Lawrence, and the missionaries Garreau and Druillettes set out with them for the West; but near Montreal Island they were ambushed by the Iroquois, and Garreau was left weltering in his blood. Undeterred by his fate or by the hardships and perils of the long journey, the aged Menard, a veteran of the Huron and Cayuga missions, set out, encouraged by Bishop Laval, with another Ottawa flotilla, in July, 1660, expecting no fate but one that would appall most men. “Should we at last die of misery,” he wrote, “how great our happiness will be!” Paddling all day, compelled to bear heavy burdens, deprived of food, and even abandoned by his brutal Ottawa guides, Menard at last reached a bay on the southern shore of Lake Superior on the festival of St. Teresa, and named it in her honor. It was apparently Keweenaw Bay. “Here,” he wrote, “I had the consolation of saying mass, which repaid me with usury for all my past hardships. Here I began a mission, composed of a flying church of Christian Indians from the neighborhood of the settlements, and of such as God’s mercy has gathered in here.” A chief at first received him into his wigwam, but soon drove him out; and the aged priest made a rude shelter of fir branches piled up, and in this passed the winter laboring to instruct and console some as wretched as himself. In the spring his zeal led him to respond to a call from some fugitive Hurons who were far inland. He set out, but was lost at a portage, and in all probability was murdered by a Kickapoo, in August, 1661.
Claude Allouez was the next Jesuit assigned to this dangerous post. In the summer of 1665 he set out, and reaching Chegoimegon Bay on Lake Superior on the first of October, began the mission of La Pointe du St. Esprit, content to labor there alone with no mission station and no countrymen except a few fur-traders between his chapel and Montreal. For thirty years he went from tribe to tribe endeavoring to plant the faith of which he was the envoy. He founded the mission at Sault Ste. Marie, those in Green Bay, the Miami, and, with Marquette, the Illinois mission. He was the first of the missionaries to meet the Sioux and to announce the existence of the great river Mesipi. His first labors were among the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie, the Ottawas at La Pointe, and the Nipissings at Lake Alimpegon. When reinforced by Fathers Nicolas, Marquette, and Dablon, the last two took post at Sault Ste. Marie; and Allouez, leaving the Ottawa mission to Father Marquette, who soon had the Hurons also gather around him at La Pointe, proceeded to Green Bay, where he founded, in December, 1669, the mission of St. Francis Xavier and a motley village of Sacs and Foxes, Pottawatamies, and Winnebagoes. His visits soon extended to other towns on the bay and on Fox River.
At these missions the Jesuits, after their daily mass, remained for a time to instruct all who came; then they visited the cabins to comfort the sick, and to baptize infants in danger of death. Study of the dialects of the various tribes cost hours of patient toil; and reaching the western limit of the Algonquin tribes, they were already in contact with the Winnebagoes and Sioux of a radically different stock,—the Dakota.
Marquette was preparing the way to the lodges of the Sioux, when the folly of the Hurons and Ottawas provoked that tribe to war. The Hurons fled to Mackinac, the Ottawas to Manitouline, and Marquette was compelled to defer his projected Sioux and Illinois missions.
The field seemed full of promise, and other missionaries were sent out. They labored amid great hardships, and suffered much from the brutality of the Indians. With tribes that were constantly shifting their camping-grounds, it was difficult to maintain any regular system of instruction for adults, or to bring the young to frequent the chapel with any assiduity. Lay brothers, skilled as smiths and workers in metal, were powerful auxiliaries in winning the good-will of the Indians, as they repaired guns and other weapons and utensils. They were the first manufacturers of the West, visiting the copper deposits of Lake Superior, to obtain material for crucifixes, medals, and other similar objects, which the missionaries distributed among their converts. Yet even these lay brothers and their helpers, the volunteer donnés, were not free from danger, and tradition claims that one of them was killed by the brutal men whom they had so long served so well.
Of these missions, that at Mackinac, with its Hurons and Ottawas, became the largest and most fervent. The former were more easily recalled to their long-forgotten Christian duties, and the Ottawas benefited by their example. Between 1670 and 1680 this mission, then at Point St. Ignace, numbered five hundred Hurons and thirteen hundred Ottawas.
The missions at Green Bay could show much less progress among the Sacs and Foxes, Mascoutens, Pottawatamies, and Menomonees.
Father Marquette, setting out in June, 1673, from Mackinac with Louis Jolliet, ascended the Fox, and reaching the Wisconsin by a portage, entered the Mississippi, which they descended to the villages of the Quappas or Arkansas. Returning by way of the Illinois River, the Jesuit gave the Kaskaskias the first instructions, and was so encouraged that he returned to found a mission, but died before he could reach his chapel at Mackinac. This Illinois mission was continued by Allouez, who visited it regularly for several years from his headquarters among the Miamis.
There had arisen by this time a strong government opposition to the Jesuits, based partly on a hostility to the order which had always prevailed in France, but heightened in Canada by the fact that in the struggle between the civil authorities and the bishop with his clergy in regard to the selling of liquor to the Indians, the Jesuits were regarded as the most stanch and active adherents of the bishop. This feeling led to the recall of the[288] Recollects. They found, however, few avenues for their labors. Several were assigned to Cavelier de la Salle, to accompany him on his explorations. One was stationed at Fort Frontenac, and Father Hennepin made some attempt to acquire a knowledge of Iroquois; but no mission work is recorded there or at Niagara, where Father Watteau was left.
Father Gabriel de la Ribourde, with Hennepin and Zenobius Membré, proceeded westward, and when La Salle established his post on the Illinois, which he called Fort Crèvecœur, the three Franciscans attempted a mission. Then Father Zenobius took up his residence in an Illinois wigwam. He found great difficulty, and was not destined to continue the experiment long. Hennepin, sent off by La Salle, descended to the Mississippi, and fell into the hands of the Sioux, who carried him up to the falls which still bear the name he conferred, “St. Anthony’s.” He was rescued after a time by Du Lhut, but can scarcely be said to have founded a mission. The Iroquois drove the French from Fort Crèvecœur by their attack on the Illinois, Father Gabriel was killed on the march by wandering Indians, and the attempted Recollect mission closed. After La Salle’s descent of the Mississippi and departure from the west, Allouez resumed his labors in Illinois, and was followed by Gravier, who placed the mission on a solid basis, and reduced the language to grammatical rules. Binneteau, the Marests, Mermet, and Pinet came to join in the good work. The Illinois seemed to show greater docility than did the tribes on Lake Superior and Green Bay. The missionaries were stationed among the Kaskaskias, Cahokias, Peorias, and Tamaroas. French settlements grew up in the fertile district, and marriages with converted Indian women were not uncommon. These missions flourished for several years, and a monument of the zeal of the Jesuits exists in a very extensive and elaborate dictionary of the language, with catechism and prayers, apparently the work of Father le Boulanger.
When Iberville reached the mouth of the Mississippi he was accompanied by Jesuit Fathers; but at that time no regular mission was attempted at the mouth of the river.
The Seminary of Quebec resolved to enter the wide field opened by the discovery of the Mississippi. Under the authority of the Bishop of Quebec, the Rev. Francis de Montigny, the Rev. Messrs. St. Côme and Davion were sent to Louisiana in 1698. They took charge of the Tamaroa mission on the Illinois, and attempted missions among the Natchez, Taensas, and Tonicas; but the Rev. Mr. St. Côme, who was stationed at Natchez, and the Rev. Mr. Foncault were killed by roving Indians. Then the priests of the Quebec Seminary withdrew from the lower Mississippi, but continued to labor at Tamaroa, chiefly for the French, till the closing years of French rule.
The Indian missions of Louisiana were then assigned to the Jesuits, who were allowed to have a residence in New Orleans, but were excluded from all ministry among the colonists. Their principal missions, among the Arkansas, Yazoos, Choctaws, and Alibamons were continued till the suppression[289] of the order. At the time of the Natchez outbreak, the Jesuit Father du Poisson, who had stopped at the post to give the settlers the benefit of his ministry in the absence of their priest, was involved in the massacre; Father Souel was butchered by the Yazoos whom he was endeavoring to convert, and Father Doutreleau escaped in a most marvellous manner. In the subsequent operations of the French against the Chickasaws, Father Sénat, accompanying a force of French and Illinois as chaplain, was taken and put to death at the stake, heroically refusing to abandon the wounded and dying.
These Louisiana missions extended to the country of the Sioux, where several attempts were made by Father Guignas, who was long a prisoner, and by other Jesuit Fathers. Aubert died by the hands of the Indians while trying to reach and cross the Rocky Mountains with La Verenderye.
The increasing hostility to the Jesuits naturally weakened their missions, which received a death-blow from the suppression of the order in France,—a step carried out so vindictively in Louisiana, that all the churches at their Indian missions were ordered to be razed to the ground.
As Canada fell to England and Louisiana to Spain, the work of the Jesuit missionaries in French North America ended. Their record is a chapter of American history full of personal devotedness, energy, courage, and perseverance; none can withhold the homage of respect to men like Jogues, Brebeuf, Garnier, Buteux, Gravier, Allouez, and Marquette. Men of intelligence and education, they gave up all that civilized life can offer to share the precarious life of wandering savages, and were the first to reveal the character of the interior of the country, its soil and products, the life and ideas of the natives, and the system of American languages. They made known the existence of salt springs in New York, and of copper on Lake Superior; they identified the ginseng, and enabled France to open a lucrative trade in it with China; they planted the first wheat in Illinois and the first sugar in Louisiana. Their missions did not equal in results those of the Franciscans in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California,—not from any lack of personal ability or devotion to their work, but because they were at the mercy of trading companies, which allowed them a stipend just sufficing for their moderate wants; but neither company nor government made any outlay for such mission-work as would have enabled the missionaries to carry out any general plan for civilizing the natives. The Spanish Government, on the contrary, dealt directly with the missionaries, and did all to insure the success of their teaching. When a mission was to be established in Texas, New Mexico, or California, with the missionaries went a party of soldiers to erect a presidio or garrison-house as the nucleus of a settlement. These soldiers took their families with them; civilized Indians from Mexico who had acquired some European arts and trades were also sent, as being able to understand the character of the Indians better. With the party went horses, cattle, sheep, swine, agricultural implements, grain and seeds for planting, looms, etc. Then a mission was established, and as converts were made in the neighboring tribes, they were brought into the mission,[290] and there taught to read and write in Spanish, instructed religiously, and trained to agriculture and trades. The mission was under discipline like a large factory, and each family shared in the profit.
The defect of the system was that no provision was made for the gradual settling apart from the mission of those who showed ability and judgment, allowing them to manage for themselves, and replacing them by others. They were kept too long in the degree of vassals, with no incentive to acquire manhood and independence. Accordingly, when the missions were suppressed, the Indians, who had never acted for themselves, were left in a state of helplessness.
Such a system in Canada would have saved the Indians of the St. Lawrence Valley and Upper Canada. What was accomplished, was effected by the indomitable energy of individuals,—the Jesuits, laboring most earnestly and continuously, effecting most; the Sulpitians ranking next; then the Priests of the Foreign Missions, and the Recollects. In our time the work of winning the Indians to the Catholic faith, or retaining them among its adherents, has devolved almost entirely on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Canada and Oregon, the Jesuits and Benedictines in the United States.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
THE works bearing directly or mainly on the history of the Catholic missions in Canada and the other parts of the northern continent once claimed by France embrace so large a collection, that, instead of the missions being an incident in the civil history, the civil history of French America for much of its first century has to be gleaned from the annals of its missionary work.
For the first Recollect mission,—1615-1629,—the main authority is Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, situé en l’Amérique vers la Mer douce, és derniers confins de la Nouvelle France, dite Canada, Paris, Denys Moreau, 1632; enlarged a few years later, and published as Histoire du Canada et Voyages que les Frères Mineurs Recollects y ont faicts pour la conversion des infidelles, Paris, Claude Sonnius, 1636. To each of these works is appended a Dictionnaire de la Langve Hvronne, Paris, 1632. Sagard’s work is very diffuse, rich in details on Indian life and customs, but gives little as to the civil history of Canada.[681]
Le Clercq, Établissement de la Foi, 2 vols. 12mo, 1691, translated as Establishment of the Faith, 2 vols. 8vo, New York, 1881,[682] gives in the first volume a clearer and more definite account of the ecclesiastical history of Canada for the period embraced in the first Recollect mission.
The Voyages de Champlain, Paris, 1619, gives some account of the introduction of the Recollects into Canada.[683] In Margry, Découvertes et Établissements des Français, Paris,[292] 1875, there are two memoirs by the Recollects, drawn up to obtain permission to return to Canada,—one made in 1637 (vol. i. p. 3), the other in 1684 (p. 18),—both bearing on their earlier labors.
Le Clercq refers in two places[684] to “an ample Relation given to the public” by the Recollects of Aquitaine for an account of their labors in Acadia; but the work is still unknown to bibliographers and students.
For the later Recollect missions, the sources to be consulted are Father Christian Le Clercq, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, Paris, 1691, and the second volume of his Établissement de la Foi. Hennepin, in his Description de la Louisiane, Paris, 1683, 1688, translated as Description of Louisiana, New York, 1881, gives an account of his own missionary career; but his Nouvelle Découverte expands his former work, and introduces matter of doubtful authenticity, while his Nouveau Voyage is based on the second volume of Le Clercq.[685]
As bearing on the Recollect missions, cf. the Voyage au Nouveau Monde of Father Crespel, Amsterdam, 1757; in English in Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness, Boston.[686]
On the Jesuit missions, the works to be consulted are, for the first attempt in Acadia, Biard, Relation de la Nouvelle France, de ses Terres, Naturel des Terres, et de ses Habitans, Lyons, 1616, reprinted in the Relations des Jésuites, Quebec, 1858, and in fac-simile by Dr. O’Callaghan; the accounts in the Annuæ Litteræ Societatis Jesu for 1612, Lyons, 1618, and for 1611, Douay, 1618; Biard’s letter in Carayon’s Première Mission des Jésuites au Canada, pp. 1-105; and an adverse view in Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 3d ed., Paris, 1618.
For the missions of Canada proper, the series of Jesuit Relations, as they are generally called, volumes issued in Paris, beginning with the “Lettre du Père Charles l’Allemant,” Paris, 1627 (also vol. xiii. of the Mercure Français), as Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France en l’année MDCXXVI, and continued annually from the Briève Relation du Voyage de la Nouvelle France, by Father Paul le Jeune, printed by Cramoisy at Paris in 1632, down to the year 1672, comprising in all a series of forty-one volumes. Besides the religious information which it was their main object to convey, in order to interest the pious in France in their mission work, the Jesuits in these Relations give much information as to the progress of geographical discovery, the resources and fauna of the country, the Indian nations, their language, manners, and customs, their wars and vicissitudes. The volumes have been much sought by collectors, and the whole series was reprinted by the Canadian Government at Quebec in 1858, in three large octavo volumes, under the title of Relations des Jésuites. Though some Relations were reprinted and translated into Latin, complete sets have never been common. In Le Clercq’s Établissement de la Foi there is a bitter and satirical review of these Jesuit Relations, but the writer evidently had only eight or nine of the volumes; and Arnauld, the great enemy of the Jesuits, having his attention drawn to them by Le Clercq’s work, found great difficulty in getting copies of any, but finally discovered fourteen in “a great library.” Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan drew attention to them in a paper before the New York Historical Society, and several collectors endeavored to complete sets. Mr. James Lenox obtained nearly all, reprinting two that exist in almost unique copies. Matter was prepared for subsequent volumes by the Superiors of the Canada missions, and the Relations for 1672-73, 1675, 1673-79, 1696, and separate Relations bearing on the Abenaki, Illinois, and Louisiana missions have been printed to correspond with the old Relations; and many of these were reprinted under the title of Relations Inédites de la Nouvelle France, 2 vols., 12mo, Paris, 1861. The autobiography of the missionary Chaumonot has also been issued (New York, 1858; Paris, 1869); and Lives of Father Isaac Jogues and Brebeuf, by Father Felix Martin (Paris, 1873, etc.). One work called forth by the Jesuit missions in Canada is the Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains comparées dux mœurs des premiers Temps, by Father Lafitau, long a missionary at Sault St. Louis, and author also of a treatise on the Ginseng.[687]
IROQUOIS FIVE NATIONS AND MISSION SITES,
1656-1684 (John S. Clark, 1879).
For the Louisiana mission there are some letters in the Lettres Édifiantes, which are also given in Rt. Rev. W. I. Kip, Early Jesuit Missions in North America, New York, 1847. The close of that mission is described in Carayon, Bannissement des Jésuites de la Louisiane, Paris, 1865. Besides the works in French, there is a Breve Relatione d’alcune Missione, by Father Joseph Bressani, a Huron missionary captured and tortured by the Mohawks. It appeared at Macerata in 1653, and a French translation of it by F. Félix Martin was issued in Montreal in 1852. The work of Du Creux, Historia Canadensis, Paris, 1664, gives a summary of the mission work of the Jesuits in Canada. Father Marquette’s account of his voyage down the Mississippi was first printed by Thevenot, Recueil de Voyages, Paris, 1681, and was translated into Dutch and issued by Vander Aa. It was printed from the original manuscript by Mr. James Lenox,—Récit des Voyages et des Descouvertes du R. Père Jacques Marquette,—and had been previously translated and published by J. G. Shea in his Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley, New York, 1852.
The history of the Sulpitian missions is to be found chiefly in recent works: Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française en Canada, 3 vols., Montreal, 1854; Vie de la Sœur Bourgeoys, 1853; Vie de Mlle. Mance, 2 vols., 1854. Belmont, Histoire du Canada, Quebec, 1840; Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montreal, Montreal, 1869; and Voyage de MM. Dollier et Galinée, Montreal, 1875, are printed from manuscripts of early missionaries of that body.
Of the missions founded by the Seminary of Quebec nothing has been printed except the Relation de la Mission du Mississippi du Séminaire de Québec en 1700, New York, 1861. The vast and successful Spanish missions, extending from the Chesapeake to the Gulf of California, have a literature of their own, of which it is not our province to treat.
NOTE.—The map on the preceding page is a reproduction of a part of a map by Gen. John S. Clark, showing the missionary sites, 1656-1684, in the Iroquois country. It appeared in Dr. Charles Hawley’s Early Chapters of Cayuga History, Auburn, 1879, which had an Introduction on the Jesuit Relations by Dr. Shea.
THE JESUIT RELATIONS,
AND OTHER MISSION RECORDS.
A CHRONOLOGICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY BY THE EDITOR.
THE main bibliographical sources for this study pertain to the Jesuit missions, as follows:—
Le Père Auguste Carayon: Bibliographie historique de la Compagnie de Jésus, ... depuis leur Origine jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, 1864, 4º.
Henry Harrisse: Notes sur la Nouvelle France, 1545-1700, Paris, 1872. He says, no. 49, that no library (1870-71) has a complete set of the Jesuit Relations; and adds that, including those of 1616 and 1627, a full set consists of fifty-four volumes, nine of which are second editions, and one a Latin translation. He had inspected all but one.
E. B. O’Callaghan: a catalogue raisonnée (1632-1672), in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1847, p. 140, also printed separately. Field (Indian Bibliography, no. 1,146), in noticing this essay, says that Dr. O’Callaghan enumerates only forty titles, of which the Carter-Brown Collection had thirty-six; Harvard College, thirty-five; Henry C. Murphy, twenty-nine. “Of the forty-eight now [1873] known to exist, Mr. Murphy has secured all but three.” Dr. O’Callaghan at that time named twenty libraries, public and private, in the United States which had sets more or less imperfect. The volumes of some years were not very scarce, those of 1648-1649 and 1653-1654 being known in ten copies in these libraries, while there were at that time no copies at all of the years 1655 and 1659; and these, marked by titles varying from the usual form, are still the rarest of the series.
The O’Callaghan pamphlet was reissued at Montreal in 1850 in a French translation by Father Martin, the superior of the Jesuits in Canada, who amended the text in places, and included the Biard Relation of 1613. He also gave an account of unprinted ones still preserved in Canada which were written subsequent to 1672, when the annual printing of them ceased.
Deriving help from this and other sources, Dr. O’Callaghan issued privately, in 1853, a broadside, with an amended list of the Relations and their several principal repositories,—State Library, Albany; Harvard College Library; the Parliamentary Library, Quebec; and the private libraries of Mr. Carter-Brown of Providence, Mr. Lenox of New York, Rev. Mr. Plante, Mr. O. H. Marshall of Buffalo, and Mr. George Bancroft.
In June, 1870, Dr. O’Callaghan issued a circular asking information of owners of the volumes for a second edition of his tract; but I cannot learn that the new edition was ever published. At the sale of Dr. O’Callaghan’s library December, 1882, his Catalogue, p. 105, showed 31 of the series; and they brought $1,068.45. Dr. O’Callaghan contributed a paper on the Relations to the International Magazine, iii. 185.
Carter-Brown Library: Catalogue, vol. ii. p. 164.
Lenox Library: Contributions, no. ii., The Jesuit Relation, etc., New York, 1879. The Relation of 1659, of which the copy in the Library of the Canadian Parliament was supposed to be unique, was reprinted in fac-simile by Mr. Lenox. In 1854, at the destruction of the Parliamentary Library at Montreal, its series of these Relations, forty-three in number (except eight), and including this unique volume, was destroyed. This Contribution shows the Lenox Library to possess forty-nine out of the series of fifty-five, counting different editions of the forty-one titles, from 1632 to 1672, making the fifty-five to include two translations and twelve second or later editions. The Lenox series lacks nos. 1, 28, and 35, as enumerated, and of no. 35 the Carter-Brown Library has the only copy known in America. The Lenox Library also lacks the first issue of no. 2, and the second issue of nos. 3 and 5. It has four duplicates, with slight variations.
These Relations will also be found entered under their respective authors in Sabin’s Dictionary and in Field’s Indian Bibliography.
The reason of the rarity of these books may lie in part in the smallness of the editions, but probably most in the avidity of readers, and consequent destruction; for Charlevoix says, “They were at the time extremely relished in France.” Of their character, the same authority says: “There is no other source to which we can apply for instruction as to the progress of religion among the savages, or for a knowledge of these people, all of whose languages the Jesuits spoke. The style of these Relations is extremely simple; but this simplicity itself has not contributed less to give them a great celebrity than the curious and edifying matter they contain.” Father Martin, in his translation of Bressani, speaks (p. 8) Of these Relations as the most precious monument, and sometimes the only source, of the history of Canada, and praises the impartial use made of them by Bancroft and Sparks. Parkman says of them: “Though the productions of men of scholastic training, they are simple and often crude in style, as might be expected of narratives hastily written in Indian lodges or rude mission-houses in the forest, amid annoyances and interruptions of all kinds. In respect to the value of their contents, they are exceedingly unequal.... The closest examination has left me no doubt that these missionaries wrote in perfect good faith, and that the Relations hold a high place as authentic and trustworthy historical documents. They are very scarce, and no complete collection of them exists in America.” Shea (Le Clercq, i. 381) has a note of the contemporary discrediting of the Relations by rival orders.
The series was reprinted by the Canadian Government in 1858 in three octavo volumes, with bibliographical notes and synopses, containing—vol. i. 1611, 1626, 1632 to 1641; ii. 1642 to 1655; iii. 1656 to 1672. These reprinted volumes are not now easy to find, and have been lately priced at £7 10s. and 100 francs. Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,177; Lenox, Jesuit Relations, p. 14.
There have been three supplemental and complemental issues of allied and later Relations; one was printed at the expense of Mr. Lenox, and the others had the editorial care of Dr. O’Callaghan and Dr. Shea, of which notice will be taken under their respective dates. See the lists of Shea’s “Cramoisy Series” (100 copies printed) in the Lenox Contributions, p. 15; Field, Indian Bibliography, nos. 129 and 1,397; and Menzies Catalogue, no. 1,811; and the O’Callaghan Catalogue for Dr. O’Callaghan’s series (25 copies printed). Dr. Shea’s acquaintance with the subject was first largely evinced by his History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States, 1529-1854, published, at the instance of Jared Sparks, in New York in 1855 (Field, no. 1,392); and he published a list of early missionaries among the Iroquois in the Documentary History of New York, iv. 189.
The earliest summarizing of these Relations or of those before 1656, was by the Père du Creux (or Creuxius, b. 1596, d. 1666) in his Historiæ Canadensis, sev Novæ Franciæ, libri decem, Paris, 1664 (pp. xxvi, 810, 4, map and thirteen plates). There are copies in Harvard College, Carter-Brown, Lenox, and New York Historical Society libraries. Cf. Rich (1832), no. 333, £1 16s.; Brinley, no. 82, $80; Carayon, no. 1,322; Harrisse, no. 120; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 945, with fac-simile of title; Leclerc, Bibl. Amér. no. 706, 500 fr.; Ternaux, no. 823; Lenox, p. 10; O’Callaghan, no. 699; Huth, i. 367; Sunderland, vol. ii. no. 3,561; Charlevoix (Shea’s edition), i. 81, who says: “This extremely diffuse work was composed almost exclusively from the Jesuit Relations. Father du Creux did not reflect that details read with pleasure in a letter become unsupportable in a continuous history.” “It contains, however,” says Dr. Shea, “some curious statements, showing that he had other material.” The map, Tabula Novæ Franciæ anno 1660, extends so as to include Hudson’s Bay, Newfoundland, the Chesapeake, and Lake Superior; and it has a corner-map, “Pars regionis Huronum hodie desertæ.” The map has been reproduced in Martin’s translation of Bressani’s Relation of 1653, and is given in part on another page of the present volume.
The Relations were not much noticed by writers at the time, and few allusions to them appear in contemporaneous works. One of the few books which drew largely from them is Le Nouveau Monde ou l’Amérique Chrestienne.... Par Me Charles Chavlmer, Historiographe de France. Paris, 1659.
The story of the missions of New France necessarily makes part of the general works of Charlevoix and the other Catholic historians, particularly the Histoire du Canada of Brasseur de Bourbourg, Paris, 1859, who depends largely upon Bancroft for his facts. Mr. Parkman, not bound by the same ties, gives a view of the Jesuits’ character, in his Jesuits in North America, which has been questioned by their adherents. His book, however, is of the first importance; and Dr. George E. Ellis, in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1867, recounts, in a review of the book, the historian’s physical disability, which has from the beginning of his labor sadly impeded the progress of his work. Cf. also Dr. Ellis’s sustained estimate of Parkman, in his Red Man and White Man in North America, p. 259. The story of the Jesuits’ trials contained in the Lettres Edifiantes is translated in Bishop W. I. Kip’s Early Jesuit Missions in North America, 1846, and again, 1866. Cf. also Magazine of American History, iii. 767; M. J. Griffin in Canadian Monthly, i. 344; W. B. O. Peabody’s “Early Jesuit Missionaries in the Northwest,” in Democratic Review, May, 1844, reprinted in Beach’s Indian Miscellany; Judge Law on the same subject, in Wisconsin Historical Society’s Collections, iii. 89; and Thébaud on the natives and the missions, in The Month, June, 1877; Poole’s Index gives other references, p. 683. Dr. Shea, at the end of his Catholic Missions, p. 503, gives a list of his sources printed and in manuscript.
A CANADIAN (from Creuxius).
Of the tribes encountered by the Jesuits, there is no better compact account than Mr. Parkman gives in the Introduction to his Jesuits in North America, where he awards (p. liv) well-merited praise to Lewis H. Morgan’s League of the Iroquois, and qualified commendation to Schoolcraft’s Notes on the Iroquois, and gives (p. lxxx) a justly severe judgment on his Indian Tribes. Mr. Parkman’s Introduction first appeared in the North American Review, 1865 and 1866.
THE OHIO VALLEY, 1600.
This sketch follows one by Mr. C. C. Baldwin, accompanying an article on “Early Indian Migrations in Ohio,” in the American Antiquarian, i. 228 (reprinted in Western Reserve Historical Society’s Tracts, no. 47), in which he conjecturally places the position of the tribes occupying that valley at the opening of the seventeenth century. The key is as follows: 1, Ottawas; 2, Wyandots and Hurons: 3, Neutrals; 4, Iroquois; 5, Eries; 6, Andastes, or Susquehannahs; 7, Algonquins; 8, Cherokees; 9, Shawnees; 10, Miamies; 11, Illinois; 12, Arkansas; 13, Cherokees. (On the Andastes see Hawley’s Cayuga History, p. 36.)
There is another map of the position of the Indians in 1600 in George Gale’s Upper Mississippi, Chicago, 1867, p. 49; and Dr. Edward Eggleston gives one of wider scope in the Century Magazine, May, 1883, p. 98. Cf. Henry Harvey’s History of the Shawnee Indians, 1681-1854, Cincinnati, 1855; and a paper by D. G. Brinton on the Shawnees and their migrations, in the Historical Magazine, x. 21. Judge M. F. Force, in Some Early Notices of the Indians of Ohio, Cincinnati, 1879, an address before the Philosophical and Historical Society of Ohio, has tracked the changing habitations of the tribes of that region. There is a paper by S. D. Peet on the location of the Indian tribes between the Ohio and the Lakes, in the American Antiquarian, i. 85. William H. Harrison controverted the view that the Iroquois ever conquered the valley of the Ohio, in his “Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio,” which was printed at Cincinnati in 1838, at Boston in 1840, and in the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio’s Transactions, vol. i. part 2d, p. 217; but compare C. C. Baldwin’s “Iroquois in Ohio, and the Destruction of the Eries,” in Western Reserve Historical Society’s Tracts, no. 40. David Cusick (a Tuscarora) published Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, at Tuscarora Village, 1825, and again at Lockport, N. Y., 1848. An historical sketch of the Wyandots will be found in the Historical Magazine, v. 263; and Peter Clarke (a Wyandot) has published the Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandots. See references in Poole’s Index under Hurons, Iroquois, Indians, etc.]
There is a rare book containing contemporary accounts of the savages, which was written at Three Rivers in 1663, by the governor of that place, the Sieur Pierre Boucher, and published in Paris in 1664, under the title, Histoire veritable et naturelle des Mœurs et Productions du Pays de la Nouvelle France, vulgairement dite le Canada. The author, says Charlevoix (Shea’s edition, i. p. 80), should not be confounded with the Jesuit of the same name; and he calls the book under consideration a “superficial but faithful account of Canada.” There are copies in the Harvard College, Lenox (Jesuit Relations, p. 10), and Carter-Brown (Catalogue ii. 941) libraries.[688]
Another early account is the Mémoire sur les Mœurs ... des Sauvages, by Nicholas Perrot, which remained in manuscript till it was edited by Father Tailhan, and printed in 1864.[689]
The Jesuit Lafitau published at Paris in 1724 his Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains in two volumes, with various plates, which in the main is confined to the natives of Canada, where he had lived long with the Iroquois. Charlevoix said of his book, twenty years later, “We have nothing so exact upon the subject;” and Lafitau continues to hold high rank as an original[299] authority, though his book is overlaid with a theory of the Tartaric origin of the red race. Mr. Parkman calls him the most satisfactory of the elder writers. (Field, no. 850; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 344, 345, 472; Sabin, vol. x. p. 22.) There was a Dutch version, with the same plates, in 1731.
Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale, in four volumes, with a distinctive title to each (1722 and 1753), is mainly a history of the Indians with which the French came in contact. He wrote early in the last century, and his book saw several editions, evincing the interest it created. His information is at second hand for the early portions of the period covered (since Cartier); but of the later times he becomes a contemporary authority. (Field, no. 66,)
Of less interest in relation to the seventeenth century is Le Beau’s Voyage Curieux et Nouveau parmi les Sauvages de l’Amérique Septentrionale, published at Amsterdam in 1738,—a work, however, of a semi-historical character, (Field, no. 901.)
Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations was printed by Bradford in New York in 1727, and is now very rare. Dr. Shea reprinted it in 1866, and in his introduction and notes its somewhat curious bibliographical history is learnedly traced. (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 393, 394; Field, Indian Bibliography, 341; Menzies, 429, $210; Sabin, vol. v. p. 222.) The three later London editions (1747, 1750, 1755) were altered somewhat by the English publishers, without indicating the variations they introduced. (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 847, 922, 1,049.) A portrait of Colden is given in the Historical Magazine, ix. 1. Sulte, in his Mélanges, p. 184, has an essay on the respective positions of the Iroquois and Algonquins previous to the coming of the Europeans.
D. G. Brinton, at the end of chap. i. of his Myths of the New World, characterizes the different writers on the mythologies of the Indians; and Mr. Parkman, Jesuits, etc., p. lxxxviii, notes some of the repositories of Iroquois legends.
A valuable paper on the origin of the Iroquois confederacy, by Horatio Hale, is printed in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xix. 241; and Mr. C. C. Baldwin has a paper on the Iroquois in Ohio in the Western Reserve Historical Society, no. 40, and another paper on the early Indian migrations, in no. 47. Mr. Hale has further extended our knowledge by the curious learning of his Iroquois Book of Rites, Cincinnati, 1883; and he also printed in the American Antiquarian, January and April, 1883 (also separately Chicago, 1883), a scholarly paper on Indian Migrations as evidenced by Language.
So far as relates to the more easterly tribes coming within the range of the Jesuits’ influence, Parkman’s description can be compared with the plain matter-of-fact enumerations which make up the picture in Palfrey’s New England, which are derived from authorities enumerated in his notes. See various papers in the Canadian Journal.
The general historians of New France necessarily give more or less attention to the study of the Indians as the Jesuits found them; and such a study is an integral part of Dr. George E. Ellis’s learned monograph, The Red Man and the White Man in North America, whose account of the different methods of converting the natives, pursued by the French and the English, may be compared with that in Archbishop Spalding’s Miscellanea, i. 333.
[In the enumeration below the initials of the repositories of copies signify: C., Library of Congress; CB., Carter-Brown Library, Providence; F., Mrs. J. F. Fisher, Alverthorpe, Penn.; GB., Hon. George Bancroft, Washington; HC., Harvard College; J., Jesuits’ College, Georgetown, D.C.; K., Charles H. Kalbfleisch, New York; L., Lenox Library, N.Y.; M., the late Henry C. Murphy, Brooklyn, L.I.; OHM., O. H. Marshall, Buffalo; NY., New York State Library, Albany; SJ., St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y.; V., Catholic Bishop of Vincennes, Indiana.
Space is not taken in these notes to give full titles nor exhaustive collations, which can be found in the authorities referred to, the figures following them being to numbers; but the references to the Lenox Contributions is necessarily to pages.]
1580.—The Lenox bibliography begins the series of allied works with A Shorte and briefe narration of the two Navigations and Discoveries to the northweast partes, called Newe France, London, 1580. Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouvelle France, no. 5.
1605.—De Monts’ Commission. See chapter iv.
1609.—Coppie d’une lettre envoyée de la Nouvelle France, par le Sieur Cōbes, Lyons. (Harrisse, no. 20; Lenox, p. 3; Sabin, xiii. no. 56,083.) Dated “Brest-en-Canada, 13 Février, 1608.” The Carter-Brown Catalogue (vol. ii. no. 80) shows only a manuscript copy. Brunet speaks of a single copy, sold and bought for America.
1610.—La Conversion des Savages ... baptizés en la Nouvelle France, Paris. Harrisse, no. 21; Lenox, p. 3; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 99.
1610.—Lettre missive, touchant la conversion ... du grand Sagamos, Paris. Lenox, p. 3; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 103 (manuscript only.)
1611.—Missio Canadensis. Epistola ex Porturegali in Acadia. This is a reprint, made for Dr. O’Callaghan at Albany in 1870 (25 copies), following the letter as given in the Annuæ litteræ Societatis Jesu, 1611 and 1612. (Cf. Lenox, p. 18; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 119.) Carayon says that this Annual extends from 1581 (imprint, 1583) to 1614; and then again, 1650-1654. There are incomplete sets in the Harvard College and Carter-Brown libraries. From the same source Dr. O’Callaghan also reprinted Relatio rerum gestarum in Nova Francia, 1613, which relates to Biard’s mission.
1613.—Contract d’association des Jésuites au trafique de Canada, Lyons. (Harrisse, no. 28.) Tross’s reprint on vellum (12 copies only) is in the Lenox (p. 4) and Carter-Brown (vol. ii. no. 148) Collections.
1611-1613.—Canadicæ Missionis Relatio ab anno 1611 usque ad annum 1613, auctore Josepho Juvencio. Dr. O’Callaghan’s reprint, no. 4. (O’Callaghan, no. 1,980; Lenox, p. 18.)
1612.—Relation dernière de ce qui s’est passé au voyage du Sieur de Poutrincourt en la Nouvelle France, Paris. A description of the voyage of Biard and Masse from Dieppe, Jan. 26, 1611. (Cf. Harrisse, no. 26.)
Copy: HC.
Upon this early mission, see Carayon, Première mission des Jésuites au Canada, lettres et documents inédits, Paris, 1864. (Sabin, vol. iii. no. 10,792.) These letters and others are cited by Harrisse, nos. 397-400, 404-406. (Cf. Parkman’s Pioneers, p. 263.) Charlevoix (Shea’s ed., p. 87) cites Juvency’s Historiæ Societatis Jesu pars quinta, book xv., Rome, 1710, as elucidating events in Acadia in 1611. (Harrisse, no. 402.) For the trading relations of the Jesuits, see Lescarbot (1618), p. 665; Champlain (1632), p. 100, and references in Harrisse, no. 28, and Parkman’s Old Régime, p. 328. These early Acadian missions are treated in the Catholic World, xii. 628, 826; xxii. 666, and in Historical Magazine, xv. 313, 391; xvi. 41.
The subject of the Capuchins and other Catholics on the Maine coast at an early date is followed in Historical Magazine, viii. 301, and in Maine Historical Collections, i. 323. Cf. Poor’s Gorges, p. 98.
1613-1614.—Relatio rerum gestarum in Nova-Francia Missione annis 1613 et 1614. Lugduni. No. 6 of Dr. O’Callaghan’s reprints, Albany, 1871. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 170; O’Callaghan, no. 1,250; Lenox, p. 19.
1616.—Relation de la Nouvelle France ... faicte par le P. Pierre Biard, Lyons. Chaps. i. to viii. are on the country and its inhabitants. Chap. xi. is on the arrival of the Jesuits in 1611; and in Harrisse’s opinion, it constitutes a reply to the Factum escrit et publié contre les Jésuites,—a publication of which we can find no other trace. It also describes the labors of the missionaries and the cruelties of Argall. See chap. iv.
See Harrisse, no. 30, on the question of an earlier edition in 1612. The Supplément of Brunet calls this 1612 edition spurious. (Carayon, p. 178; Lenox, p. 4, for a copy, with title in fac-simile by Pilinski, which yet cost 1,000 francs, as per Leclerc, no. 2,482.) A reprint, “presque en fac-simile,” was made at Albany in 1871 from a copy owned by Rufus King, of Jamaica, L. I. The Carter-Brown (vol. ii. no. 178) has only this fac-simile, and it is noted in O’Callaghan, nos. 1,207, 1,971, where it is stated only twenty-five were printed, at $25 per copy.
1626.—Coppie de la lettre escripte par le R. P. Denys Jamet, Commissaire des PP. Recollestz de Canada. Dated Quebec, Aug. 15, 1626.
References: Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 315. Dr. Shea thinks the date should be 1620. It is from Sagard, p. 58.
1626.—Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France, 1626. Envoyée au Père Hierosme L’Allemant par Charles L’Allemant. Paris, 1629. Reprinted (no. 7) in O’Callaghan’s series, from the text in Mercure François, vol. xiii.
References: Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 351; O’Callaghan, nos. 1,210, 1,250, 1,982; Lenox, p. 19. Le Clercq doubts L’Allemant’s authorship; but see Shea’s Le Clercq, i. 329.
1627.—Lettre du Père Charles l’Allemant, Supérieur de la mission de Canadas, Paris, 1627. It bears date Aug. 1, 1626.
References: Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,680; Harrisse, no. 41; Faribault, no. 361; Ternaux, no. 496; Carayon, p. 179; Lenox, p. 4; O’Callaghan, no. 1,250.
It was reprinted in 1871 in O’Callaghan’s series. (Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 328; O’Callaghan, no. 1,208.) It first appeared in the Mercure François, xiii. 1. This last publication appeared in Paris, 1611-1646, in twenty-three volumes, and contains much illustrative of these early missions. There are sets of the Mercure in the Boston Athenæum, Harvard College, Carter-Brown, Boston Public libraries, etc. The reprint of L’Allemant’s Lettre in the Quebec edition of the Relations, follows the text of the Mercure, which corresponds, as is not always the case of these early Relations, with the contemporary separate text, as Mr. Lenox has pointed out in the Historical Magazine, iii. 19. Carayon, in his Première Mission, translates from another letter of L’Allemant, preserved at Rome, and of the[301] same date, another account of these early Jesuit labors, which he sent to Père Vitelleschi. L’Allemant’s name in the contemporary publications is spelled with a single or double l, indifferently.
Another of O’Callaghan’s series (Albany, 1870), was Copie de trois Lettres escrittes en 1625 et 1626 par le P. Charles Lallemand. O’Callaghan, nos. 1,209, 1,250; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 316.
1629.—Lettre du Rev. Père l’Allemand au Rev. Père Supérieur du Collège des Jésuites à Paris, 22 Novembre, 1629. It is found in Champlain’s Voyages, and a reprint (no. 3) is in O’Callaghan’s series, Albany, 1870. O’Callaghan, nos. 1,250, 1,979; Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,681; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 390; Carayon, p. 179; Lenox, p. 18. It is translated in Shea’s Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness.
[The regular series of so-called Relations, addressed to the Provincial of the order in France, begins here.]
1632.—Le Jeune. Brieve Relation du Voyage de la Nouvelle France, fait au mois d’Avril dernier, par le P. Paul le Jeune. Paris, 1632. Pages 68, one leaf for the Privilege.
Contents: The arrival and reinstatement of the order in Quebec, with notices of the natives.
References: Carayon, no. 1,260; Harrisse, no. 49; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,946. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 381, with fac-simile of title.
Copies: CB., GB., M. Others in the Arsenal and National Libraries at Paris, etc.
It was reprinted in the Mercure François for 1633.
1633.—Le Jeune. Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France en l’année 1633. Paris, 1634. Pages 216 and Privilege, with a cupid in the vignette, and errors of pagination. A second issue has a ram’s head for a vignette, and some typographical variations. These vignettes are at the top of p. 3; that with two storks is on the titlepage.
Contents: Champlain’s arrival, and that of Brebeuf and Masse; Le Jeune’s difficulties with the native language.
References: Carayon, no. 1,261; Harrisse, nos. 55, 56; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,947-48; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 417; O’Callaghan, no. 1,212. (2d issue).
Copies: CB., GB., HC. (3d issue), M.
There is an abridgment in the Mercure François for 1633.
1634.—Le Jeune. Relation ... en l’année 1634. Paris, 1635. Pages 4, 342, with pp. 321-22 numbered 323-24. A second issue corrects p. 321, but makes 337 to be 339.
Contents: Champlain’s Domestic Life; Labors of Missionaries; Habits of Indians, and (chap. 9) Account of their Languages; Le Jeune’s Journal, August, 1633, to April, 1634, while he was living with the savages.
References: Carayon, no. 1,263. Harrisse, nos. 60, 61; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,949; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 307; Lenox, p. 4; O’Callaghan, no. 1,235; Harrassowitz (1882, 180 marks).
Copies: CB., F., GB., HC., K., L. (1st ed.), M.
1635.—Le Jeune. Relation ... en l’année 1635. Paris, 1636. Pages 4, 246, 2.
Contents: Report, dated August 28, 1635, ending on p. 112; Report from the Huron country by Brebeuf, with “divers sentimens.” Report from Cape Breton by Perrault.
References: Carayon, no. 1,264; Harrisse, nos. 58, 63; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 436; Lenox, p. 5; Sabin, vol. x. nos. 39,950, 39,951; O’Callaghan, no. 1,214; Leclerc, no. 778 (140 francs). Priced (1883), $50.
Copies: CB., GB., HC., L., M., OHM.
1635.—Le Jeune. Relation, etc. Avignon, 1636.
Contents: Same as the Paris edition.
References: Harrisse, no 64; Lenox, p. 5.
Copies: The Lenox Contributions claims its copy as the only one now known; if so, a third edition is represented in a defective copy noted in O’Callaghan, no. 1,215.
1636.—Le Jeune. Relation ... en l’année 1636. Paris, 1637. Pages 8, 272, 223.
Contents: Report; Death of Champlain, etc.; Brebeuf’s Huron report, with account of the language, customs, etc.
References: Carayon, no. 1,265; Harrisse, no. 65; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,952; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 446; Lenox, p. 5; Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks).
Copies: CB., HC., K., L. It does not appear whether copies GB., M., OHM., and V. are of this or of the following edition.
1636.—Le Jeune. Relation, etc. Paris, 1637. Pages 199 in smaller type than the preceding edition; the Huron report sometimes wanting, though mentioned in the title, while it was not mentioned in the preceding edition; but Sobolewski describes a copy which has this Huron report, occupying 163 pages.
References: Harrisse, no. 66; Lenox, p. 5.
1637.—Le Jeune. Relation ... en l’année 1637. Rouen, 1638. Pages 10,336 (pp. 193-196 omitted in paging), 256, with vignette of I. H. S. supported by two angels on the title. A second issue has the I. H. S. surrounded by rays, and there are other typographical changes in the title only. A folding woodcut of fireworks between pp. 18 and 19.
Contents: Report about the missions and the Huron Seminary near Quebec; Report by Lemercier from the Huron country, dated 1637.
References: Harrisse, nos. 67, 68; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,953; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 457; Lenox, p. 5; O’Callaghan, no. 1,216; Harrassowitz, 1880 (150 francs); Leclerc, 779 (200 francs).
Copies: CB., HC., K., M., OHM., L. (both varieties).
Harrisse, p. xiv, says the oldest original document he has found is a memorandum of a gift, August 16, 1637, by the Duchesse d’Aiguillon to the Réligieuses Hospitalières of Quebec (cf. also his no. 457).
1638.—Le Jeune. Relation ... en l’année 1638. Paris, 1638. Pages 4, 78, 2, 68. A second edition has pp. 4, 78, 76. Harrisse says it is distinguishable by the last page being marked 67, correctly, and page 39 of the Huron report having the word fidelle instead of fidèle; but the whole volume is reset.
Contents: Report,—Failure of the Huron Seminary; Persecution of the Fathers; Lemercier’s Report from the Huron Country, 1637-38, with account of Lunar Eclipse, December, 1637.
References: Carayon, no. 1,267; Harrisse, nos. 69, 70; Sabin, vol. x. nos. 39,954, 39,955; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 458; Lenox, p. 5; O’Callaghan, no. 1,217; Stevens, Bibl. Hist., no. 1,120; Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks).
Copies: CB., GB., HC., K., L. (both eds.), OHM., NY.
Harrisse, p. 62, says a Latin version is included “dans le recueil du P. Trigaut, Cologne, 1653.”
1639.—Le Jeune. Relation ... en l’année 1639. Paris, 1640. Pages 8, 166, 2, 174. A second edition was a page-for-page reprint, with typographical changes on almost every page. The Privilege on the first reads, Par le Roy en son Conseil, and is signed March 26, 1638; the word son is omitted in the second, and the date of this is Dec. 20, 1639.
Contents: Regular Report; Huron Report, June, 1638, to June, 1639.
References: Carayon, no. 1,268; Harrisse, nos. 74, 75; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,956; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. pp. 481, 482; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,218; Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks).
Copies: CB. (both eds.), GB., HC., K., L. (both eds.).
1640.—Vimont. Relation ... en l’année M. DC. XL. Paris, 1641. Pages 8, 197, 3, 196; but 191 and 192 are repeated.
Contents: Report on the State of the Colony and the Missions; Report from the Huron Country by Hierosme Lalemant, mentioning a map of the Western country by Ragueneau.
References: Carayon, no. 1,269; Harrisse, no. 76; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. p. 495; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,219; Dufossé, no. 8,660 (125 francs); Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks).
Copies: CB., GB., HC., K., L., OHM.
We derive the earliest mention of Jean Nicolet’s explorations about Green Bay from this Relation, and what it says is translated in Smith’s Wisconsin, vol. iii. See chapter v. of the present volume.
1640-1641.—Vimont. Relation ... ès années 1640 et 1641. Paris, 1642. Pages 8, 216, 104. Chap. vi. is numbered viii., and there are other irregularities.
Contents: Report,—Missions News; Wars with the Iroquois; Tadousac Mission; Report from the Huron Country by Lalemant, June, 1640, to June, 1641; First mention of Niagara as Onguiaahra; a Huron Prayer interlined.
References: Carayon, no. 1,720; Harrisse, no. 77; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. p. 509; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,220; Harrassowitz, 1883 (100 marks). Cf. Faillon, Hist. de la Col. Française, vols. i. and ii., chaps. 4 and 5, on this Iroquois War.
Copies: CB., GB., HC., K., L. (two copies, with slight variations), OHM.
1642.—Vimont. Relation ... en l’année 1642. Paris, 1643. Pages 8, 191, 1, 170; pp. 76, 77, omitted in paging.
Contents: Report,—Founding of Montreal; Capture of Jogues; Lunar Eclipse, April 4, 1642; Lalemant’s Report from the Huron Country, June, 1641, to June, 1642.
References: Carayon, no. 1,271; Harrisse, no. 80; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 528; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,221; Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks); Dufossé, 1878 (180 francs).
Copies: CB., GB., HC., K., L., M., NY., V.
On Jogues’ exploration to the Sault Ste. Marie, see Margry, Découvertes, i. 45; Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 137.
For references on the founding and early history of Montreal, see Harrisse, p. 79. The Abbé Faillon’s Histoire de la Colonie Française en Canada, Paris, 1865-1866, three volumes, with maps, pertains chiefly to Montreal, and was left incomplete at the author’s death.
MONTREAL AND ITS VICINITY
Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française, iii. 375, gives a map of Montreal preserved in the French archives,—Plan de Villemarie et des premières rues projetées pour l’établissement de la Haute Ville. This represents the town at about 1665. There is a fac-simile of another plan of about 1680 preserved in the library of the Canadian Parliament, the original being at Paris (Catalogue, 1858, p. 1,615). A plan of 1685 is given in l’Héroïne Chrétienne du Canada, ou Vie de Mlle. le Ber, Villemarie, 1860. Charlevoix gives a map with the old landmarks, and it is reproduced in Shea’s edition, ii. 170. A later one is in La Potherie, 1753 edition, ii. 311 (given above), and one of about 1759, in Miles’s Canada, p. 296.
He derives new matter from the public archives in France, goes over afresh the whole history of Champlain’s career, and throws light on points left dark by Charlevoix and the earlier narrators, and is in some respects the best of the recent French historians; but Parkman (Jesuits, p. 193) cautions us that his partisan character as an ardent and prejudiced Sulpitian should be well kept in mind (cf. Field, p. 518; and chap. vii. of the present volume). Dollier de Casson’s Histoire de Montréal, 1640-1672, is a manuscript in the Mazarin Library in Paris, of which Mr. Parkman has a copy. It was printed in 1871 by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, in the third series of their historical documents. Parkman refers to (Jesuits, p. 209), and gives extracts from, Les véritables Motifs ... de la Société de Notre Dame de Montréal pour la Conversion des Sauvages, which was published in 1643 as a defence against aspersions of the “Hundred Associates.” It was probably printed at Paris. A copy some years since passed into an American collection at 800 francs. A transcript of a copy, collated by Margry, was used in the reprint issued in the Mémoires de la Société historique de[303] Montreal, in 1880, under the editing of the Abbé Verreau, who attributes it to Olier, while Faillon has ascribed it to Laisné de la Marguerie. The editor adds some important “notices bibliographiques et documentaires;” some “notes historiques par le Commandeur Viger,” from an unpublished work,—Le Petit Registre; a “liste des premiers Colons de Montreal.” Of the older authorities, Le Clercq and Charlevoix (Shea’s edition, note, ii. 129) are useful; but Charlevoix, as Parkman says, was not partial to Montreal. The Société historique de Montreal began in 1859 the publication of Mémoires et Documents relatifs a l’histoire du Canada. The first number, “Dè l’Esclavage en Canada,” was the joint work of J. Viger and L. H. Lafontaine, but it has little matter falling within the present period; the second, “De la Famille des Lauson,” the governor of New France after 1651, by Lafontaine, with an Appendix on the “Vice-Rois et Lieutenants Generaux des rois de France en Amerique,” by R. Bellemare; the third, “Ordonances de Mr Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, premier gouverneur de Montreal,” etc; the fourth, “Règne Militaire en Canada;” the fifth, “Voyage de Dollier et Galinée.” See a paper on Montreal and its founder, Maisonneuve, in the Canadian Antiquarian, January, 1878. Concerning the connection of M. Olier with the founding of Montreal and the schemes connected with it for the conversion of the savages, see Faillon, Vie de M. Olier, Paris, 1873, iii. 397, etc., and references there cited; and also see Faillon, Vie de Mdlle. Mance, Paris, 1854, and Parkman in Atlantic Monthly, xix. 723.
1642-1643.—Vimont. Relation ... en l’années 1642 et 1643. Paris, 1644. Pages 8, 309, 3.
Contents: Report,—Algonquin Letter, with interlinear Translation; Founding of Sillery; Tadousac; Five Letters from Père Jogues about his Captivity among the Iroquois, beginning p. 284, giving, in substance[304] only, the Latin narrative mentioned below; Declaration of the Company of New France, that the Jesuits took no part in their trade; Further notice of Nicolet’s Exploration towards the Mississippi.
THE SITE OF MONTREAL.
From Lescarbot’s map of 1609, showing the Mountain and the Indian town, Hochelaga, the site of Montreal. Newton Bosworth’s Hochelaga Depicta was published in Montreal in 1839.
References: Carayon, no. 1,272; Harrisse, no. 81; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 552; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,222.
Copies: CB., F., GB., HC., L. (two copies, slightly different), M., SJ., V.
Nicolet’s explorations, which have usually been put in 1638-39, were fixed by Sulté in 1634; cf. his Mélanges, Ottawa, 1876, and Draper’s annotations in the Wisconsin Historical Collections, viii. 188, and Canadian Antiquarian, viii. 157. This view is sustained in C. W. Butterfield’s Jean Nicolet, Cincinnati, 1881. Cf. Margry, Découvertes, i. 47; Creuxius, Historia Canadensis, and the modern writers,—Parkman, La Salle: Harrisse, Notes; Margry, in Journal de l’Instruction publique, 1862; Gravier, La Salle; etc. See also chap. v. of the present volume.
1643-1644.—Vimont. Relation ... ès années 1643 et 1644. Paris, 1645. Pages 8, 256, 4, 147 (marked 174).
Contents: Report, giving account of the Capture of Father Bressani; Huron Report by Hierosme Lalemant; War of the Five Nations against the Hurons.
References: Carayon, no. 1,273; Harrisse, no. 83; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 576; Lenox, p. 6. O’Callaghan, no. 1,223. Recently priced at $50.
Copies: CB., GB., HC., L., M., OHM.
Father F. G. Bressani was in the country from 1642 to 1645, and in his Breve Relatione d’alcune missioni de PP. della Compagnia di Giesu nella Nuova Francia, Macerata, 1653, pp. iv, 127, he gave an account of the rise and progress of the Huron mission. He promised a map and plates, but they do not appear in the copies known, of which two are in the Carter-Brown (Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 750) and Lenox (Contributions, p. 8) libraries; and others were sold in the Brinley (no. 67) and O’Callaghan (no. 1,232) sales. Cf. Carayon, p. 1,317; Leclerc, no. 684 (350 francs); and Shea’s Charlevoix, p. 80. Père Martin had to bring a copy from Rome to make his French translation, Relation abrégée de quelques missions ... dans la Nouvelle France, Montreal, 1852. This version had the Creuxius map, as already stated; another of the Huron country (p. 280), and numerous notes, with a memoir of Bressani by the editor. Cf. Parkman’s Jesuits, p. 253, with references; Shea’s Charlevoix, ii. 174, with note, and his Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness, p. 104; O’Callaghan’s New Netherland; Archbishop Spalding’s Miscellanea.
The first martyr of the Huron mission was Père Antoine Daniel, killed July 4, 1648 (Parkman’s Jesuits, p. 373). Field (Indian Bibliography, p. 146) says some curious, though perhaps not very authentic, information regarding the Hurons can be got from Sieur Gendron’s Quelques Particularitéz du Pays des Hurons, par le Sieur Gendron, which appeared in Davity’s Déscription Générale de l’Amerique, edited by Jean Baptiste de Rocoles, Troyes et Paris, 1660, and was reprinted in New York in 1868. Cf. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 873; Lenox, p. 18; and Field, no. 598. A fac-simile of a corner map in Creuxius’s larger map, giving the Huron country, is given herewith. Parkman also gives a modern map with the missions and villages marked, and tells the fate of this people after their dispersement, at the end of his Jesuits. See Canadian Monthly, ii. 409.
Dr. Shea gives the following list of martyrs among the Canadian Jesuits, with the dates of their deaths: Isaac Jogues, 1646; Antoine Daniel, 1648; Jean Brebeuf, Gabriel Lallemant, Charles Garnier, and Natalis Chabanel, 1649; Jacques Buteux, 1652; Leonard Garreau, 1656, and René Menard, 1661. And of the Sulpitians: Guillaume Vignal and Jacques Le Maître, 1661. Les Jésuites-Martyrs du Canada, Montreal, 1877, includes Martin’s translation of Bressani’s Relation Abrégée, and sections on the “Caractère des Sauvages et de leur pays,” on their conversion, and on the “Mort de Quelqes Pères.”
1644-1645.—Vimont. Relation ... ès années 1644 et 1645. Paris, 1646. Pages 8, 183, 1.
Contents: Missions News; Incursions of the Five Nations; Letter from Lalemant about the Huron Mission, beginning on p. 136.
References: Carayon, no. 1,274; Harrisse, no. 84; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 594; Lenox, p. 6; Dufossé, no. 8,663.
Copies: CB., HC., L., M., V.
1645-1646.—Hierosme Lalemant. Relation ... ès années 1644 et 1645. Paris, 1647. Pages 6, 184, 128.
Contents: Report,—Missions to the Iroquois; Jogues among the Mohawks; Huron Report by Paul Ragueneau, May, 1645, to May, 1646.
References: Carayon, no. 1,275; Harrisse, no. 86; Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,684; Carter-Brown, vol ii. no. 619; Lenox, p. 7; O’Callaghan, 1,224; Harrassowitz, 1883 (160 marks).
Copies: CB., GB., HC. (two copies), K., L. (two copies), M., NY., V.
Masse died May 12, 1646, and this Relation contains an account of him.
From October, 1645, to June, 1668, there are journals of the Jesuit missionaries preserved in the archives of the Séminaire at Quebec, which give details not originally intended for the public eye, but which now form an interesting supplement to the series for the years 1645-1668, except that there is a gap between Feb. 5, 1654 and Oct. 25, 1656. These journals were printed at Quebec in 1871, as Le Journal des Jésuites; publié par les Abbés Laverdière et Casgrain. Cf. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,009, where it is stated that the greater part of the edition was destroyed by fire. A continuation of this Journal was in the hands of William Smith, historian of Canada; but is now lost. The Amer. Cath. Quarterly, U. S. Cath. Mag., and The Month contain various papers on the missions. See Poole’s Index.
1647.—Hierosme Lalemant. Relation ... en l’année 1647. Paris, 1648. Pages 8, 276; paging irregular from p. 209 to p. 228. Some copies have a repeated de in the title.
Contents: The Mission of Jogues among the Mohawks, and a narrative of his death begins p. 124; Missions among the Abenakis.
References: Carayon, no. 1,276; Harrisse, no. 87; Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,685; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 652; Lenox, p. 7; O’Callaghan, no. 1,225; Harrassowitz, 1883 (160 marks); Dufossé, no. 5,603 (190 francs).
Copies: CB., F., GB., HC., J. (two copies), K., L. (two copies), M., NY., V.
After Jogues’ captivity among the Mohawks, and his mutilations, and his rescue by the Dutch, he wrote an account of Novum Belgium in 1643-1644, which remained in manuscript till Dr. Shea printed it with notes in 1862, as explained in a note to chap. ix. of the present volume. Jogues now went to France, but returned shortly to brave once more the perils of a missionary’s life, and this second venture he did not survive. His own account of this was preserved, according to Père Martin, in the archives of the College of Quebec down to 1800, and according to Dr. Shea passed into the hands of the English Government, and was used by Smith in compiling his History of Canada, Quebec, 1815, and has not been seen since. “It is given apparently in substance in the Relation of 1646.”—Shea’s Charlevoix, ii. 188.
Dr. Shea also edited in English the “Jogues Papers” in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 2d ser., vol. iii., including the account of Jogues’ captivity among the Mohawks; and he repeated the narrative in his Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness, p. 16. The original is a Latin letter, dated Rennselaerswyck, Aug. 5, 1643, of which there is a sworn copy preserved at Montreal, which differs somewhat from the printed copy as given in Alegambe’s Mortes illustres, Rome, 1667, p. 616 (Carayon, no. 79); and in Tanner’s Societas Jesu, Prague, 1675; and the German translation of it, Die Gesellschaft Jesu, Prague, 1683. Cf. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. nos. 1,136, 1,274; Field, Indian Bibliography, 1,530; Stevens, Bibliotheca Hist. 2,017. The letter is badly translated in Bressani’s Breve Relatione, p. 77, but Martin gives it better in his version of Bressani (p. 188). Details, more or less full, can be found in Andrada’s Claros Varones, Madrid, 1666; Creuxius, Historia Canadensis, pp. 338, 378; the Dutch Church History of Hazart, vol. iv.; Barcia, Ensayo Chronologico, Madrid, 1723, p. 205; Carayon, Première Mission; the Bishop of Buffalo’s Missions in Western New York, Buffalo, 1862; and of course in Ferland, Parkman (Jesuits, pp. 106, 211, 217, 304), and the other modern historians. A portrait of Jogues is given in Shea’s edition of the Novum Belgium, and in his Charlevoix, ii. 141.
1647-1648.—Hierosme Lalemant. Relation ... ès années 1647 et 1648. Paris, 1649. Pages 8, 158, blank leaf, 135.
Contents: Dreuillettes among the Abenakis; Huron Country Report by Ragueneau, with accounts of the Great Lakes and the Native Tribes upon them; The Five Nations; The Delawares (Andastes); New Sweden, Niagara Falls, etc.
References: Carayon, no. 1,277; Harrisse, no. 89; Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,686; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 673; Lenox, p. 7; O’Callaghan, no. 1,226; Sunderland, vol. iii. no, 7,218.
Copies: CB., HC., K., L. (2 copies), M., NY., V.
Father Gabriel Dreuillettes, in the interest of the Abenakis mission, subsequently made a journey in 1651 to Boston, to negotiate a league between the New England colonies, the Canadian authorities and the Abenakis against the Iroquois. The papers appertaining were recovered by Dr. Shea and printed in New York in 1866, as Recueil de Pièces sur la Négociation entre la Nouvelle France et la Nouvelle Angleterre ès années 1648 et suivantes. A Latin letter from Dreuillettes to Winthrop, which makes a part of this book, had earlier been printed separately in 1864 by Dr. Shea, and again in 1869. The original manuscript was found among the Winthrop Papers, and is now in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (Field, Indian Bibliography, pp. 460, 461; Sabin, vol. v. p. 536; N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 2d ser., iii. 303.) Mr. Lenox also, still earlier, privately printed at Albany in 1855, after the original, “déposé parmi les papiers du Bureau des Biens des Jésuites à Québec,” Dreuillettes’ Narré du Voyage (60 copies),[307] as copied by Dr. Shea. Cf. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 713; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., iii. 34; xi. 152; Hutchinson’s Massachusetts Bay, i. 166; his Collection of Papers, p. 166; Plymouth Colonial Records, ix. 199; Parkman’s Jesuits, pp. 324, 330, and his references; Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 228, and ii. 214; Hazard’s Collection, ii. 183, 184; and N. Y. Col. Doc., ix. 6. The letter of the Council of Quebec and the commission given to the envoys sent to Boston, are also in Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, ii. 67, 69, where will also be found (iii. 21) a letter, dated Quebec, April 8, 1681, on the life and death of Druillettes.
1648-1649.—Paul Ragueneau. Relation ... ès années 1648 et 1649. Paris, 1650. Pages 8, 103. There was a second issue, with larger vignette on title, and some additional pages to the Huron report, pp. 4, 114, 2.
Contents: Text signed by J. H. Chaumonot; the Huron mission; chaps. 4 and 5 give biographies of Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, killed by the Iroquois.
References: Carayon, no. 1,278; Harrisse, nos. 90, 91; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. nos. 695, 696; Lenox, p. 7; O’Callaghan, no. 1,228; Dufossé, 1880 (180 francs). Harrassowitz, 1883 (160 marks). The second issue was recently priced in New York at $60.
Copies: CB. (both editions), GB. (first), J. (first), K. (second), L. (both), M. (first), OHM. (both).
1648-1649.—Ragueneau. Relation, etc.... Lille, 1650. Pages 121, 3. Follows the first Paris edition, but is of smaller size.
References: Harrisse, no. 92; Lenox, p. 7.
Copies: HC., L.
1648-1649.—Ragueneau. Narratio Historica ... Œniponti, 1650. Pages 24, 232, 3. A Latin translation by G. Gobat, somewhat abridged, and differently divided into chapters; smaller than the preceding edition.
References: Carayon, no. 1,316; Harrisse, no. 93; Ternaux, no. 703; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 690; Lenox, p. 7; O’Callaghan, no. 1,227. Rich, 1832 (15 shillings).
Copies: CB., HC., L.
Further accounts of the martyrdom of Brebeuf and Lalemant will be found in most of the works mentioned under 1647, in connection with Jogues. Cf. also the Mercure de France, 1649, pp. 997-1,008; Catholic World, xiii. 512, 623; Le Père Martin’s Le P. Jean de Brebeuf, sa vie, ses travaux, son Martyre, Paris, 1877; Harrisse, p. 88; Shea’s Charlevoix, ii. 221, where is an engraving of a silver portrait bust of Brebeuf, sent by his relatives from Paris to enclose his skull (cf. Parkman’s Jesuits, p. 389), which is still preserved at Quebec. The accompanying engraving is made from a photograph kindly lent by Mr. Parkman. There are other engravings in Shea’s Catholic Mission, in his Charlevoix, ii. 221; and in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 171.
1649-1650.—Ragueneau. Relation ... depuis l’Esté de la année 1649 jusques à l’Esté de l’année 1650. Paris, 1651. Pages 4, 178 (marked 187), 2. Page 171 has tailpiece of fruits. A second issue has typographical variations, with no tailpiece on p. 171, and on p. 178 a letter from the “Supérieure de l’Hospital de la Miséricorde de Kebec.”
Contents: Ragueneau’s letter begins p. 1; Lalemant’s, p. 172; Letters of Buteux and De Lyonne; Huron Mission; Murders of Garnier and Noel Chabanel; Iroquois defeat of the Hurons, and a remnant of the latter colonized near Quebec.
References: Carayon, nos. 1,279, 1,280; Harrisse, nos. 95, 96; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 719; Lenox, p. 8; Brinley, p. 139; Harrassowitz, 1883 (250 marks).
Copies: CB., GB., HC. (first edition), K., L. (both), M., NY.
Shea, Charlevoix, ii. 231, and Parkman, Jesuits, pp. 101, 406, 407, give references for Garnier. Cf. Bressani, Breve Relatione, and Martin’s translation of Bressani, for a table of thirty Jesuit and Recollect missionaries among the Hurons. Margry’s Découvertes, etc., Part I., is on “Les Récollets dans le pays des Hurons, 1646-1687.”
Parkman, Jesuits, pp. 402, 430, saying that this Relation is the principal authority for the retreat[308] of the Hurons to Isle St. Joseph, etc., gives other references.
1650-1651.—Ragueneau. Relation ... ès années 1650 et 1651. Paris, 1652. Pages 4, 146, 1.
Contents: French Settlements and the Missions. A letter signed Martin Lyonne begins p. 139.
References: Carayon, no. 1,281; Harrisse, no. 97; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 740; Lenox, p. 8; O’Callaghan, no. 1,229; Harrassowitz, 1883 (120 marks).
Copies: CB., GB., HC., K., L., M., NY.
1651-1652.—Ragueneau. Relation ... depuis l’été de l’année 1651 jusques à l’été de l’année 1652. Paris, 1653. Pages 8, 200.
Contents: Chap. i. gives an account of the death of Buteux; Chap. ix., War with the Iroquois; Chap. x., Biography of La Mère Marie de Saint Joseph.
References: Carayon, no. 1,282; Harrisse, no. 98; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 756; Lenox, p. 8; O’Callaghan, no. 1,231; Harrassowitz, 1883 (120 marks).
Copies: CB., HC., (two copies), K., L., V.
The account of the Réligieuses Ursulines of Canada in this Relation was repeated, with additions, in pp. 229-315 of La Gloire de S. Ursule, Valenciennes, 1656. Cf. Harrisse, p. 106; Lenox, p. 8; also Les Ursulines de Québec, and Saint Foi’s Premières Ursulines de France.
An account of the missions “in Canada sive Nova Francia” is the first section of the Progressus fidei Catholicæ in novo orbe, published at Coloniæ Agrippinæ, 1653. The book is very rare; the only copy noted is in the Carter-Brown Collection, vol. ii. no. 758. The Lenox Contribution, p. 8., says there was a copy in O’Callaghan’s Collection, but I fail to find it in his sale catalogue; cf. Harrisse, p. 99.
1652-1653.—François Lemercier. Relation ... depuis l’été de l’année 1652 jusques à l’été de l’année 1653. Paris, 1654. Pages 4, 184, 4.
Contents: Montreal; Three Rivers; Poncet captured by the Mohawks; Fort Orange; Peace with the Iroquois.
References: Carayon, no. 1,283; Harrisse, no. 101; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,992; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 775; Lenox, p. 8; O’Callaghan, no. 1,233; Harrassowitz, 1883 (120 marks).
Copies: CB., HC., K., L., M., OHM.
Montreal was organized as a colony in 1653. Cf. Faillon, vol. ii. chap. 10.
1653-1654.—Lemercier. Relation ... ès années 1653 et 1654. Paris, 1655. Pages 4, 176.
Contents: Negotiations with the Five Nations; Le Moyne at Onondaga; Treaty of Peace, and Discovery of Salt Springs; Letter from the Hurons at the Isle d’Orléans with a translation.
References: Carayon, no. 1,284; Harrisse, no. 103; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,993; Lenox, p. 8; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 799; O’Callaghan, no. 1,234; Harrassowitz, 1883 (120 marks); Doc. Hist. N. Y., i. 33
Copies: CB., F., HC., J., K., L., M., OHM., NY..
Cf. L. P. Tarcotte’s Histoire de l’ile Orléans, Quebec, 1867, and N. H. Bowen’s Isle of Orleans, 1860.
1655.—Copie de deux Lettres envoiées de la Nouvelle France. Paris, 1656. Pages 28. The bearer of the Relation of this year was robbed in France, and only these two letters were recovered and printed. It, with the Relation of 1660, is the rarest of the series.
References: Harrisse, nos. 108, 425; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 813; Lenox, p. 9; O’Callaghan, no. 1,974.
Copies: Those in L. and in the Ste. Geneviève at Paris are the only ones known.
Mr. Lenox printed a fac-simile edition from his own copy, with double titles, showing variations; and of this there are copies in CB., HC., etc.
1655-1656.—Jean de Quens. Relation ... ès Années 1655 et 1656. Paris, 1657. Pages 6, 168.
Contents: A Letter signed by De Quens; Le Moyne among the Mohawks; The French at Onondaga; War between the Five Nations and Eries; Ottawas at Quebec; Murder of Garreau.
References: Carayon, no. 1,285; Harrisse, no. 109; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 826; Lenox, p. 9; O’Callaghan, no. 1,237.
Copies: CB., GB., HC., L., M.
Cf. Tailhan, Mémoires sur Perrot, p. 229; and the references in Shea’s Charlevoix, vol. ii. Parkman says Perrot is in large part incorporated in La Potherie; cf. Historical Magazine, ix. 205.
1656-1657.—Le Jeune. Relation ... ès années mil six cents cinquante six et mil six cens cinquante sept. Paris, 1658. Pages 12, 211.
Contents: Begins with a Letter signed by Le Jeune; The Senecas and the French; Mission to the Cayugas; Dupuis and the Jesuits among the Onondagas; Le Moyne among the Mohawks; Customs of the Five Nations; Chap. xxi. has a Letter signed by Le Mercier.
References: Carayon, no. 1,280; Harrisse, no. 110; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,957; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 839; Lenox, p. 9; O’Callaghan, no. 1,238; Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks). Recently priced at $60.
Copies: CB., GB., HC., K., L., NY.
1657-1658.—Ragueneau. Relation ... ès années 1657 et 1658. Paris, 1659. Pages 8, 136. Martin holds that this volume was made up in Paris.
Contents: Two Letters from Ragueneau; French Settlements at Onondaga abandoned; Journal, 1655-1658,[309] dated New Holland, March 25, 1658, and signed Simon Le Moine; Routes to Hudson’s Bay; Comparison of savage and European Customs.
References: Carayon, no. 1,287; Harrisse, no. 112; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 859; Lenox, p. 9.
Copies: CB., L., M., NY.
On the French missions in New York, see Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettres historiques; Parkman’s Old Régime, chap. i.; O’Callaghan’s New Netherland; Shea’s Charlevoix, vol. iii.; J. V. H. Clark’s Onondaga (Syracuse, 1849); Charles Hawley’s Early Chapters of Cayuga History, with the Jesuit Missions in Goi-o-gouen, 1656-1684 (Auburn, 1879), with an Introduction by Dr. Shea. This last book has a map of the Iroquois territory and the mission sites, by J. S. Clark (reproduced on an earlier page).
1659.—Lallemant. Lettres envoiées de la Nouvelle France. Paris, 1660. Pages 49, 3.
Contents: Arrival of a Bishop; Algonquin and Huron Missions; Acadia Mission. The three letters are dated, respectively, Sept. 12, Oct. 10, Oct. 16, 1659.
References: Harrisse, no. 113; Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,683; Lenox, p. 9; O’Callaghan, no. 1,236.
Copies: From what was supposed to be a unique copy (since burned in 1854), in the Parliamentary Library at Quebec, Mr. Lenox had a fac-simile made, from which he afterward printed, in 1854, his fac-simile edition; but Harrisse has since reported two copies in the Bibliothèque Nationale, at Paris. Harrassowitz, in his Rarissima Americana, no. 91, p. 5, notes a copy at 2,500 marks, which is now in Mr. Kalbfleisch’s Collection.
De Laval landed at Quebec June 6, 1659, having been made Bishop of Petra and Vicar Apostolic of New France the previous year. He became Bishop of Quebec in 1674; resigned in 1688, and died in 1708. Parkman draws a distinct picture of his character in his Old Régime, chap. v., and describes his appearance from several portraits which are extant, one of which is engraved in Shea’s Le Clercq, ii. p. 50. A Life of him, by La Tour, was printed at Cologne in 1761; and an Esquisse de la vie, etc., at Quebec, in 1845. Two other publications are of interest: Notice sur la fête à Quebec le 16 Juin, 1859, 200eme anniversaire de l’arrivée de Laval, Quebec, 1859, and Translation des Restes de Laval, Quebec, 1878. Cf. Faillon, Hist. de la Colonie Française, ii. chap. 13, and Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 20, for references. In 1874 the second centennial of Laval’s becoming bishop was commemorated in a Notice biographique, by E. Langevin, “suivie de quarante-une lettres et notes historiques sur le Chapitre de la Cathédrale,” published at Montreal, 1874.
The Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame were founded this year at Montreal, and the life of the foundress, Margaret Bourgeois, by Montgolfier, was published in Montreal in 1818; and was translated and published in English in New York in 1880. Another Life, said to be by the Abbé Faillon, was published in 1853. An earlier Life, by Ransonet, was published at Liege in 1728. Cf. Parkman’s Jesuits, p. 201, and Shea’s Charlevoix, vol. v., for her portrait.
The Abbé de Queylus, who was the candidate of the Sulpitians for the Bishopric, came over in 1657. (Faillon, ii. 271; La Tour, Vie de Laval, 19; Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 20; Parkman, Old Régime, 97.)
1659-1660.—(Not signed.) Relation ... ès années mil six cent cinquante neuf et mil six cent soixante. Paris, 1661. Pages 6, 202; paging irregular in parts.
Contents: Letter from Menard; Country of the Five Nations, with Census of the Tribes; Saguenay River; Hudson’s Bay; Overthrow of the Hurons.
References: Carayon, no. 1,288; Harrisse, no. 115: Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 895; Lenox, p. 9; O’Callaghan, no. 1,239.
Copies: CB., F., GB., HC., L., M., NY.
For the dispersal of the Hurons, see Martin’s Bressani, App. p. 309; cf. Parkman’s Jesuits.
For the part relating to traders on Lake Superior in 1658, see translation, in Smith’s Wisconsin, iii. 20; cf. Margry, i. 53. Menard’s letter, Aug. 27, 1660, on the eve of his embarkation for Lake Superior, is translated in Minnesota Historical Society’s Annals, i. 20; and Collections, i. 135.
1660-1661.—Le Jeune. Relation ... ès années 1660 et 1661. Paris, 1662. Pages 8, 213, 3.
Contents: Le Jeune’s Epistle to the King; War with the Iroquois; Peace with the Five Nations; Mission to Hudson’s Bay; “Journal du premier Voyage fait vers la Mer du Nort,” begins on page 62; Letters of Le Moyne from the Mohawk Country, and from a French Prisoner among the Mohawks.
References: Carayon, no. 1,289; Harrisse, no. 117; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 907; Lenox, p. 10; O’Callaghan, no. 1,240; Harrassowitz, 1882 (125 marks). Recently priced in New York at $50.
Copies: CB., HC., K., L., NY., V.
1661-1662.—Lallemant. Relation ... ès années 1661 et 1662. Paris, 1663. Pages 8, 118, 1.
Contents: Letter dated Kebec, Sept. 18, 1662, signed Hierosme Lalemant; Disputes with two of the Five Nations; Murder of Vignal; Le Moyne among the Senecas.
References: Carayon, no. 1,290; Harrisse, no. 119; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 929; Lenox, p. 10; O’Callaghan, no. 1,241; Quaritch, no. 12,365 (£8 10s.); Harrassowitz, 1882 (150 marks).
Copies: CB., HC., J., K., L.
Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 45, note.
1662-1663.—Lallemant. Relation ... ès années 1662 et 1663. Paris, 1664. Pages 16, 169, with some irregularity of paging.
Contents: Meteorological Phenomena: Earthquake of 1663 [see Harrisse, p. 118] and Solar Eclipse, Sept. 1, 1663; War with the Iroquois; Outaouaks; Death of Menard.
References: Carayon, no. 1,291; Harrisse, no. 121; Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,688; Lenox, p. 10; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 950; O’Callaghan, no. 1,242; Dufossé, no. 5,602 (180 francs); Harrassowitz, 1882 (120 marks). Recently priced in New York at $50.
Copies: CB., HC., K., L., M., NY.
Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 48, 57.
Menard had established a mission at St. Theresa Bay, Lake Superior, in 1661. Cf. Smith’s Wisconsin, vol. iii., for a translation; cf. further, on Menard, Perrot’s Mœurs des Sauvages; Historical Magazine, viii. 175, by Dr. Shea, and his edition of Charlevoix, i. 49; Minnesota Hist. Soc. Coll., by E. D. Neill, i. 135. Cf. J. G. Shea on the “Indian Tribes of Wisconsin,” in the Wisconsin Hist. Coll., iii. 125; and a criticism by Alfred Brunson in vol. iv. p. 227.
1663-1664.—Lallemant. Relation ... ès années 1663 et 1664. Paris, 1665. Pages 8, 176, with some irregularities of paging.
Contents: Missions among the Hurons, Algonquins, and Five Nations; War of the Mohawks; Iroquois Embassy to the French.
References: Carayon, no. 1,292; Harrisse, no. 123; Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,689; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 964; Lenox, p. 10.
Copies: CB., HC., L., M., NY.
1664-1665.—Lemercier. Relation ... ès années 1664 et 1665. Paris, 1666. Pages 12, 128.
Contents: M. de Tracy’s Voyage; Strength of the Five Nations; Comets; Vignal’s Death; Nouvel[311] among the Savages. What is called a second issue has in addition a “Lettre de la R. Mère Supérieure des Réligieuses Hospitalières de Kebec du 23 Octobre, 1665,” 16 pp., which is not reprinted in the Quebec edition of the Relations. A map of Lakes Ontario, Champlain, and adjacent parts, with plans of the forts on the Richelieu River. A part of the map and plans of the forts are given herewith. Martin assigns these plans to the following Relation.
References: Carayon, no. 1,293; Harrisse, nos. 124, 133; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,994; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no 978; Lenox, p. 10; O’Callaghan, no. 1,243; Dufossé, no. 2,175 (200 francs).
Copies: CB., HC., L. (both issues), M., OHM., NY.
1665-1666.—Lemercier. Relation ... aux années mil six cent soixante cinq et mil six cent soixante six. Paris, 1667. Pages viii, 47, 16.
Contents: Courcelles’ Expedition, January, 1666, against the Oneidas and Mohawks; De Tracy’s Interview with Garacontie, and his Expedition, September, 1666, against the Mohawks.
References: Carayon, no. 1,294; Harrisse, no. 126; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,995; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 992: Lenox, p. 10; Harrassowitz, 1882 (150 marks).
Copies: CB., without the “Lettre.” K., with the “Lettre.”
Harrisse says the copies in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Ste. Geneviève Libraries in Paris contain also a “Lettre de la Révérende Mère Supérieure des Réligieuses Hospitalières de Kebec, du 3 Octobre, 1666,” 16 pp., which is called for in the contents-tables of copies in which it fails, and it is not included in the Quebec edition of the Relations. Historical Magazine, iii. 20.
1666-1667.—Lemercier. Relation ... les années mil six cens soixante six et mil six cens soixante sept. Paris, 1668. Pages 8, 160, 14. The title is without the usual vignette of storks.
THE FORTS.
A section in fac-simile of the map in the Relation of 1662-63, showing the position of the forts. These may be compared with the Carte dressée pour la Campagne de 1666, accompanied by plans of forts Richelieu, St. Louis, and Ste. Thérèse, which Talon sent with his despatch of Nov. 11, 1665, and which is engraved in Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française en Canada, iii. 125, where will also be found a map to illustrate the campaign of 1666.
Contents: Allouez’ Journal to Lake Superior; The Pottawatomies and other Western Tribes; Missions to the Five Nations; Thomas Morel’s Account of the Wonders in the Church of St. Anne du Petit Cap. A second issue has appended, a “Lettre de la Révérende Mère Supérieure des Réligieuses Hospitalières de Kebec du 20 Octobre, 1667,” 14 pp., which is omitted in the Quebec edition of the Relations.
References: Carayon, no. 1,295; Harrisse, no. 127; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,996; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,011; Lenox, p. 11; Harrassowitz, 1882, without the “Lettre” (100 marks).
Copies: CB. (2d issue), HC. (2d issue), J., K. (1st issue), L. (both), M., NY. (1st issue), V.
A translation of Allouez’ journal is in Smith’s Wisconsin, vol. iii.; cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 101, and his Discovery of the Mississippi, and Catholic Missions; Margry’s Découvertes, i. 57.
For the early missions in the far West, see Wisconsin Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. iii.; E. M. Sheldon’s Early History of Michigan; Lanman’s Michigan; James W. Taylor’s History of Ohio. Cf. Field’s Indian Bibliography, nos. 856, 1,398, 1,535, 1,688.
It has been claimed that Archbishop Fénelon (b. 1651) may have been a missionary[312] among the Iroquois from 1667 to 1674; cf. Robert Greenough in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1848, p. 109; 1849, p. 11. A half-brother of Fénelon is known to have been in Montreal; cf. Abbé Verreau on “Les deux Abbés de Fénelon,” in the Canadian Journal de l’Instruction publique, vol. viii.; Parkman’s Frontenac, pp. 33, 43. The evidence fails to establish the proof of the Archbishop’s presence here. Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. xvi. p. 344, and xvii. p. 246.
TRACY’S CAMPAIGN, 1666.
This sketch follows the principal part of a manuscript map in Mr. Parkman’s collection (No. 6) in Harvard College Library. It is called Carte des grands lacs Ontario et Autres, et des costes de la Nouvelle Angleterre et des pays traversés par Mrs. de Tracy et Courcelles pour aller attaquer les Agnez, 1666. Key:—
1. Saguenay.
2. Tadoussac.
3. Quebec.
4. R. du Sault de la Chaudiere.
5. R. des Etchemins.
6. Les 3 Rivières.
7. Fort de Richelieu.
8. R. St. François.
9. Fort de St. Louis.
10. Montreal.
11. Lac de St. Louis.
12. Lac des deux Montagnes.
13. Rivière par ou viennent les Outaouacs.
14. Lac St. François.
15. Sault.
16. Rapides.
17. Otondiala.
18. Ochouagen R.
19. Commencement du lac Champlain, ou est le fort Sa Anne du quel M. de Tracy escrit et est party le 4eme Octobre, 1666.
20. Lac du St. Sacrement.
21. Habitations Iroquoises que les troupes du Roy doivent attaquer. Trois villages des Agniez Iroquois.
22. Petit village hollandais.
23. Orange Midy.
The Catalogue of the Library of Parliament, 1858, p. 1614, gives a map, probably this one, as copied from the original in the archives at Paris.
Cf. on this campaign, Parkman’s Old Régime, p. 186. Harrisse, no. 125, following Faribault, no. 808, cites a Journal de la Marche du Marquis de Tracy contre les Iroquois, Paris, 1667, as an account of the third expedition against the Iroquois, of which Tracy took the command, Sept.-Nov., 1666, in person,—the earlier expeditions having been unsuccessful. Cf. documents in Margry, i. 169; Charlevoix, liv. ix., and Brodhead, vols. i. and ix. Cf. Colden’s Five Nations, and authorities enumerated by Shea in his Charlevoix, iii. 89, etc.
1667-1668.—Lemercier. Relation ... aux années mil six cens soixante-sept, et mil six cens soixante-huit. Paris, 1669. Pages 8, 219. Has the stork vignette of the Cramoisy press on the title, and it is the last Relation in which that sign is used.
Contents: The several Missions; Drowning of Arent van Curler; Letter of De Petrée, Bishop of Quebec; Death of the Mère Cathérine de St. Augustin.
References: Carayon, no. 1,296; Harrisse, no. 128; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,997; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,029; Lenox, p. 11.
Copies: CB., HC. (2 copies) L., M., OHM., NY.
Père Paul Ragueneau’s La Vie de la Mère Cathérine de St. Augustin, was published at Paris in 1671. Cf. Harrisse, no. 133; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,069; Leclerc, 1878 (500 francs). There was an Italian translation printed at Naples in 1752.
1668-1669.—(No author.) Relation ... les années 1668 et 1669. Paris, 1670. Pages 2, 150 (last page 140 by error). The title vignette is a vase of flowers.
THE JESUIT MAP OF LAKE SUPERIOR.
Contents: Missions among the Five Nations; Letter from Governor Lovelace, “Gouverneur de Manhate,” from Fort James (New York), Nov. 18, 1668, to Father Pierron, on the sale of ardent spirits to the Indians.
References: Carayon, no. 1,297; Harrisse, nos. 129, 530; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,049; Lenox, p. 11; O’Callaghan, no. 1,244.
Copies: CB., HC., L., M., OHM., NY.
The question of selling liquor to the Indians was one of large political bearing at times. Cf. Faillon, iii. chap. 21.
1669-1670.—Lemercier. Relation ... les années 1669 et 1670. Paris, 1671. Pages 10, 3-318. Part i. pp. 3-108, in larger type than part ii. pp. 111-318.
Contents: Missions to the Five Nations; The Iroquois and Algonquin Difficulties; The Mohawk and Mohegan War, 1669; The Père d’Ablon’s “Relation des Missions aux Ovtaovaks;” A chapter on the Dutch begins p. 145; Lake Superior and the Copper Mines; Letter from Jacques Marquette on the Western Tribes.
References: Carayon, no. 1,298; Harrisse, no. 135; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,998; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,070; Lenox, p. 11; O’Callaghan, no. 1,245; Dufossé, no. 2,176 (200 francs).
Copies: CB., F., HC., L., M., NY., V.
Translations of portions on Western explorations are in Smith’s Wisconsin, vol. iii.
1670-1671.—Claude d’Ablon. Relation ... les années 1670 et 1671.. Paris, 1672. Pages 16, 189, 1, with errors of paging. The title vignette is a basket of fruit.
Contents: The Missions; The Western Country occupied by the French, and the Country described; the Mississippi River described from the Reports of the Indians.
It has a folding map of Lake Superior (a fac-simile of it is annexed), of which, says Parkman (La Salle, pp. 30, 450), “the exactness has been exaggerated as compared with other Canadian maps of the day.” Bancroft (United States, original edition, iii. 152) gives a reproduction of it. Others are in Whitney’s Geological Report of Lake Superior, and in Monette’s Mississippi. vol. i. Harrisse (no. 201) notes a map of Lake Superior, dated 1671, and preserved in Paris.
References: Carayon, no. 1,290; Harrisse, no. 138; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,084; Lenox, p. 11; Dufossé, no. 2,177 (200 francs); Harrassowitz, 1882 (110 marks).
Copies: CB., HC., K. (without map), L., M., NY.
Cf. the “Relation de l’Abbé Gallinée” in Margry, Découvertes, etc., part i. p. 112, and[314] separately with the Abbé Verreau’s notes, Montreal, 1875. St. Lusson’s ceremony in taking possession of the country on the Lakes is noted in Ibid. i. 96.
MADAME DE LA PELTRIE.
Copied from a photograph owned by Mr. Parkman of a painting of which there is an engraving in Les Ursulines de Quebec, i. 348.
1671-1672.—D’ablon. Relation ... les années 1671 et 1672. Paris, 1673. Pages 16, 264.
Contents: Arrival of Frontenac; Huron and Iroquois, Lower Algonquin, and Hudson’s Bay Missions; Overland Journey from the Saguenay. On page 207 begins “La Sainte Mort de Madame de la Peltrie.”
References: Carayon, no. 1,300; Harrisse, nos. 139, 340; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,097; Lenox, p. 12; O’Callaghan, no. 1,246; Harrassowitz, 1882 (150 marks.)
Copies: CB., HC. (without map), K., L., M., NY., V.
Harrisse says the two copies in the Bibliothèque Nationale have the same map as the preceding Relation. O’Callaghan says all copies ought to have it. Lenox says the map in this edition is sometimes, but rarely, found with variations, the position of some of the missions being changed, and new stations added on the plate.
Parkman (La Salle, p. 29) speaks of the change now taking place in the character of the Relations, which are still “for the edification of the pious reader, filled with intolerably tedious stories of baptisms, conversions, and the exemplary deportments of neophytes; but they are relieved abundantly by more mundane subjects,— ... observations on the winds, currents, and tides of the Great Lakes, speculations on a subterranean outlet of Lake Superior, accounts of its copper mines,”[690] etc.
A Life of Madame de la Peltrie (Magdalen de Chauvigny), by Mother St. Thomas, was published in New York in 1859.
A companion of Madame de la Peltrie was commemorated in La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, première Supérieure des Ursulines (Paris, 1677), by her son, Claude Martin. She was in Canada from 1639 to 1672. (Harrisse, no. 143; Lenox, pp. 13, 14; Dufossé, no. 6,763, 125 francs.) In 1681 a series of Lettres de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation was printed, and they cover many historical incidents. (Harrisse, no. 148; Dufossé, no. 3,166, 110 francs.) A selection of them was published at Clermont Ferrand in 1837. Charlevoix published a Life of her in 1724; and in 1864 one by Casgrain was printed in Quebec, and in English at Cork in 1880. In 1873 the French text was included in Œuvres de l’Abbé Casgrain, tome i. Another by the Abbé Richardeau was printed at Tournai in 1873. There is a likeness of her in Les Ursulines de Québec depuis leur Etablissement jusqu’a nos jours. A. M. D. G. Quebec, 1863. 4 vols. Shea (Charlevoix, i. 82; ii. 101; iii. 184) enumerates other authorities: Juchereau, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. Another History of the Hôtel-Dieu, by Casgrain, was published in 1878. An account of steps to procure her canonization is in the Catholic World (New York), August, 1878. Cf. Parkman’s Jesuits, 174, 177, 199, 206.
[The contemporary printing of these Relations stopped with this for 1671-1672. The series in continuation has since been printed in various forms, as follows.]
1672-1679.—Mission du Canada; Relations inédites de la Nouvelle France (1672-1679), Paris, Ch. Douniol, 1861. 2 vols.; 2 maps, one of them a fac-simile of Marquette’s map. [These volumes are vols. iii. and iv. of Voyages et Travaux des Missionaires de la Compagnie de Jésus.]
Cf. Field. Indian Bibliography, p. 276; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,085, 1,198; Lenox, p. 14; O’Callaghan, no. 1,252.
1673-1679.—Claude Dablon. Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable aux Missions des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus en la Nouvelle France les années 1673 à 1679. A la Nouvelle York. De la Presse Cramoisy de Jean-Marie Shea, 1860. Pages 13, 290, with Marquette’s map.
Martin describes the original manuscript (147 pages, pp. 109-118 wanting) preserved at Quebec as being divided into eight chapters. It has an account of the heroic death of Marquette. Cf. Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 396; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,197; Lenox, p. 16.
Some misrepresentations having been made regarding the Cramoisy series of Dr. Shea, it is fair to say that the expense of the whole series was borne by himself alone. There are enumerations of the volumes in Field’s Indian Bibliography, the Menzies Catalogue, no. 1,811, and in the Brinley Catalogue, no. 146, etc.
1672-1673.—Dablon. Relation, etc. New York, 1861.
This concerns the missions to the Hurons near Quebec, to the Iroquois, and beyond the Great Lakes. It is also printed in the Mission du Canada, vol. i. Cf. Harrisse, nos. 597, 605; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,098; Field, no. 1,070; Lenox, p. 17.
1673-1674.—Dablon. Relation, etc. In the Mission du Canada; and an English translation is in the Historical Magazine, v. 237.
1673-1675. Récit des Voyages et des Découvertes du R. Père Jacques Marquette, de la Compagnie de Jésus, en l’année 1673 et aux suivantes: La Continuation de ses Voyages par le R. P. Claude Allouez, et Le Journal autographe du P. Marquette en 1674 et 1675. Avec la Carte de son Voyage tracée de sa main.
Printed for Mr. Lenox after the original manuscript preserved in the Collége Ste. Marie at Montreal. Cf. O’Callaghan, no. 1,246a; Carter-Brown, ii. 1,126; Lenox, p. 12.
1675.—“État présent des missions pendant l’année 1675,” in the Mission du Canada, vol. ii.
1676-1677.—Relation ... ès années 1676 et 1677. Imprimée pour la première fois, selon la copie du MS. original restant à l’Université Laval, Québec. [Albany, 1854.] Pages 2, 165.
Contents: Missions among the Iroquois, Outaouacs, and at Tadousac.
This Relation was printed for Mr. Lenox. Cf. Lenox, p. 13; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,172; O’Callaghan, nos. 1,247, 1,975.
1677-1678.—Relation, etc. This is printed in the Mission du Canada, i. 193.
Contents: Joliet’s account of his Journey with Marquette, and their discovery of the Mississippi in 1673, as edited by Père Dablon, with an account of a third journey to the Country of the Illinois, by Claude Allouez.
An English version of Allouez’ journal is given in Shea’s Mississippi Valley, p. 67, with a sketch of the missionary’s life. Cf. Margry’s “Notice sur le Père Allouez, 1665-71,” in his Découvertes, etc., Part I. p. 59. For Joliet and Marquette, see chap. vi.
1684.—Copie d’une Lettre escrite par le Père Jacques Bigot, de la Compagnie de Jésus, l’an 1684. Manate [New York], 1858.
The letter was written in behalf of the Abenakis of the St. Francis de Sales mission, to accompany offerings to the tomb of their patron saint at Annecy. The original letter is preserved in the Archives du Monastère de la Visitation à Annecy. Cf. Harrisse, no. 725; Lenox, p. 17; O’Callaghan, no. 1,972; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,278.
1684.—Jacques Bigot. Relation ... l’année 1684. À Manate, 1857 (100 copies).
The Abenakis mission of St. Joseph de Sillery and the new mission of St. Francis de Sales, and follows the original manuscript in the Collége Ste. Marie. Cf. Harrisse, no. 726; Field, no. 130; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,277; Lenox, p. 15.
1685.—Bigot. Relation ... l’année 1685. À Manate, 1858.
The St. Joseph de Sillery and St. Francis de Sales missions, and follows the original manuscript in the Collége Ste. Marie. Cf. Harrisse, no. 727; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,307; Lenox, p. 15; Field, no. 131.
1688.—Jean de St. Valier (Evêque de Québec). Relation des Missions de la Nouvelle France. Paris, 1688.
References: Harrisse, no. 159; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. nos. 1,366, 1,367; O’Callaghan, no. 2,218; Sunderland, no. 268; Lenox, pp. 12, 13.
Copies: CB., HC., L., etc.
This work has sometimes the following title instead: Estat présent de l’Eglise et de la Colonie Françoise dans la Nouvelle France. De[316] St. Valier had succeeded De Laval, but before consecration visited the country, and wrote this account of it.[691]
1688.—J. M. Chaumonot. Vie, écrite par lui-même, 1688. New York, 1858.
One of Dr. Shea’s Cramoisy series. The original manuscript is preserved in the Hôtel-Dieu, Quebec. It was followed by Suite de la vie de P. M. J. Chaumonot, par un père de la Compagnie, believed by Dr. Shea to be Rale. This was printed at New York in 1858, and continues the story to 1693. Cf. Carayon, Le Père Chaumonot; also, Harrisse, no. 753; Lenox, p. 16; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. nos. 1,348, 1,349; Field, no. 288.
1690-1691.—Pierre Milet. Relation de sa Captivité parmi les Onneiouts en 1690-91. Nouvelle York, 1864.
Cf. Lenox, p. 17; Harrisse, no. 776; Field, p. 274. It follows a copy found in Holland by Henry C. Murphy. See Vol. III. p. 415.
1693-1694.—Jacques Gravier. Relation ... depuis le Mois de Mars, 1693, jusqu’en Février, 1694. À Manate, 1857.
The mission of the Immaculate Conception among the Illinois. Cf. Lenox, p. 15; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,466; Field, no. 622.
E. Carré, the minister of the French Church in Boston, printed in 1693, with a preface by Cotton Mather, Eschantillon de la doctrine que les Jésuites enseignent aux Sauvages du nouveau monde, drawn from a manuscript found at Albany. Sabin, vol. iii. no. 11,040.
1696-1702.—Relation des Affaires du Canada en 1696; avec des lettres des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus, depuis 1696 jusqu’en 1702. Nouvelle York [Shea], 1865.
It was printed from copies of manuscripts preserved at Paris, made for H. C. Murphy, and covers the war with the Iroquois, the Sault St. Xavier, and other missions. A portion of it appeared without authority the same year, as Relation des affaires du Canada en 1696, et des Missions des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus jusqu’en 1702. Cf. Field, p. 325; Lenox, p. 17; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,489.
1700.—Relation ou Journal du Voyage du R. P. Jacques Gravier en 1700, depuis le pays des Illinois jusqu’à l’Embouchure du Mississippi. Nouvelle York, 1859.
Printed by Dr. Shea as one of his series, and translated by Shea in his Early Voyages up and down the Mississippi (Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,604). Dr. Shea also printed in 1861 De Montigny de St. Cosme and Thaumur de la Source’s Relation de la Mission du Mississippi du Séminaire de Québec en 1700, giving an account of the attempt of the Quebec Seminary to found missions on the lower Mississippi. Cf. Field, no. 1,084; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,619. An English version is in Shea’s Early Voyages, etc.
1701.—Bigot. Relation ... dans la mission des Abnaquis à l’Acadie, 1701. Manate [Shea] 1858.
Cf. Field, p. 33; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,628. Shea also printed Relation (1702) in 1865.
1717-1776.—Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères. 32 vols. in 34 parts.
References: Carayon, p. 55; Field, no. 919; Brunet, p. 1028; Catalogue Library of Parliament, 1858, p. 1192; Shea’s Charlevoix, p. 88; Sabin, vol. x. pp. 294, 395; Muller, Books on America, (1877), no. 3,680.
This serial contains various accounts supplementing the Jesuit Relations: as under 1712, Father Marest’s voyage to Hudson’s Bay in 1694-1695 with D’Iberville; under 1722 and 1724, much about Rale, etc.
As regards the date, 1717, for the beginning of this series, Dr. Shea writes:—
“This date, though generally given, is, I am convinced, erroneous. The first Recueil was approved by the Provincial in 1702, and obtained the Royal license to print Aug. 23, 1702. The approval of vol. iii. is dated in 1703. It is clear that vol. i. must have appeared in 1702 or 1703. I possess a translation of vol. i. in English: ‘Edifying and Curious Letters of some Missioners, of the Society of Jesus, from Foreign Missions. Printed in the Year 1707. 16º.’ Of course the French preceded this translation.”
Brunet says it is not easy to find the series complete. A second edition, Paris, 1780-1783, is in twenty-six volumes, but the prefaces and dedications of the original volumes are not included. There were other issues in 1819 and 1839. Stöcklein’s Brief-Schriften, etc., 1726-1756, is in part a translation, with much else besides. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 390, and vol. iii. no. 994, where a Spanish translation is noted.
CHAPTER VII.
FRONTENAC AND HIS TIMES.
BY GEORGE STEWART, JR., F.R.S.C.
COURCELLE was succeeded as governor of New France by a man of remarkable individuality, energy, and purpose. Louis de Buade, Count of Palluau and Frontenac, is beyond any doubt the most conspicuous figure which the annals of early colonization in Canada reveal. He was the descendant of several generations of distinguished men who were famous as courtiers and soldiers. He was of Basque origin, and the blood of nobles flowed in his veins. His grandfather was Antoine de Buade, a favorite of Henri IV., and one who performed the delicate mission, in 1600, of carrying to Marie de Médicis the portrait of her royal lover. He stood high in his sovereign’s estimation, was a counsellor of state and chevalier of the noble order of the King, and the wearer of several other titles of dignity and honor. By his wife, Jeanne Secontat, he had several children, among whom was Henri de Buade, an officer of the court of Louis XIII., who succeeded to the barony of Palluau, and became colonel of a Navarre regiment. This Henri married, in 1613, Anne Phélippeaux, the daughter of the Secretary of State. The future governor of New France, the fruit of this union, was born in 1620. The King acted as godfather to the babe, and bestowed on him his own name. When the child had attained his fifteenth year he entered the army, and was sent to Holland to fight under the Prince of Orange. Four years later he was conspicuous among the volunteers at the stubborn siege of Hesdin; and at the age of twenty he displayed great gallantry during a sortie of the garrison at Arras. In 1641 he conducted himself with equal bravery at the siege of Aire, and one year later, when he was only twenty-two years of age, he took part in the struggles before Callioure and Perpignan. He was colonel of his regiment at twenty-three, and during the sharp campaign in Italy commanded in several hard-contested battles and sieges. Through all this martial career he was often wounded, and at Orbitello had an arm fractured. He became a maréchal de camp (brigadier-general) in 1646, and shortly after this the first part of his military career came to a close, and he lived for a while in his father’s house in Paris.
In October, 1648, Frontenac espoused the young and beautiful Anne de la Grange-Trianon, a maiden of imperious temper, lively wit, and marvellous grace. She was one of the court beauties of the period, the intimate friend and companion of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, grand-daughter of Henri IV. Her portrait, painted as Minerva, now adorns one of the galleries at Versailles. The marriage, which took place at the church of St. Pierre aux Bœufs, in Paris, was contracted without the knowledge of the bride’s parents. Some of Frontenac’s relatives witnessed the ceremony; but the young Countess’s friends were greatly chagrined when they were informed of the event, though their anger did not last long, and a reconciliation soon followed. Not many months had elapsed before the painful discovery was made that the young couple were unsuited to each other. The bride conceived a positive dislike of her husband; and very soon after her son[692] was born she left his roof, and accepted Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s friendly offer to join her suite. But the attachment between the two high-spirited ladies did not continue long. They quarrelled, and the fair Countess was dismissed from the court. The parting caused her some real sorrow. Afterward, it is said, she intrigued to have her husband sent out of the country. The Count had the ear of the King. He was a fine courtier, polished in manner and chivalrous in spirit. He was reputed to be one of the many lovers of the haughty beauty, Madame Montespan, the favorite mistress of Louis XIV. He had, however, a most ungovernable temper, and extravagance had left him a poor man. In 1669 Turenne, the great soldier of Europe, selected him to conduct a campaign against the Turks in Candia, where he displayed much of his wonted courage and dash, but to small purpose, for the infidels triumphed in the end. The prestige of Frontenac, however, remained untarnished, and his reputation as a military leader increased. In 1672 the King further rewarded his fidelity by appointing him Governor and Lieutenant-General of New France. Various stories have been told as to the immediate cause of his appointment. Several chronicles affirm that the King had detected his intimacy with Madame de Montespan, and resolved at all hazards to get his dangerous rival out of the way. Saint-Simon takes a different view of the situation, and says that Frontenac “was a man of excellent parts, living much in society, and completely ruined. He found it hard to bear the imperious temper of his wife, and he was given the government of Canada to deliver him from her, and afford him some means of living.” The Countess had no mind to brave the rigors of her husband’s new seat of power, and accordingly she accepted the offer of a suite of rooms at the Arsenal, where she went to live with her congenial friend, the lively Mademoiselle d’Outrelaise. During her long life at the Arsenal, she and her friend gave a tone to French society; her salon became famous for its wit and gayety, and les Divines, as the ladies were called, were sought after by the first people of[319] the kingdom. Though she did not live with her husband, and held him in some aversion, she never forgot that she was his wife. She corresponded with him on occasion, and it is established that often she proved of signal service to him in the furtherance of his ambitious plans and projects. It was at the Arsenal she died, at the advanced age of seventy-five.
When Frontenac sailed for the colony he was a matured man of the world, and fifty-two years of age. “Had nature disposed him to melancholy,” says Parkman, “there was much in his position to awaken it. A man of courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the splendors of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a stern gray rock, haunted by sombre priests, rugged merchants and traders, blanketed Indians, and the wild bushrangers. But Frontenac was a man of action. He wasted no time in vain regrets, and set himself to his work with the elastic vigor of youth. His first impressions had been very favorable. When, as he sailed up the St. Lawrence, the basin of Quebec opened before him, his imagination kindled with the grandeur of the scene. ‘I never,’ he wrote, ‘saw anything more superb than the position of this town. It could not be better situated as the future capital of a great empire.’” Such was the striking condition of Quebec when Frontenac sailed into the port to assume the functions of his office. The King, his powerful minister Colbert, the Intendant Talon, and the Governor himself regarded the colony as a great prize, and one destined for a future which should in no small degree reflect the glory and grandeur of the old monarchy. Vast sums of money had been expended in colonizing and defending it. Some of the best soldiers of the kingdom and many desirable immigrants, inured to toil and hard work, were sent by Louis to build up the new country and to develop its resources. Frontenac, imbued with the same spirit as his sovereign, proceeded to bring his enormous territory to a state of order. He convened a council at Quebec, and administered an oath of allegiance to the leading men in his dominions. He sought to inaugurate a monarchical form of government. He created, with much pomp and show, three estates of his realm,—the clergy, nobles, and commons. The former was composed of the Jesuits and the Seminary priests. To three or four gentilshommes then living in Quebec he added some officers belonging to his troops; and these comprised the order of nobility. The commons consisted of the merchants and citizens. The magistracy and members of council were formed into a distinct body, though their place properly belonged to the third estate. This great convocation took place on the 23d of October, 1672, and the ceremonies were conducted in the church of the Jesuits, which had been decorated for the purpose by the Fathers themselves.
FROM LA POTHERIE.
[This view appears in the 1722 edition, i. 232; 1753 ed. ii. 232. It is also in Shea’s Le Clercq, ii. 313. Harrisse (no. 240) notes a view on the margin of a map in 1689.
Faillon, in his Histoire de la Colonie Française (iii. 373), speaks of two early plans of Quebec which are preserved, one of 1660, the other of 1664. They resemble each other, except that the last represents a projected line of fortifications across the peninsula; and in engraving the latter, Faillon’s engraver has given the plate the date of 1660, instead of 1664: Plan du Haut et Bas Québec comme il est en l’an 1660. The Catalogue of the Library of Parliament, 1858, p. 1614, shows copies of plans of these dates copied from originals in the Paris Archives. Cf. Harrisse, nos. 192-195, and no. 199 for a manuscript map of 1670, La ville haute et basse de Quebeck, also preserved in the same Archives; while the Catalogue (p. 1614) of the Canadian Parliament gives three of 1670, copies from originals at Paris.
Harrisse also notes (no. 220) as in the French Archives a Carte du Fort St. Louis de Québec, dated 1683; (no. 221) a Plan de la basse ville de Québec (1683),—both by Franquelin: (no. 224) a Plan de la Ville et Chasteau de Québec, fait en 1685, ... par le Sr. de Villeneuve; and (no. 230) a Carte des Environs de Québec ... en 1685 et 1686, par le Sr. de Villeneuve. Cf. also the Catalogue of the Library of Parliament, pp. 1615, 1616.
Plans growing out of Phips’s attack in 1690 are mentioned elsewhere. Of subsequent plans, Harrisse (no. 249) cites a Plan de la Ville de Québec, 1693, as being in the French Archives, and others (nos. 252-254, 369) of 1694, 1695, and 1699. The Catalogue of the Library of Parliament also gives manuscript plans of 1693, 1698, 1700, and 1710. Cf. J. M. Le Moine, Histoire des Fortifications et des Rues de Québec, 1875 (pamphlet).—Ed.]
Frontenac, who spoke and wrote well, made a speech to the citizens, indicating the policy which he meant to pursue, and scattering advice to the throng before him with a liberal hand. The three estates which he had founded listened to an exhortation of some length. The priests were urged to continue their labors in connection with the conversion of the Indians, whom they were advised to train and civilize while they converted. The nobles were praised for their culture and valiant conduct, and urged to be assiduous in the improvement of the colony. To the commons he recommended faithfulness in the discharge of their duties to the King and to himself. After solemnly taking the oath, the assembly dissolved. The Count next established municipal government in Quebec, on a model which obtained in several cities of France. He ordered the election of three citizens as aldermen, the senior of whom should rank as mayor. This body was to take the place of the syndic, and it was provided that one of the number should retire from office every year. The electors would then fill the vacancy with some one of their choice, though the Governor reserved the right to confirm or reject the successful candidate. He then, with the assistance of some of the chief people about him, framed a series of regulations for the government of the capital, and notified the inhabitants that a meeting would be held twice a year, where public questions would be discussed. Frontenac’s reforms were exceedingly distasteful to the King, and the minister very clearly conveyed his Majesty’s views on the subject, in a despatch written on the 13th of June, 1673. Talon, who knew the temper of the Court in such matters, had wisely abstained from taking an active part in the Governor’s scheme, and feigned illness as the cause for his non-attendance at the convention. Colbert wrote: “The assembling and division of all the inhabitants into three orders or estates, which you have done, for the purpose of having them take the oath of fidelity, may have been productive of good just then. But it is well for you to observe that you are always to follow, in the government and management of that country, the forms in force here; and as our kings have considered it for a long time advantageous to their service not to assemble the States-General of their kingdom, with a view perhaps to abolish insensibly that ancient form, you likewise ought very rarely, or (to speak more correctly) never, give that form to the corporate body of the inhabitants of that country; and it will be necessary even in the course of a little time, and when the colony will be still stronger than it now is, insensibly to suppress the syndic, who presents petitions in the name of all the inhabitants, it being proper that each should speak for himself, and that no one should speak for the[322] whole.” Louis’ policy was unmistakable. He assumed to be the autocrat of his dominions, and anything which might be construed into an attempt to weaken the principles of his policy met with a stern rebuke. Frontenac’s colonial system might have benefited New France: it was capable of being wisely administered, and rich developments might have ensued; but the King would not have it, and the Governor was forced to withdraw his plan.
Arbitrary and domineering to a degree, always anxious to preserve his dignity and to exact respect from his subordinates in office and from those about his court, whether lay or clerical, and a martinet in compelling the observance of all rules of social and military discipline, Frontenac, as may be supposed, did not get on well with all parties in the colony. He made the fatal mistake of quarrelling with the Jesuits and the Seminary priests,—the two religious orders which at that time held the greater sway in Canada, and whose influence among the people, and sometimes at court, was important, and not easy to dispel. An enemy was also found in the Intendant Talon, who suspiciously watched every movement which the Governor made, and regularly reported his impressions to France. Talon, however, was recalled before the quarrel had assumed very formidable proportions, and Frontenac was well rid of him. A more dangerous element, and one which could thwart him and upset his schemes, remained, however, to tantalize him. He had his religious convictions, and was accounted a good-living man, in the ordinary acceptance of the term. He regularly went to Mass, and followed the observances of the Church; but his Catholicism was framed in a more liberal school than that of the followers of Loyola. His enemies said that he was a Jansenist. He leaned towards the Recollect Fathers, attended their place of worship, and often called on the King for additional priests of that order, and took every opportunity to show them attention and marks of his favor. When the Jesuits appeared too strong in number, he sent to France for more Recollects, and through them he neutralized to some extent the influence of the former. But the Jesuits were powerful, diplomatic, and insidious. They constantly watched their opportunity, and changed their mode of warfare according to the circumstances of the hour. When the gloved hand answered their purpose, they used it; but they had no scruple to strike with stronger weapons. Had Frontenac chosen at the outset of his career to conciliate them and to play into their hands, his administration might have been less fretful to himself and vexatious to others. He might have fulfilled his original intention, and bettered his fortunes in the way he desired. He might have carried out some of his cherished reforms, for his zeal in that direction was really very great, and he had his heart in his task; but his haughty disposition would not be curbed, and he preferred to be aggressive towards the Jesuits rather than conciliatory. The result may be foreseen. Enemies sprang up about him on every side, and often they were more dangerous than the Iroquois tribes who constantly menaced the colony, and far more difficult to check than the English of Massachusetts or of Albany. He early began writing letters to[323] the minister about his trials with the clergy. On the 2d of November, 1672, he wrote: “Another thing displeases me, and this is the complete dependence of the Grand Vicar and the Seminary priests on the Jesuits, for they never do the least thing without their order; so that they [the Jesuits] are masters in spiritual matters, which, as you know, is a powerful lever for moving everything else.” He complained of their spies, and proceeded to resist their influence wherever he found it asserting itself. The Sulpitians fared no better at his hands, and he waged as bitter a warfare against them and those who followed their teachings. He befriended the Recollects so warmly, that it is not strange that they eagerly lent him all the assistance they could to further his efforts in breaking down the power of their rivals. It is said that at first he favored them out of a mere spirit of opposition to the Bishop and his allies, the Jesuits; but as time wore on, his favor deepened into affection, and he more than once declared to the King that the Recollects ought to be more numerous than they were. He told Colbert that their superior was a “very great preacher,” and that he had “cast into the shade and given some chagrin to those in this country who certainly are not so able.” He charged the clergy with abusing the confessional and intermeddling with private family affairs, and expressed his dislike in strong terms of their secret doings in the colony, and their attempts to set husbands against wives, and parents against children,—“and all,” he wrote to the minister, “as they say, for the greater glory of God.” It is clear that the Count distrusted the “Black Gowns” from the very first, and resolved to hold them at arm’s length. Much of his energy was wasted in trying to lessen their influence at court; and the King and his minister were kept pretty busy reading and answering the recriminatory letters of the Governor and his unsympathetic intendants, whose feelings always prompted them to side with the Jesuits and the Church, and against Frontenac.
A policy of Louis XIV. was the civilization of the Indians, and Frontenac was, early in his career, instructed to take means to civilize them, to have them taught the French language, and to amalgamate them with the colonists. At that time the Count knew very little about Indian nature; but he embarked in the scheme with all his energy and zeal. He soon gained a mastery over the most savage tribes, taught the warriors to call him father, and succeeded in inducing the Iroquois to intrust him with the care of eight of their children,—four girls and four boys. The former were given to the Ursulines, while he kept two of the boys in his own house, and placed the others, at his own cost, in respectable French families, and had them sent to school to be educated. He tried to get the Jesuits to assist him in this task, but they failed to respond cordially to his urging; and he complained bitterly of their want of sympathy with the movement, even charging them—not very accurately, it must be admitted—with “refusing to civilize the Indians, because they wished to keep them in perpetual wardship.”
But a new question now arose, and Frontenac’s mind was turned towards western exploration. He warmly favored the idea, and, relinquishing for the moment all thought of his trials with the priests, he gave his whole attention to the proposals of that bold and self-reliant explorer, the Sieur Robert de la Salle. This young man was poor in pocket, but his head was full of schemes. There was much in common between the two men. Both had strong will and ability of no mean calibre. They were not easily discouraged, and having once engaged in an undertaking, they had sufficient determination to carry it through. Frontenac greatly liked La Salle, and the two remained fast friends for many years. A short time before the Governor arrived in Canada, the Iroquois had made an attack on the French, and Courcelle had been compelled to punish them. To keep them in check and to facilitate the fur-trade of the upper country, he decided that a fort should be built near the outlet of Lake Ontario. This determination had also been reached some time before by the Intendant Talon, and both officers had submitted the suggestion to the King. Frontenac was not long in perceiving the advantages which the establishment of such a fort presented, and he resolved to build it, as much to protect the colony as to augment his own slender resources, which were running very low. La Salle had gained the confidence of the Governor, who had listened to his overtures, and manifested great interest in everything he said. “There was between them,” says Parkman, “the sympathetic attraction of two bold and energetic spirits; and though Cavelier de la Salle had neither the irritable vanity of the Count nor his Gallic vivacity of passion, he had in full measure the same unconquerable pride and hardy resolution. There were but two or three others in Canada who knew the western wilderness so well. He was full of schemes of ambition and of gain; and from this moment he and Frontenac seem to have formed an alliance which ended only with the Governor’s recall.” The fort recommended by Courcelle, if built, might be employed in intercepting the trade which the tribes of the upper lakes had begun to carry on with the Dutch and English of New York. This trade Frontenac resolved to secure for Canada, though it must be said that those who would have control of the fort would monopolize the larger share of the traffic to themselves, to the great displeasure of the other merchants, who resolutely set their faces against the project. Frontenac knew this perfectly well, for it was principally with a desire to benefit himself that he had given the plan countenance. La Salle understood the western country, and was familiar with Lake Ontario and its shores. He soon convinced the Governor that the most suitable spot for the contemplated fortified post was at the mouth of the River Cataraqui, and there, where the city of Kingston now stands, the fort[693] was built, in July, 1673. La Salle had told Frontenac that the English were intriguing with the Iroquois and the tribes of the upper[325] lakes to get them to break the treaty with the French and bring their furs to New York. This statement was true, and it hastened the Governor’s action. With his usual address, he announced his intention of making a tour through the upper parts of the colony with a strong force of men, that the Iroquois and their associates might be intimidated, and with a view to the securing of a more permanent peace. He had no money to carry on this crusade, so he issued an order to the people of Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers, and other settlements within his jurisdiction, calling on them to supply him, at their own cost, with men and canoes as soon as the spring sowing had passed. The officers in the colony were requested to join the expedition, and they dared not refuse. On the 3d of June Frontenac left Quebec, accompanied by his guard, his staff, some of the garrison of the Castle of St. Louis, and a band of volunteers. Arriving at Montreal, he tarried there thirteen days with his following. There were some matters which required his attention, and he speedily set about to arrange them in a manner which should at least be satisfactory to himself.
La Salle had been despatched to Onondaga, the political stronghold of the Iroquois, on a mission to secure the attendance of their chiefs at a council convened by the Governor, to be held at the Bay of Quinté, situated on the north of Lake Ontario. While the intrepid traveller was on his way, Frontenac changed his mind about the place of rendezvous, and sent a messenger after him, calling the sachems to meet at Cataraqui, where he decided to construct the fort. The Governor of Montreal received Frontenac with suitable honors. He met him on shore with his soldiers and people, a salute was fired, and the judge and the syndic pronounced speeches of interminable length, but loyal and patriotic in sentiment. The priests of St. Sulpice received him at their church, where an address of welcome was presented. The Te Deum was sung, and the Count then retired into the fort, and began preparing for his coming journey. It was not long before he discovered that his project found little favor in the eyes of the people of Montreal, who feared that much of their trade might be diverted from them by the construction of the new post. The Jesuits, too, were opposed to the rearing of forts and trading posts in the upper districts, and they did what they could to discourage the scheme. Frontenac was warned that a Dutch fleet had captured Boston, and would soon proceed to attack Quebec. Dablon was the author of this last rumor; but the Count turned a deaf ear to remonstrance and report, and continued his preparations. His followers and their stores were already on the way to Lachine, and on the twenty-eighth of June the Governor-General himself set out. His force consisted of four hundred men, including the Mission Indians, and one hundred and twenty canoes and two flat-bottomed boats. The voyage was an arduous and difficult one. Without the Indians, it is a question whether it could have been accomplished at all. The fearful journey was full of perils and hardships, and, to add to their discomfiture, before the place of destination was reached rain fell in torrents. Frontenac’s management of the Indians[326] approached the marvellous. They worked for him with genuine zeal, and showed by their toil as much as by their manner that they respected his authority and admired him as a man. He divined the Indian nature well, though he had been in the country but a few months; and the longer he remained in the colony, the greater his influence over them became. He knew when to bully and when to conciliate, when to apply blandishments and when to be stern. It was a happy thought which prompted him to call himself their father. It gave him the superiority of position at once. Other Onontios were brothers; but the great Onontio was the father.[694] He really liked the Indians, and could enter into their ways and customs with a spirit born of good-will. He was a frank, and often fiery soldier, and a true courtier; but he could be playful with the Indian children, and it was not beneath his dignity to lead a war-dance, should policy demand, as it did sometimes. He seemed to know the thoughts of his dusky friends, and they felt that he could read what was passing through their minds. His control over the tribes, friends and foes alike, was certainly never surpassed by any white man.
He was, moreover, true to his allies; and on more than one occasion refused to make peace for himself with the ferocious Iroquois, when he could easily have done so, unless they complied with his terms, and included in the treaty the Indians friendly to the French. He would never abandon his friends to save himself; and the tribes, hostile and friendly, early in his career learned this, and it served to establish his fame as a man of fair dealing and chivalrous principle. He never yielded his point even when his savage enemies were many and his own forces few and feeble. He maintained his ascendency always, and lecturing his children, pointed out the duties they should observe. Such was his personal magnetism, that they listened and obeyed him when their following was five times as great as his own. The secret of Frontenac’s supremacy over savage nature seemed to lie in the fact that he never ceased to have perfect faith and belief in himself. He had fiery blood in his veins, and an iron will, that the blandishments which he employed at times never quite concealed. Even when reduced to severe straits, he did not lose that boldness of demeanor which carried him through so many perils. The Iroquois gave him most trouble. They were fond of fighting, and when they were not attacking the French, they were waging war on the Illinois and Hurons, and on other tribes whose aid was often found on the side of Frontenac. The Confederacy preferred to sell their peltries to the English and Dutch of Albany,[327] than to the French. They drove with the English better bargains and secured higher prices, and the English encouraged them to bring to them their beaver skins. But the tribes who were friendly to their white enemies had by far the richest product of these furs, and La Salle’s fort of St. Louis, the mission of Michillimackinac, and other posts really controlled the trade. To gain this traffic, and to divert it into the hands of their newly-found friends, the English and Dutch, the five tribes of the League proceeded in 1673 to make war on the Indians who engrossed it. Great anxiety was felt in the colony when this determination on the part of the Confederacy became known, and the tribes interested—the Illinois, the Hurons, and Ottawas—manifested the utmost fear. Frontenac deemed a conference advisable, and he invited the Iroquois to come to him and discuss affairs; but the arrogant warriors sent back an insolent answer, and told the messenger that Frontenac should come to them,—a suggestion which some of the French, who were terror-stricken, urged the Governor to act upon. But the Count had no such intention, and refused to make any concession. He sent them word that he would go no farther than Montreal, or, at the utmost, to Fort Frontenac, to meet them. In August, he met the Hurons and Ottawas at Montreal in council. There had been jealousy among the tribes, but the Count warned them against dissension among themselves, called them his children, and exhorted them to live together as brethren. A celebrated Iroquois chief came next, with several of his followers. This was Decanisora, who invited Frontenac to Oswego to meet the Five Tribes. The Count, determined to hold his ground, replied with firmness, “It is for the father to tell the children where to hold council, not for the children to tell the father. Fort Frontenac is the proper place, and you should thank me for going so far every summer to meet you.” He then conciliated the chief with presents and a wampum belt, telling him that the Illinois were Onontio’s children, and therefore his brethren, and that he wished them all to live together in harmony. There was peace for a brief space, but it did not continue many months.
When Frontenac neared the end of his toilsome journey, and had reached the first opening of Lake Ontario, he made up his mind to show the Iroquois the full extent of his power, and to make as imposing a display as possible. He arranged his canoes in line of battle, and disposed of them in this wise: four squadrons, composing the vanguard, went in front and in one line; then the two bateaux followed, and after them came the Count at the head of all the canoes of his guard, of his staff, and of the volunteers attached to his person. On his right, the division from Three Rivers, and on his left, the Hurons and Algonquins were placed. Two other squadrons formed a third line, and composed the rear-guard. In this order they proceeded about half a league, when an Iroquois canoe was observed to be approaching. It contained the Abbé d’Urfé (who had met the Indians above the River Cataraqui, and notified them of the Count’s arrival) and several Iroquois chiefs, who offered to guide their visitors to the place of[328] rendezvous. After an exchange of civilities, their offer was accepted, and the whole party proceeded to the spot selected. The Count was greatly pleased with the locality, and spent the rest of the afternoon of the 12th of July in examining the ground. The Iroquois were impatient to have him visit them that night in their tents; but he sent them word that it was now too late, but that in the morning, when it would be more convenient to see and entertain each other, he would gladly do so. This reply was considered satisfactory. At daybreak the next morning, the réveillé was sounded, and at seven o’clock everybody was astir and under arms. The troops were drawn up in double file around Frontenac’s tent, and extended to the cabins of the Indians. Large sails were placed in front of his tent for the savage deputies to sit on, and to the number of sixty they passed through the two files thus formed to the council. They were greatly impressed with the display, and “after having sat, as is their custom, and smoked some time,” says the journal of the Count’s voyage, “one of them, named Garakontie, who had always been the warmest friend of the French, and who ordinarily acted as spokesman, paid his compliment in the name of all the nations, and expressed the joy they felt on learning from Sieur de la Salle Onontio’s design to come and visit them. Though some evil-disposed spirits had endeavored to excite jealousy among them at his approach, they could not, they said, hesitate to obey his orders, but would come and meet him in the confidence that he wished to treat them as a father would his children. They were then coming, they continued, as true children, to assure him of their obedience, and to declare to him the entire submission they should always manifest to his command. The orator spoke, as he claimed, in the name of the Five Nations, as they had only one mind and one thought, in testimony whereof the captain of each tribe intended to confirm what he had just stated in the name of the whole.” The other chiefs followed, and after complimenting Frontenac, each captain presented a belt of wampum, “which is worthy of note,” says the chronicle, “because formerly it was customary to present only some fathoms of stringed wampum.”
The Count replied in a form of address very similar to theirs. He assured them that they did right in obeying the command of their father, told them to take courage, and not to think that he had come to make war. His mind was full of peace, and peace walked by his side. After this harangue, he ordered six fathoms of wampum to be given to them, and a gift of guns for the men, and prunes and raisins for the women and children. The great council took place later on. Meanwhile, the construction of the fort began, and the workmen pursued their task with such ardor and speed, that by the 17th of July, the date fixed for the grand council, it was well advanced. The work was done under the supervision of Raudin, the engineer of the expedition. The Indians watched the building of the fort with curious interest. The Count regularly entertained two or three of the principal Iroquois at each meal, while he fondled the children and distributed sweetmeats among them, and invited the squaws to dance in the evenings. The great[329] council assembled at eight o’clock in the morning. The ceremony was the same as that which had been observed at the preliminary meeting. Frontenac wore his grandest air. He entreated them to become Christians, and to listen to the instructions of the “Black Gowns.” He praised, scolded, and threatened them in turn, and drawing their attention to his retinue, said: “If your father can come so far, with so great a force, through such dangerous rapids, merely to make you a visit of pleasure and friendship, what would he do if you should awaken his anger, and make it necessary for him to punish his disobedient children? He is the arbiter of peace and war. Beware how you offend him.” He further warned them not to molest the allies of the French, on pain of chastisement. He told them that the storehouse at Cataraqui was built as a proof of his affection, and that all the goods they needed could be had from there. He could not give them the terms yet, because the cost of transportation was so far unknown to him. He cautioned them against listening to men of bad character, and recommended the Sieur de la Salle and such as he as persons to be heeded. He asked the chiefs to give him a number of their children to be educated at Quebec, not as hostages, but out of pure friendship. The Indians wanted time to consider this proposition, and the next year they acceded to it. At intervals, during the delivery of his speech, Frontenac paused and gave the Indians presents, which seemed to please them. The council closed, and three days later, the Iroquois started on their journey homeward, while Frontenac’s party returned in detachments. The fort was finished, and the barracks nearly built. Frontenac would have left with his men for home sooner than he did, but a band of Indians from the villages on the north side of Lake Ontario being announced, he remained with some troops to receive them. He treated them as he had treated the others, and pronounced the same speech. Leaving a garrison in the fort, he then set out for Montreal, which he reached on the 1st of August.[695]
The enterprise cost the King ten thousand francs, and Frontenac regarded the investment as a good one indeed. He hoped that he had impressed the savages with fear and respect, that he had obtained a respite from the ravages of the Iroquois, and that the fort would be the means of keeping the peltry trade in the hands of the French, its situation affording the opportunity of cutting it off from the English, who were making efforts to secure it for themselves. Frontenac wrote to the minister in November, that with a fort at the mouth of the Niagara and a vessel on Lake Erie, the French could command all the upper lakes.
François Perrot, the Governor of Montreal, owed his position to Talon, his wife’s uncle, who had induced the Sulpitians, the proprietors and feudal lords of Montreal and the island, and in whom the appointment rested, to give the place to him. Knowing that the priests could at will depose him, he sought to protect himself by asking the King to give him a royal appointment.[330] This Louis did; and the Sulpitians could now make no change without consent of the King. Perrot was a man of little principle, selfish and unscrupulous, who turned every movement to his own advantage. His passion was for money-making, and his position as governor gave him many opportunities. One of his first acts, with that object in view, was to set up a storehouse on Perrot Island, which gave him full command of the fur-trade. This post was situated just above Montreal, and directly in the route of the tribes of the upper lakes and their vicinity. A retired and trusted lieutenant, named Brucy, was placed in charge, whose chief business it was to intercept the Indians and secure their merchandise, to the no small profit of the Governor and himself, and the great scandal of the neighborhood. The forests were ranged by coureurs de bois, who also trafficked with the savages, and bore off the richest peltries before the real merchants of Montreal had had the opportunity. King Louis had in vain attempted, by royal edicts of outlawry and stringent instructions to his representatives and subordinates, to dislodge the bushrangers and to put an end to their doings. The coureurs de bois, however, were hardy sons of the soil; some of them were soldiers who had deserted from the army; all of them were men of endurance, and accustomed to brave the sternest hardships. They loved their wild life and the adventurous character of their calling. They were, moreover, on very excellent terms with Perrot, who connived at their escapades and shut his ears to all complaint. He had no motive to heed the order of his sovereign, so long as the wayward rangers shared with him the proceeds of their dealings with the Indians. This, on their part, they were very willing to do.
Frontenac was jealous of Perrot’s advantages, and though he had but few soldiers in his command with whom to enforce obedience, he determined to strike a blow at the bushrangers, and make an attempt to execute the King’s orders. Perrot had of late grown despotic and tyrannical. He was comparatively beyond the reach of his superior, and had matters pretty much under his own control. The journey from Quebec to Montreal sometimes occupied a fortnight, and the Governor-General, as he well knew, was not able to strike heavily with the shattered remnants of forces who served under him. Perrot was therefore bold and defiant; but he miscalculated the temper of his chief, and it was not long before the arms of Frontenac were long enough to reach him. Perrot, in a fit of temper, had imprisoned the judge of Montreal because that functionary had dared to remonstrate against the disorders which had been perpetrated by the coureurs de bois. The affair caused much excitement; and with other acts of the Governor, the Sulpitians were soon convinced of the grave error they had made in their choice of a chief magistrate. They were powerless, however, to unseat him. Frontenac now wrote to the minister, and asked for a galley, to the benches of which it was his intention to chain the outlaws as rowers. He then ordered the judge at Montreal to seize every coureur de bois that he could find. Two of them were living at the[331] house of Lieutenant Carion, a friend of Perrot’s, and when the judge’s constable went to lay hands on them, Carion abused the officer, and allowed the men to escape. Perrot indorsed the conduct of his lieutenant, and even threatened the judge with arrest, should he make a similar attempt again.
CANADIAN ON SNOW-SHOES.
A fac-simile of a print in Potherie, vol. i.
Frontenac, when he heard of the manner in which his orders had been treated, flew into a passion. He despatched Lieutenant Bizard and three soldiers to Montreal, charged to arrest and convey to the capital the offending Carion. Bizard succeeded in making the arrest, and left a letter in the house of Le Ber the merchant for Perrot, from Frontenac, giving notice of what had been done. Perrot was, however, earlier advised of the arrest. He hastened with a sergeant and three or four soldiers, found Bizard, and indignantly ordered him under arrest. Nor did Le Ber fare better, for, because he had testified to the scene he had witnessed, he was thrown into jail. These arrests produced much excitement in the place, and Perrot after a while was aware that he had acted with inconsiderate rashness. He released Bizard, and sent him off to Quebec, the bearer of a sullen and impertinent letter to the Count. In due time an answer came, in an order to come to Quebec and render an account of his conduct. Frontenac also[332] wrote to the Abbé Salignac de Fénelon,[696]—a zealous young missionary stationed at Montreal, one of whose uncles had been a firm friend of Frontenac during the progress of the Canadian war,—and desired him to see Perrot and explain the situation. The Abbé’s task was a delicate but congenial one, and he pursued it with such good effect that the Governor was induced to accompany him to headquarters. They made the journey on snow-shoes, and walked the whole distance of one hundred and eighty miles on the St. Lawrence. The interview with the Count was short. Both men were choleric and easily excited. Perrot was disappointed at his reception, after taking the trouble to come so far, and at such a season of the year. Frontenac was stubborn and angry, and the position of his rival at his feet did not mollify his passion, but rather increased it. He put an end to the interview by locking up his offending subordinate in the château, and ordering guards to be placed over him day and night. A trusty friend of Frontenac, La Nouguère by name, was despatched to Montreal to take command. Brucy was seized and cast into prison, while a determined war was made on the coureurs de bois. The two who had been the main cause of the recent trouble were captured and sent to Quebec, where one of them was hanged in the presence of Perrot. The end of this war of extermination soon came, and Frontenac informed the minister that only five of these rangers of the wood remained at large; all the others had returned to the settlements, and given up their hazardous calling.
The old jealousy between Quebec and Montreal now showed itself again. The Sulpitians thought that Frontenac had acted a high-handed part in placing La Nouguère in command over their district without as much as consulting them. Perrot was still their selected governor, and they revolted against the arbitrary conduct of the Governor-General. They roused the colonists against Frontenac’s course, and the Abbé Fénelon, who possessed many of the indiscretions of youth, and who felt that he had been trapped, became the most bitter of the Count’s enemies. Before he left Quebec to return home, he gave his former friend a good deal of abuse; and his first act on reaching Montreal was to preach a sermon full of meaning against Frontenac. Dollier de Casson, the superior of the congregation, reproved the preacher and disclaimed the sermon. Fénelon, in turn, declared that bad rulers in general, and not Frontenac in particular, were meant; but his future conduct belied his words. He made the cause of Perrot his own, and was active in his behalf. Frontenac summoned him before the council on a charge of inciting sedition. The Abbé d’Urfé, a relative of Fénelon, tried to smooth matters over with the Count, but he fared very ill, and was shown the door for his pains.
And now ensued a remarkable trial before the council at Quebec. Perrot was charged with disobeying the royal edicts and of treating with contempt the royal authority. The other offender was the Abbé Fénelon. Frontenac had a pliant council to second his wishes. The councillors owed their positions to him, and as he had power to remove them when he willed, they soon ranged themselves on his side, and showed that they were friendly to his cause. Perrot challenged the right of the Governor-General to preside over the case, on the ground that he was a personal enemy. He moreover objected to several of the councillors on various pretexts. New judges were appointed for the trial, and Perrot’s protests continuing, the board overruled all his exceptions, and the trial went on. Other sessions proceeded to try the impetuous Abbé. Frontenac presided at the council-board. When Fénelon was led in, he seated himself in a vacant chair, though ordered to stand by the Count, and persisted in wearing his hat firmly pressed over his brows. Hot words passed between the Governor and his prisoner, the result of which was that the Abbé was put under arrest. The priest assumed that Frontenac had no right to try him, and that the ecclesiastical court alone had jurisdiction over him. The war grew fierce, and the councillors, half afraid of what they had done, at length decided to refer the question to the King himself. The Governor of Montreal and the vehement Abbé were accordingly despatched to France, and all the documents relating to the case were sent with them. Frontenac presented his side of the argument in a long despatch, which, considering his provocation, was moderate in tone and calm in judgment. The Abbé d’Urfé accompanied the prisoners to France, and as his cousin, the Marquise d’Allègre, was shortly to marry Seignelay, the son of Colbert, he hoped much from his visit. Perrot, too, was not without friends near the King: Talon, his wife’s relative, held a post at court. Besides these influences the Church had other means at work.
In April, 1675, the King and Colbert disposed of the Perrot question. They wrote calmly and with dignity. His Majesty condemned the action of Perrot in imprisoning Bizard, and had the offender confined for three weeks in the Bastile, “that he may learn to be more circumspect in the discharge of his duty, and that his example may serve as a warning to others.” He had already endured ten months of imprisonment in Quebec. The King also told Frontenac that he should not, “without absolute necessity,” cause his “commands to be executed within the limits of a local government, like that of Montreal, without first informing its governor.” Perrot was sent back to his government, and ordered to apologize to Frontenac. Colbert informed the Count of the approaching marriage of his son with the heiress of the house of Allègre, and hinted at the closeness of the connection which existed between the Abbé d’Urfé and himself. Frontenac was urged to show the Abbé “especial consideration,” and also to treat with kindness the priests of Montreal. Fénelon was sustained in his plea that he had the right to be tried by an ecclesiastical tribunal; but his superior,[334] Bretonvilliers, absolutely forbade him to return to Canada, and wrote a letter to the members of his order at Montreal, telling them not to interfere in worldly matters, but to profit by the example of M. Fénelon. He advised them “in matters of this sort” to “stand neutral.”
The King now resolved to make some administrative changes in New France, with a view, it is probable, of lessening the hold of Frontenac on the body politic of the colony. He announced that the appointment of councillors should rest with him alone in future, and promptly filled the vacant office of Intendant by appointing M. Duchesneau whose duty it was to watch the Governor-General, and to manage certain details in executive work. Bishop Laval, who had been absent from Canada for some time, also returned to his see; and Frontenac, who had ruled alone, without bishop, without intendant, and with a subservient council, viewed the new aspect of affairs with ill-concealed disgust. It was not long before the threatened outbreak came. The question of selling brandy to the natives, which had disturbed previous administrations, became again a contention between governor and prelate.[697] The Intendant promptly sided with the Bishop and the clergy, while the latter stood aside at times, and allowed their secular ally to lead the contest, content themselves to give him arguments and advice. One question after another arose. Many of them were of trivial import, but all of them were vexatious and troublesome, and to an imperious mind like Frontenac’s galling in the extreme. The old rivalry of Church and State in the matter of honors and precedence became troublesome. Colbert wrote strongly to Duchesneau, and ordered him not to make himself a partisan of the Bishop, and to pay proper respect to Frontenac. The latter was commanded to live in harmony and peace with the Intendant. The King was incensed at the constant bickerings, and ordered Frontenac to conform to the practice prevailing at Amiens, and to demand no more. The Intendant was roundly berated by the minister, who told him that he ought to be able to understand the difference between a governor and an intendant, and that he was completely in the wrong as regards the pretensions he had assumed.
But if the religious quarrel was settled for a time, a civil difficulty arose. The council no longer remained a mere body for registering the Governor’s decrees. The new order of things gave him a council of men who were opposed in many respects to his views and interests. The King had reinstated Villeray,—a former councillor, and a man wholly under Jesuitical influence. Frontenac, who thought him a “Jesuit in disguise,” called him “an intriguing busybody, who makes trouble everywhere.” The attorney-general[335] was Auteuil, another enemy of the Governor. Tilly was a third member, and the Count at first approved of him; but his opinion was destined to change. Under the ordinance of Sept. 23, 1675, the Intendant, whose official position entitled him to rank as the third man in the colony, was appointed president of the council. His commission, dated June 5, 1675, read: “Présider au Conseil Souverain en l’absence du dit Sieur de Frontenac.” Frontenac was styled in many of the despatches which reached him from the Crown, “Chief and President of the Council.” A conflict of authority immediately arose, and both Governor and Intendant claimed with equal right (one would suppose from the royal documents in their possession) the position of presiding officer. Frontenac bided his time, and remained patient until late in the autumn, when the last vessel cleared for France. Then he asserted his claim to the title of chief and president, and demanded to be so styled on the records of the council. In support of his contention he exhibited a letter from Louis dated May 12, 1678. The Intendant, supported by the clergy, opposed the claim. The Governor refused to compromise, scolded Duchesneau, and threatened to teach him his duty, while he ordered Villeray, Tilly, and Auteuil to their houses, and commanded them to remain there until he should give them permission to leave.[698] Auteuil begged the King to interfere, and the wearied monarch wrote to his representative: “You have wished to be styled Chief and President on the records of the supreme council, which is contrary to my edict concerning that council; and I am the more surprised at this demand, since I am very sure that you are the only man in my kingdom who, being honored with the title of governor and lieutenant-general, would care to be styled chief and president of such a council as that of Quebec.” So the King refused the title of president to either, and commanded that Duchesneau should perform the duties of presiding officer. He also said that Frontenac had abused his authority in exiling two councillors and the attorney-general for so trivial a cause, and warned him to be careful in future, lest he be recalled from office. Several other disputes in the council followed. They were mostly about matters of small moment, but they created great storms while they lasted. The imprisonment of Councillor Amours by order of the Count for an alleged infringement of the passport law, and the presence of his wife with a petition to the council for redress and a speedy trial, caused much discussion and provoked very strong feeling.
Duchesneau was the object of Frontenac’s constant displeasure. On him was visited his fiercest wrath; but the Intendant bore it all with varying moods,—sometimes disputing with Frontenac, at others abusing him, and occasionally treating the diatribe of vituperation which flowed from the Count’s lips with lofty disdain and scorn. He wrote letters to the Court, and[336] lodged complaint after complaint against the Governor, who, in his turn, pursued the same course. Out of the council quarrels others involving more important issues sprang up, and nearly all the people in the colony were in time driven to one side or the other. With Frontenac, as Parkman points out, were ranged La Salle and his lieutenant, La Forêt; Du Lhut, the leader of the coureurs de bois; Boisseau, agent of the farmers of the revenue; Barrois, the Governor’s secretary; Bizard, lieutenant of his guard; and others. Against him were the members of the council, Aubert de la Chesnaye, Le Moyne and his sons, Louis Joliet, Jacques Le Ber, Sorel, Boucher, Varennes, and many of the ecclesiastics. Duchesneau received replies from the Court, and they must have been galling to his pride and self-respect. He was plainly assured that though Frontenac was not blameless, his own conduct was far more open to censure. In this strain Colbert’s letter continued, and he said: “As to what you say concerning his violence, his trade with the Indians,[699] and in general all that you allege against him, the King has written to him his intentions; but since, in the midst of all your complaints, you say many things which are without foundation, or which are no concern of yours, it is difficult to believe that you act in the spirit which the service of the King demands,—that is to say, without interest and without passion. If a change does not appear in your conduct before next year, his Majesty will not keep you in your office.” The King returned his usual advice to Frontenac, told him to live on good terms with the Intendant, and prohibited him from trading with the Indians. But neither the letters of the King nor the minister had much effect apparently, for the Governor and Intendant continued to war against each other. At last the King wrote thus sharply to the Count:—
“What has passed in regard to the coureurs de bois is entirely contrary to my orders, and I cannot receive in excuse for it your allegation that it is the Intendant who countenances them by the trade he carries on, for I perceive clearly that the fault is your own. As I see that you often turn the orders I give you against the very object for which they are given, beware not to do so on this occasion. I shall hold you answerable for bringing the disorder of the coureurs de bois to an end throughout Canada; and this you will easily succeed in doing if you make a proper use of my authority. Take care not to persuade yourself that what I write to you comes from the ill-offices of the Intendant. It results from what I fully know from everything which reaches me from Canada, proving but too well what you are doing there. The Bishop, the ecclesiastics, the Jesuit Fathers, the supreme council, and, in a word, everybody, complain of you; but I am willing to believe that you will change your conduct, and act with the moderation necessary for the good of the colony.”
Frontenac felt the ground slipping under him, but he continued his suicidal policy, while he wrote to some friends in France to recount his woes, and to solicit their good offices with the Court.
Seignelay came to power in 1681. He was the son of Colbert, and a man of very good abilities, matured under the eye of the great minister. He soon received long letters from Frontenac and the Intendant, filled with accusations and countercharges. Affairs had gone badly during the spring and summer of 1681. Some blows were struck, and a resort to sharper weapons was hinted at. The Intendant, Frontenac said, had barricaded his house and armed his servants. Duchesneau declared that his son had been beaten by the Governor for a slight offence, and afterward imprisoned in the château for a month, despite the pleadings of the Bishop in his behalf. These matters, and much more, were regularly reported to the new minister. Both officials stated that furs had been carried to the English settlements, and each blamed the other for it. The Intendant maintained that the faction led by Frontenac had spread among the Indians a rumor of a pestilence at Montreal, for the purpose of keeping them away from the fair, and in order that the bushrangers might purchase the beaver-skins at a low price. The allegation was groundless, but it had its effect at court. The King, tired at last of the constant strife, recalled both Frontenac and Duchesneau in the following year.
Frontenac’s successor was Le Fèbvre de la Barre, a soldier of repute who had already rendered his country good service in the West Indian war, where he had gained some notable successes against the English. For reducing Antigua and Montserrat and recapturing Cayenne from the enemy, he had been promoted to a lieutenant-generalship. He arrived at Quebec with Meules, his intendant, at a most inopportune time. The great fire of August 4, 1682, had laid waste fifty-five houses, and destroyed vast quantities of goods.
The new Governor took up his residence in the château, while Meules went to live in a house in the woods. La Barre was a very different man from Frontenac. He had nothing of that soldier’s peculiar energy or determination. He was a temporizer, cold and insincere, and no match for Indian diplomacy or duplicity. The Indians gauged his capacity before he had been in Canada many weeks, and as compared with Frontenac they felt that they had a child to deal with. The King had given him pretty plain[338] instructions. He was ordered not only to apply himself to prevent the violence of the Iroquois against the French, but also to endeavor to keep the savages at peace among themselves, and by all means to prevent the Iroquois from making war on the Illinois and other tribes. He was further told that his Majesty did not attach much importance to the discoveries which had lately been made in the countries of the Nadoussioux, the River Mississippi, and other parts of North America, deeming them of but slight utility; but he enjoined that the Sieur de la Salle be permitted to complete the exploration he had commenced, as far as the mouth of the Mississippi, “in case he consider, after having examined into it with the Intendant, that such discovery can be of any utility.”
It was not long before La Barre exhibited his total incapacity for governing Canada. He lowered the French prestige in the eyes of the Indians of the Confederacy, and left his red allies to their fate. He was jealous of La Salle, and hated him cordially. Charlevoix accounts for his incapacity by saying that “his advanced age made him credulous when he ought to be distrustful, timid when he ought to be bold, dark and cautious towards those who deserved his confidence, and deprived him of the energy necessary to act as the critical condition of the colony demanded when he administered its affairs.” He was not very old, being little more than sixty years of age at the time. He found the Iroquois flushed with victory over their enemies, and displaying an arrogant bearing towards the French. He wrote a braggart letter to the King; said that with twelve hundred men he would attack twenty-six hundred Iroquois, and then begged for more troops. To the minister he wrote that war was imminent, and unless those “haughty conquerors” were opposed, “half our trade and all our reputation” would be lost. He was always talking about fighting; but those about him knew that he rarely meant all he said. He developed a remarkable predilection for trade, and soon after his arrival allied himself to several of the Quebec merchants, with that object in view. This gave grave offence to all those who could not participate. The tables were turned, and the old enemies of Frontenac now reigned, while La Salle and La Forêt were deposed. Du Lhut, the leader of the coureurs de bois, and a quondam friend of the Ex-Governor, transferred his allegiance to the new authority. La Barre soon showed his feeling towards La Salle. Jacques Le Ber and Aubert de la Chesnaye were early despatched to Fort Frontenac, which La Forêt commanded, with orders to seize it and all it contained, on the flimsy pretext that La Salle had failed to fulfil the conditions of his contract. La Forêt was offered his former position as commander of the fort; but he refused to be false to his chief, and sailed for France in high dudgeon.
On the 10th of October a conference on the state of affairs with the Iroquois was held. There were present the Governor, Intendant, Bishop of Quebec, M. Dollier, Superior of the Seminary of St. Sulpice of Montreal, Father Dablon, the Governor of Three Rivers, and others. The meeting[339] was harmonious, and the importance and danger of the situation seemed to be understood. A most uninviting prospect lay before the little colony. The Iroquois, well armed and equipped, could strike first the Illinois, and in turn all the tribes in alliance with the French, and so divert the peltry trade into other channels, and finally fall upon the French themselves. It was stated at the conference that the English were responsible for this, and that they had been urging the Iroquois on for four years, in order to ruin Canada, and to secure for themselves and the Dutch the entire peltry trade of the continent. It was determined to make an effort to prevent the Iroquois from bringing upon the friendly Indians the fate they had previously dealt upon the Algonquins, the Andastes, the Abenaquis, and others. It was finally thought that the war might be averted for a time, and meanwhile the King was urgently importuned for troops and two hundred hired men, besides arms and ammunition.
The attack came sooner than had been expected. In the early spring the Seneca Indians were reported to be moving in considerable force on the Illinois, the Hurons, and the Ottawas of the lakes. La Barre, greatly excited, hastened his preparations. He wrote to France, explaining the posture of affairs, and demanding more troops. Du Lhut was sent with thirty men, with powder and lead, to Michillimackinac, to strengthen the defences there, and to guard the stores, of which there was a great quantity. Charles Le Moyne was despatched to Onondaga with a mission, which so far succeeded that forty-three Iroquois chiefs went to Montreal to meet the Governor. They arrived on the 14th of August. A council was held, and over two thousand crowns’ worth of presents were distributed among the Indians. La Barre demanded friendship for the Ottawas, the Algonquins, and the Hurons; but there was no firmness in his demands. He was timid, and when the fierce Senecas declared that the Iroquois made war on the Illinois because they deserved to die, he said nothing, and his silence sealed their doom. The delegates were asked to agree not to plunder French traders who were provided with passports. They agreed to this. It was a suggestion of La Chesnaye, and evidently aimed at La Salle, though La Barre denied that he gave the Iroquois liberty to plunder and kill the explorer. By a sort of poetic justice, the first captures the Iroquois made under their agreement were two boats belonging to La Chesnaye, which had gone up the lakes during Frontenac’s reign, and had no passports. On the 30th of August the deputies left Montreal.
La Barre continued his trading operations. He and La Chesnaye anticipated the annual market at Montreal, by sending up a large fleet of vessels, and securing enormous quantities of furs, a great part of which was clandestinely sent to Albany and New York. The Governor’s persecutions of La Salle went on, and in the spring he sent the Chevalier de Baugis, with canoes and soldiers, to seize his fort of St. Louis; but his scheme suffered defeat. La Barre now prepared in earnest for war, and was resolved to attack the Senecas in the following August[340] (1684). On the 31st of July the King wrote that he had sent him three hundred soldiers.
It has been said that the English colonists of New York had instigated the Iroquois to make war on the French. Colonel Thomas Dongan, Lord Tyrconnel’s nephew, and a Roman Catholic, was governor of New York. Though he had respect for the King of France, he nevertheless thought himself entitled to a share of the fur-trade, which had so long remained a monopoly of the Canadians, and he decided to make some effort to obtain it. The Duke of York warned him against offending the French governor; but while Dongan publicly professed to observe his Grace’s injunction, he was really in frequent intrigue with the enemies of the French, and did all he could to provoke the Iroquois into making war on La Barre and his allies. The English had secured the allegiance of the five tribes of the Confederacy; the hatchet had been buried, and the song of peace had been sung. Dongan was wily, and got the Iroquois to recognize his king as their lawful sovereign. This would give him the command of the country south of the great lakes. The Indians readily promised, but without any intention of keeping their word. Their motive evidently was to make the most out of either party, and yield nothing. La Barre complained of the Senecas and Cayugas, and wrote to Dongan, telling him not to sell the offenders any arms or ammunition, and saying that he meant to attack the tribes for plundering French canoes and attempting a French fort. Dongan wrote in reply that the Iroquois were British subjects, and if they had done wrong, reparation should be made. Meanwhile he urged La Barre not to make his threatened attack, and begged him to keep the peace between the two colonies. Next he laid the complaints of the French governor before the chiefs, who on their part declared that the French had carried arms to their foes, the Illinois and the Miamis. Dongan handled the question with tact, and played upon the fears of the Indians so well that he got them to consent to his placing the arms of the Duke of York in their villages, which he said would save them from the French. They further agreed that they would not make peace with Onontio without consent of the English. In return for this, Dongan promised aid in case their country should be invaded.
The English Governor was a believer in prompt action, and he hastened to have the Iroquois’ subjection to King Charles confirmed. To that end he despatched a Dutch interpreter, Arnold Viele by name, to Onondaga. But Charles Le Moyne and the crafty Jesuit Jean de Lamberville, who knew the Indian character well, were there before the envoy of the English arrived. Le Moyne had been sent to invite the tribes to a conference with La Barre. The chief of the Onondagas was Otréouati, or Big Mouth, a famous orator and influential warrior, and ranking as one of the ablest Indians of the Confederacy. He was unscrupulous as regards keeping promises, but his valor and astuteness were beyond question. The two Frenchmen had spent some days in trying to induce the Onondagas to get[341] their Seneca confederates to make peace with the French. The Senecas at first would not hear of it; but finally they succumbed to Big Mouth’s eloquence, and gave the Onondagas power to complete a treaty for them. Viele appeared on the scene; but he was no diplomat, and he shocked the pride of the Onondagas when he told them, with more arrogance than policy, that the English were masters of their territory, and that they had no right to hold council with the French without permission. It was natural that Big Mouth should become indignant: he asserted the independence of his tribe, and told his warriors and chiefs not to listen to the proposals of a man who seemed to be drunk, so opposed to all reason was what he uttered. The end of it was that Big Mouth and his sachems consented to accompany Le Moyne to meet La Barre.
The French Governor was ready for the campaign, having seven hundred Canadians, a hundred and thirty regulars, and two hundred mission Indians under his command. He was to be reinforced by a band of Indians on the way, and a company of coureurs de bois led by Du Lhut and La Durantaye. More warriors were to join him at Niagara. He declared that he intended to exterminate the Senecas; but his Intendant, Meules, had no faith in his promises, and kept urging him on, as if he feared that he would make peace without striking a blow,—a fatal course in his eyes. He wrote to the Governor two letters on the subject, concluding the second one thus: “If we do not destroy them, they will destroy us. I think you see but too well that your honor and the safety of the country are involved in the results of this war.” He also sent a despatch to Seignelay, which contained the customary complaints against La Barre, and some vigorous comments on his conduct in trading against the orders of the King, and his warlike pretensions which meant nothing. “I will take the liberty to tell you, Monseigneur,” he wrote, “though I am no prophet, that I discover no disposition on the part of Monsieur the General to make war against the aforesaid savages. In my belief, he will content himself by going in a canoe as far as Fort Frontenac, and then send for the Senecas to treat of peace with them, and deceive the people, the Intendant, and, if I may be allowed with all possible respect to say so, his Majesty himself.” La Barre proceeded on his way with his army, and after encountering a few adventures en route, finally reached Fort Frontenac, where the whole party encamped. A malarial fever broke out among the French, and many died. La Barre himself was greatly reduced and wasted by the disease, and so disheartened that he abandoned his plans, and sought to secure peace on the most favorable terms that he could get. He no longer thought of punishing the Senecas, nor had he the courage to invite them to council. He crossed over to La Famine with a few men, and sent Le Moyne to beg the tribes to meet him on their side of the lake. Here provisions grew scarce, and hunger and discontent prevailed among his followers. Several soldiers languished through disease; others died.
La Barre awaited the return of his envoy with fear and suspense. When[342] at last he came on the third of the month, with Big Mouth and thirteen deputies, the Governor received the party with what grace he could. He had sent his sick men away, and told the Indians that his army was at Fort Frontenac; but the keen-witted savages were not deceived, and one of their number, understanding French, gathered during the evening from the conversation of the soldiers the true condition of affairs. The council was held on the 4th of September; and Baron La Hontan, who was present, gives a long account of what took place. The Governor related the offences of the Iroquois; charged them with maltreating and robbing the French traders in the country of the Illinois, with introducing the “English into the lakes which belong to the King, my master, and among the tribes who are his children, in order to destroy the trade of his subjects,” and with having made “several barbarous inroads into the country of the Illinois and Miamis, seizing, binding, and leading into captivity an infinite number of those savages in time of peace.... They are the children of my king,” he said, “and are not to remain your slaves. They must at once be set free and sent home.” Should such things occur again, he was ordered, he said, to declare war against the offending tribes. He agreed to grant them terms of peace, provided they made atonement for the past, and promised good conduct for the future; otherwise he would burn their villages and destroy them. Big Mouth rose and replied. He very soon convinced La Barre of the hopelessness of his task. “Listen, Onontio,” he said. “I am not asleep, my eyes are open; and by the sun that gives me light I see a great captain at the head of a band of soldiers who talks like a man in a dream. He says that he has come to smoke the pipe of peace with the Onondagas; but I see that he came to knock them in the head if so many of his Frenchmen were not too weak to fight. I see Onontio raving in a camp of sick men, whose lives the Great Spirit has saved by smiting them with disease. Our women had snatched war-clubs, and our children and old men seized bows and arrows, to attack your camp, if our warriors had not restrained them, when your messenger, Akouessan, appeared in our village.” The savage refused reparation; said that his tribe had been born free, and that they depended on neither Onontio nor on Corlaer, the governor of New York. “We have knocked the Illinois in the head,” he continued, “because they cut down the tree of peace and hunted the beaver on our lands. We have done less than the English and the French, who have seized upon the lands of many tribes, driven them away, and built towns, villages, and forts in the country.” La Barre, greatly disgusted, retired to his tent, and the council closed. In the afternoon another session was held, and in the evening a treaty was patched up. Big Mouth agreed to some reparation, which, however, he never made; but he would not consent to make peace with La Barre’s allies, the Illinois, whom he declared he would fight to the death. He also demanded that the council fire should be removed from Fort Frontenac to La Famine,—a concession yielded by La Barre without hesitation, but which Frontenac would never have granted.
The Governor returned home the next day, broken and dispirited; his men followed, wasted by fever and hunger, as best they could. This disgraceful truce was treated with contempt by all, the allies of the French included; and for a while it was thought that the friendly tribes would go over to the enemy in a body, make peace with their old rivals, and divert the channel of trade from Montreal to Albany. Lamberville only indorsed the Governor’s conduct, and styled him the “savior of the country” for having made peace at so critical a time. Meules and the others viewed the matter differently, and the former wrote to the minister that the Governor’s excuses were a mere pretence; that he had lost his wits, had gone off in a fright, and since his return his officers could not abstain from showing him the contempt in which they held him. The King, much annoyed, recalled La Barre, and the Marquis de Denonville, a colonel in the Queen’s regiment of Dragoons, full of piety and a devoted friend of the Jesuits, was sent to succeed him.
Denonville had been thirty years a soldier, and was much esteemed at court for his valor. It was agreed on all hands that the King’s selection of him for governor of the troubled colony was a very good one. But results proved it otherwise; and Denonville’s administration was even more unfortunate than that of La Barre, whose disastrous reign had brought Canada almost to the brink of ruin. When he arrived at Quebec in the autumn of 1685, with his wife and a portion of his family, he found little to cheer him. One hundred and fifty of the five hundred soldiers who had been sent out to Canada by King Louis had perished of scurvy while crossing the sea. The colony was in great disorder; the Iroquois roamed at their pleasure, destroyed when and whom they pleased, and vented their anger with all the cruelty and ferocity of their savage nature on such tribes as favored the French. The Indian allies of the French who had been abandoned by La Barre had little respect left for the nation whose chief representative had so badly served them. But now all this would be changed. Denonville was ordered to ratify the peace with the Iroquois or to declare war, the alternative being left to his own discretion. The King, who felt acutely the disgrace of La Barre’s abandonment of the Illinois, enjoined the new governor to repair that mischief as speedily as possible, to sustain the friendly tribes, and to humble the Iroquois at all hazards. A vigorous policy was determined on, and the King had great faith in the instrument which was to effect it. Denonville was given especial instructions regarding the English of New York, who at this time were constantly intriguing with the enemies of New France. Dongan understood the country well, and was striving with all his energy to secure control of the valuable fur districts south of the Great Lakes. To that end he was always in treaty with the Iroquois,[344] who promised and disregarded their promises as exigency or humor suited them. The King was fully aware of this, and his instructions of March 10, 1685, are especially clear on this point. First, the French ambassador at London, M. Barillon, was desired to demand from the King of England “precise orders obliging that Governor [Dongan] to confine himself within the limits of his government, and to observe a different line of conduct toward Sieur de Denonville, whom his Majesty has chosen to succeed said Sieur de la Barre.” And Denonville was himself told that “everything must be done to maintain good understanding between the French and English; but if the latter, contrary to all appearances, excite and aid the Indians, they must be treated as enemies when found on Indian territory, without, at the same time, attempting anything on territory under the obedience of the King of England.” Meanwhile, the English were seizing posts in Acadia[700] which had always been occupied by the French. Denonville was ordered to send to the governor at Boston to explain the points of boundary, and to request him to confine himself to his own limits in future. Perrot, the former governor of Montreal, was now governor of Acadia, and he was instructed to keep up a correspondence with Denonville, and to take his orders from him.[701]
The struggle for the supremacy was between Denonville and Dongan. The latter dared not act as openly as he wished, for his King, being often at the mercy of Louis, kept saddling him with mandates which he could not disobey, though they sorely touched his pride. He could, however, intrigue; and the convenient Iroquois, who found their gain in the dissensions of the English and French, and who soon learned to encourage the rivalry between the two white powers encroaching on their domain, turned listening ears to his words. Louis favored the schemes of Denonville, which had been formed on a very extensive scale, and involved the mastery of the most fruitful part of the entire continent. New York had at this time about 18,000 inhabitants; Canada’s population was 12,263; but while the latter people were united in furthering French aims, the inhabitants of New York, save the active traders of the colony who were concerned in the purchase of peltries, took very little interest in Dongan’s plans. The English colonies were all deeply interested in checking French advancement, but they declined to help the government of New York, and Dongan was forced to fight his battles single-handed. His king furnished him neither money nor troops; but the assistance rendered, though sometimes in a negative sense, by the Iroquois league, was often formidable enough, and served his purpose on occasion. On the part of Denonville there were, of course, counter-intrigues. Through Lamberville he distributed presents to the Iroquois, and Engelran spent many days at Michillimackinac trying to stay the Hurons, Ottawas, and other lake tribes from allying themselves with the[345] English, as they threatened to do. It was clear that a bold stroke must be made to keep these hitherto friendly tribes on the side of the French, and the only means which seemed to be open was war with the Iroquois. The latter were also intriguing with their old enemies, and trying to make treaties independently of the French. The coureurs de bois, too, were a source of danger and annoyance. La Barre had not kept them in check, and Denonville speedily discovered that they acted as though they regarded the edicts of the King as so much waste paper. It was impossible to prevent their selling brandy to the Indians, and demoralizing and debauching the tribes. Denonville wrote for more troops, and seemed anxious to deal a decisive blow at the Iroquois. Affairs were in a deplorable state, and nothing short of a stalwart exhibition of French power would save the country. “Nothing can save us,” wrote the Governor, “but the sending out of troops and the building of forts and blockhouses. Yet I dare not begin to build them; for if I do, it will bring down all the Iroquois upon us before we are in a condition to fight them.”
A brisk correspondence sprang up between the Governor of New York and Denonville. At first it was polite and complimentary, but ere long it assumed a sterner character, and strong language was employed on both sides. A good deal of fencing was indulged in. There were charges and countercharges. Each blamed the other for keeping bad faith, and each side made every effort to out-manœuvre the other. Denonville saw with military prescience that forts would be of service at several important points. One of these sites was situate on the straits of Detroit, and he hastened to send Du Lhut with fifty men to occupy it. The active woodsman promptly built a stockade at the outlet of Lake Huron, on the western side of the strait, and paused there for a while. News reached Denonville that Dongan contemplated sending, early in the spring of 1687, an armed expedition in the direction of Michillimackinac to forestall the trade there. He complained to the Governor of New York, and advised the King about it. To Du Lhut he issued orders to shoot down the intruders so soon as they presented themselves. Dongan dissembled until he heard from England, when he altered his tone, and wrote a letter much subdued in temper to Denonville. The French Governor replied, and counselled harmony.
Intelligence from the north reached Denonville about this time, which gave him considerable satisfaction. The French had resolved in the spring of 1686 to assert their right to the territory of Hudson’s Bay. An English Company had established a post at the mouth of Nelson River, on the west, and on the southern end there were situate forts Albany, Hayes, and Rupert, each garrisoned by a few men. The rival of this Company was the Company of the North, a Canadian institution, which held a grant from Louis XIV. The French had decided to expel the English from their posts, and Denonville approved the plan, and sent Chevalier de Troyes with a band of eighty men to assist the Company. Forts Hayes and Rupert were assaulted at night. In each instance the attack was a surprise, and the[346] posts readily fell into the hands of the invaders. Several of the English were killed, others were wounded, and the rest were made prisoners. Iberville attacked a vessel anchored near the fort; three of its defenders were killed, and others, including Bridger, the governor for the Company, were captured. At Fort Albany, which was garrisoned by thirty men, a stouter resistance was offered, but at the end of an hour it was silenced, and shared the fate of its fellows.
Meanwhile, a treaty of neutrality had been signed at Whitehall, and there was peace between England and France for a time. The document bears date Nov. 16, 1686. On Jan. 22, 1687, instructions were sent to Governor Dongan to maintain friendly relations with Denonville, and to give him no cause for complaint. The King of France delayed despatching his orders to Canada until four months had elapsed.
Denonville was ordered to punish the Iroquois. He had eight hundred regulars, and a further contingent of eight hundred men were promised in the spring. Abundant means, too, had been provided; namely, 168,000 livres in money and supplies. Denonville was in high feather, and everything turned in his favor for a time. He had got rid of his meddling Intendant, Meules, and a pious man like himself had been sent in his place. This was Champigny. The Bishop, St. Vallier, had only words of praise for the administration as it then stood: Church and State were in perfect harmony at last. The attack on the Iroquois towns was well planned, and every precaution was observed to keep the matter secret until the time for action had arrived. Dongan, however, learned the truth from straggling deserters, and he was not slow in informing the Iroquois of the warlike designs of the French.
Denonville’s plan was to proceed to the Senecas, the strongest castle and the nearest to Niagara, his course taking him along the southern shore, which he elected on account of certain advantages which it possessed over the northern side. The little army moved out from Montreal on its career of conquest June 13, 1687. After some difficulty, Fort Frontenac was reached. Champigny and his men had arrived a few days in advance of the main army; and through his exertions thirty men and ninety women and children of a peaceable tribe belonging to the Iroquois and living in the neighborhood, were decoyed into the fort under the pretence of being feasted, and treacherously captured. Other Indians were taken in the same way, many of whom were afterward consigned to the French galleys. The Iroquois were more chivalrous. They had Lamberville, the Jesuit missionary whom Denonville had basely left to his fate, in their power, and could easily have destroyed him, but they allowed him to go free and join his friends. At the fort there were assembled, according to Denonville, about two thousand[347] men, regulars, militia, and Indians. Eight hundred troops, newly arrived from France, had been left at Montreal to protect the settlers and property there. More allies were awaiting his commands at Niagara; they consisted of one hundred and eighty Frenchmen, and four hundred Indians, under Tonty, La Durantaye, and Du Lhut. The journey to Niagara had not been made without hardship and adventure. The Indians of the party had been difficult to manage, and for a while Durantaye was not sure that they would remain with him. Some of the English traders, commanded by Johannes Rooseboom, a Dutchman, on the way to Michillimackinac with goods, were encountered, and Durantaye hastened with one hundred and twenty coureurs de bois to meet them. The party, consisting of twenty-nine whites and five Mohawks and Mohicans, were threatened with death if they resisted. They immediately surrendered, and were despatched to Michillimackinac as prisoners. The merchandise they brought was parcelled out among the Indians. This stroke was the means of saving Durantaye’s life, and the Indians with him became in consequence his sure allies. While making for Niagara, McGregory’s canoes were met, and the same fate overtook them. This capture proved important, for McGregory had with him a number of Ottawa and Huron prisoners whom the Iroquois had taken. It was the Englishman’s intention to restore these captives to their countrymen, to make good the terms of the triple alliance which had been entered into by the English, the Iroquois, and the lake tribes. McGregory’s capture destroyed the whole arrangement, and he and his companions, with those of Rooseboom, were ultimately sent as prisoners to Quebec.
The war-party at Niagara were ordered to repair to the rendezvous at Irondequoit Bay, on the border of the Seneca country, and Denonville went to meet them. His command numbered three thousand men, for a reinforcement of Ottawas of Michillimackinac who had refused to follow Durantaye, having altered their minds, now joined the party. The host was well officered. The leaders were Denonville, the Chevalier de Vaudreuil,—an excellent soldier, fresh from France,—La Durantaye, Callières, Du Lhut, Tonty, Berthier, La Valterie, Granville, Longueil, La Hontan, De Troyes, and others. On the afternoon of the 12th of July, at three o’clock, having already despatched four hundred men to garrison the redoubt, which had been put in a condition of defence for the protection of the provisions and canoes, Denonville began his march across the woods to Gannagaro,—twenty-two miles distant. Each man carried with him food for thirteen days. Three leagues were made the first day, and the party camped for the night. Two defiles were passed the next morning. The heat was intense, and the mosquitoes were very troublesome, but the men moved on in pretty fair order. So far, only a few scouts of the enemy had been encountered. At two o’clock the third defile was entered. It had been the Governor’s intention to rest here, but having been notified by scouts that a considerable party of the Senecas was in the neighborhood, an advance was made by Callières, who was at the head of the three companies commanded by[348] Tonty, Durantaye, and Du Lhut, besides the detachment of Indians. This body, which formed the vanguard of the army, pushed rapidly through the defile, unconscious of the fact that an ambuscade of Senecas, three hundred strong, was posted in the vicinity. When they reached the end they came upon a thicket of alders and rank grass. At a given signal, the air was rent with defiant shouts, and a host of savages leaped from their places of concealment, and sent a volley of lead into the bewildered French, while the three hundred Senecas who lined the sides of the defile sprang upon the van. They had thought to crush their enemy at a blow, but Denonville, hurrying up with his sixteen hundred men, soon spread consternation into their ranks. The firing was heavy on both sides; but the Senecas were defeated with considerable slaughter, and finally fled from the scene in dismay. Denonville wrote that “all our Christian Indians from below performed their duty admirably, and firmly maintained the position assigned to them on the left.” The French did not follow the flying savages, being too much fatigued by their long march. Their loss was five or six men killed and twenty wounded. Among the latter was Father Engelran, who was seriously injured by a bullet.
The next morning the army pressed forward again, but no Seneca warriors were to be seen. The villages were deserted, and ten days were occupied by the soldiers and their allies in reducing the Indian villages and destroying the provisions and stores which the Senecas had left behind them. Denonville withdrew on the 24th with his army, and set out for Montreal. On the way back he ordered a stockade to be built at Niagara, on the site of La Salle’s old fort, between the River Niagara and Lake Ontario. Montreal was reached on the 13th of August.[702]
Denonville thought that he had made a successful stroke; but he was over sanguine. After this his power seemed to wane, and his prestige went down. Dongan was savage when he heard of the imprisonment of McGregory and Rooseboom, and wrote a sharp letter demanding their return. Denonville refused, and upbraided him for having assisted the savages. He thought better of his resolution as his anger cooled, however, and in a few weeks released his prisoners.
Dongan called a conference of the Iroquois, and told them to receive no more Jesuit missionaries into their towns. He called them British subjects, and said that they should make no treaties with the French without asking leave of King James. The humbled Indians promised obedience.
Hitherto, Dongan had not succeeded in getting his king to recognize the Iroquois as his subjects. On the 10th of November, 1687, however, a[349] warrant arrived from England authorizing the Governor to protect the Five Nations, and to repel the French from their territory by force of arms, should they attack the villages again. The commissioners appointed, in accordance with the terms of the neutrality treaty signed at Whitehall, had the boundary question before them. Both French and English claimed the Iroquois, and the matter was assuming a serious aspect. News came in August, 1688, to Denonville, that the subject of dispute would receive prompt and satisfactory settlement.[703]
Meanwhile, the French Governor made several overtures to obtain peace with the Iroquois; but their demands were greater than his pride could grant. Dongan’s hand was seen in every proposition formulated by the savages. Father Vaillant was sent to Albany to try and obtain easier conditions, but the effort was vain; and the Iroquois absolutely refused to make peace or grant a truce until Fort Niagara was razed, and all the prisoners restored. These terms were exasperating; but when Denonville learned that Dongan had been recalled by King James, his spirits rose, and he felt as if a great load were removed. The governments of New York, New Jersey, and New England became one administration, and Sir Edmund Andros was named governor over all. So far as Denonville was concerned, he was no better off than before, for the new Governor insisted on all of Dongan’s old demands being satisfied, and actually forbade peace with the Iroquois on any other basis.
The state of Canada at this time, 1688, was most deplorable. Disease had broken out, and the mortality was fearful. Before spring, ten only, out of a garrison of one hundred men at Niagara, survived the scourge. The provisions had become bad, and prowling Senecas prevented any of the inmates of the fort from venturing out to look for food. Fort Frontenac’s garrison was also sadly diminished, and the distress throughout the country, from famine and disease, was very great. To add to the Governor’s troubles, the fur-trade had languished. Bands of Iroquois menaced the unfortunate settlers. The fields were untilled; danger lurked in every bush, and destitution, gaunt and grim, abounded everywhere. Peace must be had at any price, if the colony would live, and Denonville resolved to make it. He had become unmanned by his trials, and though he still had a force of fourteen hundred regulars, some militia, and three or four hundred Indian converts, he hesitated to venture on war. He wrote to the Court for eight hundred more troops, and the King sent him three hundred. Then he made up his mind to fight. He planned a campaign against the Iroquois which he[350] hoped would break their power. He proposed to divide his army into two sections, with one of which he might crush the Onondagas and Cayugas, and with the other the Mohawks and Oneidas. He asked the King for four thousand troops, and the Bishop backed his demand with an earnest prayer; but France could not spare them, and the Governor was left to his own resources. He fell back on the arts of the diplomat, and invited the wily old chief Big Mouth, to a council at Montreal. The savage consented to come, despite his promises to the English, and presently he appeared before Denonville at the head of twelve hundred warriors. He addressed the Marquis haughtily, and said that he would make peace with the French, but the terms would not include their allies: the Iroquois must be left free to attack them when and how they would. Denonville, like De la Barre on a former occasion, dared not refuse, and the red allies of the Governor were again abandoned to their fate. A declaration of neutrality was drawn up June 15, 1688, and Big Mouth promised that deputies from the whole Confederacy should proceed to Montreal and sign a general peace.
A chief of the Hurons named Kondiaronk, or the Rat, heard of the treaty about to be made. Should it be ratified, it meant the destruction of his own tribe. He took steps to prevent it, and with a band of trusty savages intercepted the Iroquois deputies on their way to Montreal, at La Famine, and attacked them. One chief was killed, a warrior escaped with a broken arm, and the rest were wounded and taken prisoners. The Rat told his captives that Denonville had informed him that they were to pass that way, and when the captives replied that they were envoys of peace, the crafty Huron assumed an injured air, liberated them all save one, and giving them guns and ammunition, told them to go back to their people, and avenge the treachery of the French. They departed, breathing vengeance against Onontio. The wounded Iroquois who had been in the mêlée escaped, however, learned a different story at Fort Frontenac, where he was well received, and hastened to Onondaga charged with explanations. The Iroquois pretended to be satisfied, and Denonville believed them; but ere long he was terribly undeceived. From one pretext and another, the treaty was not signed.
And now occurred one of the direst and blackest tragedies in the annals of New France. During the night and morning of the 4th and 5th of August, 1689, some fourteen or fifteen hundred Iroquois landed at Lachine. A tempest was raging at the time, and taking advantage of the storm and the darkness, they crept noiselessly up to the houses of the sleeping settlers, and, yelling their piercing war-whoop, fell upon their defenceless and surprised victims. The houses were fired, and the massacre of the inmates which followed was swift and frightful. Few escaped; men, women, and children were indiscriminately slain in cold blood. It is estimated that more than two hundred persons were butchered outright, and one hundred and twenty were carried off as prisoners and reserved for a fate worse than death. Women were impaled, children roasted by slow fires, and other horrors[351] were perpetrated. Three stockade forts, Rémy, Roland, and La Présentation, respectably garrisoned, were situate in the vicinity of this bloody deed. Two hundred regular troops were encamped less than three miles away. Their officer, Subercase, was at the time in Montreal, some six miles from his command. A fugitive from the massacre alarmed the soldiers, and then fled to Montreal with his terrible news. Flying victims of the tragedy were seen at intervals pursued by Iroquois, but the presence of the file of soldiers prevented them from following up their prey. It was far into the day when Subercase returned, breathless, from Montreal. He hastily ordered his troops to push on, and, reinforced by one hundred armed settlers and several men from the forts, marched towards the encampment of the Indians. Most of the latter were helplessly drunk by this time, and Subercase could have killed many of them easily; but just as he was about to strike, Chevalier de Vaudreuil appeared upon the scene, and by orders of Denonville commanded the gallant officer to stand solely on the defensive. In vain Subercase protested; but the orders of his superior could not be gainsaid. The troops were marched back to Fort Roland, a great opportunity for revenge was lost, and the fatal pause cost the French very dearly. The next day the savages were early on the alert. Eighty men hurrying from Fort Rémy to join Vaudreuil were cut to pieces, and only Le Moyne, De Longueil, and a few others succeeded in making their way through the gate of the fort which they had just abandoned. The Indians continued their fiendish work. They burned all the houses and barns within an area of nine miles, and pillaged and scalped, without opposition, within a circle of twenty miles. The miserable policy of Denonville completely paralyzed the troops and inhabitants, and they allowed the Iroquois to remain in the neighborhood until they had surfeited themselves with slaughter, though with a little determined effort they could readily have driven them off. At length the savages withdrew of their own accord, and as they passed the forts they called out loud enough for the inmates to hear, “Onontio, you deceived us, and now we have deceived you.”
Other troubles overtook the colony: the rebellion broke out in England; war was declared between Britain and France, in the midst of which Denonville was recalled, and brave, chivalrous Frontenac, now in his seventieth year, crossed the seas again, his past conduct forgiven by King Louis, to administer for a second time the affairs of Canada.
It was in the autumn of 1689, and by evening, that Frontenac was received at Quebec with fireworks and jubilations. His passage had been long, and the season was too far advanced to render it practicable to organize an attack on New York by sea and land, in accordance with secret instructions which he had received on leaving France;[704] so the condition[352] of affairs in Canada at once engaged his attention. These were far from cheerful. Frontenac hastened to Montreal, only to meet the garrison of Fort Frontenac, which had abandoned and partially destroyed the works, and were withdrawing under Denonville’s orders. In every direction the settlements were in terror of the stealthy Iroquois; and even the tribes of the lakes, having found under Denonville’s policy that little dependence could be placed in the support of the French, were showing signs of revolt. Frontenac had induced a council of the Iroquois; but his proposition for peace was only met by the revelation of their alliance with the tribes of Michillimackinac. The French Governor acted promptly: he despatched a force, accompanied by the astute Nicholas Perrot, to endeavor to prevent any overt act on the part of the Ottawas.
Meanwhile, to punish the English and to impress the savages, Frontenac sent out three expeditions. The first, from Montreal, fell suddenly upon Schenectady, then the farthest outpost of the English in New York, and perpetrated a fearful massacre. The invaders retired, not without pursuit, leaving some prisoners in the hands of the English, who learned from them that Frontenac designed to make a more formidable attack in the spring. Schuyler, of Albany, appealed to Massachusetts for help; but the New England colonies soon had a sharper appeal for their own defence. Towards the end of January, Frontenac’s second expedition had left Three Rivers, and two months later it fell suddenly upon Salmon Falls, a settlement on the river dividing Maine from New Hampshire, where the force plundered and killed whom they could, and retreated so as to intercept and join the third of the French parties, which had left Quebec in January, and was now on its way to attack Fort Loyal, at the present Portland. After a vigorous resistance, Captain Sylvanus Davis, a Massachusetts man, who commanded the English, surrendered that post upon terms which were not kept. Murder and rapine followed, as in the other cases, while Davis and some others were led captive to Canada. Frontenac received the New Englander kindly, who was still in his power when another and more famous New Englander appeared before Quebec with a fleet, in pursuance of a part of a plan of attack on New France which the English were now bent on making in retaliation. At a congress in May, 1690, held in New York, the scheme was arranged. A land force under Fitz-John Winthrop was to march from Albany to Montreal. It fell (as we shall see) by the way, and disappeared. A sea-force was to sail from Boston and attack Quebec at the same time. This for a while promised better.
During the previous year the Boston merchants had lost ships and cargoes by French cruisers, which harbored at Port Royal.[705] Another chapter tells the story of the reprisals which the aroused New Englanders made, and how Sir William Phips had returned with captives and booty to Boston, just after the Massachusetts Government had begun to make preparations to carry out their part of the campaign as planned in New York. There[353] is no test of soldiership like success, and the adventitious results of the Port Royal expedition stood with the over-confident and unthinking for much more than they signified, and Phips of course was put in command of the new Armada. Money was borrowed, for recurrent frontier wars had drained the colonial treasuries. England was appealed to; but she refused even to contribute munitions of war. So with a bluff and coarse adventurer for a general, with a Cape Cod militia-man in John Walley as his lieutenant, with a motley force of twenty-two hundred men crowded in thirty-two extemporized war-ships, and with a scant supply of ammunition, the fleet left Boston Harbor in August, 1690.
Meanwhile Frontenac at Quebec had, during the winter, been constructing palisades in front of the inland side of the upper town, and leaving the work to go on, had gone up in the early summer to Montreal, to be elated by the arrival of a large fleet of canoes bringing furs from the upper lakes. All this indicated to Frontenac that his policy of reclaiming to the French interest the tribes about Michillimackinac was working successfully, and he rejoiced. While here, however, he got news of Winthrop’s force coming down Lake Champlain. It turned out that the English did nothing more than to frighten him a little by the sudden onset of a scouting party under John Schuyler, which fell upon the settlement at La Prairie, and then vanished.
Suddenly again word came of a rumor of a fleet having sailed from Boston to attack Quebec. Frontenac made haste to return to that town, and was met on the way by more definite intelligence of the New England fleet having been seen in the river. When he reached Quebec, not a hostile sail was in sight. He was in time, and his messengers were already summoning assistance from all distant posts.
In coming up the river, Phips had captured two vessels, so that the fleet which two or three days after Frontenac’s arrival slowly emerged into the basin of Quebec counted thirty-four vessels to the anxious eyes of the French. Phips’s prisoners had told him that there were not two hundred men in the works; Frontenac knew that his reinforcements had already made his garrison about twenty-seven hundred men.
Phips promptly sent a summons to surrender. His messenger was blindfolded and tumbled about over the barricades, to impress him with the preparations of defence. Frontenac disdained to take the offered hour for consideration, and sent back his refusal at once. Phips dallied with councils of war till he heard the acclamations with which the Governor of Montreal was received, when he brought several hundred additional men to the garrison. Walley was at last landed with a force of twelve or thirteen hundred, who experienced some fighting, which they conducted courageously enough, but without result, and suffered much from the inclemency of the weather. Without waiting for the land troops to reach a position for assaulting the town, Phips moved up his ships, and began a bombardment, wholly ineffectual, and drew a return which damaged him so[354] considerably, that, after renewing it the following day, he finally drew off. There was another delay in rescuing Walley and his men, who were at last re-embarked under cover of the night. The fleet now fell down the river, stopped to repair, and then made their way back to Boston, straggling along for several months, some of the vessels never reaching home at all. The miseries of mortification and paper money were all that New England had to show for her bravado.[706]
Attack on Quebec.
To Frontenac the success of his defence was a temporary relief, so far as the English were concerned, though the New England cruisers continued to intercept his supplies in the Gulf. But the Iroquois wolves began to prowl again. Taunted by their savage allies for their inertness, the English and Dutch of Albany once more raided towards Montreal, under Peter Schuyler, and, inflicting more damage than they received, successfully broke through an ambuscading force on their retreat. All this irritated Frontenac. He prayed his King for help to destroy New York and Boston; and when a false report reached him that ten thousand “Bastonnais” had sailed to wreak their revenge for Phips’s failure, he set vigorously to work strengthening the vulnerable points of his colony. He varied his activity with continued expeditions against the Iroquois, whether strolling or at home, striking particularly against the Mohawk towns; and he protected a great fleet of canoes which in the troublous times had been kept back in the upper country, and now brought credit and hope to the lower settlements in an ample supply of furs.
But during all this turmoil with public foes, Frontenac was having his old troubles over again with the Bishop and the Intendant. Outward courtesy and secret dislike characterized their intercourse, and discord went in the train of the Bishop as he made his pastoral tours among a people bound in honor and reverence to the Governor.
The reader must turn to another page[707] for the struggle with the “Bastonnais” which Frontenac was watching meanwhile in Acadia; but this did not divert his attention from the grand castigation which at last he was planning for the Iroquois. He had succeeded, in 1694, in inducing them to meet him in general council at Quebec, and had framed the conditions of a truce; but the English at Albany intrigued to prevent the fulfilment, and war was again imminent. Both sides were endeavoring to secure the alliance of the tribes of the upper lakes.[708] These wavered, and Frontenac saw the peril and the remedy. His recourse was to attack the Iroquois in their villages at once, and conquer on the Mohawk the peace he needed at Michillimackinac. It was Frontenac’s last campaign. In July, 1696, he left Montreal with twenty-two hundred men. He went by way of Fort Frontenac, crossed Lake Ontario, landed at Oswego, and struggled up its stream, and at last set sails to his canoes on Lake Onondaga. Then his force marched again, and Frontenac, enfeebled by his years, was borne along in an arm-chair. Eight or nine miles and a day’s work brought them to the Onondagas’ village; but its inhabitants had burned it and fled. Vaudreuil was sent with a detachment, which destroyed the town of the Oneidas. After committing all the devastation of crops that he could, in hopes that famine would help him, Frontenac began his homeward march before the English at Albany were aroused at all. The effect was what Frontenac wished. The Iroquois ceased their negotiations with the western tribes, and sued for peace.
Meanwhile the crowns and diplomats of England and France had concluded the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. Frontenac got word of it from New York as early as February of 1698, and a confirmation from Louis in July. There were still some parries of diplomacy between the old French soldier and the English governor at New York, the Earl of Bellomont, each trying to maintain the show of a paramount authority over the Five Nations. But Frontenac was not destined to see the end. In November he sickened. His adversary, Champigny, mollified at the sight, became reconciled to him, and soothed his last hours. On the twenty-eighth he died, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, and New France sincerely mourned her most distinguished hero.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
A LARGE portion of the manuscript sources of this chapter may be found in the invaluable collection of papers relating to New France in the Archives of the Marine and Colonies, the Archives Nationales, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; and in the office of the Provincial Registrar at Quebec. The archives of New York, Massachusetts, and Canada have made extensive transcripts from these documents, as follows:—
1. Correspondance Officiele, first series, vols. i.-v. There are transcripts from the Paris documents copied in France for the State of New York, and translations of them all are in the ninth and tenth volumes of the Documents relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York.[709]
2. Correspondance Officiele, second series, vols. ii., iv.-viii. These papers exist in manuscript, and have not been translated into English. Copies are in the Library of Parliament, Ottawa, and in the Archives Office of the Quebec Government.
3. A collection of papers made by an agent of Massachusetts at Paris, relating chiefly to Acadian matters, contains also a good deal about Frontenac. They were copied afterward in Boston on an order from the Quebec Government, and are in the keeping of the Registrar at Quebec. The Quebec administration intends publishing these papers.[710] [They have since been published.]
The original Register and Proceedings of Council, in several volumes, remain in very fair condition in the archives of the Quebec Government. The first, a folio bound in calf and indexed, bears two titles, the first of which is, Registre des Insinuations du Conseil Supérieur de 1663 à 1682, ninety-six pages. It begins with the King’s edict creating the Superior Council, dated April 1, 1663, and ends with the “Procès Verbal” of the Superior Council concerning the Redaction of the Code Civil, or ordinance of Louis, April 14, 1667.
The second title is, Jugements et Délibérations du Conseil Souverain de la Nouvelle France, 1663 à 1676, two hundred and eighty-one pages. It begins with an arrêt of the Superior Council ordering the registration of the King’s edict of April 1, 1663, creating the Superior Council for New France, to be held at Quebec; and ends with an interlocutory judgment, dated Dec. 19, 1676, upon a petition of François Noir Roland, complaining of his curate for refusing him absolution. This book, or register, is authenticated by the certificate of the Governor, Comte de Frontenac, on the first page, as follows:—
“Le Présent Régîstre du Conseil Souverain contenant trois cens soixante et seize feuillets a été ce jour paraphé ne varietur par premier et dernier, par nous Louis de Buade de Frontenac Chevallier Comte de Palluau, Conseiller du Roy en ses Conseils, Gouverneur et Intendant Général pour sa Majesté, en la Nouvelle France, Québec le quinzième Janvier Mille six cents soixante et quinze.”
“Frontenac.”
The entries in general throughout this end of the book are authenticated by the Governor, Bishop, Intendant, councillors, or Clerk of the Council; and the last, or two hundred and eighty-first leaf, is signed by Duchesneau, Intendant, and by Dupont, Member of the Council. Its general contents consist of a variety of orders, regulations, ordinances, judgments, civil and criminal, of the Superior Council, licitation, and adjudications of Crown estates, representations to the King and his ministers upon various subjects. There are four following volumes of this register in the archives at Quebec bearing the dates 1677 to 1680, 1681, 1681 to 1687, and 1688 to 1693, respectively. Each of these contains interesting details of Council proceedings during the first administration of Frontenac, the time of La Barre and Denonville, and during Frontenac’s second term.
The Édits et Ordonnances, vol. iii., contain copies of the commissions of Frontenac, La Barre, and Denonville.
For particulars concerning the youth of Frontenac, his family and marriage, see Parkman’s Appendix, where, among other sources, are named the journal of Jean Héroard, physician to the court, part of which is cited in Le Correspondant of Paris for 1873; Pinard, Chronologie Historique-Militaire; Les Mémoires de Sully; Table de la Gazette de France; Mémoires de Philippe Hurault (in Petitot); Jal, Dictionnaire Critique, Biographique, et d’Histoire, article, “Frontenac;” Historiettes de Tallemant des Réaux, ix. (ed. Monmerqué); Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, vols. i.-iii.; and Mémoires du Duc de Saint-Simon.[711]
At Frontenac’s death we have an Oraison funèbre du Comte de Frontenac, par le Père Olivier Goyer, preached from the text: “In multitudine videbor bonus et in bello fortis.” A copy of this eulogy, containing a running commentary on its sentiments strongly adverse to the views of the orator, is preserved in the Seminary of Quebec. These comments, selections from which will be found in Parkman’s Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV., pp. 431-434, are, the Abbé Casgrain informs me, from the caustic pen of the Abbé Charles Glandelet, who came to Canada in 1675, and labored half a century in the Seminary. He was first theologian, superior, and confessor of the Ursulines, and died at Three Rivers at the advanced age of eighty years.
In considering the early printed books pertaining to our subject, we find them copious; but unfortunately we can scarcely account many of them trustworthy historical authorities, since prejudice and partisanship characterize them for the most part. The contests of the period greatly developed antagonisms, and it was not easy at the time to resist their influences. When we collate the writings of these contemporaries, we find a great lack of unity and sympathy, and this often extends to matters of trifling import. While thus in many ways these books fail of becoming satisfactory chronicles, as expressions of current partisan feeling they often throw great light on all transactions; and it is fortunate that in their antagonisms they give rival sentiments and opposing narratives, from which the careful student, with the help of official and other contemporary documents, may in the main satisfy his mind. Foremost among these early narratives is the Premier Établissement de la Foy dans la Nouvelle France of the Père Le Clercq: of this, however, as well as of the works of Hennepin and La Hontan, Tonti, and Marquette, an examination is made in another chapter.[712]
Of the more general early narratives, we must give a prominent place to a book which ranks as a respectable authority, and is frequently quoted,—Bacqueville de la Potherie’s[358] Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale depuis 1534 jusqu’à 1701, Paris, 1722, four volumes. It is particularly useful in studying the relations of Frontenac and Callières, but as a contribution upon the condition of the Indians at that time it has its chief value.[713]
The Histoire du Canada of the Abbé Belmont, superior of the Seminary of Montreal during 1713 and 1724, is a short history of affairs from 1608 to 1700. The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec printed, about 1840, in their Collection de Mémoires, a small edition of the work from a manuscript copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. It is very scarce, and copies are held at high prices, but the Society intend reissuing it shortly. Its general accuracy has not been questioned, and the views expressed are evidently the outcome of careful consideration.
The general history of the administrations of Frontenac, De la Barre, and Denonville is exhaustively treated by Father Francis-Xavier de Charlevoix; and the first place in time and importance among the contributions to the general history of Canada, of a date earlier than the present century, must be given to this Jesuit’s Histoire et Description Générale de la Nouvelle France, avec le Journal Historique d’un Voyage fait par l’Ordre du Roi dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, which was issued at Paris in 1744.[714] Shea says: “Access to State papers and the archives of the religious order to which he belonged, experience and skill as a practised writer, a clear head and an ability to analyze, arrange, and describe, fitted him for his work.” Parkman, whose studies have made him a close observer of Charlevoix’s methods, speaks of his “usual carelessness.”
Charlevoix arrived in Canada in September, 1720, on an expedition to inspect the missions of Canada. His purpose took him throughout the limits of New France and Louisiana, and by the Illinois and the Mississippi to the Gulf. His work is commensurate with his opportunities; his faults and errors were those of his order; and his religious training inclined him to give perhaps undue prominence to the ecclesiastical side of his subject; and though the character of Frontenac suffers but little at his hands, some of the prejudice which Charlevoix bestows upon the Recollects necessarily colors his judgment in matters where the Governor came in contact with the Jesuits.
The Abbé La Tour, not a very trustworthy authority, wrote Mémoires sur la Vie de M. de Laval, premier Évêque de Québec in 1761,—a small book which is worth looking into, though not with the object of accepting all its statements. Frontenac is bitterly attacked, his faults magnified, and many serious charges are preferred against him. But one volume, however, was published,—a thin book of a few pages, bearing the imprint of Jean Frederick Motiens, Cologne, 1761. The second volume was never printed. The[359] copy of vol. i. which the Abbé Vemey possessed has this note in the latter’s handwriting: “L’Abbé de la Tour de Montauban, author of this Life, of which the first volume only has been published, promised me a manuscript copy of the second volume; but he did not keep his word. Owing to the unfair manner in which Bishop St. Vallier was treated in the second volume, his family objected to its publication.” The first volume ends with the year 1694. A second edition was published at Paris in 1762.[715]
A useful work, which should not be lost sight of in the consideration of this period, is L’Histoire de l’Hôtel Dieu de Québec, de 1639 à 1716, by the reverend mother, Françoise Juchereau de St. Ignace, printed in Paris in 1751. It is rich in facts and incidents, and especially valuable as an authority on the missionary activity of the time, and on the attempt made by the clergy to evangelize the savages. A supplementary work, prepared with great care and thoroughness from original documents, and bearing the same title, has been written by the Abbé H. R. Casgrain. It is brought down to 1840, and was published at Quebec in 1878. The Abbé is one of the most industrious of the French-Canadian writers, and his book is full of interesting details and notes.[716]
In the third series of Historical Documents published under the auspices of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in 1871, is a paper entitled “Recueil de ce qui s’est passé en Canada au sujet de la guerre, tant des Anglais que des Iroquois, depuis l’année 1682.” It contains a good account of the Lachine massacre, the truthfulness of which may be accepted. The author accompanied Subercase to the scene.[717]
In a collection entitled, Bibliotheca Americana: Collection d’ouvrages inédits ou rares sur l’Amérique, with the imprint of Leipsic and Paris, appeared the Mémoire sur les Mœurs, Coustumes, et Réligions des Sauvages de l’Amérique Septentrionale, par Nicolas Perrot, publié pour la première fois par le R. P. Tailhan, de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1864. Considerable importance is attached to this memoir by Charlevoix, La Potherie, Ferland, and others, who frequently quote it in their narratives. Harrisse (no. 833) says that this work seems to have been written day by day from 1665 to the death of Perrot, who was an eye-witness of events under the administration of De la Barre, Denonville, and Frontenac. Colden gives a part of the narrative in his History of the Five Indian Nations, London, 1747.[718]
It remains to characterize the chief general works of our own time, which indicate the great interest with which modern research has invested the story of New France. The French-Canadians generally accept François-Xavier Garneau as their national historian, and his Histoire du Canada well entitles him to that consideration. He began writing his history in 1840, and published the first volume in Quebec in 1845, the second in 1846, and the third, treating of events down to 1792, in 1848. A new edition, revised and corrected, and brought down to 1840, appeared at Montreal from Lovell’s press, in 1852, and a third edition at Quebec in 1859.[719] In 1882 the fourth edition, edited by his son,[720] was issued at Montreal by Beauchemin & Valois. It is enriched by many valuable notes, and has a recognized place as a work of conspicuous merit.
The ecclesiastical history of Canada is particularly illustrated by the Abbé J. B. A. Ferland in his Cours d’Histoire du Canada, 1534-1759, Quebec, 1861 and 1865, two volumes. The author died while the second volume was passing through the press, and the completing of the publication devolved upon the Abbé Laverdière, one of the ablest scholars in the Canadian priesthood. Ferland had access to many documents of great interest, and his work shows judgment and a skilful handling of the rich store of materials within his reach.[721]
The Histoire de la Colonie Française en Canada, with maps, by the Abbé Faillon, a Sulpitian priest of very great ability, was projected on an extensive plan. The author visited Canada on three separate occasions, spending several years in the country, and made the most of his opportunities in gathering his material, not only there, but from the archives of the Propaganda at Rome and from the public offices in Paris. The result was a work of high value; but it must be read with a full perception of the author’s intention to rear a monument to commemorate the labors and trials of the Sulpitians of Montreal.
Parkman[722] thus speaks of him: “In all that relates to Montreal I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Abbé Faillon, the indefatigable, patient, conscientious chronicler of its early history; an ardent and prejudiced Sulpitian; a priest who three centuries ago would have passed for credulous, and withal a kind-hearted and estimable man.”
Three volumes only appeared, the first two in 1865, and the third in 1866. The latter deals with events covered by a small portion of the period discussed in this chapter. M. Faillon’s death at Paris in 1871 prevented further publication; but he has left in manuscript enough prepared material to complete the work as far as the conquest of 1759-1760. The book was published anonymously, according to the custom of the Congregation of St. Sulpice.[723]
It is, however, to an American of Puritan stock that the story we are illustrating owes, for the English reader certainly, its most conspicuous recital. Two volumes of Francis Parkman’s series of France and England in North America concern more especially the period covered by the administrations of Frontenac, De la Barre, and Denonville; these are his Frontenac, and New France under Louis XIV. (Boston, 1877), and his La Salle, and the Discovery of the Great West (Boston, 1879); but the consideration of the last of these belongs more particularly to another chapter. Of Parkman as an historian there has been a wide recognition of a learning that has neglected no resource; a research which has proved fortunate in its results; a judgment which, though Protestant, is fair and liberal;[724] a critical perception, which in the conflict of testimony keeps him accurate[361] and luminous; and a style which has given his narrative the fascinations of a romance.
John Dennis wrote a tragedy,—Liberty Asserted,—which was acted in London in 1704, in which Frontenac was made a character, together with an English governor and Iroquois chief. Betterton acted in it. A romantic picture of the period is furnished in an amusing novel by M. Joseph Marmette, formerly of Quebec, but now of Paris, entitled François de Bienville. Frontenac figures as one of the principal characters in the story. Frontenac’s expeditions against the Iroquois were made the subject of a poem by Alfred B. Street,—Frontenac: or, the Atotarho of the Iroquois. London and New York, 1849.
M. T. P. Bedard, of the Archives department, has a paper in the Annuaire de l’Institut Canadien, nos. 7 and 8, 1880, 1881, which discusses the first and second administrations of the Count, and sheds some light on the social and political aspects of the country between 1672 and 1698, the year in which Frontenac died.
EDITORIAL NOTES.
THE QUEBEC MEDAL.
This is engraved from a copy kindly lent by W. S. Appleton, Esq., of Boston. See Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xi. 296, and Shea’s Charlevoix, iv. 190, and his Le Clercq, ii. 329. See the “Historic Medals of Canada,” in the Quebec Lit. and Hist. Soc. Transactions, 1872-1873, p. 73.
A. Frontenac’s Second Term.—Mr. Parkman has accompanied his narrative[725] of the attempt on Quebec in 1690 with an indication of the sources of the story. Besides the despatches of Frontenac and the Relation of Monseignat (both printed in the New York Colonial Documents, vol. ix.), there is an account taken by vessel to Rochelle, which is without place or date, and was probably there printed. It is entitled, Relation de ce qui s’est passé en Canada, à la descente des Anglais à Québec, au mois d’Octobre, 1690, faite par un Officier (Harrisse, no. 168; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,426), and contains Phips’s summons to Frontenac (also given in Mather’s Magnalia, and repeated by Parkman, Frontenac, p. 266), and Frontenac’s verbal answer.
PLAN OF ATTACK ON QUEBEC, 1690.
Fac-simile of an engraved plan in La Hontan’s New Voyages, London, 1703, vol. i. p. 160. It was re-engraved for the French edition of 1705.
The copy of Phips’s summons sent to Paris by Frontenac is indorsed by him to the effect that he retained the original. The Mercure de France also issued an “Extraordinaire,” with an account (Harrisse, no. 166,) and another brief Relation de la levée du siége de Québec (Harrisse, no. 167) was printed at Tours. La Hontan, Le Clercq, La Potherie, and Juchereau (L’Hôtel Dieu), give other accounts contemporary, or nearly so, and their testimony has been availed of by Charlevoix (cf. Shea’s ed., iv. 169) and the later writers, like Garneau.
ATTACK ON QUEBEC, 1690.
Fac-simile of the engraving in La Hontan’s Mémoires, La Haye, 1709, vol. ii. p. 14. It was re-engraved for the 1715 edition.
On the English side, besides a contemporary bulletin issued in the Publick Occurrences, Boston, Sept. 25, 1690 (given in Hist. Mag., August, 1857), two participators in the expedition left narratives,—one of which by John Walley is printed in Hutchinson’s Massachusetts, i. app. no. xxi., which concerns chiefly the land forces; and the other was by the officer second in command of the militia, and is entitled, An account of the late action of the New Englanders, under the command of Sir William Phips, against the French at Canada, sent in a letter from Maj. Thomas Savage, of Boston, in New England (who[364] was present at the action), to his brother, Mr. Perez Savage, in London. London, 1691. This quarto tract is in Harvard College Library; it was reprinted in the Mass. Hist. Coll., xiii. 256.
In the same Collections, third series, i. 101, is the diary of Captain Sylvanus Davis, who was at the time a captive in Quebec; cf. also Johnston’s Bremen, Bristol, and Pemaquid. An original journal of the expedition is said to have been intrusted to Admiral Walker at the time of his venture in 1711, and to have been lost in one of his ships (Walker’s Journal, p. 87). Phips’s side of the story is doubtless told amid the high laudation of Cotton Mather’s Life of Phips; some light is thrown upon the times in Dummer’s Defence of the Colonies; and various tokens of the preparations for the expedition are preserved in the Hinckley Papers, vol. iii, in the Prince Library.
Somewhat later we have the story in some of its aspects in Colden’s Five Nations; later still, in Hutchinson’s Massachusetts Bay, vol. i.; again, in part, in Belknap’s New Hampshire; while the chief modern writers who have preceded Parkman, on the English side, have been Palfrey’s New England, iv. 51; Barry’s Massachusetts, ii. 79; Bowen’s “Life of Phips,” in Sparks’ American Biography; and Warburton, in his Conquest of Canada, chap. 14.
Of the supporting Winthrop expedition from Albany, we have the French accounts in La Potherie (iii. 126), and in the New York Colonial Documents, ix. 513. The recently published Winthrop Papers (iv. 303-324) throw considerable light through the letters of Fitz-John Winthrop on the preparations which were made; and they give also his reasons for the expedition’s failure, and through his Journal, with which the one printed in the New York Colonial Documents, iv. 193, may be compared. Parkman’s Frontenac (p. 257) and Shea’s Charlevoix (iv. 145) note the authorities; and the New York Colonial Documents (iii. 727, 752) and Doc. Hist. N. Y. (ii. 266, 288) yield other light than that already mentioned. The Journal of Schuyler’s raid to La Prairie is given in the Doc. Hist. N. Y., ii. 285, and in the publications of the New Jersey Historical Society, vol. i.
Concerning the minor episodes of this second term of Frontenac’s government, both Parkman and Shea indicate the essential authorities. On the destruction of Schenectady, the letter of Monseignat and other papers in the Doc. Hist. of New York, vol. i. 297, etc. (where authorities are cited), and a letter of Schuyler and his associates in the Massachusetts Archives, printed in the Andros Tracts, are of[365] the first importance. Cf. also M. Van Rennsselaer’s paper in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1846, p. 101, and the same Society’s Fund Publications, ii. 165; a letter from Governor Bradstreet, in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., ii. 150; and the contributions in Munsell’s Albany. French accounts are in Le Clercq (Shea’s edition, ii. 292); Potherie, ii. 68; N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 466; and English accounts in Smith’s New York, p. 66; Colden’s Five Nations (1727), p. 114.
On Schuyler’s raid by way of Lake Champlain in 1691, the French side is still to be gathered from La Potherie, with help from Belmont, Histoire du Canada, and from the Relation of 1682-1712, and from the despatches of Frontenac and Champigny. Schuyler’s own Journal and other documents, French and English, are in the N. Y. Colonial Documents, vol. iii.; Parkman (p. 294) examines the question of the number of the forces engaged, and Shea, Charlevoix, iv. 202, gives references.
On the expedition against the Mohawks, led by Mantet, Courtemanche, and La Noue, we have more various accounts. Parkman gives a graphic recital, and his notes show he has used all the sources. The French authorities, besides the letter of Callières to the home government, are the Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable en Canada, 1692-93; the Relation de ce qui s’est passé en Canada au sujet de la Guerre, 1682-1712; while citations of original journals, etc., are in Faillon’s Vie de Mdle. Le Ber, and of course we have La Potherie (iii. 169) and Belmont. The N. Y. Col. Docs., vol. ix., contain important material, including a “Narrative of Military Operations in Canada;” and Major Peter Schuyler’s report is in vol. iv. of the same collection. Colden, in his Five Nations, p. 142, wrote while the actors were still living. There was a tract on the expedition issued in London the same year, which is of such rarity that the copy in the Carter-Brown Library (Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,446, with fac-simile of title; also Harrisse, no. 171) is the only one known to me, and from it Sabin, in 1868, reprinted it. It is entitled, A Journal of the late actions of the French in Canada, with the manner of their being repulsed, by his Excellency Benjamin Fletcher, Governor of New York, etc. By Coll. Nicholas Reyard [should be Beyard] and Lieutenant-Coll. Charles Lodowick.
The reader must turn to the chapter on Acadia for the authorities for such other expeditions as come within the alleged limits of that province and the neighboring English settlements.
A CANADIAN SOLDIER.
This sketch of the costume of a grenadier de St. Louis, Compagnie canadienne, is taken from the Mass Archives: Documents Collected in France, iii. 3.
On Frontenac’s last raid,—the attack upon the Onondagas, in 1696,—we must naturally find our chief information from the French, for the English at Albany were not ready to advance till the French had done their work and had gone. Frontenac and Callières each despatched accounts to Paris; and besides the Relation, 1682-1712, already referred to, we have the Relation de ce qui s’est passé en Canada,—a manuscript preserved in the library of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (see Parliamentary Library Catalogue, 1858, p. 1613); the Relation, 1696, which Shea has printed, and of course the accounts in La Potherie, iii. 270, and Charlevoix (Shea adds references in his edition, vol. v.), and the papers in the Doc. Hist. of N. Y., i. 323, and the N. Y. Col. Docs. iv. 342. Parkman’s narrative (Frontenac, chap. xix.) is clearly put and exemplified.
B. General Documentary Sources Of Canadian History.—Harrisse prefaces his Notes pour servir à l’histoire, à la bibliographie et à la cartographie de la Nouvelle France et des pays adjacents, 1545-1700, Paris, 1872, with an account of the sources of early Canadian history, and of the repositories of documentary material in Paris, etc. He states that the French Government refused access to their archives to an agent of the Historical Society of Quebec in 1835, and that a similar refusal was made in 1838; but that in 1842 General Cass, then United States Minister, succeeded, in behalf of the State of Michigan, in securing about forty cartons for publication; and ten years later the Parliament at Quebec obtained copies of documents, which now (1872) form a series of thirty-six folios,—not embracing, however, the papers of the early discovery, which were withheld.
Louis P. Turcotte, in his address on Les Archives du Canada (Quebec, 1877), says that the first inventory of the public archives of Canada was published in 1791; that it shows the subsequent loss of important documents; that the first steps were taken to procure copies from the European archives in 1835, which were not successful at the time; and that the better results made by the State of New York (1841-1844) were accordingly availed of. In 1845 the Canadian agent, M. Papineau, secured other copies in France; and in 1851-1852 M. Faribault added twenty-four volumes of transcripts to the collection, now in the library at Ottawa; and sixteen volumes have been added since. M. Turcotte pays a tribute, for his zeal and industry in preserving early Canadian records, to M. Jacques Viger, whose efforts have been since supplemented by the labors of l’Abbé Verreau, who has formed a large library of copies of manuscripts and printed books. M. Verreau was in 1873 sent by the Canadian Government to Europe to make additional collections.
The Catalogue of the Library of the Canadian Parliament, made by Gérin-Lajoie, and published in 1858, gives (p. 1448) an account of the manuscript collections at that time in the possession of the Canadian Government at Toronto, and now transferred to Ottawa, and divides them thus:—
First series.—Copies of copies made by Brodhead for the State of New York, from the archives at Paris, seventeen volumes, with six additional volumes, drawn at second hand in the same way from the Colonial Office in London. These copies were made before the Brodhead collection was printed. Kirke, in his First English Conquest of Canada, London, 1871, says: “The papers in the Record Office [London] relating to Canada, Acadia, or Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland are numerous and continuous from 1621 to 1660, with the exception of the period from 1640 to 1649, during which years we find no papers.”
Second series.—Copies obtained in Paris by Faribault, and made under Margry’s direction; twelve volumes, giving the official correspondence of the governors, 1637-1727. These are enumerated in the Catalogue.
Third series.—Copies of official correspondence relative to Canada, 1654-1731; twelve volumes, likewise arranged by Margry, and also enumerated in the Catalogue.
Fourth series.—A transcript of Franquet’s “Voyages et mémoires sur le Canada, 1752-53,” and other documents mentioned in the Catalogue.
Fifth series.—Maps, copied by Morin, and enumerated on pp. 1614-21 of the Catalogue.
Cf. Collection de Mémoires et de Relations sur l’histoire ancienne du Canada, d’après des manuscrits récemment obtenus des archives et bureaux publics en France, Quebec, 1840; and the Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, 1870-71, and 1871-72. The Collection contains Belmont and the Report attributed to Talon. Cf. Magazine of American History, iii. 458, in the Quebec Society.
The Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, publiés par Clément, Paris, 1865, vol. iii., second part, contain various important papers,—like the instructions as intendant of Talon, March 27, 1665; of De Bouteroue, April 5, 1668; Duchesneau, May 30, 1675; those to Gaudais in 1663, and to Courcelles in 1669: besides letters to Frontenac, April 7, 1672; June 13, 1673; May 17, 1674; April 22, 1675; May 10, 1677; March 21, 1678; Dec. 4, 1679; April 30, 1681 (pp. 533, 557, 574, 585, 594, 622, 631, 641, 644): others to Talon, Feb. 11, 1671; June 4, 1672 (pp. 511, 539); to Duchesneau, April 15, 1676; April 28, 1677; May 1, 1677; May 15 and 24, 1678; April 30, 1679 (pp. 605, 614, 619, 632, 635, 638); with one to l’Évêque de Petrée, May 15, 1669 (p. 451). Margry (i. 247) gives some of the correspondence of Frontenac and Colbert, 1672-1674, relative to the pushing of Recollect missionaries farther west; and in Clément’s Histoire de Colbert, Paris, 1874, vol. i. last chapter, there is an exposition of Colbert’s colonial policy.
Mr. Ben: Perley Poore was appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts, in May, 1845, to select and transcribe such documents in the French archives as he might find to bear upon the early history of Massachusetts and the relations of New England with New France. His[367] report to the Governor, Dec. 28, 1847, accompanied by letters from John G. Palfrey and Jared Sparks, telling the story of his work, constitutes Senate Doc., no. 9 (1848), Mass. Documents. His transcripts, covering papers from the discovery to 1780, fill ten volumes in the Archives of the State, and are accompanied by two volumes of engraved maps. Mr. Poore, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and with the pledge of Colonel William P. Winchester to assume the expense if necessary, had already a year earlier begun his work. M. Davezac was at that time chef des archives of the Marine, and the confusion which Brodhead, the agent of New York, had earlier found among the papers had disappeared under the care of the new custodian. From other departments as well as from other public and from private sources, Mr. Poore increased his collection, and added to it water-color drawings and engraved prints of an illustrative nature; but unfortunately many of the documents cited are given by title only, and the blank pages left to be filled are still empty. It is these papers which have been copied within a year or two for the Government of the Province of Quebec.
The manuscript collections of Mr. Parkman are very extensive, and are still in his house; the more important of his maps, however, have been transferred to the College Library at Cambridge, and these have been sketched elsewhere in the present volume. The Editor is under great obligations to Mr. Parkman for unrestricted access to his manuscripts. They consist of large masses of miscellaneous transcripts, with a few original papers, and so far as they come within the period of the present volume, of the following bound series:—
I. Acadia, in three volumes. These are transcripts made by, or under the direction of, Mr. Ben: Perley Poore, and in considerable part supplement the collection made by Mr. Poore for the State of Massachusetts.
II. Correspondance officielle, in five volumes, coming down to 1670, being transcripts from the French archives.
III. Canada, in eight volumes, covering 1670-1700, being transcripts from the French archives, and supplementing Brodhead’s Colonial Documents of New York, vol. ix.
C. Bibliography.—Harrisse’s Notes, etc., is the latest of the general bibliographies of the history and cartography of New France; and this with his Cabot constitutes a complete, or nearly so, indication of the sources of Canadian history previous to 1700. Charlevoix in 1743 prefixed to his Nouvelle France a list of authorities as known to him, and characterized them; and this is included in Shea’s translation. Of the modern writers, Ferland and Faillon in their introduction each make note of their predecessors. The work of G. B. Faribault, Catalogue d’ouvrages sur l’histoire de l’Amérique, et en particulier sur celle du Canada, avec des notes, Quebec, 1837, containing nine hundred and ninety-six titles, besides maps, etc., has lost whatever importance its abounding errors left for it formerly. There is a biographical sketch (1867) of Faribault in the Abbé Casgrain’s Œvres, vol. ii. Cf. Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, p. 118. H. J. Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, Ottawa, 1867, includes the writers on Canadian history who have published since the conquest of 1759.
From this book and other sources the following enumeration of the various general histories of Canada, compendious as well as elaborate, and including such as cover a long interval in a general way, is taken:—
Excepting one volume of a projected History of Canada, by George Heriot, published in London in 1804, and which was an abridgment of Charlevoix, the earliest of modern works is The History of Canada from its first Discovery to 1796, by William Smith, published in Quebec in 1815. The author was a son of the historian of New York.
There was published in Paris in 1821, in a duodecimo of 512 pages, a sketchy compendium by D. Dainville,—Beautés de l’histoire du Canada, ou époques remarquables, traits intéressans, mœurs, usages, coutumes des habitants du Canada, tant indigènes que colons, depuis sa découverte jusqu’à ce jour.
In 1837 Michael Bibaud published at Montreal a Histoire du Canada sous la domination Française. A second edition was published in 1845. In 1844 appeared his Histoire du Canada et des Canadiens sous la domination Anglaise. This author also published a Bibliothèque Canadienne, a monthly magazine, which for several years gathered and preserved considerable documentary material.
Between 1845 and 1848 the work of Garneau, mentioned in the preceding chapter, was printed, which became the basis of Bell’s adaptation in 1866.
In 1851 a comprehensive compendium by W. H. Smith,—Canada [West]: Past, Present, and Future,—in two volumes, was published at Toronto.
Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Histoire du Canada; de son Église et de ses missions, published in Paris in 1852, is characterized in the Note on the Jesuit Relations, following chap. vi.
A popular History of Canada from its first Discovery to the Present Time, by John MacMullen was published at Brockville in 1855 and 1868.
L. Dussieux’s Le Canada sous la domination Française was published at Paris in 1855, and a new edition in 1862.
F. M. N. M. Bibaud’s Les Institutions de l’histoire du Canada (to 1818), Montreal, 1855, is a concise narrative.
Between 1861 and 1865, and in 1865-1866, were published the works of Ferland and Faillon, of which note is made in the preceding chapter.
John Boyd’s Summary of Canadian History was issued at Toronto in 1860, and many editions since.
In 1863 Boucher de la Bruère, fils, published a brief survey,—Le Canada sous la domination Anglaise.
Alexander Monro’s History, Geography, and Statistics of British North America was published at Montreal in 1864.
William Canniff’s History of the Settlement of Upper Canada, with special reference to the Bay Quinté, appeared at Toronto in 1869. This book was undertaken under the auspices of the Historical Society of Upper Canada, which was established at St. Catharines in 1861.
At Montreal, in 1872, appeared Henry H. Miles’s History of Canada under the French régime (1535-1763), with Maps, Plans, and Illustrative Notes.
Andrew Archer’s History of Canada was published in 1875 at London.
John Harper’s History of the Maritime Provinces was issued at St. John, N.B., in 1876.
Charles R. Tuttle’s Short History of Canada, 1500-1878, appeared in Boston in 1878.
F. Teissier’s compendious historical sketch of Canada under the French, 1562-1763, appeared at Limoges,—Les Français au Canada. It is not dated, but is recent.
The series of monographs by Mr. Parkman is spoken of elsewhere.
An important work is now publishing: Histoire des Canadiens-Français. 1608-1880. Origine, Histoire, Réligion, Guerres, Découvertes, Colonization, Coutumes, Vie Domestique, Sociale et Politique, Développement, Avenir. Par Benjamin Sulte. Ouvrage orné de portraits et de plans. Montreal. 1882-1883.
THE GENERAL ATLASES AND CHARTS
OF THE
SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.
BY THE EDITOR.
THE general atlases at this time becoming familiar to Europe were unfortunately made up on a thrifty principle, little conducive to keeping the public mind abreast of current discovery,—so far as America, at least, was concerned,—and very perplexing now to any one studying the course of the cartographical development of American geography. Dates were sedulously erased with a deceitful purpose (which is not yet gone into disuse) from plates thus made to do service for many years, and united with other dated maps, to convey an impression of a like period of production.
Bestelli e Forlani’s Tavole moderne di Geografia de la maggior parte del mondo, Roma, 1558-80, with seventy-one large maps, including three maps of the world, and three of America, is reputed the best atlas which had been constructed up to that date. Sets vary much in their make-up.[726]
Perhaps the prototype of the modern atlas can be best found in the Theatrum orbis terrarum of Ortelius, issued in the first edition at Antwerp in 1570, of which an account has been given elsewhere.[727] His portrait is on a later page.
In 1597 appeared the earliest special atlas of America in the Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum of Cornelius Wytfliet, which was reissued the same year with its errata corrected.[728] It had nineteen maps, which were also used in the second edition, issued in 1598. A fac-simile of the title of 1597 is given on the next page.[729]
This is a fac-simile of a cut in Lorenzo Crasso’s Elogii d’ Huomini letterati, Venice. 1666. There’s a portrait of him at sixty-two in the 1584 edition of Ptolemy, the second of Mercator’s own editing. It is engraved by Francis Hoggenberg. The engraving in the 1613 edition of Mercator’s Atlas represents Mercator and Hondius seated at a table, and is colored. There is said to be an engraving in the 1618 edition of Ptolemy, but it is wanting in the Harvard College copy. Cf. fac-similes of old prints in Raemdonck’s Mercator, in C. P. Daly’s address on The Early History of Cartography, and in Scribner’s Monthly, ii. 464. There is another portrait of Mercator in J. F. Foppens’ Bibliotheca Belgica, Bruxelles, 1739.
Reference has been made elsewhere to the conspicuous work of Gerard Mercator, which was a sort of culmination of his geographical views, in his great mappemonde of 1569.[730] Then after giving his attention to a closer study of Ptolemy and to the publication of an edition of the great Alexandrian geography, with a revision of Agathodæmon’s charts, but without any attempt to make them conform to the newer knowledge, he set about the compilation of a modern geographical atlas (applying this word for the first time to such a collection, though modern usage has somewhat narrowed the meaning as he applied it); and he had published two parts of it, when he died, in December, 1594,—the second part having appeared at Duisburg in 1585, and the third in 1590. Shortly after his death, a son, Rumold Mercator, published in 1595, at Dusseldorf, part i., and prefixed to it a Latin biography of his father, by Walter Ghymm, which is the principal source of our knowledge of his career.[731] The son Rumold died in 1600, and in 1602, at the expense of the estate, the three parts of the Atlas were united and published together, making what is properly the earliest edition of the so-called Mercator Atlas. It had one hundred and eleven maps and a Latin text. It is very rare, for Raemdonck says he has met with but two copies of it. Up to this time it had contained no American maps. A map of America, as one of the four quarters of the globe, was called for in part iii.; but Raemdonck (p. 257) says he has never seen a copy of that part which has it.
Mercator’s maps were followed, however, pretty closely in Mathias Quad’s or Quadus’s Geographisch Handtbuch,[732] Cologne, 1600, which contained a map of the world and another of North America, with some other special American maps; and such were also contained in the Latin version called Fasciculus geographicus, Cologne, 1608, etc.
This is a fac-simile of an engraving in J. F. Foppens’s Bibliotheca Belgica, 1739, vol. i. p. 3. There is another engraving in Lorenzo Crasso’s Elogii d’huomini letterati, Venice, 1666.
In 1604 Mercator’s plates fell by purchase into the possession of Jodocus Hondius,[733] of Amsterdam, who got out a new edition in 1606,[734] to which he added fifty maps, including a few American ones; and thus began what is known as the Hondius-Mercator Atlas. The text was furnished by Montanus,[735] and the new maps were engraved by Petrus Kærius, who also prepared for Hondius the Atlas minor Gerardi Mercatoris in 1607.[736]
MAPPEMONDE DE GERARD MERCATOR Duisbourg. 1569.
After the death of Jodocus Hondius, Feb. 16, 1611, Heinrich Hondius (b. 1580; d. 1644) and Johannes Jannsonius (d. 1666) completed the Atlas; and what is known as the fourth edition (1613) contains portraits of Mercator and the elder Hondius. In this there were ten American maps, and for several editions subsequently there were 105 of Mercator’s maps and 51 of Hondius’. Such seemingly was the make-up of the seventh edition in 1619 (though called fourth on the title); but there is much arbitrary mingling of the maps observable in many copies of these early editions.
The same Latin text and its translations appeared in the several editions down to 1630, when what is called sometimes the eleventh edition appeared with 163 maps (105 by Mercator, 58 by Hondius); but I have noted copies with 184 maps, of which ten are American, and a copy dated 1632, with 178 maps. Raemdonck does not venture to enumerate all the Latin editions of Hondius and Jannsonius; but he mentions those of 1612, 1613, 1616, 1623, 1627, 1628, 1630, 1631.
In 1633 a marked change was made in the Mercator-Hondius Atlas. There was a new Latin text, and it was now called the Atlas novus, and made two volumes, containing 238 newly engraved maps (only 87 of Mercator’s remaining, while Hondius added 151, including 10 new maps of America). The French text was issued the same year, but it added details not in the Latin, and in the general description of America is quite different.[737] The German text also appeared in 1633; but it had—at least in the copy we have noted—only 160 maps, and of these 6 were American. The Dutch text is dated usually in 1634.
In 1635 the English text appeared with the following title: Historia Mundi; or, Mercator’s Atlas.... Lately rectified in divers places, and also beautified and enlarged with new mappes and tables by the studious industry of Iudocus Hondy. Englished by W. S., London;[738] and of this there was a second edition in 1637. The only map showing New France is a general one of America, which is no improvement upon that of the 1613 edition.
The English market was also supplied with another English version, published much more sumptuously, in two large folios, at Amsterdam in 1636, with the title, Atlas; or, a Geographical Description of the Regions ... of the World, represented by New and Exact Maps. Translated by Henry Hexham. Printed at Amsterdam by Henry Hondius and John Johnson.[739] The American maps are in the second volume, where the map of the two Americas is much like the world-map in vol. i. There is no part of New France shown in the special maps, except in that of “Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium, et Virginia,” where lying west of the Lac des Iroquois (Ontario) is a single and larger “Grand lac.”
A still further enlargement of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas novus took place in 1638, when it appeared in three imperial folio volumes, with 318 maps, 17 of which are special maps of America.[740] It was now more commonly known as Jannson’s Atlas,—this publisher being a son-in-law of Jodocus Hondius,—and it went on increasing till it grew to eight volumes, to which were added a volume “Orbis Maritimus” (1657), a second on the ancient world, a celestial atlas[375] for a third, and an “Atlas Contractus,” or résumé, for the fourth; making twelve in all.[741]
At this time there was a rival in the Atlas of Blaeu, of which the reader will find an account in chapter ix. of the present volume, to be supplemented by the present brief statement.
Willem Jannson Blaeu was born in 1571, and died in 1638, and, with his sons Jean and Cornelis, devoted himself with untiring assiduity to his art. In 1647 the number of their maps reached one hundred. In 1655 their Atlas had reached six volumes, and contained 372 maps. In this year (1655) the Blaeu establishment issued separately the American map, Americæ nova Tabula, with nine views of towns and representations of native costumes, accompanied by four pages of text. The Latin edition of 1662-63, Atlas major, sive cosmographia Blaviana, had 586 maps, of which the collection in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (ii. 900) shows 23 in vol. xi. to belong to America.[742]
The Blaeu establishment was burned in 1672, and most of the plates were lost. Those which were saved passed into the hands of Frederic de Witt, who put his name on them, and they continued to be issued thus inscribed in the Blaeu Atlas of 1685, etc.; and when De Witt’s business fell to Covens and Mortier, the inscriptions were again altered.[743]
A French atlas began a little later to attract attention, and ultimately made the name of its maker famous in cartographic annals. It was begun in 1646 by Nicolas Sanson d’Abbeville, who in 1647 was appointed Royal Geographer of France, and held that office till his death.[744] The volume of his Atlas, containing fifteen American maps, and entitled L’Amérique, en plusieurs Cartes nouvelles et exactes, was published by the author in Paris without date, but probably in 1656, though some copies are dated in 1657, 1658, and 1662.[745]
The elder Sanson, having been born in 1600, died in 1667, leaving about four hundred plates to his sons, who kept up the name,[746] and their stock subsequently fell to Robert Vaugondy, who has given a notice of the Sansons in his Essai sur l’Hist. de la Géog., as has Lenglet Dufresnoy in his Méthode pour étudier la Géographie.[747]
A new Dutch atlas, that of N. Visscher, called Atlas minor, sive Geographia compendiosa, appeared at Amsterdam about 1670. It contained twenty-six maps, and had three American maps; but the number was increased in later editions.[748] In 1680 it appeared in two volumes with 195 maps,[376] 10 of which were American, and plates by Jannson, De Witt, and others, were included. It is not easy to discriminate among various composite atlases of this period, the chief cartographers being made to contribute to various imprints. Another Atlas minor, novissimas Orbis Terrarum Tabulas complectens, is likewise of this date (1680), and passes under the name of S. Wolfgang, with maps by Blaeu, Visscher, De Witt, and others. This usually contains nineteen American maps. Other atlases have the name of Frederic de Witt, who, as we have seen, got possession of some of Blaeu’s plates. The first example of his imprint appeared about 1675, at Amsterdam, with a printed index calling for 102 maps. Another edition (? 1680) is indexed for 160 plates, contained in two volumes of maps, and a third of charts.[749] Another small German atlas, the Vorstellung der gantzen Welt, of J. U. Muller, was published at Ulm in 1692, which had eighteen small American maps; and towards the close of the century the Atlas minor of Allard obtained a good popularity. The pre-eminent name of Delisle, just becoming known, marked the opening of a new era in cartography, which is beyond the limits of the present volume.
Some notice should be given of another class of atlases, the successors of the portolanos of the sixteenth century, and the beginning of the later science of hydrography. In these the Dutch were conspicuous; and many of their subsequent charts trace back to the larger pascaart of the North Atlantic which Jacob Aertz Colom published at Amsterdam about 1630.[750] Among the earliest of the regular Zee-Atlases was that of Theunis Jacobsz, published in Amsterdam about 1635, which has a chart showing the American coast-line from Nova Francia to Virginia. Of large importance in this direction was the Arcano del Mare of Robert Dudley, issued at Florence in 1646-1647, of which mention has been made in other chapters in this and in the preceding volume. Another of the Amsterdam Coloms—Arnold Colom—published his Zee-Atlas about 1650, which contains six American coast-charts, and sometimes appears with a Latin title, Ora maritima Orbis universi, and is of interest in the historical study of our American coast-lines, improving as he does the preceding work of Jacobsz. Later editions of Colom, dating the charts, appeared in 1656 and 1663.[751] Of about this same date (1654) is a pascaart, published at Amsterdam, which seems to have been the joint business project of Frederic de Witt, Anthony and Theunis Jacobsz, and Gulielmus Blaeu. The world-map in it is dated 1652, and is doubly marked “C. J. Visscher” (Claes Jannson Visscher) and “Autore N. J. Piscator” (Nicolas Joanides), as the Latin equivalent of the same person. It shows the Atlantic coast from Labrador to Brazil. The first edition of Hendrick Doncker’s Zee-Atlas ofte Water-Waereld appeared at Amsterdam in 1659, and is particularly useful for the American coasts. New maps were added to it in the edition of 1666; but the Nieuwe Groote vermeerderde Zee-Atlas of 1676, though still called Doncker’s, is based on Colom, and has Colom’s six American charts. Additional American and other charts were added to the 1697 edition; while a set of still larger charts constitute Doncker’s Nieuw Groot Zeekaert-boek of 1712.[752]
The Zee-Atlas of Van Loon, with its forty-five double charts, appeared in 1661.[753] It is in parts reproduced from Blaeu, De Laet, and Jannson. Its numbers 46 and 47 show the coast from Newfoundland southwards. P. Goos, in his Lichtende Colomme, Amsterdam, 1657, had touched the Arctic coasts of America; but in his Zee-Atlas of 1666 he gave in excellent manner eleven charts of the coasts of both Americas, out of the forty-one charts in all. These were all repeated in the edition of 1668-1669, and in the French edition, Atlas de la Mer, 1673. Other Dutch editions, with some changes, followed in 1675 and 1676. It was issued with an English text at Amsterdam in 1670.
Frederic de Witt, who had earlier appended to his Atlas a section of maritime charts, published his Zee-Atlas in 1675, which contained twenty-seven charts, eight of which were American; and in 1676 Arent Roggeveen issued his well-known navigator’s chart-book, which in English is known as The Burning Fen (1676), and which also has a Spanish dress (1680). It gives in successive charts the whole eastern coast of the two Americas, on a large scale. Johann van Keulen, who had published a chart of the coast from Nantucket to Trinidad in 1680, issued a Zee-Atlas in 1682-1687, based in part upon Van Loon, enlarging it in successive issues, so that in the edition of 1694 it had 146 charts, of which 38 were American. A later edition in 1734 contained 12 large folded charts of American coasts.[754]
Near the close of the century we come to the earliest of the French marine atlases, the Neptune Français, which Jaillot published in its enlarged form in 1693; but not till a Suite du Neptune Français was issued in 1700 did any charts of American coasts make part of it. This contained eleven on America, professing to be based on Sanson’s drafts.
THE MAPS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY,
SHOWING CANADA.
BY THE EDITOR.
[Detailed maps of the Upper Lakes and the Mississippi Basin, as well as those produced by Hennepin, though connected with this period, are made the subject of separate treatment elsewhere in the present volume. The general atlases are treated in the next preceding pages.]
MOLINEAUX, 1600.
The key is as follows:
1. Discovered by Cabot.
2. Bacalaos.
3. C. Bonavista.
4. C. Raso.
5. C. Britton.
6. I. Sables.
7. I. S. John.
8. Claudia.
9. Comokee.
10. C. Chesepick.
11. Hotorast.
12. La Bermudas.
13. Bahama.
14. La Florida.
15. The Gulfe of Mexico.
16. Virginia.
17. The Lacke of Tadenac, the bounds whereof are unknowne.
18. Canada.
19. Hochelague.
Except for the supposed inland sea, much the same configuration of Nova Francia is given in the map of not far from this date which Hondius made to illustrate Drake’s voyage, and of which a fac-simile is given in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of The World Encompassed. The same general character belongs to the Hondius map in the 1613 edition of Mercator; while in the same book the Orbis Terræ compendiosa Descriptio is very nearly of the original Mercator and Ortelius type, which is also closely followed in a second map, America, sive India nova, per Michælem Mercatorem. Another map of the same date is in Megiser’s Septentrio Novantiquus, Leipsic, 1613.
IN the notes at the end of chapter ii. we followed the cartography of New France down to the opening of the seventeenth century. We saw in the map of Molineaux (1600) an indication of a great inland sea, as the prototype of the Great Lakes; but the general belief of the[378] period, just as Champlain was entering on his discoveries, is well shown in the map, “Americæ sive Novi Orbis nova Descriptio,” which appeared in Botero’s Relaciones universales, published at Valladolid in 1603.[755]
The Spanish and the Dutch only repeated, but hardly with as much precision, what the map in Botero had shown;[756] and we only get approximate exactness when we come to the map of Lescarbot in 1609, of which sections are given in the present and in other chapters.[757] Champlain’s first map was made in 1612, and his second in 1613,[758] both of which appeared in Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain, Paris, 1613. Between the issue of these 1612 and 1613 maps of Champlain and his greater one in 1632, the cartography of New France is illustrated by several conspicuous maps. Those of Hondius and Mercator, so called, of the same year were of course unaffected by the drafts of Champlain. We begin to notice some effects of Champlain’s work, however, in several of the Dutch maps; in that of Jacobsz, or Jacobsen, of 1621, for instance, of which account will be found on another page.[759] Maps by Jodocus Hondius and Blaeu represent a number of streams flowing from small lakes uniting to form the St. Lawrence. One by Jannson, in 1626, nearly resembles for the St. Lawrence region that portion of a “new and accurate map of the world, 1626,” which makes part of Speed’s Prospect of the most famous Parts of the World.
In 1625 the Pilgrimes[760] of Purchas introduces us to two significant maps. One is that which Sir William Alexander issued in his Encouragement to Colonies in 1624, and was reproduced by Purchas, calling it “New England, New Scotland, and New France.” The essential part of it is given in Vol. III. chap. ix. The other is that called “The North Part of America,” ascribed to Master Briggs.
BOTERO, 1603.
In the original edition of De Laet’s Nieuwe Wereldt,[761] published in 1625, we have a map of North America; but in the 1630 (Dutch) edition we find a special map of New France, which was repeated in the (Latin) 1633 edition. Harrisse[762] is in error in assigning the[379] first appearance of this map to the 1640 French edition.
Champlain’s great map appeared in his 1632 edition.
NEWFOUNDLAND, 1609.
Part of Lescarbot’s map. There is in the Kohl Collection, in the State Department at Washington, a map of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River of about this date, copied from one in the Dépôt de la Marine at Paris. Kohl also includes a map by Joannes Oliva, copied from a manuscript portolano among the Egerton Manuscripts in the British Museum, which purports to have been made at Marseilles in 1613. Its names and legends are Italian and Latin; and the map, while inferior to Hakluyt’s map, bears a strong resemblance to it. It is much behind the time, except as respects the outline of Newfoundland, which seems to be more accurately drawn than before. This island was still further to be improved in Mason’s map of 1626. Oliva seems to have been ignorant of Lescarbot’s book.
EASTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1612 MAP.
These fac-similes of the 1612 map are made from the Harvard College copy. There are other fac-similes in the Boston and Quebec editions; and one by Pilinski (fifty copies at 40 francs) was made in Paris in 1878. Sabin’s Dictionary, p. 478, says: “The copies vary in the maps. Mr. Lenox’s copy differs from that in the New York Historical Society. Sometimes in one map there are more references than in the others, and the spelling of the references varies. The large map is usually in two parts, and is very often wanting or defective.” Harrisse, nos. 306-318, enumerates the proper maps of this 1613 edition. The title of the 1613 edition speaks of this map: “La première servant à la navigation, dressée selon les compas, qui nordestent, sur lesquels les mariniers navigent.”
WESTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1612 MAP.
PART OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1613 MAP.
The title of the 1613 edition speaks of this map as being “en son vray Meridien, avec ses longitudes et latitudes: à laquelle est adjousté le voyage du destroict qu’ont trouvé les Anglois, au dessus de Labrador, depuis le 53e degré de latitude, jusques au 63e én l’an 1612, cerchans un chemin par le nord pour aller à la Chine.”
AMERICÆ SEPTENTRIONALIS PARS (Jacobsz, 1621).
BRIGGS IN PURCHAS, 1625.
It will be observed that Champlain had reached, in his plotting of the country east of the Penobscot, something more than tolerable accuracy. Farther west, proportions and relations were all wrong. The country between the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine is much too narrow. The Penobscot is made almost to unite with the more northern river; and this error is perpetuated in the Dutch maps published by Blaeu, and Covens and Mortier[384] many years later. The placing of Lake Champlain within a short distance of Casco Bay was another error that the later Dutch cartographers adopted in one form or another. Lake Ontario is not greatly misshapen; but Erie is stretched into a strait, while beyond a distorted Huron a “grand lac” is so placed as to leave a doubt if Superior or Michigan was intended.
SPEED, 1626.
Notwithstanding this pronounced belief in large inland seas, and the publication of the belief, the notion did not make converts in every direction. Two years later (1634) a map of Petrus Kærius, and even his other map, which appeared in Speed’s Prospect of the most famous Parts of the World, published in London, gave no intimation of Champlain’s results. The same backwardness of knowledge or apprehension is apparent in the map which accompanies the Amsterdam edition of Linschoten in 1644; in that of the world, dated 1651, which appeared in Speed’s 1676 edition; in the map in Petavius’s History of the World, London, 1659; and in two maps of N. I. Visscher, both dated 1652, which make the St. Lawrence River rise in the neighborhood of the Colorado. We might not expect the Zee-Atlas of Van Loon to give signs of the inland lakes; but it is strange that the map “Americæ nova descriptio,” ignoring the great interior waters, was used in editions of Heylin’s Cosmographie, in London, from 1669 to 1677.
NOVA FRANCIA ET REGIONES ADJACENTES
(De Laet).
Cf. another section of De Laet’s map in chap. viii. De Laet was much better informed than Champlain regarding the relative position of Lake Champlain to New England; and he placed it more in accordance with the English belief, as expressed by Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (Adams’s edition, p. 234), who speaks of Lake Champlain as being three hundred miles distant from Massachusetts Bay,—a distance somewhat in excess. De Laet’s map is also given in Cassell’s United States, i. 240.
Some of the Dutch cartographers were not so inalert. Johannes Jannson in his America septentrionalis, and even Visscher himself in his Novissima et accuratissima totius Americæ Descriptio give diverse interpretations to this idea of the inland seas. The draft in the Hexham English[385] translation (1636) of the Mercator-Hondius atlas is not much nearer that of Champlain.
JANNSON.
Harrisse (Notes, etc., nos. 190, 191) refers to two charts of the St. Lawrence of 1641 which are preserved in Paris, and are known to be the work of Jean Bourdon, who came to Quebec in 1633-34. Perhaps one of these is the same referred to by Kohl, as dated 1635, and in the Dépôt de la Marine, of which a copy is in the Kohl Collection in the State Department at Washington. Harrisse also (no. 324) refers to a Description de la Nouvelle France,—a map published by Boisseau in Paris in 1643.
The map in Dudley’s Arcano del Mare (Florence, 1647), called “Carta particolare della terra nuova, con la gran Baia et il Fiume grande della Canida: D’America, carta prima,”[763] presents a surprise in making the St. Croix River connect the Bay of Fundy with the St. Lawrence; and Dudley seems to have had very confused notions of the sites of Hochelaga and the Saguenay. The annexed sketch is much reduced.
The same transverse strait appears in Carte générale des Costes de l’Amérique, published at Amsterdam by Covens and Mortier. A treatment of the geographical problem of the lakes which had more or less vogue, is shown in Gottfried’s Neue Welt, 1655, in a map called “America noviter delineate;” and this same treatment was preserved by Blaeu so late as 1685.
VISSCHER.
A most decided advance came with the map, Le Canada, ou Nouvelle France, of Nicolas Sanson in 1656,[764]—a far better correlation of the three lower lakes than we had found in Champlain, with an indication of those farther west.[765] Contemporary with Sanson was the English geographer Peter Heylin, whose map, as has already been noted, betrays no knowledge of Champlain. His Cosmographie in Four Books appeared in 1657,[766] and the second part of the fourth book relates to America, and is accompanied by the map in question. The contemporary Dutch maps of Jannson, Visscher, and Blaeu deserve little notice as contributions to knowledge.[767]
EASTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S MAP 1632.
The great map of 1632, by Champlain, has been reproduced full size in the Quebec edition of his works, and also in the Prince Society edition. A fac-simile, somewhat reduced, is given in O’Callaghan’s Documentary History of New York, vol. iii. Another, full size, was made by Pilinski in 1860, and published by Tross, of Paris (thirty-six copies, and of date, 1877, fifty copies at 40 francs). Field calls it “imperfect.” Brunet, however, says it has “une admirable exactitude.” The copy of the 1632 edition in the Bibliothèque Nationale lacks this map. The Harvard Le Mur copy has no map (Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 268).
Sabin (no. 11,839) says that the map here copied (the original of which is in the Harvard College “Collet” copy) belongs properly to the copies having the Le Mur and Sevestre imprints, and has the legend, “Faict l’an 1632 par le Sieur de Champlain;” while the proper Collet map is smaller, and is inscribed, “Faict par le Sieur de Champlain, suivant les Mémoires de P. du Val, en l’Isle du Palais.” The earliest copy, however, which I have found of the map thus referred to bears date 1664, and is called Le Canada, faict par le Sr. de Champlain, ... suivant les Mémoires de P. du Val, Géographe du Roy. This map appeared with even later dates (1677, etc.), preserving much of the characteristics of the 1632 map, though stretching the plot farther west, and at a time when much better knowledge was current. Harrisse, nos. 331, 348; but cf. no. 274. Kohl, in the Department of State Collection, has one of date 1660.
WESTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1632 MAP.
DUDLEY, 1647.
Of the map of Creuxius, made in 1660 and published in 1664, a fac-simile of a part is annexed.[768] For the eastern parts of the country reference may be made to the map Tabula Novæ Franciæ, of about 1663, given in the chapter on Acadie.[769]
CREUXIUS, 1660.
CARTE GÉNÉRALE OF COVENS AND MORTIER.]
One of the volumes of the great Blaeu Atlas of 1662, America, quæ est Geographiæ Blavianæ Pars quinta, very singularly ignored all that the cartographers of New France had been long divulging, and the same misrepresentation was persistently employed in the later Blaeu Atlas of 1685, which contained in other American maps a variety of notions equally erroneous, and which had been current at a period very long passed.
GOTTFRIED, 1655.
The map in Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, 1670, “per Jacobum Meursium,” not the same as the “Novissima et accuratissima totius Americæ Descriptio” of John Ogilby’s great folio on America, 1670, and later years, seems to be substantially N. Visscher’s map of the same title, issued in Amsterdam in the same year.[770]
The maps of Hennepin (1683-1697) form a part of a special note elsewhere in the present volume; and the map accompanying Le Clercq’s Etablissement de la Foy, 1691, is also reproduced in Shea’s translation of that book.[771] It makes the Mississippi debouch on the Texas shore of the Gulf of Mexico, as many of the maps of this period do.
Maps of a general character, indicating a knowledge of the interior topography of America, sometimes expanding, and not seldom retrograde, followed rapidly as the century was closing, of which the most important were the maps of Amérique septentrionale (1667, 1669, 1674, 1685, 1690, 1692, 1695), by the Sansons, and the Roman reprint of it in 1677,[772] as well as La Mer du Nort of Du Val in 1679,[773] Sanson’s Le Nouveau Mexique, of the same year, which extends from Montreal to the Gulf;[774] the North America of the English geographer, William Berry (1680);[775] the Partie de la Nouvelle France of Hubert Jaillott (1685);[776] and the same cartographer’s Amérique septentrionale of 1694, and Le Monde of 1696; the Carte Generalle de la Nouvelle France[777] (1692) engraved by Boudan; the Amérique septentrionale of De Fer (1693); the marine Cartes (1696) of Le Cordier;[778] the New Sett of Maps published by Edward Wells in London in 1698-99; and finally the Amérique septentrionale of Delisle.[779] The maps of La Hontan (1703-1709) are the subject of special treatment in another note.
SANSON, 1656.
This is the same map, whether with the imprint, “Paris, chez Pierre Mariette, 1656,” or “Chez l’Autheur” in his America en plusieurs Cartes, 1657, though the scale in the former is much larger.
BLAEU, 1662 AND 1685.
Cf. a section in Cassell’s United States, i. 312.
NOVI BELGII TABULA, 1670.
From Ogilby’s America, p. 169.
OGILBY’S MAP, 1670.
If we run through the series of maps here sketched, we cannot but be struck with the unsettled notions regarding the geography of the St. Lawrence Valley. Beginning with the clear intimation by Molineaux, in 1600, of a great body of interior water, which was the mysterious link between the Atlantic and the Arctic seas, and finding this idea modified by Botero and others, we see Champlain in 1613 still leaving it vague. The maps of the next few years paid little attention to any features farther west than the limit of tide-water; and not till we reach the great map which accompanied the final edition of Champlain’s collected voyages[394] in 1632 do we begin to get a distorted plot of the upper lakes, Lake Erie being nothing more than a channel of varying width connecting them with Lake Huron. The first really serviceable delineation of the great lakes were the maps of Sanson and Du Creux, or Creuxius, in 1656 and 1660. Here we find Lake Erie given its due prominence; Huron is unduly large, but in its right position; and Michigan and Superior, though not completed, are placed with approximate accuracy. This truth of position, however, was disregarded by many a later geographer, till we reach a type of map, about the end of the century, which is exemplified in that given by Campanius in 1702.
FROM CAMPANIUS, 1702.
A water-way which made an island of greater or less extent of the peninsula which lies between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, appeared first in 1600 on the Molineaux map, and was repeated by Dudley in 1647; but on other maps the water-sheds were separated by a narrow tract. So much uncertainty attended this feature that the short portage of the prevailing notion was far from constant in its position, and on some maps seems repeated in more than one place,—taking now the appearance of a connection on the line of the St. Croix, or some other river of New Brunswick; now on that of the Kennebec and Chaudière; again as if having some connection with Lake Champlain, when a misconception of its true position placed that expanse of water between the Connecticut and the Saco; and once more on the line of the Hudson and Lake George.
CHAPTER VIII.
NEW NETHERLAND, OR THE DUTCH IN NORTH AMERICA
BY BERTHOLD FERNOW,
Keeper of the Historical Records, State of New York.
SAYS Carlyle: “Those Dutch are a strong people. They raised their land out of a marsh, and went on for a long period of time breeding cows and making cheese, and might have gone on with their cows and cheese till doomsday. But Spain comes over and says, ‘We want you to believe in St. Ignatius.’ ‘Very sorry,’ replied the Dutch, ‘but we can’t.’ ‘God! but you must,’ says Spain; and they went about with guns and swords to make the Dutch believe in St. Ignatius. Never made them believe in him, but did succeed in breaking their own vertebral column forever, and raising the Dutch into a great nation.”
A nation’s struggle for religious liberty comes upon every individual member of that nation as a personal matter, as a battle to be fought with himself and with the world. Hence we see the Dutch, encouraged by the large influx of Belgians whom the same unwillingness to believe in St. Ignatius had driven out of their homes, emerge from the conflict with Spain, individually and as a nation, more self-reliant, sturdy, and independent than ever before.
Compelled by the physical condition of their country to become a maritime nation, while other circumstances directed them to commercial pursuits, they had long been the common carriers of the sea, and had availed themselves at an early date of the discoveries made by the Cabots, Verrazano, and other adventurous explorers in the century succeeding the voyages of Columbus. They had studied the weak points of that vast Spanish empire “where the sun never set,” and found in the war with Spain a good excuse to make use of their knowledge, and to send their ships to the West Indies and the Spanish main to prey upon the commerce of their enemies. The first proposition to make such an expedition, submitted to the States-General in 1581 by an English sea-captain, Beets, and refused by them, was undoubtedly conceived in a purely commercial spirit. Gradually the idea of destroying the transatlantic resources of Spain, and thereby[396] compelling her to submit to the Dutch conditions of peace and to the evacuation of Belgium, caused the formation of a West India company, which, authorized to trade with and fight the Spaniards in American waters, appears in the light of a necessary political measure, without, however, throwing in the background the necessity of finding a shorter route to the East Indies.[780]
Although the scheme to form a West India company was first broached in 1592 by William Usselinx, an exiled Antwerp merchant, it was many years before it could be carried out. The longing for a share in the riches of the New World conduced in the mean time to the establishment of the “Greenland Company” about 1596, and the pretended search by its ships for a northwest passage led to a supposed first discovery of the Hudson River, if we may rely upon an unsupported statement made by officers of the West India Company in an appeal for assistance to the Assembly of the Nineteen in 1644. According to this document, ships of the Greenland Company had entered the North and Delaware rivers in 1598; their crews had landed in both places, and had built small forts to protect them against the inclemency of the winter and to resist the attacks of the Indians.
Of the next adventurer who sailed through the Narrows we know more, and of his discoveries we have documentary evidence. A company of English merchants had organized to trade to America in the first years of the seventeenth century. Their first adventures, directed to Guiana and Virginia, were not successful,[781] yet gave a new impetus to the scheme originally conceived by Usselinx. A plan for the organization of a West India company was drawn up in 1606, according to the exiled Belgian’s ideas. The company was to be in existence thirty-six years, to receive during the first six years assistance from all the United Provinces, and to be managed in the same manner as the East India Company. Political considerations on one side and rivalry between the Provinces on the other prevented the consummation of this project. A peace or truce with Spain was about to be negotiated, and Oldenbarnevelt, then Advocate of Holland and one of the most prominent and influential members of the peace party, foresaw that the organization of a West India company with the avowed purpose of obtaining most of its profits by preying on Spanish commerce in American waters would only prolong the war. Probably he saw still farther. Usselinx’s plan was, as we have seen, to compel Spain by these means to evacuate Belgium, and thus give her exiled sons a chance to return to their old homes. A wholesale departure of the shrewd, industrious, and skilled Belgians would have deprived Holland of her political pre-eminence and have left her an obscure and isolated province. On the other hand, each province and each seaport desired a share in the equipping of the fleet destined to sail in the interests of the proposed company, and as no province[397] was willing to allow a rival to have what she could not have, the project itself between these two extremes of the opposing parties came to nought. It was only when Oldenbarnevelt, accused of high treason, had been lodged in prison, and the renewal of the war with Spain had been commended to the public, that the scheme was taken up again, in 1618.
Private ships, sailing from Dutch ports, had not been idle in the mean time; in 1607 we hear of them in Canada trading for furs, and in 1609 an English mariner, Henry Hudson, who had made several voyages for the English company already mentioned, offered his services to the East India Company to search for the passage to India by the north.
Under the auspices of the Amsterdam chamber of this company Hudson left the Texel in the yacht “Half Moon” April 4, 1609. His failures in the years 1607 and 1608, while in the employ of the English company, had discouraged neither him nor his new employers; but soon ice and fogs compel him, so we are told, to abandon his original plan to go to the East Indies by a possible northeast passage, and he proposes to his crew a search for a northwest passage along the American coast, at about the 40th degree of latitude. A contemporary writer states: “This idea had been suggested to Hudson by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea leading into the Western Ocean by the north of Virginia.” So westward Hudson turns the bow of his ship, to make a first landfall on the coast of Newfoundland, a second at Penobscot Bay, and a third at Cape Cod. Thence he takes a southwest course, but again fails to strike land under the 40th degree; he has gone too far south by one degree, and he anchors in a wide bay under 39° 5″ on the 28th of August. He is in Delaware Bay. Scarcely a week later, on the 4th of September, he finds himself with his yacht in the “Great North River of New Netherland,” under 40° 30´. A month later, to a day, he passes again out of the “Great mouth of the Great River,” homeward bound to report that what he had thought to be the long and vainly sought northwest passage was only a great river, navigable for vessels of light draught for one hundred and fifty miles, and running through a country fair to look upon and inhabited by red men peacefully inclined. Little did Hudson think, while he was navigating the waters named for him, that Champlain, another explorer, had recently been fighting his way up the shores of the lake now bearing his name, and that, a century and a half later, the great battle for supremacy on this continent between France and England,—between the old religion and the new,—would be fiercely waged in those peaceful regions.
The report brought home by Hudson, that the newly discovered country abounded in fur-bearing animals, created the wildest excitement among a people compelled by their northern climate to resort to very warm clothing in winter. Many private ventures, therefore, followed Hudson’s track soon after his return, and finally the plan to organize a West India company, never quite relinquished, was now, 1618, destined to be carried out. There[398] was in this juncture less opposition to it; but still various reasons delayed the consent of the States-General until June, 1621, when at last they signed the charter. Englishmen from Virginia, who claimed the country under a grant, had tried to oust the Dutch, who had before this established themselves on the banks of the Hudson, under the octroi of 1614. The West India Company nevertheless, undismayed, took possession, in 1623, by sending Captain Cornelis Jacobsen Mey as director to the Prince Hendrick or South River (Delaware), and Adrian Jorissen Tienpont in like capacity to the Prince Mauritius or North River. Mey, going up the South River, fifteen leagues from its mouth erected in the present town of Gloucester, N. J., about four miles below Philadelphia, Fort Nassau, the first European settlement in that region; while the director on the North River, besides strengthening the establishment which he found at its mouth, built a fort a few miles above the one erected in 1618 near the mouth of the Normanskil, now Albany, by the servants of the “United New Netherland Company,” and called it “Fort Orange.”
Tienpont’s successor, Peter Minuit, three years later, in 1626, bought from the Indians the whole of Manhattan Island for the value of about twenty-four dollars, with the view of making this the principal settlement. This purchase and the organization, under the charter, of a council with supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority, must be considered the first foundation of our present State of New York, even though the titles of the officers constituting the council,—upper and under merchant, commissary, book-keeper of monthly wages,—seem to prove that in the beginning the Company had only purely commercial ends in view. Their charter of 1621, it is true, required them “to advance the peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts,” but not until the trade with New Netherland threatened to become unprofitable, in 1627-28, was a plan taken into consideration to reap other benefits than those accruing from the fur-trade alone, through a more extended colonization. The deliberations of the Assembly of the Nineteen and directors of the West India Company resulted in a new “charter of freedoms and exemptions,” sanctioned by the States-General, June 7, 1629. Its provisions, no more favorable to liberty, as we understand it now, than that of 1621, attempted to transplant to the soil of New York the feudal system of Europe as it had already been established in Canada; and with it was imported the first germ of that weakening disease,—inadequate revenues,—which caused the colony to fall such an easy prey to England’s attack in 1664. While the charter was still under discussion, several of the Company’s directors took advantage of their position and secured for themselves a share of the new privileges by purchasing from the Indians, as the charter required, the most conveniently located and fertile tracts of land. The records of the acknowledgment of these transactions before the Director and Council[399] of the Colony are the earliest which are extant in the original now in the possession of the State of New York. They bear dates from April, 1630, to July, 1631, and include the present counties of Albany and Richmond, N. Y., the cities of Hoboken and Jersey City, N. J., and the southern parts of the States of New Jersey and Delaware.
This mode of acquiring lands from the Indians by purchase established from the beginning the principles by which the intercourse between the white and the red men in the valley of the Hudson was to be regulated. The great Indian problem, which has been and still is a question of paramount importance to the United States Government, was solved then by the Dutch of New Netherland without great difficulty. Persecuted by Spain and France for their religious convictions, the Dutch had learned to tolerate the superstitions and even repugnant beliefs of others. Not less religious than the Puritans of New England, they made no such religious pretexts for tyranny and cruelty as mar the records of their neighbors. They treated the Indian as a man with rights of life, liberty, opinion, and property like their own. Truthful among themselves, they inspired in the Indian a belief in their sincerity and honesty, and purchased what they wanted fairly and with the consent of the seller. The Dutch régime always upheld this principle, and as a consequence the Indians of this State caused no further difficulty, with a few exceptions, to the settlers than a financial outlay. The historians who charge the Dutch with pusillanimity and cowardice in their dealings with the Indians forget that to their policy we owe to-day the existence of the United States.
The country between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes and the Savannah River, was at the time of the arrival of the Dutch practically ruled by a confederacy of Indian tribes,—the Five Nations,—who, settled along the Mohawk and Upper Hudson rivers and in western New York, commanded the key to the continent. It was indeed in their power, had they pleased, to allow the French of Canada to crush the Dutch settlements on the Hudson; and had this territory become a French province, the united action of the American colonies in the French and Revolutionary wars would have been an impossibility. These Five Nations, called by the Jesuit fathers living among them the most enlightened but also the most intractable and ferocious of all the Indians, became soon after the arrival of the Dutch the stanch friends of the new-comers, and remained so during the whole Dutch period. The English wisely adhered to this Indian policy of the Dutch, and by the continued friendship of the Five Nations were enabled successfully to contend with the French for the supremacy on this continent.
The purchasers of the tracts already mentioned—with one exception, associations of Dutch merchants—lost no time in sending out people to settle their colonies. Renselaerswyck, adjoining and surrounding Fort Orange, had in 1630 already a population of thirty males, of whom several had families, sent out by the Association recognizing Kilian van[400] Renselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam, as patroon. The same men, associated with several others, among whom was Captain David Pietersen de Vries, had bought the present counties of Sussex and Kent, in the State of Delaware, to which by a purchase made the following year they added the present Cape May County, N. J. On December 12, 1630, they sent two vessels to the Delaware or South River, “to plant a colony for the cultivation of grain and tobacco, as well as to carry on the whale-fishery in that region.” They carried out the first part of the plan, but were so unsuccessful in the second part that the expedition proved a losing one. Undismayed by their financial loss, another was sent out in May, 1632, under Captain de Vries’ personal command, although information had been received that the settlement on the South River, Zwanendael, had been destroyed by the Indians, and all the settlers, thirty-two in number, killed. Arriving opposite Zwanendael, De Vries found the news but too true; and after visiting the old Fort Nassau, now deserted, and loitering a while in the river, he left the region without any further attempt at colonization. The pecuniary losses attending these two unfortunate expeditions induced the patroons of Zwanendael, two years later, to dispose of their right and title to these tracts of land to the West India Company.
Shortly before Minuit was appointed director of New Netherland, a number of Walloons, compelled by French intolerance to leave their homes between the rivers Scheldt and Lys, had applied to Sir Dudley Carleton, principal Secretary of State to King Charles I., for permission to settle in Virginia. The answer of the Virginia Company not proving satisfactory, they turned their eyes upon New Netherland, where a small number of them arrived with Minuit. For some reasons they left the lands first allotted to them on Staten Island, and went over to Long Island, where Wallabout,[782] in the city of Brooklyn, still reminds us of the origin of its first settlers. It will be remembered that Englishmen from Virginia (under Captain Samuel Argal, in 1613) had attempted to drive the Dutch from the Hudson River.[783] It is said that the Dutch then acknowledged the English title to this region under a grant of Queen Elizabeth to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584, and made an arrangement for their continuing there on sufferance. Be that as it may, the West India Company had paid no heed to this early warning. Now, in 1627, the matter was to be recalled to their minds in a manner more diplomatic than Argal’s, by a letter from Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, which most earnestly asserted the right of the English to the territory occupied by the Dutch. This urged the latter to clear their title, for[401] otherwise it said: “It will be harder and with more difficulty obtained hereafter, and perhaps not without blows.” Before the director’s appeal for assistance against possible English invaders reached the home office, the Company had already taken steps to remove some of the causes which might endanger their colony. They had obtained, September, 1627, from King Charles I. an order giving to their vessels the same privileges as had been granted by the treaty of Southampton to all national vessels of Holland,—that is, freedom of trade to all ports of England and her colonies. But their title to New Netherland was not cleared, because they could not do it; for they did not dare to assert the pretensions to the premier seisin, then considered valid according to that maxim of the civil law, “quæ nullius sunt, in bonis dantur occupanti;” nor did they later claim the right of first discovery when, after the surrender of New Netherland to the English, in 1664, negotiations were had concerning restitution. Only once did they claim a title by such discovery. This was when the ship “Union,” bringing home the recalled director Minuit (1632), was attached in an English port, at the suit of the New England Company, on a charge which had been made notwithstanding the King’s order of September, 1627, and which alleged that the ship had obtained her cargo in countries subject to his Majesty. The denial of this claim and the counter claim of first discovery by Englishmen set up by the British ministry failed to bring forth a rejoinder from their High Mightinesses of Holland.
When De Vries, having ascertained the destruction of his colony on the Delaware, came to New Amsterdam, he found there the newly appointed director, Wouter van Twiller, just arrived. He was, as De Vries thought, “an unfit person,” whom family influence had suddenly raised from a clerkship in the Company’s office at Amsterdam to the governorship of New Netherland “to perform a comedy,” and his council De Vries calls “a pack of fools, who knew nothing except to drink, by whose management the Company must come to nought.” De Vries’ prediction came near being realized. Seized with a mania for territorial aggrandizement, Van Twiller bought from the Indians a part of the Connecticut territory in 1633, and by building Fort Hope, near the present site of Hartford, planted the seed for another quarrel with the English at Boston, who claimed all the land from the Narragansetts nearly to the Manhattans under a grant made in 1631 to the Earl of Warwick, and under a subsequent transfer from the latter in 1632 to Lord Say and Seal’s company. Notwithstanding their numerical weakness, the Dutch kept a footing in Connecticut for nearly twenty years; but they could not prevent the same Englishmen from invading Long Island in a like manner, and being prominent actors in the[402] final catastrophe of 1664. Another purchase made by Van Twiller from the Indians, also in 1633, which included the territory on the Schuylkill, the building of Fort Beeversreede there and additions made to Fort Nassau, put new life into the sinking settlement on the Delaware River, and thus gave color to the subsequent statement, made in the dispute with the Swedes, that they (the Dutch) had never relinquished their hold upon this territory.[784] Thoroughly imbued with a sense of the wealth and power of the West India Company, then in the zenith of its power, Van Twiller expended the revenues of his government lavishly in building up New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, and, without regard for official ethics, abused his position still further at the expense of the Company, by granting to himself and his boon companions the most fertile tracts of land on and near Manhattan and Long islands. His irregular proceedings, finally brought to the notice of the States-General by the law officer of New Netherland, led to his recall in 1637, when he was succeeded by William Kieft.
Up to this time the history of New Netherland is more or less a history of the acts of the director, who proceeded more like the agent of a great commercial institution than the ruler of a vast province. He assumed to be the head of the agency, and all the other inhabitants of the colony were either his servants or his tenants. Nominally he was also directed to supervise the proceedings of adjoining colonies of the same nationality; but they either died out, like Pavonia (New Jersey) and Zwanendael (Delaware), or as yet the interests of those private establishments, like Renselaerswyck (Albany) had not come in conflict with those of the Company so as to call forth the authority vested in the director. The relations with the Indians had also been amicable so far, a slight misunderstanding with the New Jersey Indians excepted; and the quarrel with the English about the Connecticut lands having been referred to the home authorities for settlement, this complication did not require any display of statesmanship. The province having been brought to the verge of ruin by Wouter van Twiller, up to the beginning of whose administration it had returned a profit of $75,000 to the Company, the abilities of his successor were taxed to their utmost to rebuild it, and his statesmanship was tried in his dealings with the Swedes, the English, and the Indians.
The absorption, for their own benefit, of the most fertile lands by officers of the Company had naturally tended to prevent actual settlers from coming to New Netherland, and the Company itself had thus far failed to send over colonists, as required by the charter. The incessant disputes between the Amsterdam department of the Company and the patroons of Renselaerswyck over the interpretation of the privileges granted in 1629, and the complaints of the fiscal[785] of New Netherland against Wouter van Twiller, which pointedly referred to the general maladministration[403] of the province, at last induced their High Mightinesses to turn their attention to it. A short investigation compelled them to announce officially that the colony was retrograding, its population decreasing, and that it required a change in the administration of its affairs. But as the charter of the Company was the fundamental evil, the Government was almost powerless to enforce its demands, and had to be satisfied with recommending to the Assembly of the Nineteen of the West India Company the adoption of a plan for the effectual settlement of the country and the encouragement of a sound and healthful emigration. This step resulted in overthrowing the monopoly of the American trade enjoyed by the Company since 1623, and in opening not only the trade, but also the cultivation of the soil under certain conditions, to every immigrant, denizen, or foreigner. The new order of things gave to the drooping colony a fresh lease of life. Its population, hitherto only transient, as it consisted mainly of the Company’s servants, who returned to Europe at the expiration of their respective terms, now became permanent,—“whole colonies” coming “to escape the insupportable government of New England;” servants who had obtained their liberty in Maryland and Virginia availing themselves of the opportunity to make use of the experience acquired on the tobacco plantations of their English masters; wealthy individuals of the more educated classes emigrating with their families and importing large quantities of stock; and the peasant farmers of continental Europe seeking freehold homes on the banks of the Hudson and on Long Island, which they could not acquire in the land of their birth. These all flocked now to New Netherland, and gave to New Amsterdam something of its present cosmopolitan character; for Father Jogues found there in 1643 eighteen different nationalities represented by its population. Two other invasions, however, of New Netherland brought a people likewise intent upon the cultivation of the soil and trading with the Indians; but they were not such as “acknowledged their High Mightinesses and the Directors of the West India Company as their suzerain lords and masters,” and these caused some anxiety and trouble to the new director.
The first of these invasions, arriving on this side of the Atlantic in Delaware Bay almost simultaneously with Kieft, was made in pursuance of a plan long cherished by the great Protestant hero of the seventeenth century, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, to give his country a share in the harvest which other nations were then gathering in the New World. Various reasons deferred the carrying out of this plan, first laid before the King in 1626 by the same Usselinx who planned the West India Company; and not until 1638 did the South Company of Sweden send out their first adventure under another man, also formerly connected with the West India Company, Peter Minuit.
Kieft’s protest against this intrusion had no effect upon the Swedish commander and his colony, whose history is told in another chapter. More energy was displayed by the Dutch two years later in dealing with some[404] Englishmen from New Haven, who began a settlement on the Schuylkill River, opposite Fort Nassau, and who were promptly driven away. Laxity and corruption on the part of the Dutch local director seems to have been the cause of the almost inexplicable patience with which the Dutch bore the encroachments made by the Swedes; and not until the government of New Netherland was intrusted to the energetic Stuyvesant was anything done to counteract the Swedish influences on the Delaware. Stuyvesant built in 1651 a new fort (Casimir, now Newcastle, Del.), below the Swedish fort Christina (Wilmington), the treacherous surrender of which, in 1654, to a newly arriving Swedish governor, led in 1655 to the complete overthrow of Swedish rule.
The next two years, to 1657, the inhabitants of the Delaware territory had to suffer under the mismanagement of various commanders appointed by the Director-General and Council, whose lack of administrative talent helped not a little to embarrass the Company financially. Under pressure of monetary difficulty, part of the Delaware region was ceded by the Company to the municipality of Amsterdam in Holland, which in May, 1657, established a new colony at Fort Casimir, calling it New Amstel, while the name of Christina was changed to Altena, and the territory belonging to it placed in charge of an agent of more experience than his predecessors. The remaining years of Dutch rule on the Delaware derive interest chiefly from an attempt by comers from Maryland to obtain possession of the country through a clever trick; from quarrels between the authorities of the two Dutch colonies brought on by the weakness and folly of the directors of the “City’s Colony;” and from difficulties with Maryland which arose out of the Indian question. With the surrender of New Amsterdam in 1664, the Delaware country passed also into English hands.
Historians have hitherto failed to give due weight to the attempt of Sweden to establish this American colony, and to the effect it had upon the fortunes of the West India Company. The expedition of 1655, although politically successful, not only exhausted the ready means of the New Netherland Government, but also plunged it and the Company into debts which never ceased to hamper its movement, and which afterward rendered it impossible to furnish the province a sufficient military protection.
But no less a share in the final result of 1664 is due to the second invasion of the Dutch territory, made about the time when the Swedes first appeared on the Delaware, by Englishmen crossing over from Connecticut to the east end of Long Island. The whole island had been granted by the Plymouth Company to the Earl of Stirling in 1635; and basing their claims on patents issued by Forrest, the Earl’s agent in America, the invaders quickly settled in the present County of Suffolk (1640), and resisted all efforts of the Dutch to drive them off. Prejudicial to the Company’s interests as these encroachments upon their territory were, they were calculated to call forth all the administrative and diplomatic talents of which Kieft was supposed to be possessed; but unfortunately by his lack of these qualities he contrived[405] to lay the colony open to a danger which almost destroyed it. The trade with the interior had led to an intimacy between the Indians and the Dutch which gave the natives many chances to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the habits, strength, and usages of the settlers; while the increased demand for peltries required that the Indians should be supplied with better means to meet that demand. They were consequently given firearms; and when thus put on the same footing with the white inhabitants, Kieft committed the folly of exacting from them a tribute as a return for aiding them in their defence against their enemies by the building of forts and by the maintenance of a military establishment. He even threatened to use forcible measures in cases of non-compliance. The war resulting from this policy lasted until 1645, and seriously impaired the finances of the Company and the development of the colony. Equally arbitrary and devoid of common-sense was Kieft’s administration of internal affairs. Before the beginning of the Indian war, upon which he was intent, circumstances compelled him to make a concession to popular rights, which he might use as a cloak to protect himself against censure. He directed that the community at large should elect twelve delegates to consult with the Director and Council on the expediency of going to war, and when fairly launched into the conflict he quickly abolished this advisory board,—the first representative body of New York,—but only to ask for an expression of the public opinion by another board a few months later in 1643. This, at last disgusted with Kieft’s tyranny and folly, set to work to have him removed in 1647. The people had not forgotten that in the Netherlands they had been self-governing, and had enjoyed the rights of free municipalities. Although all the minor towns had acquired the same privileges almost at the beginning of their existence, New Amsterdam, the principal place of the colony, was still ruled by the Company through the Director and Council. The opposition which he met from the burghers of this place was the principal cause of his recall.
The relations of New Netherland with its English neighbors during Kieft’s administration were in the main the same as under his predecessors. He continued to complain of the grievous wrongs and injuries inflicted upon his people by New Haven, but had no means to do more than complain. The stronger English colonies kept their settlement on the Connecticut, and established another within the territory claimed by the Dutch at Agawam, now Springfield, Mass.
The arrival of the new director-general was celebrated by the inhabitants of New Amsterdam with all the solemnity which circumstances afforded; and they were pleased to hear him announce that he “should be in his government as a father to his children for the advantage of the Company, the country, and the burghers.” They had good reasons to be hopeful. Petrus Stuyvesant, the new director, had gathered administrative experience as governor of the Company’s Island of Curaçao, and while in Holland on sick leave, in 1645, he had proved his knowledge of New Netherland affairs[406] by offering acceptable suggestions for the better management of this and the other transatlantic territories of the Company. His views, together with instructions drawn up by the Assembly of the Nineteen for the guidance of the director, were embodied in resolutions and orders for the future government of New Netherland, which revolutionized and liberalized the condition of the colony. It was henceforth to be governed by the Director-General and a Council composed of the vice-director and the fiscal. The right of the people to be heard by the provincial government on the state and condition of the country, through delegates from the various settlements, was confirmed; and the carrying trade between the colony and other countries, which the reform of 1639 had still left in the hands of the Company and of a few privileged persons, was now opened to all, although under certain rather onerous restrictions.
The first few months of the new administration fully justified the hope with which Stuyvesant’s arrival had been accompanied. The state in which Kieft had left the public morals compelled Stuyvesant to issue and enforce such orders, that within two months of his assuming the new duties the director of the Patroons’ Colony at Albany wrote home: “Mynheer Stuyvesant introduces here a thorough reform.” What the state of things must have been may be inferred from Stuyvesant’s declaration that “the people are without discipline, and approaching the savage state,” while “a fourth part of the city of New Amsterdam consists of rumshops and houses where nothing can be had but beer and tobacco.”
Unfortunately for his own reputation and for the good of the colony, he used his energies not solely to make provisions for future good government, but he allowed his feudal notions to embroil him in the quarrels of the late administration, by espousing the cause of Kieft, who had been accused by representatives of the commonalty of malfeasance in office. This grave error induced the home authorities to consider Stuyvesant’s recall; but he was finally allowed to remain, and in the end proved the most satisfactory administrator of the province sent out by the Company. It was his and the Company’s misfortune that he was appointed when the resources of the Company were gradually diminishing in consequence of the peace with Spain. He was thus constantly hampered by a lack of means; and when the end came, he had only from one hundred and fifty to two hundred soldiers, scattered in four garrisons from the Delaware forts to Fort Orange, to defend the colony against an overwhelming English force.
During the seventeen years of his administration Stuyvesant endeavored to cultivate the friendship of the Indians; and in this he was in the main successful, save that the tribes of the Mohegan nation along the Hudson refused to become as firm friends of the Dutch as their suzerain lords,[407] the Mohawks, were. While Stuyvesant was absent on the South River, in 1655, to subdue, in obedience to orders from home, the Swedish settlements there, New Amsterdam was invaded by the River Indians and almost destroyed. The Colony and the Company had not yet recovered from the losses sustained by this invasion, nor from the draft made upon their financial resources by the successful expedition against the Swedes, when a few tribes of the same River Indians reopened the war against the Dutch. They first murdered some individuals of the settlement on the Esopus (now Kingston, Ulster County), and later destroyed it almost completely. With an expense at the time altogether out of proportion to the means of the Government, Stuyvesant succeeded in 1663 in ending this war by destroying the Esopus tribe of Indians.
The negotiations with the New England colonies for a settlement of the boundary and other open questions fall into the earlier part of Stuyvesant’s administration. Although he could flatter himself that he had obtained in the treaty of Hartford, 1650, as good terms as he might expect from a power vastly superior to his own, his course only tended to separate the two factions of New Netherland still farther. His espousal of Kieft’s cause had, as we have seen, alienated him from the mass of his countrymen, whose anger was now still more aroused when he selected as advisers at Hartford an Englishman resident at New Amsterdam and a Frenchman. He was accused of having betrayed his trust because he had been obliged to surrender the jurisdiction of the Company over the Connecticut territory and the east end of Long Island. Listening to these accusations, coming together as they did with the Kieft affair, the Company increased the difficulties surrounding their director by an order to make Dutch nationality one of the tests of fitness for public employment.
The people had already in Kieft’s time loudly called for more liberty,—a desire which Stuyvesant in the strong conservatism of his character was by no means willing to listen to. As, however, liberal principles gained more and more ground among the population, he at last gave his consent to the convocation of a general assembly from the several towns, which was to consider the state of the province. It was too late. The power of the Dutch in New Netherland was waning; Connecticut had been lost in 1650; Westchester at the very door of the Manhattans, and the principal towns of western Long Island were in the hands of the English; and a few months after the first meeting of the delegates the English flag floated over the fort, which had until then been called New Amsterdam.
The magnitude of the commerce of the United Provinces had long been a thorn in the side of the English nation; for years Cato’s Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam had been the burden of political speeches. Differences arising between the two governments, Charles II., only lately the guest of Holland, allowed himself to be persuaded by his chancellor, Shaftesbury, that this commerce would make Holland as great an empire as Rome had been, and this would lead to the utter annihilation of England.[408] There was apparently no other motive reflecting “honor upon his prudence, activity, and public spirit,” to induce him to order the treacherous expedition which seized the territory of an unsuspecting ally.
When the English fleet appeared off the coast of Long Island the Dutch were not at all prepared to offer resistance, their small military force of about two hundred effective men being scattered in detachments over the whole province. Nevertheless Stuyvesant would have let the issue be decided by arms; but the people failed to support him, and insisted upon a surrender, which was accordingly made. They had not forgotten how he had treated their demands for greater liberty, and they expected to be favorably heard by an English government. New Amsterdam, fort and city, as well as the whole province were named by the victors in honor of the new proprietor, the Duke of York; while the region west of the Hudson towards the Delaware, given by the Duke to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, received the name of New Jersey in compliment to the latter’s birthplace. Fort Orange and neighborhood became Albany; the Esopus, Kingston, and all reminiscences of Dutch rule, so far as names went, were extinguished, only to be revived less than a decade later.
Although the treaty of Breda, July 21, 1667, had given to Holland (which by it was robbed of her North American territory) the colony of Surinam, the States took advantage of the war brought on by the ambitious designs of England’s ally, France, against Holland in 1672, to retake New Netherland in 1673. Again the several towns and districts changed their names,—New York to New Orange; Fort James in New York to Willem Hendrick; Albany to Willemstadt, and the fort there to Fort Nassau,—all in honor of the Prince of Orange. Kingston was called Swanenburg; and New Jersey, Achter Col (behind the Col). During the first few months after the reconquest the province was governed by the naval commanders and the governor, Anthony Colve, appointed by the States-General. The passionate character of the new governor may have induced the commanders to remain until matters were satisfactorily arranged under the new order of things. The different towns and villages were required to send delegates to New Orange with authority and for the purpose of acknowledging their allegiance to the States-General of Holland. All submitted promptly, with the exception of the five towns of the East Riding of Yorkshire on Long Island, which, however, upon a threat of using force if they would not come with their English colors and constables’ staves, also declared their willingness to take the oath of allegiance. A claim upon Long Island, petitions from three of its eastern towns to New England for “protection and government against the Dutch,” and an arrogant attempt made by Governor Winthrop of New Haven to lecture Colve, forced the latter into an attitude of war, which resulted in a bloodless rencontre between the Dutch and the English from Connecticut at Southold, Long Island, in March, 1674. “Provisional Instructions” for the government of the province, drawn up by Colve, estranged and annoyed its English[409] inhabitants, who were declared ineligible for any office if not in communion with the Reformed Protestant Church, in conformity with the Synod of Dort. Therefore, when, after the failure of receiving reinforcements from home, New Netherland was re-surrendered to England (February, 1674), the States-General being obliged to take this step by the necessity of making European alliances, the English portion of the population were glad to greet (November, 1674) again a government of their own nationality, and the Dutch had to submit with the best possible grace.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
OUR sources for the history of New Netherland are principally the official records of the time, which must be considered under two heads: the records of the governments in Europe which directly or indirectly were interested in this part of the world; and the documents of the provincial government, handed down from secretary to secretary, and now carefully preserved in the archives of the State of New York. Of the former we have copies, the procuring of which by the State was one of the epoch-making events in the annals of historiography. A society, formed in 1804[786] in the city of New York for the principal purpose of “collecting and preserving whatever may relate to the natural, civil, or ecclesiastical history of the United States in general and the State of New York in particular,” having memorialized the State Legislature on the subject, a translation was ordered and made of the Dutch records in the office of the Secretary of State. This translation—of which more hereafter—undoubtedly threw light upon the historical value and importance of the State archives, but proved also their incompleteness; and another memorial by the same society induced the Legislature of 1839 to authorize the appointment of an agent who should procure from the archives of Europe the material to fill the gaps. Mr. John Romeyn Brodhead, who by a residence of two years at the Hague as Secretary of the American Legation seemed to be specially fitted for, and was already to some extent familiar with, the duties expected from him, was appointed such an agent in 1841, and after four years of diligent search and labor returned with eighty volumes of manuscript copies of documents procured in Holland, France, and England, which were published under his own and Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan’s supervision[787] as Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, eleven volumes quarto, including index volume. The[410] historical value of these documents, which the State procured at an expense of about fourteen thousand dollars, can not be estimated too highly. When made accessible to the public, they removed the reproach that “New York was probably the only commonwealth whose founders had been covered with ridicule” by one of her sons, by showing that the endurance, courage, and love of liberty evinced by her first settlers deserved a better monument than Knickerbocker’s History of New York.[788] Mr. Brodhead was unfortunately too late by twenty years to obtain copies of the records of the East and West India companies; for what would have proved a rich mine of historical information had been sold as waste paper at public auction in 1821. These lost records would have told us what the Dutch of 1608-1609 knew of our continent; how Hudson came to look for a northwest passage under the fortieth degree of north latitude; and how, where, and when the first settlements were made on the Hudson and Delaware,—information which they certainly must have contained, for the States-General referred the English ambassador, in a letter of Dec. 30, 1664, to the “very perfect registers, relations, and journals of the West India Company, provided with all the requisite verifications respecting everything that ever occurred in those countries” (New Netherland). We cannot glean this information from the records of the provincial government, consisting of the register of the provincial secretary, the minutes of council, letter-books, and land papers, for they begin only in 1638, a few land patents of 1630, 1631, and 1636 excepted. Even what we have of these is not complete, all letters prior to 1646 and council minutes for nearly four years having been lost. Where these missing parts may have strayed, it is hard to say. Article 12 of the “Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland, subscribed at the Governor’s Bouwery, August 27, O. S., 1664,” insured the careful preservation of the archives of the Dutch government by the English conquerors. In June, 1688, they were still in the Secretary’s office at New York; a few months later “Edward Randolph, then Secretary of ye Dominion of New England, carried away [to Boston] ye severall Bookes before Exprest,” says a Report of commissioners appointed by the Committee of Safety of New York to examine the books, etc., in the Secretary’s office, dated Sept. 23, 1689. Why he carried them off, the minutes of the proceedings against Leisler would probably disclose, if found. They remained in Boston until 1691, when Governor Sloughter, of New York, had them brought back. Comparing the inventory of June, 1688 (which states that there were found in “Presse no. 3 a parcell of old Dutch Records and[411] bundles of Papers, all Being marked and numbred as yey Lay now in the said presse,”[789] which, to judge from the number of books in the other presses, must have been large) with an inventory and examination of the Dutch records made in June, 1753, under the supervision of the commissioners appointed by an act of the General Assembly to examine the eastern boundaries of the province, I come to the conclusion that the missing Dutch and English records were lost either in their wanderings between New York and Boston, or during the brief Dutch interregnum of 1673-74,[790] or perhaps in the fire which consumed Fort George in New York on the 18th of April, 1741, although Governor Clarke informs the Board of Trade that “most of the records were saved and I hope very few lost, for I took all the possible care of them, and had all removed before the office took fire.”
The inventory of 1753 shows that up to the present day nothing has since been lost, with the exception of a missing account-book and of some things which time has made illegible and of others which the knife of the autograph-hunter has cut out. It is difficult to say how much has gone through the latter unscrupulous method into the hands of private parties. The catalogues of collections of autographs sold at auction occasionally show papers which seem to have belonged to the State archives, but it is impossible to prove that they came thence. An examination, hurriedly made a few years ago, of the 103 volumes of Colonial Manuscripts of New York, showed that about three hundred documents had been stolen since Dr. O’Callaghan published in 1866 the Calendar[791] of these manuscripts. The then Secretary of State, Mr. John Bigelow, published the list of missing documents, calling upon the parties in possession of any of them to return the property of the State; and a month later he had the gratification of receiving a package containing about sixty, of which, however, only twenty were mentioned in the published list, while the loss of the others had not then been discovered. A thorough examination would probably bring the number of missing or mutilated papers to nearly one thousand. It is equally remarkable and fortunate, that during the war of the Revolution the records became an object of solicitude both to the royal Governor and the Provincial Congress.
The latter, fearing that the destruction of the records would “unhinge the property of numbers in the colony, and throw all legal proceedings into the most fatal confusion,” requested, Sept. 2, 1775, Secretary Bayard, whose ancestor, Nicolas Bayard, also had them in charge when the English retook New York in 1674, to deposit them in some safe place. Bayard, struggling between his duties as a royal officer and his sympathies as a born American, hesitated to take the papers in his charge from the place appointed for their keeping, but packed them nevertheless in boxes to be ready for immediate removal. Sears’s coup de main in November, 1775, and the intimation that he intended speedily to return with a larger body of “Connecticut Rioters” to take away the records of the province, induced Governor Tryon to remove “such public records as were most interesting to the Crown” on board of the “Dutchess of Gordon” man-of-war, to which he himself had fled for safety. When called upon, Feb. 7, 1776, by order of the Provincial Congress, to surrender them, he offered to place them on board a vessel, specially to be chartered for that purpose, which was to remain in the harbor. He pledged his honor that they should not be injured by the King’s forces, but refused to land them anywhere, because they could not be taken to a place safer than where they were. “Shortly afterwards,” he writes to Lord Germain in March, 1779, “the public records were for greater security (the Rebels threatening to board in the night and take the vessel) put on board the ‘Asia,’ under the care of Captain Vandeput. The ‘Asia’ being ordered home soon after the taking of New[412] York, Captain Vandeput desired me to inform him what he should do with the two boxes of public records. I recommended them to be placed on board the ‘Eagle’ man-of-war.” The records not “most interesting to the Crown” (most likely including the Dutch records) were taken with Secretary Bayard to his father’s house in the “Out Ward of New York,” where a detachment of forty-eight men of the First New York City Regiment, later of Captain Alexander Hamilton’s Artillery Company, was detailed to guard them. In June of the same year, 1776, they were removed to the seat of government at Kingston, N. Y. Almost a year later two hundred men were raised for the special duty of guarding them, and when the enemy approached Kingston this body conveyed them to a small place in the interior (Rochester, Ulster County), whence they were returned to Kingston in November, 1777. From that date they followed the legislature and executive offices to New York in 1783, and finally in 1798 to Albany, where they have since remained. In New York the records which were carried off by Governor Tryon, and had been in the mean time transferred from the “Eagle” to the “Warwick” man-of-war and then returned to the city in 1781, were again placed with the others. At the instance of the New York Historical Society, the Dutch part of the State records were ordered to be translated; and this duty was entrusted by Governor De Witt Clinton to Dr. Francis A. van der Kemp, a learned Hollander, whom the political dissensions in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century had driven from his home. Unfortunately, Dr. van der Kemp’s knowledge of the English tongue was not quite equal to the task; nor was his eyesight, as he himself confesses in a marginal note to a passage dimmed by age, strong enough to decipher such papers as had suffered from the ravages of time and become almost illegible. This translation, completed in 1822, is therefore in many instances incorrect and incomplete; grave mistakes have been the consequence, much to the annoyance of historical students. Some of the errors were corrected by Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan, who published in 1849-54, under the authority of the State, four volumes of Documents relating to the History of the Colony (1604-1799), selected at random from the copies procured abroad, from the State archives, and from other sources. In 1876 the Hon. John Bigelow, Secretary of State, directed the writer of this paper to translate and prepare a volume of documents relating to the Delaware colony, which was published in 1877; another volume, containing the records of the early settlements in the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys, translated by the writer, followed in 1881; this year will see a third, on the settlements on Long Island; and a fourth, to be published later, will contain the documents relating to New York city and the relations between the Dutch and the neighboring English colonies. These four volumes contain everything of a general and public interest, so that the parts not translated anew will refer only to personal matters.
These being the official sources of information for the history of New Netherland, it is proper to inquire whether they are trustworthy beyond doubt. The charge made by Robert Thorne, of Bristol, in 1527[792] against the “Portingals,” of having “falsified their records of late purposely,” might be repeated against the Dutch wherever the claim of first discovery of the country is discussed.
I have already stated that one of the motives, and perhaps the principal one, for establishing the West India Company was of a political nature. The destruction of Spain’s financial resources was to lead to an honorable and satisfactory peace with Holland. Spain relied for the sinews of war on its American colonies; and we must inquire how much of the information relating to location and extent of these colonies had reached the Dutch notwithstanding the Spanish efforts to suppress it.
Hakluyt says:[793] “The first discovery of these coasts (never heard of before) was well begun by John Cabot and Sebastian his son, who were the first finders out of all that great tract of land stretching from the Cape of Florida unto those Islands which we now call the Newfoundland, or which they brought and annexed to the Crown of England [1497].”
RIBERO’S MAP, 1529.
[This is a section of the Carta Universal of the Spanish cosmographer, Diego Ribero. It needs the following key:—
1. R. de St. iago.
2. C. de Arenas (Sandy Cape).
3. B. de S. Χρō-al.
4. B. de S. Atonio.
5. Mōtana Vde.
6. R. de buena madre.
7. S. Juā Baptista.
8. Arciepielago de Estevā Gomez.
9. Mōtanas.
10. C. de muchas yllas.
11. Arecifes (reefs).
12. Medanos (sand-hills).
13. Golfo.
14. R. de M[=o]tanas.
15. Sarçales (brambles).
16. R. de la Buelta (river of return).
A. “Tiera de Estevā Gomez, la qual descrubrio por mandado de su magt el año de 1525: ay en ella muchos arboles y fructas de los de españa y muchos rodovallos y Salmones y sollos: no han alla do oro.”
The map, which is described more fully in another volume, has been the theme of much controversy, it being usually held to be the result of Gomez’s explorations; but this is denied by Stevens. References upon it by the Editor will be found in the Ticknor Catalogue, published by the Boston Public Library. It is of interest in the present connection as being one of the current charts of the coast, though made eighty years earlier, which Hudson could and did take with him. How he interpreted it is not known. In our day there is much diverse opinion upon its points. Mr. Murphy, for instance, in his Voyage of Verrazzano, puts the Hudson River at 5, and Cape Cod at 10. Sprengel, who published a memoir on this map in 1795, thought Hudson’s river was the one between 10 and 11. Asher, in his Henry Hudson, p. xciii, takes the same view. Kohl, in his Discovery of Maine, p. 304, and in his Die beiden ältesten General-Karten von America, p. 43, makes the river between 10 and 11 the Penobscot, and the hook near 2 Cape Cod, though he acknowledges some objections to this interpretation of the latter landmark, because the names between 2 and 8 are those that in later maps are given to the New Netherland coast. It seems to the Editor, however, as it does to Kohl, that Ribero had fallen into a confusion of misplacing names, common to early map-makers, and that we cannot keep the names right and accept the strange geographical correspondences which, for instance, Dr. De Costa imposes on the map in his Verrazano the Explorer, when he makes the hook near 2 to be Sandy Hook, at New York Bay, and the bay between 10 and 11 the Penobscot, which he thinks “clearly defined,” while “Ribero gives no hint of the region now embraced by Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.” It is difficult to accept Dr. De Costa’s “wildly exaggerated” Sandy Hook, or his notion of “Dr. Kohl’s confusion” in regarding the great gulf of these early maps, shown between 2 and 10, as the Gulf of Maine. With all the difficulties attending Kohl’s interpretation, it presents fewer anomalies than any other. There is so much uncertainty at the best in the interpretation of these early maps, that any understanding is subject to change from the developments now making in the study of this early cartography.—Ed.]
I will not assert that the Cabots actually saw and explored the whole coast from Florida to Newfoundland, but they must have brought away the impression that the land seen by them was a continent, and that no passage to the East Indies could be found in these latitudes, but should be looked for farther north. A map in the collection of the General Staff of the Army at Munich;[794] supposed to have been made by Salvatore de Pilestrina about 1517, shows that the cartographers of[414] that period had accepted this Cabot theory as a fact. The voyage of Esteban Gomez in 1524, sent out “to find a way to Cathay” between Florida and the Baccalaos,[795] resulted only in discovering “mucha tierra, continuada con la que se llama de los Baccalaos, discurriendo al Occidente y puesta en XL. grados y XLI.”[796]
The next voyage along the coast of North America, made in 1526 by Lucas Vasquez de Aillon and Matienzo, must be considered of importance for the cartography of the first half of the sixteenth century; for their discoveries, although of no direct benefit to them or to Spain, proved to Spanish map-makers and their imitators that North America was not, like the West Indies, an archipelago of islands, but a continent. Even though Ramusio, in the preface to vol. iii. of his work, published in 1556, declares it is not yet known whether New France is connected with Florida or is an island, the maps made shortly after Aillon’s voyage[797] show that the cartographers had decided the matter in their minds.
This knowledge was not confined to the map-makers and officials, who might have been forbidden to divulge such information. A contemporary writer says, in 1575:—
“La forme donc de la Floride est en peninsule et come triangulaire, ayant la mer qui la baigne de tous costez sauf vers le Septentrion.... Au Septentrion luy sont Hochelaga [Canada] et autres terres.... Or ce pays Floridien commence à la grande rivière, que les mondernes ont appelé de St. Jean [Cape Fear River?], qui le separe du pays de Norumbeg en la nouvelle France.”[798]
And I refer further to the divers Descriptiones Ptolemaicæ[799] published during the sixteenth century,—books accessible to the public of that day, and most likely known to and read by every navigator of the Atlantic.
To bring this information still nearer home to Henry Hudson, I mention the map made by Thomas Hood, an Englishman, in 1592,[800] and the work of Peter Plancius, published in 1594.[801] Hudson, an English navigator, could hardly have been ignorant of his countryman’s production, which shows under 40° north latitude the mouth of a river called Rio de San Antonio, the name given to Hudson’s River by the earlier Spanish discoverers. Before starting on his voyage in the “Half Moon,” Hudson had been in consultation with Dr. Peter Plancius, who adds to his chapter on “Norumberga et Virginia” a map, incorrect, it is true, as to latitudes and other details, but nevertheless showing an unbroken coast-line.
DUTCH VESSELS, 1618.
This cut is a fac-simile of one in the title of Schouten’s Journal, Amsterdam, 1618. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 87.
When, therefore, it is stated that Hudson abandoned the plan of seeking for a northeast passage, in the hope of finding, under 40° north latitude, a passage to the Western Ocean, as advised by his friends Captain John Smith, of Virginia, and Dr. Plancius, we are asked to accept as true a statement made and spread about for political purposes. These will be understood when we recall the motives for the establishment of the West India Company,—a project in which Plancius, a minister of the Reformed Church, and as such driven from his Belgian home by the Spaniards, gave his hearty and active co-operation to Usselinx. International law gave possession for his sovereign to any one who discovered a new land not formerly claimed by any Christian prince or inhabited by any Christian nation. To have a base for their operations in America against Spain, Holland required territory not so claimed, and the shrewd projectors undoubtedly deemed it most advisable to establish this base not only in an unclaimed but also in a hitherto unknown country. Therefore it was necessary to claim for Hudson the discovery of the river bearing his name, as the West India Company did in 1634,[802] although a few years before, in 1632, they had admitted by inference[803] that Hudson’s River was known to other nations under the name of Rio de Montañas, and of Rio de Montaigne, before Hudson saw it.[804] In the following decade the statement of 1634 was forgotten, and the company in 1644 claimed title by the first discovery of the Hudson and Delaware rivers, through ships of the Greenland Company in 1598.[805] Still later, in 1659, by the mouth of their diplomatic agents in Maryland and Virginia, it is asserted that Holland derived its title to New Netherland through Spain as “first discoverer and founder of that New World,” and through the French, who, by one Jehan de Verrazano[806] a Florentine, were in 1524 the second followers and discoverers in the northern parts of America.[807] Falsification in politics was evidently then, as it is now, a venial sin; the statements made for political purposes, although emanating from official sources, must, therefore, be accepted with due caution.[808]
As the history of New Netherland is closely connected with that of the West India Company, and as the West India Company was one of the great political factors in the United Provinces, the Dutch State-Papers[809] and the writings of contemporaneous authors[810] must be duly considered by the student of this period of our history.
Most prominent among contemporaneous writers is Willem Usselinx, the originator of the Dutch West India and Swedish South Companies, even though his writings have not always a direct bearing upon the history of New Netherland. We know little of the life of this remarkable man, beyond the facts that he was a native of Belgium and a merchant at Antwerp, whom the political and religious troubles of the period had compelled to leave his fatherland and to seek refuge in Holland; that, inspired by hatred against Spain, he conceived the plan of the West India Company; that for some unexplained reason the West India Company lost his services, which were then, about 1626, offered to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the establishment of the South Company.[811] As Usselinx chiefly wrote before the West India Company was organized, and as its advocate, his books and pamphlets, instead of being historical, are of a more or less polemical character. He never forgets what he had to suffer through Spain, and points out constantly how important to Holland is the commerce of the West Indies, and that in their peace negotiations with Spain the States-General must by all means preserve the freedom of trading[417] to America. These writings date from before Hudson’s voyage in 1609, and Usselinx disappears from the list of writers after the publication of the patent granted by Sweden to the South Company in 1627, unless we admit the above-quoted West-Indische Spieghel to be his work. Asher, in his Bibliographical Essay, gives as the latest of his works the Argonautica Gustaviana,[812] and had evidently no knowledge of the Advice to Establish a new South Company, written by Usselinx in 1636.
The next writer to be considered had exceptional facilities in gathering his material. As director of the West India Company, Johannes de Laet[813] had of course ready access to the records, while as co-patroon of Rensselaerswyck he had an especial interest in the country where his daughter and son-in-law[814] had made their home. Two manuscript volumes in folio, written by De Laet himself, and now in the collection of Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, give us an idea of the painstaking diligence with which De Laet collected the matter of the books which he intended to write. These two volumes contain no material relating specially to New Netherland, but he made undoubtedly as extensive preparations for the chapter on the Dutch colony in North America in his Nieuwe Wereld,[815] as he had made for the others, by copying from the most authentic works on the subject, by talking with seafarers returned from the transatlantic colony, and by transcribing letters from private persons residing there. His intention to give to his fellow-citizens as perfect a description of the New World as circumstances would allow, was carefully carried out. It would have been difficult to produce anything better at the time when he wrote; and we must accept this book as the standard work on New Netherland of the seventeenth century, even though he makes in the book, as well as on its accompanying map, a few slight errors; saying, for instance, that “Manhattan Island is separated from the mainland by the Hellgate,” or that “Fort Orange stood [at the time of his writing, 1625] on an island close to the left [western] shore of [Hudson’s] river.”
The title of De Laet’s next work[816] is very[418] misleading, for one would naturally expect to find the history of the first settlement on the soil of New York in all its details;[817] but the name of New Netherland is only mentioned, as it were, by accident. Still the book has its value for the student of the philosophy of American history, for in the preface the author frankly admits that the object of the West India Company was war on Spain, and he congratulates the country upon the successes so far obtained; and he further shows how the Company, organized for warlike purposes, could not give any attention to a country which, under the circumstances, required the utmost care for its profitable development. Considering that De Laet was personally interested in New Netherland as co-patroon of Rensselaerswyck and through the marriage of his daughter to an inhabitant of the province, it is astonishing to find so little said by him of the actual occurrences there. It may be that reasons of policy and prudence restrained him from baring to the public eye many things for which the Company could be called to account. The new race, however, with which his countrymen had come in contact, had sufficiently excited his interest to induce him to study their habits and speculate upon their origin, so that when the learned Grotius published a treatise on the American Indians,[818] De Laet rushed into the field combating Grotius’s theories.
While De Laet reports the events in New Netherland up to a given date as a member of the Government saw them, we have two authors before whose eyes some of these events took place, and who in writing about them criticise them in the manner of subjects and citizens. To the first of these, David Pietersen de Vries, Artillerie-Meester van d’ Noorder Quartier, Mr. Bancroft gives the credit of being the founder of the State of Delaware.[819] How far the abortive attempt of establishing the colony of Zwanendael, mentioned in the narrative, and the voyage bringing over the colonists may be called “the cradling of a state,” I leave others to decide. De Vries published in 1655 an account of his voyages[820] made twenty years before, and tells us in his book, in the most[419] unvarnished manner and with the bluntness of a sailor, how badly New Netherland was being governed under the administration of Minuit and Van Twiller. No doubt as to the veracity of his statements can be entertained, as in his case there could be no motive for “divagation.” He views the loss of his Delaware colony with the proverbial equanimity both of a Dutchman and of a sailor, and stands so far above the coarseness of manners and life in his time, that he considers officials addicted to drink not much better than criminals. Where he speaks of matters not seen by himself, and of the Indians and their mode of life, he follows closely the best authority to be found; namely, the work of Domine Johannis Megapolensis.
The other author, Jonker[821] Adrian van der Donck, Doctor of Laws and Advocate of the Supreme Court of Holland, has done more to give to his contemporaries a full knowledge of the country of his adoption, and to implant in the country itself better institutions, than any other man. Sent over in 1642 as Schout (sheriff) of the Patroons’ Colony of Rensselaerswyck, he in 1647 left this service in consequence of a quarrel with the vice-director, and purchased from the Indians the colony of Colen Donck, now Yonkers, for which he received a patent in 1648.[822] A controversy arose about this time between the Government and several colonists, among whom was Van der Donck, which led to a remonstrance being drawn up, to be laid before the States-General for a redress of certain grievances which they had so far failed to obtain either from the provincial governor or the West India Company.[823] It is a contemporaneous relation of events in New Netherland signed by eleven residents of New Amsterdam. Its probable author was Van der Donck; at least his original journal was the source from which this “Remonstrance” was derived. The form in which Governor Stuyvesant seized it[824] is, however, different from the one in which it was published. In the latter it is divided in three parts: 1. A description of the natives and of the physical features of the country; 2. Events connected with the earliest settlements of the country; 3. Remonstrance against the policy of the West India[420] Company. The tone and character of such a document must be necessarily aggressive; but, even though the reply to it by the provincial secretary, Van Tienhoven,[825] denies most of its allegations, it certainly contains valuable and trustworthy information.
Van der Donck’s next work, acknowledged by him as his own,[826] is an improvement on De Laet’s similar description. The time which had elapsed since De Laet’s publication had taught different lessons, and Van der Donck’s personal experience in the country described by him could not fail to give him a better insight than even the best written reports afforded to De Laet. But, with the latter, this author falls into the error of ascribing to the Indians a statement that the Dutch were the first white people seen by them, and that they did not know there were any other people in the world. This assertion is contradicted by the Long Island Indians, who talked with a later traveller, telling him that “the first strangers seen in these parts were Spaniards or Portuguese, who did not remain long, and afterwards the Dutch came.”[827] The so-called “Pompey Stone,” in the State Geological Museum, might be taken for another contradiction of De Laet’s and Van der Donck’s statements. Still more apparently contradictory evidence might be the similarity of some so-called Indian words with words of the Latin tongues.[828] Nor is Van der Donck correct in the relation of the discovery of the country by Hudson, and the map accompanying his work has several grave errors. The description of the physical features of the country, of the animals, and of the Indians is followed by a discourse between a patriot and a New Netherlander on the conveniences of the new colony, in which the questions are asked and answered, whether it is to the advantage of Holland to have such a flourishing colony, and whether this colony will ever be able to defend itself against foreign enemies.
Another resident of New Netherland, the Reverend Johannis Megapolensis (van Mekelenburg), one of the few educated men who came to this country at that early date, has given us a book which, though not strictly referring to the history of the country, must yet be considered as one of the collateral sources, and finds its most appropriate place here, following the Descriptions. As minister of the Reformed Church at Rensselaerswyck, whither he was called by the patroon in 1642, he came soon in close contact with the Indians; and having learned the difficult Mohawk language, he became, several years earlier than the New England preacher, John Eliot, a missionary among[421] the Indians. The result of his labors was an account of the Mohawks, their country, etc.[829] This account was closely followed by De Vries, as mentioned above, and by most of the other writers on the Indians.
A large share of the material for this work Megapolensis must have received from Father Jogues, a Jesuit missionary whom the Dominie rescued from captivity among the Mohawks. The letters of this courageous and zealous servant of the Church to his superiors teem with information concerning the Indians, whom he endeavored to Christianize,[830] and at whose hands he died.
Either the financial success of De Laet’s works, whose copyright had in the mean time expired, or else the interest in New Netherland affairs which had been newly aroused by the[422] presentation to, and discussion before, the States-General of the Vertoogh, led to the compilation in 1651[831] of a book on New Netherland by Joost Hartgers, a bookseller of Amsterdam, which is nothing more than a clever arrangement of extracts from De Laet’s Description, second edition, the Vertoogh, and Megapolensis’ Indian treatise. Of much greater importance and value to the historical student is an anonymous publication of 1659, the title of which gives no idea of its real contents. Like most popularly written works of the day discussing topics of public interest, it is in the form of a conversation between a countryman, a citizen, and a sailor, who discuss the deplorable depression of commerce, navigation, trade, and agriculture in Holland, and speculate on the best means to improve this state of affairs.[832] The author speaks of New Netherland matters with a positiveness which puts it beyond a doubt that he had been in that country.[833] Only a few pages are given to the description of New Netherland, but the propositions advanced on colonization, self-government of colonies, free-trade, and slavery are all aimed at the West India Company and its American territories. These propositions are of such a broad and liberal character, that they would do credit to any writer of our more enlightened times. A similar feeling of hostility against the West India Company and New Netherland, both then (1659) in a condition to invite criticism, pervades the work of Otto Keye,[834] who advocates the colonization of Guiana as being more rational and profitable than that of New Netherland. Starting with the argument that a warm climate is preferable to a colder one, on account both of physical comforts and of greater commercial advantages, he gives a description of the two countries, the bias being of course in favor of Guiana.
The most remarkable of all the contemporary Dutch books appeared also anonymously in 1662.[835] The description of the country given in this work adds nothing new to our store[423] of information, and the book itself has therefore been ranked by American historians with such compilations as the works of Montanus, Melton, and others, who simply reprinted De Laet, Van der Donck, etc. It is, however, of great value, for through it we obtain an insight into the Dutch politics of the day, which had so far-reaching an influence on the history of New Netherland and on its colonization. The fight between the Gomarian (Orangist) and the Arminian[836] (Liberal) parties, which had so long prevented the first organization of the West India Company, had never been settled and was now revived. The De Witts, as leaders of the Arminians, were as much opposed to this organization as Oldenbarnevelt had been. Whether the ulterior loss of New Netherland, to which this opposition finally led, embarrassed them as much as is stated[837] or not, it was certainly at this time (1662) in the programme of the Arminian party to destroy the West India Company, and by reforming the government of New Netherland build up the country. This seems to have been the motive for writing the Kort Verhael, which, according to Asher,[838] was written by a journalist, opposing the third ultra-radical and the Orangist parties, in conjunction with a Mennonist. It will be remembered that in 1656-1657 part of the South River (Delaware) territory had been surrendered, for financial reasons, to the authorities of Amsterdam, and had ceased to be in the jurisdiction of the Governor-General of New Netherland. The plan[839] submitted to the burgomasters in the Requests and Representations, etc., aimed at a further curtailing of the Company’s territory in that region by planting there a colony of Mennonists, with the most liberal self-government, under the supreme jurisdiction of the city of Amsterdam; while the vehemence with which Otto Keye and his work favoring Guiana at the expense of New Netherland are attacked shows that the Anti-Orangists, though bent upon ruining one of the principal factors of the Orange party, were by no means inclined to give up New Netherland as a colony. A work from which copious extracts are given in the Kort Verhael, and called Zeker Nieuw-Nederlants geschrift,—“A Certain New Netherland Writing,”—seems to be lost to us; also a work, Noort Revier,—“North River,”—mentioned by Van der Donck.
The works of Montanus,[840] Melton,[841] and a few others[842] deserve no more mention than[424] by title, as being compilations of extracts from books already referred to; and with these closes the list of such contemporary and almost contemporary Dutch works on New Netherland as are either purely descriptive or both descriptive and historical.
Of the contemporary Dutch works of purely historical character, not one treats of New Netherland alone; but the Dutch historians of the time could not well write of the res gestæ of their nation without referring to what they had done on the other side of the Atlantic. The first of them in point of time, Emanuel van Meteren,[843] gives us in his Historie van de Oorlogen en Geschiedenissen der Nederlanderen,[844] a minute description of the discoveries made by Hudson, and must be specially consulted for the history of the origin of the West India Company. Although credulous to such an extent that the value of his painstaking labors is frequently endangered by the gross errors caused by his credulity, he had no chance of committing mistakes where, as in the case of the West India Company, everything was official. His information regarding Hudson’s voyage of 1609, we may assume, was derived from Hudson himself on his return to England, where Van Meteren lived as merchant and Dutch consul until 1612, the year of his death.
The next Dutch historian whose work is one of our sources, Nicolas Jean de Wassenaer,[845] takes us a step farther; but he too fails to give us much more than a record of the earliest years of the existence of the West India Company. His account of how this Company came to be organized differs somewhat as to the motives from all others.[846]
With the works of Aitzema,[847] Saken van Staat en Oorlogh in ende omtrent de[425] Vereenigde Nederlanden, 1621-1669, and Herstelde Leeuw, 1650,[848] and with Costerus’s Historisch Verhael, 1572-1673, we come to the end of the list of Dutch historians giving us information of the events in New Netherland. But I cannot allow the reader to take leave of these Dutch books without a few words concerning the first book printed which treated of New Netherland. The Breeden Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien ... gemaeckt ende gestelt uijt diverse ... memorien door I. A. G. W. C., Antwerpen, 1649,[849] is neither purely historical nor descriptive, but its polemic character requires such constant allusion both to the events in, and to the geography of, New Netherland, that we must class it among the most important sources for our history. Its authorship is unknown, and has been subject to many surmises.
It may cause astonishment that the writers of Holland, a country then renowned for its learning, should not have thought it worth their while to write a history of their transatlantic colonies. But we must bear in mind, first, that the settlement of New Netherland was neither a governmental nor a popular undertaking; second, that in the beginning the West India Company had no intention of making it a colony, and that the people, who came here under the first governors as the Company’s servants, and also those who later came as freeholders, were hardly educated enough, even if they had not been too busy with their own affairs, to pay much attention to, or write of, public matters. The few educated men were officers of the Company, and did not care to lose their places by speaking with too much frankness of what was going on. Whatever they desired to publish they had to submit to the directors of the Company, and it is not likely that any unpleasant information would have passed the censor. Third, the Company did not desire any information whatever concerning New Netherland, except what they thought fit, to be given to the public,[850]—hence the obstacles which prevented Adrian Van der Donck from writing the history of New Netherland in addition to his Description,[851] and the scanty information which the contemporary historian has to give us.
Subsequent Dutch writers found a good deal to say about the Dutch colonies on the Hudson and Delaware rivers. The most trustworthy among them is Jean Wagenaar,[852] who, beginning life as a merchant’s clerk, felt a strong desire for acquiring fame as an author. He studied languages and history, and at last wholly devoted himself to Dutch history. His Vaderlandsche Historie is held in Holland to be the best historical work written, although his political bias as an opponent of the House of Orange is evident. Wagenaar is, however, more an annalist than a historian. As official historiographer, and later[426] Secretary of the City of Amsterdam, he had free access to the archives; hence his statements are not to be discredited. His account of the circumstances under which Hudson was sent out in 1609 differs materially from all other writers. “The Company,” he says, “sent out a skipper to discover a passage to China by the northwest, not by the northeast.” A resolution of the States of Holland, quoted by Wagenaar, proves that previous to Hudson’s voyage the Dutch knew that they would find terra firma north of the Spanish possessions, and contiguous to them.[853]
The scantiness of information concerning New Netherland in Dutch books explains why we can learn still less from the writings of other nations; for sectional or national feeling caused either a complete silence on colonial affairs, or incorrect and contradictory statements, leading many to rely on hearsay, unsupported by records.
Among the earliest works (not in Dutch) speaking of New Netherland, we have the work of Levinus Hulsius (Hulse), a native of Ghent, distinguished for his learning, and after him his sons, who published, at Nürnberg, Frankfort, and Oppenheim, a Sammlung von 26 Schiffahrten in verschieden fremde Landen,—“Collection of twenty-six Voyages in many Foreign Countries,”—between the years 1598 and 1650; the twelfth part of this work chronicles the attempts of the English and Dutch to discover a passage by way of the North Pole, and includes Hudson’s voyage.[854] The twentieth part refers likewise to voyages to this continent, and specially to our coast. Other German works of this early period can only be mentioned by their title, because for the above reasons they are not sufficiently correct to be considered trustworthy sources of information.[855] Their titles show them to be not much more than “hackwork,” with little value to the contemporary or any later reader. But when we find that a celebrated geographer of the time, Philipp Cluvier (born at Dantzic, 1580, died 1623), omits all mention of the existence of such countries as New England and New Netherland, we can well understand how difficult it must have been to gather material for a universal geography.[856] Later editors of the same work, writing in 1697, had then apparently only just learned that up to 1665 a part of North America was called Novum Belgium. Hardly less ignorant, though he mentions Virginia and Canada in describing the bounds of Florida, is Gottfriedt in his Neuwe Archontologia Cosmica, Frankfort, 1638; yet he too was a distinguished geographer.[857]
Turning to the English, we find a few credible and a great many very fantastic and unreliable writers, treating either specially or incidentally of New Netherland. The first mention of the Dutch on the Hudson is made in a little work, republished in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society,[858] in which it is stated that an English sea-captain,[427] Dermer, “met on his passage [from Virginia to New England] with certain Hollanders who had a trade in Hudson’s River some years before that time (1619).” This is probably the first application of Hudson’s name to the river. In a letter[859] from the same traveller, dated at a plantation in Virginia, December, 1619, he describes his passage through Hellgate and Long Island Sound, but does not say anything about the settlement on Manhattan Island.
This letter of Dermer and the Brief Relation first informed the English that “the Hollanders as interlopers had fallen into ye middle betwixt the plantations” of Virginia and New England.[860] The Description of the Province of New Albion[861] informs us that “Capt. Samuel Argal and Thomas Dale on their return [from Canada in 1613] landed at Manhatas Isle in Hudson’s River, where they found four houses built, and a pretended Dutch governor under the West India Company’s of Amsterdam share or part, who kept trading-boats and trucking with the Indians;” but the official correspondence[862] between the authorities of Virginia and the Home Government proves that Argal and his party never went to New Netherland, although they intended to do so in 1621; for, hearing that the Dutch had settled on the Hudson, a “demurre in their prceding was caused.”[863] The motive for making the above-quoted statement concerning Argal’s visit in 1613 is apparent. The imposing pseudonym under which the Description of New Albion appeared was probably assumed by Sir Edmund Ploeyden (Plowden), to whom in 1634 Lord Strafford, then viceroy of Ireland, had granted the patent of New Albion[864] covering the Dutch possession, and who therefore had an obvious interest adverse to the Dutch title. Its publication at the time, when the right of the Dutch to the country was being discussed between England and the States-General of Holland, was intended to influence the British mind. It contains a queer jumble of fact and fancy, and it is not necessary to say more about its claims to be an historical authority than has already been published in the Memoirs of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.[865]
Considering that, according to Van der Donck, Sir Edmund Ploeyden had been in New Netherland several times, it seems almost incredible that he should have made such astonishing statements, if he was the author of the book. A perusal of a work published a few years previous to the Description of New Albion would have set him right, at least so far as the geography of the country was concerned.[866] The author of the Short Discovery has very correct notions of the hydrography of New Netherland, acquired apparently[428] by the study of Dutch maps; but the distances and degrees of latitude are as great a puzzle to him as to many other geographers and seamen of that day. As he wrote before the Dutch title to New Netherland was disputed, he is of course silent concerning the English claims to the territory.
The historian writing of New Netherland to-day has the advantage of being able to consult the journal of a governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, who took an active part in the occurrences which he describes.[867] Although it does not cover the whole of the Dutch period of New York, and his puritanical bias is occasionally evident, we have no more reliable source for the history of the relations between the colonies.
The few historical data given in the next book to be considered[868] are of interest, as the author endeavors to “assert the rights of the English nation in vouching the legal interest of England in right of the first discovery or premier seizure to Novum Belgium.” They show, however, also how in so short a period as a man’s life even contemporary history can be distorted. According to Heylin, who takes Sir Samuel Argal as his source, Hudson had been commissioned by King James I. to make the voyage of 1609, and after making his discoveries sold his maps and charts to the Dutch. The Dutch were willing to surrender their claims to Sir Edmund Ploeyden, he says, for £2,500, but took advantage of the troubles in England, and, instead of surrendering, armed the Indians to help them in resisting any English attempt to reduce New Netherland. Leaving aside Plantagenet’s New Albion, we meet here, in a work which the author’s high reputation must immediately have placed among the standard works of the day, a most startling falsification of facts and events which had occurred during the lifetime of the author. It is impossible to account for it, even if we suppose that these statements were made for political effect; for the men who read Heylin’s book had also read the correct accounts of Hudson’s voyages, and knew that Heylin’s statements were false. The learned prelate is only little less at fault in his geographical account. Although he tells us that Hudson gave his name to one of the rivers, he mentions as the two principal ones only the Manhates or Nassau or Noort and the South rivers, being evidently in doubt which is the Hudson. Heylin had studied geography better than his contemporary Robert Fage, who published about the same time A Description of the whole World, London, 1658, but he is utterly silent as to New Netherland. In 1667, when he published his Cosmography, or a Description of the whole World, represented by a more exact and certain Discovery, he had learned that “to the Southwest of New England lyeth the Dutch plantation; it hath good ground and good air, but few of that Nation are inhabiting there, which makes that there are few plantations in the land, they chiefly intending their East India trade, and but one village, whose inhabitants are[429] part English, part Dutch. Here hath been no news on any matter of war or state since the first settlement. There is the Port Orange, thirty miles up Hudson’s River,” etc. This was written three years after New Netherland had become an English colony, when New York city numbered almost two thousand inhabitants, and some ten or twelve villages were flourishing on Long Island.
The best description, or rather the most ample, written by an Englishman, is that of John Josselyn, who published his observations made during two voyages to New England in 1638-1639 and 1663-1671.[869] Although he had been in the country, his notions concerning it are somewhat crude. New England, under which name he includes New Netherland, is thought to be an island formed by the “spacious” river of Canada, the Hudson, two great lakes “not far off one another,” where the two rivers have their rise, and the ocean. His account of the Indians, of their mode of living and warfare, is highly amusing, and at the same time instructive, although no philologist would probably accept as correct his statement that the Mohawk language was a dialect of the Tartar. Nor would the botanist place implicit faith in the statement that in New England barley degenerated frequently into oats; and the zoölogist would be astonished to learn of “frogs sitting upon their breeches one foot high.” His credulity has led this eccentric raconteur into describing many similar wonderful details; but his work is nevertheless of value, as giving, I believe, the first complete description of the fauna and flora of the Middle Atlantic and New England States. In some of his historical data he follows Plantagenet, probably at second-hand through Heylin, and is so far without credit.
Religion, which had already done so much to increase the population of the colony on the Hudson, was to cause a new invasion by the Dutch into their old possessions. While Arminians and Gomarists, Cocceians and Vœtians, were continuing the religious strife in Holland, a new sect, the Labadists, sprang up. The intolerance with which they were treated compelled their leaders to look out for a country where they might exercise their religion with perfect freedom. An attempt at colonization in Surinam, ceded to Holland by England in the Treaty of Breda, 1667, having failed, they turned their eyes upon New York, then under English rule, and in 1679 sent two of their most prominent men—Jasper Danckers and Peter Sluyter—across the ocean to explore and report. The account of their travels was procured, translated, and published by Mr. Henry C. Murphy in the Collections of the Long Island Historical Society.[870] It tells in simple language, showing frequently their religious bias, what the travellers saw and heard. The drawings with which they illustrated their journal give us a vivid picture of New York two hundred years ago. As they talked with many of the men who had been prominent in Dutch times, their account of historical events acquires special interest. The tradition then current at Albany, that the ruins of a fort on Castle Island indicated the place where Spaniards had made a settlement before the Dutch, is discredited by them; but the discovery of the so-called Pompey Stone, an evident Spanish relic, at not too great a distance from the Hudson River, makes it desirable that this tradition should receive special investigation. It is true the Indians in Van der Donck’s time who were old enough to recollect when the Dutch first came, declared that they were the first white men whom they saw;[871] but their descendants told these travellers “that the first strangers seen in these parts were Spaniards or Portuguese; but they did not remain long, and afterwards the Dutch came.” The Spaniards under Licenciado d’ Aillon had made landings and[430] explored the country south and east of New York, and may not one of their exploring parties have come to Albany and fortified themselves?
While Aitzema gives us, in his Saken van Staat, the Dutch side of the public affairs in the seventeenth century, Thurloe,[872] in his Collection of State Papers, uncovers English statesmanship and diplomacy. His official position as secretary to the Council of State under Charles I., and afterwards to the Protector and his son, gave him a thorough insight into the workings of the public machinery, and makes his selection of papers extremely valuable. Among them will be found a document of the year 1656 on the English rights to New Netherland, which is highly interesting. I can refer only by title to other works of the seventeenth century speaking of New Netherland, as they are only either more or less embellished and incorrect repetitions of former accounts, or because they are beyond my reach.[873]
Skipping over a century, we come to the work of a native of New York, the History of the Province of New York from its first Discovery to the Year 1732, by William Smith, Jr. Considering that it was written and published before the author had reached his thirtieth year,[874] and that he had to gather his information from the then rare and scanty libraries of America and the official records of the province, the work reflects no small credit on its author. For the discovery by Hudson, he follows the accepted version,—that Hudson in 1608, under a commission from King James I., first landed on Long Island, etc., and afterward sold the country, or rather his rights, to the Dutch. Smith’s knowledge of law should have prevented his repeating this statement, for he ought to have been aware that Hudson could not have had any individual claim to the country discovered by him. Another statement, repeated by Smith on the authority of elder writers,—namely, that James I. had conceded to the Dutch in 1620 the right to use Staten Island as a watering-place for their ships going to and coming from Brazil,—a careful perusal of the correspondence between the authorities of New Netherland and the Directors of the West India Company, then within easy reach, would have told him to be untrue or incorrect. If there were any truth in this statement, for which I have not found the slightest foundation, it would only prove that, with their usual tenacity of purpose, the Dutch, having once determined to settle on Manhattan’s Island, could not be deterred from carrying out their project. Although admitting that, in the long run, it would have been impossible for the Dutch to preserve their colony against the increasing strength of their English neighbors, he condemns the treachery with which New Netherland was wrested[431] from the Dutch. It is to be regretted that with so many official Dutch documents as Smith found in the office of the secretary, he did not write the history of the Dutch period of the province with more detail, and that he studied those which he consulted with hardly sufficient care.
Before a proper interest in the history of New York had been reawakened after the exciting times of the Revolution and of 1812, it revived in the European cradle of New York to such an extent as to bring forth a valuable contribution to our historical sources from the pen of the learned Chevalier Lambrechtsen.[875] Its value consists principally in the fact that the author had access to the papers of the West India Company, since lost, and that it instigated research and called attention to the history of their State among New Yorkers, several of whom now set to work writing histories.[876] Not one of them is of great value now, the documents procured in the archives of Europe having thrown more and frequently a different light on many facts. Many statements are given as based on tradition, others are absolutely incorrect,[877] and none tell us anything about New Netherland that we have not already read in De Laet, Van der Donck, and other older writers.
To the anti-rent troubles in this State and to the researches into the rights of the patroons arising from them, we are indebted to the best work on New Netherland which has yet been written. Chancellor Kent’s assertion, that the Dutch annals were of a tame and pacific character and generally dry and uninteresting,[878] had deterred many from their study. Now it became an absolute necessity to discover what privileges had been held by the patroons under the Dutch government, and, upon examining the records, Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan was amazed to find a vast amount of historical material secluded from the English student by an unknown language. The writing of a history of that period, which had been a dark page for so long a time, immediately suggested itself; and as about the same time the papers relating to New York, which the State had procured abroad, were sent home by Mr. Brodhead, the agent of the State, the plan was carried into effect, and the History of New Netherland, or New York under the Dutch, by E. B. O’Callaghan, New York, 1846, vol. ii. 1850, made its appearance.[879]
It is perhaps beyond the possibilities of the human mind to write history, not simply annals, from a thoroughly objective point of view; but the historian must try to suppress his individuality as far as he can, or at least to criticise only the events of a remote period from the standpoint of that period, and not from his own, which is more modern and advanced. Dr. O’Callaghan followed no philosophy of history. He tried to suppress his individuality as Irishman, Canadian revolutionist, and devout Romanist; but occasionally it was stronger than his will, and impaired the objectivity and fairness of his judgment. Yet the descendants of the settlers of New Netherland owe to him a greater debt than to any of their own race, for he, first of any historian, has shown us the colony in its origin—the steadiness, sturdiness, and industry of the colonists, who were men as religious as the New England Puritans, but more tolerant towards adherents of other creeds. Notwithstanding this historian’s desire to be accurate in his statements, his unqualified reliance upon previous writers has on several occasions led him into errors, the gravest of which is perhaps the repetition of Plantagenet’s story of Argal’s invasion. I have tried to show above that the English documents disprove this statement, which O’Callaghan repeats on the authority of Heylin.
J. Romeyn Brodhead, the collaborator of Dr. O’Callaghan in editing the documents procured for the State by his agency, was the next to enter the field as a writer on the history of New York. While Dr. O’Callaghan in a few instances allows his inborn prejudices to make him criticise the actions of the Dutch too harshly, and without due allowance for the times and circumstances, Mr. Brodhead, a descendant both of Dutch and English early settlers, fails on the other side, and becomes too lenient. Generally, however, his History of New York is written with great independence of judgment and with thorough criticism of the authorities. It is to be regretted that death prevented the completion of the work, which does not go farther than 1691; but what Mr. Brodhead has given us must, for its completeness and accuracy of research, and for the genuine historical acumen displayed in it, rank as a standard work and a classical authority on the subject.[880]
There are many additional works to be consulted by those who desire reliable information on the early history of New York,—the more general histories (like Bancroft’s, chap. xv.), monographs,[881] and local histories, the Transactions of the various historical societies of the State, etc.; but the passing of them in review has been in some degree relegated to notes.
When the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras said that man was born to contemplate the heavens, the sun, and the moon, he might have added also the earth and its formation in all its details, and enjoined on his disciples the necessity of representing the result of such contemplations by maps and charts. We require a map fully to understand the geography and chorography of a country; hence a study of the maps made by contemporaneous makers becomes the duty of the writer of New Netherland history. I have already stated that the coast of New York and the neighboring districts were known to Europeans almost a century before Hudson ascended the “Great River of the North,” and that this knowledge is proved by various maps made in the course of the sixteenth century. Nearly all of them place the mouth of a river between the fortieth and forty-first degrees of latitude, or what should be this latitude, but which imperfect instruments have placed farther north.[433] The configuration of the coast-line shows that they meant the mouth of the Hudson. Only one, however, of these sixteenth-century maps, made by Vaz Dourado at Lisbon, in 1571, gives the Hudson River in its almost entire course, from the mountains to the bay. A copy of this map, made in 1580, which found its way to Munich, was probably seen by Peter Plancius, who induced Hudson to explore that region of the New World, so little known to Europeans at that time. Although Vaz Dourado’s map enlightens us so very little, I mention it because his map must lead to the investigation of the question whether the Dutch under Hudson were the first to navigate the river.
FROM THE FIGURATIVE MAP, 1616.
[Brodhead’s statements regarding the finding of this map are in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1845, p. 185; compare also his New York, i. 757. The original parchment map measured 2 × 2 feet, and showed the country from Egg Harbor, in New Jersey, to the Penobscot, 40° to 45°. The paper map covered the territory from below the Delaware Capes to above Albany, and is three feet long. The original is in colors, which are preserved in the chromolithograph of it issued at the Hague in 1850 or thereabout. (Asher’s List, no. 1; Muller’s 1877 Catalogue, no. 2,270.) There is a reduction of it in Cassell’s United States, i. 247.—Ed.]
The oldest map of the territory now comprising the States of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, and known as “The Figurative Map,” was found by Mr. Brodhead in the[434] archives at the Hague. It is on parchment, and is beautifully executed. A fac-simile copy, taken by Mr. Brodhead, was deposited in the State Library at Albany, and reproductions have been published in the New York Colonial Documents, vol. i., also in Dr. O’Callaghan’s History of New Netherland. It purports to have been submitted to the States-General of Holland in 1616, with an application for a charter to trade to New Netherland, but it was probably produced then a second time, having done duty before on a similar occasion in 1614, with a map exhibiting the Delaware region on a larger scale. This 1614 map was on paper, and was found by Mr. Brodhead in the same place, and may be seen in similar reproductions, accompanying those of the 1616 map. Who the draughtsman of either was, is unknown. An inscription on the latter refers to draughts formerly made, which were consulted, and to the report of some men, who had probably been the Dutchmen captured by the Mohawks and mentioned in Captain Hendricksen’s report (New York Colonial Documents, i. 13). De Laet seems to have had these maps before him when he wrote his Novus Orbis, and to have constructed the map accompanying his work from these two. Notwithstanding the great care and detail exhibited in them, they are necessarily inaccurate, but highly interesting and instructive, as they indicate the location of the several Indian tribes at the time of the arrival of the Dutch and of the Spaniards before them. The names given on these maps to some of the Indian tribes are so unmistakably of Spanish origin, that it is hard to believe they were not first applied by the Spaniards, and afterwards repeated by the Indians to the before-mentioned three Dutch prisoners among the Mohawks. We find one tribe called “Capitanasses,” while in colloquial Spanish capitanázo means a great warrior; another, whom the Dutch later knew as Black Minquas, is designated by the name of “Gachos,” the Spanish word gacho being applied to black cattle. Still another is called the “Canoomakers;” canoa being a word of the Indian tongues of South America,[882] the North American Indian could only have learned it from the Spaniards, and in turn have taught its meaning to the Dutch. Even the Indian name given to the island upon which the city of New York now stands, spelled on the earliest maps “Monados, Manados, Manatoes,” and said to mean “a place of drunkenness,” points to a Spanish origin from the colloquially-used noun moñas, drunkenness, moñados, drunken men. If to these indications of Spanish presence on the soil of New York before the Dutch period we add the evidence of the so-called Pompey Stone,[883] found in Oneida County, with its Spanish inscription and date of 1520, and the names of places given in their corruption by the Dutch in a grant covering part of Albany County (“Semesseerse,” Spanish semencera, land sown with seed; “Negogance,” place for trade, Spanish negocio, trade), we can no longer hesitate to believe that the traditions reported by Danckers and other writers mentioned before had some foundation, and that the Spaniards knew and had explored the country on the Hudson long before the Dutch came, but had thought, as Peter Martyr expresses it, after the failures of Esteban Gomez and the Licenciado d’ Aillon, “To the South, to the South, for the great and exceeding riches of the Equinoctial; they that seek gold must not go to the cold and frozen North.” The Spaniards never considered North America as of any value in itself; they looked upon it only as a barrier to the richer fields of Asia.
Dr. O’Callaghan had in his collection[884] a copy, on vellum, of a map entitled “Americæ Septentrionalis Pars,” from the West-Indische Paskaert, which he added to the maps in the first volume of the New York Colonial Documents. The maker of it was A. Jacobsen, and, to judge from the fac-simile of the West India Company’s seal exhibited on it, he made it for that company in 1621. It bears internal evidence that Jacobsen had as model one of the elder Spanish and English maps, as he retains some Spanish and English names for places, which on the Dutch maps just mentioned have Dutch names. No[435] attempt is made to give details of interior chorography. The coast-line is fairly correct, and the rivers named are indicated by their mouths.[885]
The next in the order of date is also a manuscript map, of which a reduced copy was published by Dr. O’Callaghan in his History. Although it is only a delineation of part of New Netherland, the manor of Rensselaerswyck,[886] it is of importance to the historian, who in consulting it has to exercise his judgment to the utmost. Made in 1630 by Gillis van Schendel at the expense of six dollars, which paid also for four copies on paper, it shows, in the very year in which the land was purchased from the Indians and patented to the patroons, such a large number of settlements on both sides of the river, as to create the suspicion that it was made to induce emigration from Holland, where the four copies on paper were sent. De Laet, whose share of the land, as one of the patroons, is designated by De Laet’s Burg, De Laet’s Island, De Laet’s Mill Creek and Waterfall, makes no reference to this map.
The first printed map of New Netherland accompanies De Laet’s Novus Orbis, under the title of “Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium, et Virginia.” In outline it resembles the map of 1621 by Jacobsen, while the details are taken from the maps presented to the States-General. It is very vague, however, and does not even give the names of any river. Long Island is represented by three islands, and the Delaware River rises, as on the 1616 map, out of a large lake in the Seneca country.[887]
PART OF DE LAET’S MAP, 1630.
Jacobsen’s map of 1621 seems to have been used by Robert Dudley in his Atlas, upon which an Italian engraver, Antonio Francesco Lucini, worked; and Lucini’s signature is attached to a “Carta particolare della Nuova Belgia è parte della Nuova Anglia, d’America carta ii.,” which constitutes a part of Dudley’s work.[888] He seems to have consulted Spanish, Dutch, and English maps of more or less correctness, but understood none of them well. The Hudson is called “Rio Martins ò R. Hudsons.” Manhattan’s Island is in its proper place, with New Amsterdam marked on it; but the name “Isla Manhatas” is given to the land between Newark Bay, Passaic River on the west and the Hackensack on the east; while the strip of land now called Bergen Point is called “Oster’s Ilant.” The position of Manhattan has evidently troubled him very much, for we find the name again inserted covering the eastern townships of Westchester County. Stratford Point, at the mouth of the Housatonic, is “Cabo del Fieme,” while Long Island, called “I. di Gebrok Land,” is a group of six islands, the largest of which bears the correct name of Matouwacs, and Fisher’s Island is called “Isla Lange.” Staten Island, “I. State,” is relegated, shorn of its dimensions, to Newark Bay, and its space divided by “I. Godins” and one of the six islands in the Long Island group called “C. Godins.” The low coast of New Jersey, near Long Branch, is properly named “Costa Bassa.” Thence going south, we come to “Porto Eyer” (Egg Harbor) and “I. Eyer,” “C. Pedras Arenas” (Barnegat), “C. Mai,” “Rio Carlo” (Delaware), and “C. Hinlopen ò C. James.[437]” The student of our early cartography must revert often to the rival maps and atlases of Blaeu and Jansson. The elder of the Blaeus, W. J. Blaeu, was long a maker of maps and globes,[889] and began to be known, with his map of the world, in 1606. He had issued many other maps when, in 1631, he collected them into his Appendix Theatri Ortelii (103 maps), the earliest of his atlases, which he later remodelled and enlarged, sometimes giving the text in French, and sometimes in Latin; that of 1638 being known as his Novas Atlas, and containing fourteen American maps. After several intermediate issues,[890] following upon the death of the elder Blaeu in 1638,[891] his atlas, under the care of his son, John Blaeu,[892] was issued with various texts, and with a wealth of skill rarely equalled since, as the Atlas Major.[893]
Jansson produced a rival of the earliest Blaeu atlas in 1633, with one hundred and six maps.[894] In 1638 it was called Atlas Novus, and had seventeen maps of America.[895] In 1639 a French edition was called Nouveau Théâtre du Monde, with new maps by Henry Hondius, son of the elder Hondius, eighteen of them being American, and that on New Netherland following De Laet’s map. It includes New England and Virginia, and is the original of various later maps.[896] A fifth part of the Nouveau Theatre was added in 1657, containing coast charts of America. Jansson reached his best in his Orbis Antiquus, of about even date (1661) with Blaeu’s best.
In Mr. Edward Armstrong’s essay on Fort Nassau a map in private hands is mentioned which seems to be little known. It exhibits the grant made to Sir Edmund Ploeyden of the Province of New Albion, and was printed at London in 1651. It is a strange combination of knowledge and ignorance, if not intentional deceit, purporting to have been made by “Domina Virginia Farrer,” and shows the headwaters of James River to be within ten days’ march of the California coast.[897]
A map of the Delaware territory was made, about 1638, by Måns Kling, for the Swedish Government. A later map of the same region, made by the Swedish engineer Peter Lindstroem in 1654, unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1697, when the Royal Palace at Stockholm burned down, is reviewed in another chapter. A Dutch map of the Delaware, made about 1656, has also been lost.[898]
Mr. Asher[899] and Mr. Armstrong incline to the opinion that the earliest of the later[438] group of maps made during the Dutch occupancy is the original state of what is called Dancker’s map, known under the title of Novi Belgii Novæque Angliæ necnon Pennsylvaniæ et Partis Virginiæ tabula, multis in locis emendata a Justo Danckers, and supposed to date between 1650 and 1656.[900] The map purporting to be the oldest, and which there is reason to believe was this earlier plate retouched, is the Novi Belgii, etc., tabula multis in locis emendata a Nicolao Joannis Visschero, of which Asher speaks of a copy in the Royal Library at the Hague.[901]
SKETCH OF PART OF VISSCHER’S MAP.
It was afterward included in what is known as Visscher’s Atlas Minor.[902] Visscher’s map, with its view of New Amsterdam, was reproduced in what is known as Van der Donck’s map, Nova Belgica sive Nieuw Nederlandt,[903] which appeared in the second edition of the Beschrijvinge van Nieuw Nederlant, 1656.
Van Der Donck’s New Netherland.
EDITORIAL NOTES.
A. Bibliography.—In the bibliography of New Netherland, the first place must be given to the Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland, by G. M. Asher, Amsterdam, 1854-1867, the work appearing in parts. It embodies the results of work in the royal library and in the royal archives at the Hague; at Leyden in the library of the University and in that of Dr. Bodel Nyenhuis, rich in maps, and particularly in the Thysiana Library, which he found a rich field; and at Amsterdam, among the extensive stock of Mr. Frederick Muller, without whose assistance, the author says, the book would not have been written.[904] In his Introduction he gives a succinct sketch of the history and geography of New Netherland.
Next in importance are the catalogues of Frederick Muller of Amsterdam, particularly the series, Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Plates on America,[905] begun in 1872, and which he calls “an essay towards a Dutch-American bibliography.” It was also under Mr. Muller’s direction and patronage that Mr. P. A. Tiele prepared his Mémoire bibliographique sur les journaux des navigateurs néerlandais réimprimés dans les collections de De Bry et de Hulsius, etc., Amsterdam, 1867. It covers those voyages not Dutch of which accounts have appeared in Dutch, as well as the distinctively Dutch collections. The compiler dedicated it to Mr. James Lenox, from whose rich collection he derived much help. Muller’s Catalogue (1872), no. 110; Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 1,002.
The best American collection of books on New Netherland is probably that now in the Lenox Library. Mr. Asher said of it some years ago (Essay, p. xlix, sub anno 1867) that it was “absolutely complete.”
B. New Amsterdam.—The earliest accounts of the town by Wassenaer (1623), De Laet (1625), De Rasiere (1627), and Michaelis (1628), have already been mentioned. (Cf. the paper on the first settlement by the Dutch in Doc. Hist. N. Y., vol. iii.) Stuyvesant, in his letter to Nicoll in 1664, claimed that the town was founded in 1623. This statement is repeated in De la Croix’s book, with De Vries’s additions, published in Dutch as Algemeene Wereldt-Beschrijving, 1705. (Asher, no. 19.) O’Callaghan, New Netherland, ii. 210, has established that the town was incorporated in 1653.
The original Dutch records of New Amsterdam have been put into English in MS. volumes in the archives of the city, and some parts of them are printed in Valentine’s New York City Manual, and in Historical Magazine, xi. 33, 108,[440] 170, 224, 354; xii. 30; xiii. 39, 168. Cf. paper on the development of its municipal government in the Dutch period, in Mag. of Amer. Hist., May, 1882, and the papers on the city of New York in Doc. Hist. N. Y., vols. i. and iii. Some notes on the Indian incursions in and about New Amsterdam during the Dutch period are in Valentine’s New York City Manual, 1863, p. 533. The principal histories of the town are Martha J. Lamb’s (1877), M. L. Booth’s (1859), W. L. Stone’s (1872), and David T. Valentine’s (1853). The last comes down only to 1750, and this and Lamb’s are of the most importance.
NEW YORK AND VICINITY, 1666.
This fac-simile of the lower portion of the map entitled “De Noord Rivier, anders R. Manhattans, off Hudson’s Rivier, genaamt t’Groodt,” which appeared in a tract at Middleburgh (and also at the Hague in 1666 in Goos’s Zee-Atlas) in answer to the reply of Downing to the memoir (1664) of the deputies of the States-General. The cut is made from the reproduction in Mr. Lenox’s edition of H. C. Murphy’s translation of the Vertoogh and Breeden Raedt, New York, 1854. The North is to the right.
Something can be derived from the gatherings of J. F. Watson in his Annals of New York City and State, 1846, and the appendix to his Annals of Philadelphia, 1830. The reader will find interest in various local antiquarian quests, as exemplified in J. W. Gerard’s Old Streets of New[441] York under the Dutch (1874).[906] A map of the original grants of village lots on the island, from the Dutch West India Company, is in the City Manual (1857), and in the same (1856) is a map showing the made and swampy lands, as indicating the original surface of the town. In other volumes (1852 and 1853), and in Valentine’s History, p. 379, is a modern plan of the city, showing the line of the original high-water marks and the location of the early farms. It is one of these farms, that of Dominie Bogardus, the pastor of the Dutch church, who so vigorously opposed Kieft’s plans, that is now the property of Trinity Church, and the source of a large revenue. (See the Key in Valentine’s History, p. 380.) The same serial preserves views of sundry landmarks, like the canal in Broad Street, of 1659 (in 1862, p. 515), a windmill of 1661 (in 1862, p. 547), a house built in 1626 (in 1847, p. 346). A plan of the fort built in 1633-1635 is in Valentine’s New York, p. 27; and at p. 38 is a plan of the town in 1642, as well as the author could make it out from existing data.
For the northern part of the island, James Riker’s History of Harlem, 1881, affords much interest, tracing more minutely than usual the associations of the early comers with their family stocks in Europe, and showing by a map the original locations of their house-lots at Harlem.
C. Local Histories.—The Editor is not aware of any considerable bibliography of New York local histories, except as they are included in F. B. Perkins’s Check List of American Local History. Some help may be derived from the Brinley and Alofsen Catalogues, and others of a classified character. We have indicated in another Note the labors of Mr. Munsell for the Albany region. An edition of G. Furman’s Antiquities of Long Island, edited by F. Moore in 1875, includes a bibliography of Long Island by Henry Onderdonk, Jr. The most considerable of all the local histories is Stiles’s History of Brooklyn, 1867-1870, which gives a map of the Breuckelen settlements in 1646. The Faust Club in 1865 issued (125 copies) an older book, G. Furman’s Notes of Brooklyn, which had originally appeared in 1824. Benj. F. Thompson’s History of Long Island, 2d ed., 1843, is the most comprehensive of the accounts of that island, while N. S. Prime’s History of Long Island is more particularly concerned with its ecclesiastical history. There are various lesser monographs on the island towns, like Riker’s Newton (1852), Onderdonk’s Hempstead (1878), etc. Cf. also Historical Magazine, viii. 89; and in the same, vi. 145, Mr. G. P. Disosway recounts the early history of Staten Island.
Mr. Fernow translated and edited in the Documents relative to the Colonial History of New York, vol. xiii., the papers in the State archives upon the history and settlements on the Hudson and the Mohawk (1630-1684), as he has said in the text, which must stand as the basis for much which is given in the special treatises of Bolton on West Chester County (or such thorough monographs as that of C. W. Baird on the History of Rye, 1781 in this county), P. H. Smith on Duchess County, 1877, not to name others. The more remote parts of the State have little or no connection with the Dutch period.
D. The Dutch Governors.—Mr. George Folsom has a paper on the governors in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., vol. i. On Peter Minuit, the first governor, there is a paper by J. B. Moore in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1849, p. 73, and another in Historical Magazine, xiii. 205. An autograph of Kieft is given herewith. Of Stuyvesant, the last governor, who survived the surrender, and died in 1672 (Brodhead, ii. 183), we have various memorials. His portrait is preserved, belonging to Mr. Robert Van Rensselaer Stuyvesant, and has been engraved several times,—Dunlap’s New York, vol. i.; O’Callaghan’s New Netherland, vol. ii.; Lamb’s New York, i. 127; Gay’s Popular History of the United States, vol. ii. (Cf. Catalogue of the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Gallery, no. 67.) Two reminders of him long remained to New Yorkers,—his house in the Bowery, which is shown as it existed at the time of his death in Valentine’s New York, p. 53, and in his Manual, 1852, p. 407; and in Watson’s Annals of New[442] York, p. 196, as it stood later perched upon so much of the original knoll as improvements had not removed. The old pear-tree associated with his name is depicted in Valentine’s Manual, 1861, p. 533, and in Lossing’s Hudson River, p. 416.
Mr. Fernow contributed to the Magazine of American History, ii. 540, a monograph on Stuyvesant’s journey to Esopus in 1658. See also 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections, vi. 533.
E. Levinus Hulsius’s Collection of Voyages.—The twenty-six parts of this work were originally issued between 1598 and 1650, and this long interval, as well as their German text finding more popular use than the Latin of De Bry, has conduced to make sets much rarer of Hulsius than of De Bry. Scholars also award Hulsius the possession of more judgment in compiling and translating than is claimed for De Bry. Asher printed in 1833 a Short Bibliographical Memoir of Hulsius, which became, when extended, his Bibliographical Essay on the Voyages and Travels of Hulsius and his Successors, in 1839; and in this he doubts if a perfect set of all the editions of all the parts had ever been got together. An approximate completeness, however, pertains to the sets in the Carter-Brown and Lenox libraries, as described in the Catalogue of the former, vol. i. p. 467, and in the Contributions to a Catalogue of the Lenox Library, no. i, New York, 1877. The set described in this shows all the first editions of the twenty-six parts, with second issues of three of them, Latin as well as German of two of them; two parts successively issued of one of them (part xi.) and other copies with variations of three of them. There are eighteen second editions, counting variations (one is lacking); nine third editions or variations; six fourth editions (with one lacking); two fifth editions (with one lacking). This would indicate that an absolutely complete set, to include every part, edition, and variety, would increase the twenty-six parts to seventy-three. The Carter-Brown copy seems to be less perfect. The Huth Catalogue shows a complete series of first editions only.
Tiele’s Mémoire Bibliographique pertains to such voyages in this collection as were made by Dutch navigators. Sabin’s Dictionary, viii. 526, gives fuller collations for the parts relating to America. Quaritch printed a collation in 1860.
Bohn published a collation of Lord Lyndsay’s copy.
The Lenox Library possesses MS. Collations of the Grenville and other sets in the British Museum, of those in the Royal Library, Berlin, and the City Library of Hamburg.
Sets of such completeness as collectors may hope to attain have been quoted at £335 (Crowninshield sale, 1860,—all first editions but one), and 6,700 and 4,500 marks.
CHAPTER IX.
NEW SWEDEN, OR THE SWEDES ON THE DELAWARE.
BY GREGORY B. KEEN,
Late Professor of Mathematics in the Theological Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo, Corresponding Secretary of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
THE honor of projecting the first Swedish settlement in foreign parts is due to Willem Usselinx,—a native of Antwerp, who resided for several years in Spain, Portugal, and the Azores, and was afterward engaged in mercantile pursuits in Holland, acquiring distinction as the chief founder of the Dutch West India Company.[907]
Failing to obtain adequate remuneration for his services in the Netherlands, he visited Sweden, and succeeded in inducing Gustavus II. (Adolphus) to issue a Manifest at Gottenburg, Nov. 10, 1624, instituting a general commercial society, called the Australian Company, with special privileges of traffic with Africa, Asia, and America. Authority was conferred on Usselinx to solicit subscriptions, and a contract of trade was drawn up to be signed by the contributors, the whole scheme being commended in a paper of great length by the projector of it. On the 14th of June, 1626, a more ample charter was conceded, which was confirmed in the Riksdag of 1627,[908] and followed by an order of the sovereign requiring subscribers to make their payments by May, 1628. The King himself pledged 400,000 daler of the royal treasure on equal risks, and other members of his family took stock in the Company, which embraced the Royal Council, the most distinguished of the nobility, officers of the army, bishops and other clergymen, burgomasters and aldermen of the cities, and many of the commonalty.
It was believed that the enterprise would prove of great commercial benefit to Sweden, besides affording private individuals opportunity to recover fortunes lost through the disastrous wars of the period, and furnishing, in the[444] colonies to be established, safe places of retreat for many exiles. By means of a union, in 1630, with the Ship Company, instituted by agreement of the cities of Sweden, at the Riksdag of the preceding year, the Australian—or, as it was now generally called, the South—Company acquired the control of sixteen well-equipped vessels, which they proceeded to send to sea. No advantage, however, was derived from any of the voyages made, and in 1632 four of the ships were taken by Spain.
Meanwhile the momentous conflicts of the age diverted the attention of the monarch and drained the resources of the country, causing inevitable delay in carrying out the plans of the Company, until at last it was determined to seek the aid of foreign capital. Just before the battle of Lützen closed the earthly career of Gustavus, a new charter was prepared for his signature, extending the privileges of the former one to the inhabitants of Germany, and prolonging the enjoyment of them until the first day of January, 1646. This paper, which was already dated, was published by Axel Oxenstjerna, Chancellor of the Kingdom of Sweden,[909] at Heilbronn, April 10, 1633, and was confirmed, with certain modifications, by the Deputies of the four Upper Circles at Frankfort, Dec. 12, 1634.
Another, written at the same time and signed by the Chancellor May 1, 1633, recognized Usselinx as “Head Director of the New South Company,” with authority to receive subscriptions and promote the undertaking; in discharge of which duty the zealous Belgian issued a fresh defence of his project, addressed especially to the Germans, besides reprinting in their language the earlier documents on the subject. Nevertheless, no success attended even this well-advertised revival of the long-cherished enterprise, and subsequent appeals of Usselinx to France and England, the Hanse Towns, and the States-General appear to have been without result.[910]
The first real advance towards the founding of New Sweden was made in 1635. In May of that year Chancellor Oxenstjerna visited Holland, and on his return home held correspondence upon the advantages of forming a Swedish settlement on the coast of Brazil or Guinea, with Samuel Blommaert, a merchant of Amsterdam and a member of the Dutch West India Company, who had participated five years before in an attempt to colonize the shores of the Delaware; and in the following spring he commissioned Peter Spiring, another Dutchman, dwelling in Sweden, to learn whether some assistance might not be obtained from the States-General. With this intent, proposals were made by Usselinx, now Swedish minister, to induce the States of Holland to found a “Zuid-Compagnie,” in conjunction with his Government; but the Assembly of the Nineteen (to whom the matter was referred) refusing their consent, the States postponed further action in the premises.
Nevertheless, if failure attended this appeal to the rulers of the nation, Spiring’s intercourse with private individuals had a happier issue; and conversations with Blommaert introduced to his acquaintance Peter Minuit, or Minnewit, a native of Wesel, who had served the Dutch West India Company from 1626 to 1632 as Director-General of New Netherland,[911] living in New Amsterdam, and who was then once more residing in Cleves,—the person who was destined to conduct the first Swedish expedition to America.
In a letter dated at Amsterdam, June 15, 1636,[912] borne home by Spiring, Minuit offered “to make a voyage to the Virginias, New Netherland, and other regions adjoining, certain places well known to him, with a very good climate, which might be named Nova Suedia;” and this proposal, or one grounded on it, was read in the Swedish Råd, the 27th of September. Soon afterward Spiring was again sent out to Holland as minister; and on further consultation with Minuit and Blommaert, now Swedish Commissary (or consul-general) at Amsterdam, it was determined to form a Swedish-Dutch Company to carry on trade with, and establish colonies on, portions of the North American coast not previously taken up by the Dutch or English. The cost of the first expedition was estimated at twenty-four thousand[447] (it actually amounted to over thirty-six thousand) Dutch florins, half of which was to be contributed by Minuit and Blommaert and their friends, and the remaining half to be subscribed in Sweden. Minuit was to be the leader of it, and Blommaert the commissioner in Amsterdam. After these stipulations had been concluded, in February, 1637, Minuit set out for Stockholm. The Government embraced the scheme, and promised to place two fully-equipped vessels at the disposal of the Company, while the contribution of money required from Sweden was subscribed by Axel Oxenstjerna, his brother Gabriel Gustafsson Oxenstjerna, their cousin Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstjerna, and Clas Fleming (Royal Councillors and Guardians of Queen Christina), and Peter Spiring.
Fleming, like the Chancellor, was a very zealous promoter of the project, and, as virtual chief of the admiralty (the head-admiral was aged and disqualified for service), obtained a commission to fit out the ships, concerting the details with Minuit and Blommaert, who procured an experienced crew and suitable cargo in Holland. The vessels were sent over to Gottenburg during the spring, when the expedition was to start. Delays occurred, however, and the vessels,—the “Kalmar Nyckel” (Key of Calmar), a man-of-war, under Captain Anders Nilsson Krober, and the sloop “Gripen” (the Griffin), Lieutenant Jacob Borben commander, both belonging to the United South and Ship Company,—did not receive their passports before the 9th of August, and were not ready to sail until late in the autumn. Soon after leaving, they encountered severe storms, and were obliged to put into the Dutch harbor of Medemblik for repairs and fresh provisions, but set out once more in December for their place of destination.
Here they arrived not later than March, 1638, Minuit exercising his discretion as commander of the expedition to direct his course to the River Delaware, with which, under the name of the South River of New Netherland, he had become acquainted during his former sojourn in America. According to Campanius, the colonists first landed on the west side of Delaware Bay, below the Mordare Kil (Murderkill Creek), at a place they called Paradis Udden (Paradise Point), “probably,” says he, “because it seemed so grateful and agreeable.” They afterward proceeded up the river, and on the 29th of March Minuit concluded a purchase of land from five chiefs of the Minquas (belonging to the great Iroquois race), appropriately rewarding them with articles of merchandise. The territory thus acquired embraced the west shore of the Delaware, from Bomtiens Udden (near Bombay Hook) northward to the River Schuylkill, no limit being assigned towards the interior.[913] At its boundaries Minuit[448] erected posts bearing the insignia of his sovereign, designating the country as New Sweden, and immediately built a fort, called, in honor of the queen,[914] Christina, at a point of rocks about two miles from the mouth of the Minquas (now Christeen) Creek, to which stream he gave the name of Elbe.
Soon after his arrival he despatched “Gripen” to Jamestown, in Virginia, for a cargo of tobacco to carry to Sweden free of duty,—a privilege which the governor declined to grant, out of regard to the instructions of the English king, while the Treasurer of the Province wrote to Sir Francis Windebanke, Principal Secretary to Charles I., suggesting the removal of the Swedes from the neighborhood of the Delaware, which he described as “the confines of Virginia and New England,” claiming it as appertaining to his sovereign. The sloop was suffered to remain “ten days, to refresh with wood and water,” and then returned to Minuit. Subsequently the Swedish commander sent her up the river for purposes of traffic, when he was summarily challenged by the Dutch at Fort Nassau, a stronghold built in 1623, by Cornelis Jacobsen Mey, at Timber Creek on the east side of the Delaware, which had afterward been abandoned and reoccupied several times, and was then in the possession of traders from New Amsterdam. The actions of Minuit were also reported by the Assistant-Commissary at that place to Willem Kieft, the Director-General of New Netherland, and were in turn communicated by Kieft, in a letter of the 28th of April, to the Directors of the West India Company in Holland, and were made the subject of a formal protest, addressed by Kieft to Minuit, the 6th of May, claiming jurisdiction over the South River for the Dutch. No heed was paid, however, to remonstrances of either Hollanders or English; and Minuit proceeded to improve his fort by building two log-houses in the inclosure for the accommodation of the garrison, while he stocked it plentifully with provisions, leaving a portion of his cargo to be used in barter with the Indians, “all whose peltries,” says Governor Kieft, “he had attracted to himself by liberal gifts.”
The colonists who remained in New Sweden numbered twenty-three men, under the command of Lieutenant Måns Kling (the only Swede expressly named as taking part in this first expedition to the Delaware), who had charge of the military affairs, and Hendrick Huygen, a relative of Minuit, likewise born in Cleves, who was intrusted with the civil and economical duties of the direction. Minuit himself departed for the West Indies, probably in July, on board the “Kalmar Nyckel,” having sent “Gripen” thither before him.[449] After disposing of his merchandise, and securing a cargo of tobacco at the Island of St. Christopher, while paying a visit to a Dutch ship lying near by, he perished by the destruction of that vessel in a sudden and violent storm. The “Kalmar Nyckel” had the good fortune to escape, and soon afterward sailed for Sweden, but was forced by November gales to take refuge in a port of Holland; while “Gripen” returned to the Delaware, and, obtaining a load of furs, acquired by traffic with the Indians, set out for Gottenburg, where she arrived at the close of May, 1639.
A second expedition to New Sweden had already been projected, which Queen Christina and the Swedish partners in the South Company determined to render more national in character than that conducted by Minuit. Natives of Sweden were particularly invited to engage in it; and none volunteering to do so, the governors of Elfsborg and Värmland were directed to procure married soldiers who had evaded service or committed some other capital offence, who, with their wives and children, were promised the liberty of returning home at pleasure at the end of one or two years.
Through the zeal of Fleming, the President of the College of Commerce, and his efficient secretary Johan Beier, a number of emigrants were at last assembled at Gottenburg, and put on board the “Kalmar Nyckel,” freshly equipped and provided with a new crew by Spiring and Blommaert in Holland, and commanded by a Dutch captain, Cornelis van Vliet, who had been for several years in the Swedish service. The vessel was also to carry out the second governor of New Sweden, Lieutenant Peter Hollender, commissioned July 1, 1639, who was probably, as his name indicates, a Dutchman, and (since he signed himself “Ridder”) doubtless a nobleman. The ship sailed in the beginning of autumn, but, springing a leak in the German Ocean, was obliged thrice to return to Holland for repairs, when the captain was finally discharged for dishonesty and negligence, and another, named Pouwel Jansen, was engaged to take his place. At length, on the 7th of February, 1640, the “Kalmar Nyckel” left the Texel, and reached Christina in safety the 17th of the following April.[915]
How the first settlers had fared since the departure of Minuit, we are unfortunately not informed by them; but it is testified by Governor Kieft that they succeeded in appropriating a large trade with the natives, which “wholly ruined” that of the Dutch. Still, according to the same authority, the arrival of the second colony was singularly opportune, since they had determined to quit the Delaware and remove the very next day to New Amsterdam. Such an intention was of course at once abandoned, and Governor Hollender strengthened his foothold on the river by securing a title from the Indians to the western bank of it as far north as Sankikan (near Trenton Falls), in spite of the protests of the Dutch Commissary, who even fired upon him as he sailed past Fort Nassau. A letter of remonstrance was sent to this officer by the Swedish governor, but his instructions requiring him to deal gently with the Hollanders, and his people being afterward treated by Governor Kieft “with all civility,” no serious collisions occurred between the rival nations during his direction of the colony. The “Kalmar Nyckel” was soon made ready for her return voyage, and, sailing in May, arrived in July at Gottenburg.
The constant intercourse of the Swedish authorities with prominent merchants of Amsterdam in founding the Colony of New Sweden had by this time attracted the attention of other Hollanders to the settlement now successfully established, and the liberality of the terms accorded the Swedish company induced Myndert Myndertsen van Horst, of Utrecht, to appeal to Queen Christina for the privilege of planting a Dutch colony within the limits of her territory, after the model of the patroonships of their own West India Company. This favor was conceded in a charter of the 24th of January, 1640, which was transferred by Van Horst to Hendrik Hoochcamer and other fellow-countrymen, granting the right to take up land on both sides of the Delaware, four or five German miles below Christina, to be held hereditarily under the Crown of Sweden, with freedom from taxation for ten years, but subject to the restriction that their trade be carried on in vessels built in New Sweden and confined to Swedish ports, and also assuring liberty for the exercise of their so-called Reformed religion. Simultaneously with the charter, a passport was issued for the ship “Fredenburg,” Captain Jacob Powelsen, to carry the emigrants, and a commission for Jost van Bogardt, as Swedish agent in New Sweden, with special authority over this colony. The latter was likewise the leader of the expedition, which was composed chiefly of persons from the province of Utrecht; and he arrived with it at the Delaware on the 2d of November, 1640. The Dutchmen appear to have seated themselves three or four Swedish miles from Christina. So little mention, however, is afterward made of this peculiarly constituted settlement,[916] it seems probable that it soon lost its individuality.
About this time occurred the first attempt on the part of the inhabitants of New England to obtain a foothold in New Sweden. Captain Nathaniel Turner is said to have bought land from the Indians “on both sides of Delaware Bay or River,” as agent of New Haven, in 1640; and in April, 1641, a similar purchase was made by George Lamberton, also of New Haven, notwithstanding one of the tracts acquired in this manner was comprised within that long before sold by the natives to the Swedish governors, while the other, extending from Cape May to Narraticons Kil (or Raccoon Creek), on the eastern shore of the Delaware, had been conveyed only three days earlier, by the same sachem, to Governor Hollender. Taking advantage of this nugatory title, and in contravention of engagements entered into with Director Kieft, some twenty English families, numbering about sixty persons, settled at Varkens Kil (now Salem Creek, New Jersey), whose “plantations” were pronounced, at a General Court held in New Haven, Aug. 30, 1641, to be “in combination with” that town.
Meanwhile preparations were making in Sweden to send forth a fresh expedition to America. On the 13th of July, 1640, the Governor of Gottenburg was enjoined to persuade families of his province to emigrate, “with their horses and cattle and other personal property.” On the 29th the Governor of Värmland and Dal was directed to enlist certain Finns, who had been forced to enter the army as a punishment for violating a royal edict against clearing land in that province by burning forests; and on the 30th the Governor of Örebro was instructed to induce people of the same race, roaming about the mining districts under his jurisdiction, to accompany the rest to the Transatlantic Colony. Lieutenant Måns Kling, who had returned in the “Kalmar Nyckel,” was also especially commissioned, on the 26th of the following September, to aid in this work in the mining regions and elsewhere, and particularly to procure homeless Finns, who were living in the woods upon the charity of the settled population of Sweden. In all these mandates the fertility of the new country and the advantages of colonists in it are clearly intimated; and in the last it is declared to be the royal aim that the inhabitants of the kingdom may enjoy the valuable products of that land, increase in commerce and in knowledge of the sea, and enlarge their intercourse with foreign nations. In May, 1641, the people collected by Kling accompanied him on the ship “Charitas” from Stockholm to Gottenburg, where they were joined by the others, who by that time were ready to set forth. On the 20th of February the Government had resolved to buy out the Dutch partners in their enterprise, instructing Spiring to pay them eighteen thousand gulden from the public funds, provided they abandoned all further claims. This, no doubt, was done; and thus the third Swedish expedition to New Sweden sailed under the auspices of a purely Swedish company. It comprised the well-tried[452] “Kalmar Nyckel” and the “Charitas,” and arrived at its place of destination probably in the summer or autumn of 1641.[917]
Nothing is known with regard to New Sweden at this period; but in the spring of 1642 some of the colonists from New Haven, already spoken of, took possession of a tract of land, which they claimed to have purchased of the Indians on the 19th of April, on the west side of the Delaware, extending from Crum Creek a short distance above the Schuylkill, and proceeded to build a trading-house on the latter stream. This attracted the attention of Director Kieft, and on the 22d of May he despatched two sloops from New Amsterdam with instructions to Jan Jansen van Ilpendam, the Dutch commissary at Fort Nassau, to expel the English from the Delaware. His orders were promptly executed; and the settlements on the Schuylkill and (it is said) at Varkens Kil were broken up, partly through the aid of the Swedes, who had agreed with Kieft “to keep out the English,” the trespassers being taken to Fort Amsterdam, from whence they were sent home to New Haven. Lamberton, still persisting in trading on the Delaware, was arrested not long afterward at Manhattan, and compelled to give an account of his peltries, and to pay duties on his cargo. According to Governor John Winthrop, of Massachusetts, such “sickness and mortality” prevailed this summer in New Sweden as “dissolved” the plantations of the English, and seriously affected the Swedes.
In Sweden the interest in the little American colony was now at its height; and in July and August, 1642, Spiring was consulted in the Råd and the Räkningekammår upon the question of appropriating the funds of the South and Ship Company for the expenses of another expedition across the ocean. This resulted in the formation of a new company, styled the West India, American, or New Sweden Company, although oftener known as the South Company, with a capital of thirty-six thousand riksdaler, half being contributed by the South and Ship Company, one sixth by the Crown, and the remainder by Oxenstjerna, Spiring, Fleming, and others. To it, also, was transferred the monopoly of the tobacco trade in Sweden, Finland, and Ingermanland, which had been granted to the South Company in 1641. On the 15th of August a third governor was commissioned to succeed Hollender in the direction of New Sweden; namely, Johan Printz, who had taken part in the Thirty Years’ War as Lieutenant-Colonel of the West Götha Cavalry, and, after his dismissal from the service for the capitulation of Chemnitz, was engaged in 1641 in procuring emigrants for the colony in Northern Finland. He had been restored[453] to royal favor and ennobled in July. His “Instructions” were likewise dated Aug. 15, 1642, and were signed by Peter Brahe, Herman Wrangel, Clas Fleming, Axel Oxenstjerna, and Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstjerna, Councillors of the Kingdom and Guardians of Queen Christina, who was still in her minority. They are comprised in twenty-eight articles, endowing him with extensive authority in the administration of justice, and enjoining him to keep the monopoly of the fur-trade, and to pay particular attention to the cultivation of the soil,—especially for the planting of tobacco, of which he was expected to ship a goodly quantity on every vessel returning to Sweden,—as well as to have a care of the raising of cattle, of the obtaining of choice woods, of the growth of the grape, production of silk, manufacture of salt, and taking of fish. He was to maintain the Swedish Lutheran form of religion and education of the young, and treat the Indians “with all humanity,” endeavoring to convert them from their paganism, and “in other ways bring them to civilization and good government.” His territory was defined to include all that had been purchased of the natives by Minuit and Hollender, extending, on the west side of the Delaware, from Cape Hinlopen[918] northwards to Sankikan, and on the east from Narraticons Kil southwards to Cape May. Over the whole of this region he was commanded to uphold the supremacy of his sovereign, keeping the Dutch colony under Jost van Bogardt to the observance of their charter, and bringing the English settlers under subjection, or procuring their removal, as he deemed best. His relations with the Holland West India Company and their representatives at Manhattan and Fort Nassau were to be friendly but independent, and, in case of hostile encroachments, “force was to be repelled by force.” On the 30th of August a budget was adopted for New Sweden, specifying, besides the Governor, a lieutenant, sergeant, corporal, gunner, trumpeter, and drummer, with twenty-four private soldiers, and (in the civil list) a preacher, clerk, surgeon, provost, and executioner, their salaries being estimated at 3,020 riksdaler per annum. Fleming and Beier (this year appointed postmaster-general) had the chief direction of the enterprise, and special factors were designated for the Company’s service in Gottenburg and Amsterdam. At length all preparations were completed, and the fourth Swedish expedition to New Sweden, consisting of the ships “Fama” (Fame) and “Svanen” (the Swan), set sail from Gottenburg on the 1st of November, 1642, carrying Printz, with his wife and children, Lieutenant Måns Kling, the Rev. Johan Campanius Holm, and many others, among whom were a number of forest-destroying Finns, sent out as formerly by their respective governors.[919] They pursued the usual course through the[454] English Channel and past the Canary Islands, spending Christmas with the hospitable Governor of Antigua; and, after encountering severe storms, towards the close of January entered Delaware Bay, and on the 15th of February, 1643, landed in safety at Fort Christina.
Unfortunately, the first and very full report of the new governor to the West India Company, dated April 13, 1643, and despatched on the return voyage of the “Fama,” appears to have been irrecoverably lost; but in letters addressed the day before and the day after, respectively, to Councillors Peter Brahe and Axel Oxenstjerna, still preserved in Sweden, Printz gives a favorable account of the country and an interesting description of the natives, and earnestly advises the sending out of more emigrants. Soon after his arrival he made a journey through his territory, sailing up the Delaware to Sankikan, and determined to take up his abode on the Island of Tennakong, or Tinicum, situated about fifteen miles above Christina. Here he built himself a house (Printzhof), and erected a fort of heavy logs, armed with four brass cannon, called Nya Göteborg (New Gottenburg),—a name also bestowed on the whole place in a patent from his sovereign of the 6th of the following November, granting it “to him and his lawful issue as a perpetual possession.” About twenty emigrants settled on this island, with their families, including Printz’s book-keeper and clerk, with his body-guard and the crew of a little yacht used by the Governor. A redoubt was likewise constructed “after the English plan, with three angles,” on the eastern shore, “close to the river,” by a little stream now known as Mill Creek, three or four miles below Varkens Kil, which was named Nya Elfsborg.
It was defended by eight brass twelve-pounders, and committed to the charge of Lieutenant Sven Schute and Sergeant Gregorius van Dyck, with a gunner and drummer and twelve or fifteen common soldiers; and was already occupied in October, when a Dutch skipper, carrying David Pieterszen de Vries on his last voyage to the Delaware, was required to strike his flag in passing the place and give account of his cargo, although the noted patroon was afterward courteously entertained five days at Tinicum by Governor Printz, who bought “wines and sweetmeats” of his captain, and accompanied him on his return as far as Fort Christina.
The latter post remained the chief place of deposit of the stores of the colony under Commissary Hendrick Huygen, and was settled by about forty persons and their families, including the Reverend Johan Campanius, a miller, two carpenters, a few sailors and soldiers, and a dozen peasants, who were occupied in the cultivation of tobacco. A tobacco plantation was also formed the same year on the west side of the Delaware, four or[455] five miles below Tinicum, under the direction of Peter Liljehöck, assisted by an experienced tobacco-grower, specially hired for the service, with a dozen or more husbandmen, and received the name of Upland. About the same time another was begun by Lieutenant Måns Kling, with seven or eight colonists, on the Schuylkill. At first both of these places were destitute of forts, although log houses, strengthened by small stones, were built for the accommodation of the settlers.[920] A large quantity of maize was sown by Printz immediately after his arrival for the sustenance of the colony, but not yielding the results anticipated from certain statements of Governor Hollender, the deficiency was supplied by purchase of some cattle and winter rye at the Island of Manhattan. Provisions were also obtained from Dutch and English vessels which visited the Delaware. During the autumn, rye was planted in three places, and in the following spring some barley, which grew so well, says the Governor, “it was delightful to behold.” For greater convenience of communication between the scattered settlements two boats were built by the carpenters, one for the use of Elfsborg, the other for Christina.
Although the instructions to Governor Printz concerning his relations with the English were probably issued in ignorance of the attempt of Kieft to dislodge the latter from the Delaware, the success of the Dutch Director-General does not seem to have been so complete as to render them superfluous. Lamberton still visited the river for purposes of trade, and a few settlers from New Haven yet remained at Varkens Kil. Printz, therefore, “went to the houses” of these English families, and “forced some of them to swear allegiance to the crown of Sweden.” He also found opportunity of apprehending Lamberton, and brought him before a tribunal comprising Captains Christian Boije and Måns Kling, Commissaries Huygen and Jansen, and six other persons then on the Delaware, assembled in the name of the Swedish sovereign at Fort Christina, July 10, 1643. Printz met two protests made by the Englishman at his trial, claiming land on both sides of the river in virtue of purchases from the Indians, by showing that the territory in question was embraced in tracts already bought of the savages by Governors Minuit and Hollender. He also proved to the satisfaction of the court that Lamberton had traded with the natives in the vicinity even of Fort Christina without leave and in spite of repeated prohibitions, obtaining a quantity of beaver skins, for which the defendant was required by the tribunal to pay double duty. And, finally, Lamberton was accused by the Governor of bribing the Indians to murder the Swedes and Dutch,—a charge which was supported by several witnesses, who also testified that on the day agreed upon an unusual number of savages had assembled in front of Fort Christina, who were, however, frightened off before they could attain their purpose.[456] In passing upon this grave indictment, the court preferred to treat the defendant with clemency “on this occasion,” and postponed action on the subject. These decisions naturally did not content Lamberton, and at a meeting of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, held at Boston September 7, complaint was made by his associates, Governor Theophilus Eaton and Thomas Gregson, of “injuries received from the Dutch and Swedes at Delaware Bay;” when it was “ordered that a letter be written to the Swedish governor, expressing the particulars and requiring satisfaction,” to be signed by John Winthrop “as Governor of Massachusetts and President of the Commissioners.” This resolution was complied with, and a commission was given to Lamberton “to go treat with” Printz upon the subject, and “to agree with him about settling their trade and plantation” on the Delaware. Winthrop’s letter was answered by the Governor of New Sweden, Jan. 12, 1644, with a statement of the facts established at his court already mentioned, and a fresh examination of the matter was instituted on the 16th. This was likewise conducted at Fort Christina, in the presence of the Governor, Captains Boije, Kling, and Turner, Commissary Huygen, Sergeant Van Dyck, Isaac Allerton, and Secretary Carl Janson, and resulted in the exculpation of Printz from the offences charged against him. Copies of these proceedings and of all others relating to the New Haven people were transmitted to a General Court of Massachusetts which met at Boston in March, and Governor Winthrop, in acknowledging the receipt of them in a friendly letter to Governor Printz, promised “a full and particular response at the next meeting of the Commissioners of the United Colonies.” At the same time a fresh commission was issued to Governor Eaton, though “with a salvo jure, allowing him to go on with his plantation and trade in Delaware River,” accompanied by a copy of the Massachusetts patent, which he desired “to show the Swedish governor.” Certain merchants of Boston likewise obtained the privilege of forming a company for traffic in the vicinity of a great lake believed to be the chief source of the beaver trade, which was supposed to lie near the headwaters of the Delaware; and, to carry out their project, despatched a pinnace, well manned and laden, to that river, with a commission “under the public seal,” and letters from the Governor of Massachusetts to Kieft and Printz for liberty to pass their strongholds. “This,” says Winthrop, “the Dutch promised” to concede, though under “protest;” but “when they came to the Swedes, the fort shot at them ere they came up,” obliging them to cast anchor, “and the next morning the Lieutenant came aboard and forced them to fall lower down.” On complaint to Governor Printz, the conduct of that officer was repudiated, and instructions were sent to him from Tinicum not to molest the expedition. All further progress was, however, checked by the Dutch agent at Fort Nassau, who showed an order from his Governor not to let them pass that place; and since neither Printz nor Kieft would permit them to trade with the Indians, they returned home “with loss of their voyage.” The letter which Printz addressed to Winthrop,[457] explaining his actions on this occasion, dated at Tinicum, June 29, 1644, is more amiable than truthful; for in the copy sent to the authorities in Sweden the Governor qualifies his intimation that he promoted the undertaking, with the statement that he took care that the Dutch at Fort Nassau brought it to nought, since it was the purpose of the persons who were engaged in it “to build a fort above the Swedish post at Sankikan, to be armed with men and cannon, and appropriate to themselves all the profits of the river.” Not less successful was the opposition of the Governor to an attempt to invade his territory by the English knight, Sir Edmund Plowden, who had recently come to America to take possession, in virtue of a grant from King Charles I. of England, of a large tract of land, in which New Sweden was included. For though certain of the retainers of this so-styled “Earl Palatine of New Albion,” who had mutinied and left their lord to perish on an island, were apprehended at Fort Elfsborg in May, 1643, and courteously surrendered to him by Printz, the latter refused to permit any vessels trading under his commission to pass up the Delaware, and so “affronted” Plowden that he finally abandoned the river.[921]
The relations between the Swedes and Dutch were seemingly more friendly. “Ever since I came here,” says Printz in his Report of 1644, “the Hollanders have shown great amity, particularly their Director at Manhattan, Willem Kieft, who writes to me very frequently, as he has opportunity, telling the news from Sweden and Holland and other countries of Europe; and though at the first he gave me to understand that his West India Company laid claim to our river, on my replying to him with the best arguments at my command, he has now for a long while spared me those inflictions.”
The Indians always exhibited the most amicable dispositions towards the Swedes, partly no doubt through timidity, but at least equally in consequence of the kind treatment habitually shown them by the colonists of that nation. Still, in the spring of 1644, influenced, it is presumed, by the example of their brethren in Virginia and Maryland and the vicinity of Manhattan, who had recently been provoked to fierce hostility against the Dutch and English, some of the savages massacred two soldiers and a laborer between Christina and Elfsborg, and a Swedish woman and her husband (an Englishman) between Tinicum and Upland. Printz, however, immediately assembling his people at Christina to defend themselves from further outrages, the natives “came together,” says he, “from all sides, heartily apologizing for, and denying all complicity in, the murderous deeds, and suing earnestly for peace.” This was accorded them by the Governor, but “with the menace of annihilation if the settlers were ever again molested.” Whereupon a treaty was signed by the sachems, and ratified by the customary interchange of presents, assuring tranquillity for the future and restoring something of the previous mutual confidence.[922]
During the six years now elapsed since the founding of New Sweden[458] the colonists were compelled to undergo the privations which inevitably attend the first settlement of a wild and untitled country; and the frequent scarcity of food and insufficiency of shelter, combined with the novelty and uncertainty of the climate, and occasional seasons of disease, had the usual effect of diminishing their numbers. Especially fatal was the last summer, that of 1643, when no fewer than seventeen (between six and seven per cent) of the male emigrants died, among these being the Reverend Reorus Torkillus, the first pastor of the colony.
The need, therefore, for fresh recruits to take the places of those who proved themselves unequal to the trials of their situation constantly presented itself to the survivors, and ought, surely, to have been appreciated by the authorities in Sweden. Nevertheless, the fifth Swedish expedition to the Delaware, which arrived at Christina on the “Fama,”[923] March 11, 1644, added very little to the numerical strength of the settlement;[924] while, through the carelessness of the agent at Gottenburg, some of the clothing and merchandise was shipped in a damaged condition.
The principal emigrant on this occasion was Johan Papegåja, who had already been in New Sweden, and now returned, bearing letters of recommendation to the Governor from his sovereign and from Peter Brahe, President of the Royal Council, in consequence of which he was at once appointed to the chief command at Fort Christina. He was likewise accepted as a suitor for the hand of Printz’s daughter, Armgott, and not long afterward became the Governor’s son-in-law. Brahe acknowledged the receipt of Printz’s letter, before referred to, on the 18th[459] of August; and congratulating him on his safe arrival at the Delaware he expresses the hope that he will “gain firm foothold there, and be able to lay so good a foundation in tam vasta terra septentrionali, that with God’s gracious favor the whole North American continent may in time be brought to the knowledge of His Son, and become subject to the crown of Sweden.” He particularly admonishes the Governor to cultivate friendship with “the poor savages,” instructing them, and endeavoring to convert them to Christianity. “Adorn,” says he, “your little church and priest after the Swedish fashion, with the usual habiliments of the altar, in distinction from the Hollanders and English, shunning all leaven of Calvinism,” remembering that “outward ceremonial will not the less move them than others to sentiments of piety and devotion.” He likewise enjoins “the use of the Swedish language in spoken and written discourse, in all its purity, without admixture of foreign tongues. All rivers and streams, forests, and other places should receive old Swedish names, to the exclusion of the nomenclature of the Dutch, which,” he has heard, “is taking root. In fine,” he adds, “let the manners and customs of the colony conform as closely as possible to those of Sweden.” To Printz’s reply to this letter we are indebted for the fullest account of the religious rites observed in the settlement which has been preserved to us. “Divine service,” says the Governor, “is performed here in the good old Swedish tongue, our priest clothed in the vestments of the Mass on high festivals, solemn prayer-days, Sundays, and Apostles’ days precisely as in old Sweden, and differing in every respect from that of the sects around us. Sermons are delivered Wednesdays and Fridays, and on all other days prayers are offered in the morning and afternoon; and since this cannot be done everywhere by our sole clergyman, I have appointed a lay-reader for each place, to say prayers daily, morning and evening, and dispose the people to godliness. All this,” he continues, “has long been witnessed by the savages, some of whom we have had several days with us, attempting to convert them; but they have watched their chance, and invariably run off to rejoin their pagan brethren,”—a statement not inconsistent with the testimony of Campanius, who admits that, although his grandfather held many conversations with the Indians, and translated the Swedish Lutheran catechism into their language[925] for their instruction in Christian doctrine, no more definite result was reached than to convince them of the relative superiority of the religion thus expounded.
In the course of three months a cargo was obtained for the return voyage of the “Fama,” consisting of 2,142 beaver skins, 300 of which were from the Schuylkill, and 20,467 pounds of tobacco, part being bought in[460] Virginia, while the rest was raised by the Swedes and their English neighbors at Varkens Kil, Printz allowing a higher price for this, to encourage the cultivation of the plant and to induce immigration to New Sweden. The Governor also freighted the vessel with 7,300 pounds on his personal account. Five of the colonists embraced this opportunity to go back to Sweden, among whom were Captain Boije, the clergyman “Herr Israel,” and a barber-surgeon. The “Fama” set sail on the 20th of June, and reached Europe in the autumn, but putting into a Dutch harbor to revictual was detained there pending a long controversy as to the payment of duty between Peter Spiring, then Swedish Resident at the Hague, and the States-General, and did not arrive at Gottenburg till May, 1645.
At the date of Governor Printz’s second Report to the Swedish West India Company, which was sent home by the “Fama,” the colonists in New Sweden numbered ninety men, besides women and children. About half of these were employed, at stipulated wages, in the discharge of various civil and military functions on behalf of the Crown and Company. The “freemen” (frimännen)—so called because they had settled in the colony entirely of their own will, and might leave it at their option—held land granted them in fee, temporarily not taxed, which they cultivated for themselves, being aided also by the Company with occasional gifts of money, food, and raiment. Persons who had been compelled to immigrate, as elsewhere stated, in punishment for offences committed by them in Sweden, were required to till ground reserved to the Company, which fed and clothed them, or to perform other work, at the discretion of the Governor, for a few years, when they were admitted to the privileges of freemen, or assigned duty in the first class above mentioned.
In the autumn of 1644 a bark was sent by the merchants of Boston to trade in the Delaware, which passed the winter near the English plantation at Varkens Kil, and the following spring fell down the bay, and in three weeks secured five hundred skins of the Indians on the Maryland side. Just as the vessel was about to leave, she was treacherously boarded by some of the savages, who rifled her of her goods and sails, killing the master and three men, and taking two prisoners, who were brought six weeks afterward to Governor Printz, and were returned by him to New England.
On the 25th of November, 1645, a grievous calamity befell the colony in the burning of New Gottenburg, which was set on fire, between ten and eleven o’clock at night, by a gunner, who was tried and sentenced by Printz, and subsequently sent to Sweden for punishment. “The whole place was consumed,” says the Governor, “in a single hour, nought being rescued but the dairy;” the loss to the Company amounting to four thousand riksdaler. “The people escaped, naked and destitute; but the winter immediately setting in with great severity, and the river and creeks freezing, they were cut off from communication with the mainland,” and barely avoided starvation until relief arrived in March. Printz continued, however, to reside at Tinicum,[461] and soon rebuilt a storehouse, to receive “provisions and cargoes to be sold on behalf of the Company.” He also erected a church upon the island, “decorating it,” says he, “so far as our resources would permit, after the Swedish fashion,” which, with its adjoining burying-ground, was consecrated by Campanius, Sept. 4, 1646.
In the summer of the same year occurred the first outbreak of the jealousy which had existed from the beginning between the Swedes and Hollanders, however well it may have been concealed, especially during the need of concerted action against their common rival the English. On the 23d of June a sloop arrived at Fort Nassau with a cargo from Manhattan, to trade with the Indians, and was directed by Andries Hudde, the Dutch commissary who had succeeded Jan Jansen, “to go into the Schuylkill.” She was immediately commanded by the Swedes to leave the place,—an order which was repeated to Hudde, and reiterated the next day by Campanius. The result was a conference between the Dutch commissary and Commissary Huygen, Sergeant Van Dyck, and Carl Janson, on behalf of Printz; which was followed on the 1st of July by so menacing an admonition from the Governor, that Jurriaen Blanck the supercargo, fearing his vessel and goods might be confiscated, felt constrained to yield, and abandoned his enterprise. Soon afterward Hudde was prevented from executing a commission of Director Kieft, to search for minerals at Sankikan, through the opposition of the Indians, prompted by a report of the warlike intentions of the Hollanders circulated among the savages by Printz. And when, in September, in obedience to instructions from Manhattan, the Dutch commissary purchased from the natives land on the “west shore” of the Delaware, “distant about one league to the north of Fort Nassau” (within the limits of the present city of Philadelphia), and erected the arms of his West India Company upon it, these were pulled down “in a hostile manner,” on the 8th of October, by Commissary Huygen, and a protest against his action was delivered to him on the 16th by Olof Stille and Mans Slom, on the part of the Swedish governor. The latter likewise forbade his people to have any dealings with the Hollanders, and treated a counter-protest, sent to him by Hudde on the 23d, with such contempt as effectually completed the rupture.
It was now two years and three months since the “Fama” left the Delaware, during the whole of which time no letters were received in the colony either from Sweden or from Holland. This apparent neglect of her offspring by the mother country was accounted for by Chancellor Oxenstjerna through the occurrence of the war with Denmark, which absorbed the attention of the Government and cost the life of Admiral Fleming, who had been the chief administrator of the interests of the settlement. Not until the 1st of October, 1646, did the sixth Swedish expedition arrive in[462] New Sweden, on the ship “Gyllene Hajen” (the Golden Shark), after a tempestuous voyage of four months, in which the vessel lost her sails, topmasts, and other rigging, and the crew almost to a man fell sick. Few, if any, emigrants came out on this voyage; but the cargo was valuable, comprising cloth, iron implements, and other goods, which supplied the needs of the settlers, with something to spare for sale in New England. Printz was also enabled to revive his languishing trade with the Indians. He “immediately despatched Commissary Hendrick Huygen, with Sergeant Gregorius van Dyck and eight soldiers, to the country of the Minquas, distant five German miles, who presented the savages with divers gifts, and induced them to agree to traffic with the Swedes as formerly, particularly,” says the Governor, “as the Commissary promised them higher prices than they could get from the Hollanders.” On the 20th of February, 1647, the vessel sailed on her return, carrying 24,177 pounds of tobacco, of which 6,920 pounds were raised on the Delaware, while the rest was purchased elsewhere. Lieutenant Papegåja went home in her, commissioned to execute some private behests of the colonists, and to present the Governor’s third Report to the Swedish West India Company.
In the document referred to, dated at New Gottenburg the day “Gyllene Hajen” left, Printz gives a very satisfactory account of the settlement, which, he says, at that time numbered one hundred and eighty-three souls. “The people,” he adds, “have always enjoyed good health, only two men and two young children having died” since the second Report. “Twenty-eight freemen were settled, and beginning to prosper; many more being willing to follow their example if they could be spared from the fortified posts.” Of these, Fort Elfsborg had been considerably strengthened; Fort Christina, which was quite decayed, repaired from top to bottom; and Fort Nya Korsholm, on the Schuylkill, was nearly ready for use. This last was doubtless the structure called by Campanius “Manaijung, Skörkilen,”[926]—“a fine little fort of logs, filled in with sand and stones, and surrounded by palisades with sharp points at the top.” “I have also built,” says Printz, “on the other side of Korsholm, by the path of the Minquas, a fine house called Wasa,[927] capable of defence against the savages by four or five men; and seven stout freemen have settled there. And a quarter of[463] a mile farther up the same Indian highway I have erected another strong house, settling five freemen in the vicinity,—this place receiving the name of Mölndal, from a water-mill I have had constructed, which runs the whole year, to the great advantage of the country; especially,” adds he, “as the windmill, which was here before I came, was good for nothing, and never would work.” Both of these posts the natives were obliged to pass in going to Fort Nassau; and the Swedish governor hoped, by storing them with merchandise for barter, to intercept the traffic with the Dutch. Printz insists upon the need of getting rid of the latter, accusing them of ruining his trade, and supplying the savages with ammunition, and inciting them against the Swedes. “The English Puritans,” he continues, “who gave me a great deal of trouble at first, I have been able finally to drive away; and for a long time have heard nothing from them, except that last year Captain Clerk, through his agent from New England, attempted to settle some hundred families here under our flag, which I civilly declined to permit until further instructed in the matter by her Majesty.” The Governor earnestly solicits the sending of more people from Sweden, particularly “families to cultivate the country,” artisans and soldiers, “and, above all, unmarried women as wives for the unmarried freemen and others.” He likewise mentions the names of several officers who wished to be allowed to return home, and desires himself to be relieved, especially as he had been in New Sweden more than a year and a half beyond the term agreed upon.
Printz’s Report and Papegåja’s representations seem to have hastened the sending of another vessel to the Delaware, for on the 25th of September, 1647, the seventh expedition sailed from Gottenburg on “Svanen,” Captain Steffen Willemsen. Papegåja returned on the ship, bearing a letter of commendation from Queen Christina to Governor Printz, promising to consider a request of the latter for augmentation of his salary and a grant of “seventy farms,”[928] but requiring him to remain in the colony until his place could be supplied.
A great deal of the ammunition asked for by the Governor was sent out on this vessel, but very few emigrants,[929]—a circumstance which was explained, in a communication from Chancellor Oxenstjerna in reply to Printz’s Report, by the near approach of winter. Action was likewise taken some months later by the Crown making good the deficiency of the South Company through payment of the salaries of its officers in New Sweden,—a burden which had been temporarily assumed by it in consequence of the misappropriations, as well as insufficiency, of the tobacco excises which had been granted towards that object by statute of[464] the 30th of August, 1642. And by the same royal letter, dated Jan. 20, 1648, merchandise coming from Holland for transportation to New Sweden was freed from duty, as also tobacco and furs which arrived in the kingdom from the colony. On the 16th of the following May “Svanen” set out again from the Delaware, and after a remarkably quick voyage arrived on the 3d of July at Stockholm. The clergyman Johan Campanius Holm returned in her, and Lieutenant Papegåja wrote to Chancellor Oxenstjerna, begging the favor of a position in Sweden, since the people in New Sweden were too inconsiderable for him to be of any service to the company where he was, and “the country was troublesome to defend, both on account of the savages and of the Christians, who inflict upon us,” says he, “every kind of injury.”
This complaint is evidently directed against the Hollanders, who now began to strengthen their position on the Delaware. Willem Kieft, so amiably pacific in his comportment towards the Swedes, was superseded in the government of New Netherland in May, 1647, by Peter Stuyvesant,—a man of arbitrary and warlike character, who declared it to be his intention to regard as Dutch territory not only New Sweden, but all land between Cape Henlopen and Cape Cod. Meanwhile, Governor Printz persisted in a haughty demeanor towards the Dutch, continuing to impede or prevent their navigation of the “South River,” and he is charged with inciting suspicion of his rivals among both Indians and Christians,—actions which were protested against by Stuyvesant, to whom the Swedish governor made a reply which was transmitted to Manhattan by Commissary Hudde in December. During the winter Printz collected a great quantity of logs for the purpose of erecting more buildings at the Schuylkill; and when in the spring Hudde, instigated by the natives, constructed a fort called Beversrede at Passajung, Lieutenant Kling opposed the work, and ordered his men, some twenty-four in number, to cut down the trees around the spot. On news of this, and in consequence of a complaint of the Directors of the Dutch West India Company that the limits between the Swedes, English, and Hollanders were still unsettled, Councillors Lubbertus van Dincklagen and Johannes la Montagne, despatched by Stuyvesant on that mission in June, procured from the natives confirmation of a grant of land on the Schuylkill made to Arendt Corssen on behalf of the Dutch in 1633, and, visiting New Gottenburg, protested before the Governor against the actions of the Swedes. No attention was paid to this, however, and houses which two Dutchmen immediately began to build upon the tract were destroyed by Printz’s son (Gustaf Printz) and Sergeant Van Dyck. In September the Governor caused a house to be built within a dozen feet of Fort Beversrede, and directly between it and the river, while Lieutenant[465] Sven Schute prevented the construction of houses by the Hollanders in November. Another Dutchman obtained permission from Director-General Stuyvesant to settle on the east side of the Delaware, at Mantaes Hoeck (near the present Mantua Creek, New Jersey), and solicited the aid of Governor Printz in carrying out his purpose. This was promised him, provided he acknowledged the jurisdiction of that officer; but, fearing some advantage might be taken of the concession by the Hollanders, Printz immediately bought from the Indians the land between this place and Narraticons Kil, which constituted the northern boundary of the purchase of Governor Hollender, and erected the Swedish arms upon it. According to Hudde, the Governor of New Sweden likewise endeavored to acquire from the natives territory about Fort Nassau, more completely to isolate that place from intercourse with Manhattan, but was anticipated by the Dutch, who secured it for themselves in April, 1649.
Meanwhile, in the mother country an expedition was preparing, which but for its untimely fate would have furnished the colony with such ample means of security and self-defence as might very probably have postponed or even altogether prevented the ultimate subjugation of the latter by the Hollanders. On the 24th of March, 1649, Queen Christina issued orders to the College of the Admiralty to equip the “Kalmar Nyckel,” then lying at Gottenburg, for the projected voyage across the ocean; and finding it would take too long to get her ready, on the 13th of April her Majesty authorized the substitution of the ship “Kattan” (the Cat), under the command of Captain Cornelius Lucifer. A certain Hans Amundson Besk was appointed leader of this, the eighth, Swedish expedition to New Sweden, which comprised his wife and five children, and sixty-three other emigrants, including a clergyman, clerk, and barber-surgeon, many mechanics, and some soldiers, with sixteen unmarried women, designed no doubt as wives for the earlier settlers. The fact that three hundred Finns applied for the privilege of joining the party showed there was no lack of voluntary colonists. The cargo embraced implements of every sort, and a large quantity of the materials of war,—“two six-pounder brass cannon, two three-pounder, twelve six-pounder, and two four-pounder iron cannon, powder, lead, grenades, muskets, pistols,” and so forth, besides rigging for a ship to be built on the Delaware. The vessel sailed on the 3d of July from Gottenburg, and arrived in safety at the West Indies, where, through the carelessness of the captain, on the 26th of August she struck a rock near an island fourteen miles from Porto Rico. When ready to set out afresh, the emigrants were pillaged by the inhabitants, who were Spaniards, and were taken to the latter place, where certain of them permanently settled, while others contrived in the course of one or two years[466] to get back to Sweden. Eighteen, only, determined to continue their voyage to the Delaware, leaving Porto Rico with that intention in a little bark which they were able to purchase, May 1, 1651. They were seized the very next day, however, by a frigate, which carried them to Santa Cruz, then in the possession of France, where they were most barbarously treated by the Governor and his people. In a few weeks all died but five, who were taken off by a Dutch vessel, of whom a single survivor finally reached Holland. Commander Amundson and his family were sent by the Governor of Porto Rico to Spain, where they arrived in July of the same year, and whence they afterward proceeded to Amsterdam, and at last returned to Sweden.
This expedition, therefore, effected nothing for the colonists on the Delaware, who must have been greatly depressed by the news of its calamities. This reached them, through a letter of Director-General Stuyvesant to Commissary Hudde, on the 6th of August, 1650 (N. S.).[930] Printz immediately wrote by a Dutch vessel to Peter Brahe, referring to the report, and giving some account of the settlement since the departure of “Svanen,” two years and three months before. “Most of the people,” says he, “are alive and well. They are generally supplied with oxen and cattle, and cultivate the land with assiduity, sowing rye and barley, and planting orchards of delicious fruit, and would do better if all had wives and servants. Last year the crops were particularly excellent, our freemen having a hundred tuns of grain to sell. In short, the governor who relieves me will find his position as good as any similar one in Sweden. I have taken possession of the best places, and still hold them. Notwithstanding repeated acts and protests of the Dutch, nothing whatever has been accomplished by them; and where, on several occasions, they attempted to build within our boundaries, I at once threw down their work: so that, if the new governor brings enough people with him, they will very soon grow weary and disgusted, like the Puritans, who were most violent at first, but now leave us entirely in peace. This year, however, they had all the trade, since we received no cargoes; and so long as this is the case we must entertain some fear of the savages, although as yet we have experienced no hostility from them.” Further details as to the condition of the colony were to be orally communicated to the authorities in Sweden by Lieutenant Sven Schute, who was sent home for that purpose. Printz earnestly renewed his appeal to be released, urging his age and great feebleness, and recalling the services he had rendered to his country during the past thirty years.
So determined had been the opposition of the Governor to the encroachments of the Hollanders, that the Directors of the Dutch West India Company now began to think of applying to Queen Christina for a settlement[467] of limits between the rival jurisdictions,—a purpose they communicated to the Director-General of New Netherland in a letter of the 21st of March, 1651, meantime requiring him, however, to “endeavor to maintain the rights of the Company in all justice and equity.” In accordance with these instructions, and in consequence, it is likely, of Printz’s fresh interference in the spring with operations of the Dutch in the neighborhood of Fort Beversrede and on an island in the Schuylkill, the energetic Stuyvesant despatched “a ship, well manned and equipped with cannon,” from New Amsterdam, which made her appearance at the mouth of the Delaware on the 8th of the following May, and “dropping anchor half a (Swedish) mile below Fort Christina, closed the river to navigation of all vessels, large and small.”
VISSCHER’S MAP, 1651.
This is an extract from Visscher’s map as given by Campanius, and the date is fixed from the presence on it of Fort Casimir (built that year) and Fort Elfsborg (abandoned that year). The name above the latter one is a manuscript addition in the copy used in the reproduction. It is also reproduced in Dr. Egle’s Pennsylvania, p. 43.
She was, to be sure, soon forced to withdraw by an armed yacht made ready by Printz; but her captain sending tidings of his situation to Manhattan, on the 25th of June Stuyvesant himself came overland, with a hundred and twenty men, being joined at Fort Nassau by eleven sail (including four well-furnished ships), and after proceeding up and down the river several times, with demonstrations of hostility, finally landed two hundred of his soldiers at a place on the west bank between Forts Christina and Elfsborg, called Sandhoeck (near New Castle, Delaware), where he built a small fort, to which he gave the name of Casimir. He likewise cut down the Swedish boundary posts, and sought by threats to compel the[468] freemen to acknowledge the rule of the Hollanders. Abandoning and razing Fort Nassau, because of its less convenient position (too far up the stream), he stationed two men-of-war at his new fort, and collected toll of foreign vessels, even plundering and detaining several Virginia barques on account of duty demanded on their traffic in New Sweden for the previous four years. Printz was not strong enough to resist these acts by force; but when the Dutch director-general found some Indians ready to deny the rights of the Swedes, and even to undertake to sell to him the territory which he had seized, the Governor held a meeting on the 3d of July at Elfsborg with the heirs of the sachem who had conveyed to Governor Minuit the land between Christina and Bomtiens Udden, embracing the site of Fort Casimir, and obtained a confirmation of that grant, with a denial of the title of the savages who disposed of it to Stuyvesant. A protest was addressed to the latter from New Gottenburg on the 8th, claiming this region as well as that above Christina to Sankikan, and appealing for observance of “the praiseworthy alliance between her Royal Majesty of Sweden and the High and Mighty States-General.” Similar conferences were likewise held at New Gottenburg on the 13th and the 16th of the same month, resulting in still more explicit recognition, on the part of the natives, of the right of the Swedes to the territory on the Delaware; but neither this action of the savages nor a personal visit of Printz produced any effect on the Dutch director-general, although, it is said, at his departure the rival governors mutually promised to maintain “neighborly friendship and correspondence,” and to “refrain from hostile or vexatious deeds against each other.” The Governor of New Sweden related these events in letters of the 1st of August to Chancellor Oxenstjerna and Councillor Brahe, saying that he had been obliged to abandon all save his three principal posts (New Gottenburg, Nya Korsholm, and Christina), which he had strengthened and reinforced. In other respects the colony had prospered, reaping “very fine harvests at all the settlements, besides obtaining delicious crops of several kinds of fruit” that year. “Nothing is needed,” he adds, “but a much larger emigration of people, both soldiers and farmers, whom the country is now amply able to sustain.”
Although the Director-General of New Netherland had informed Printz that his invasion of New Sweden was authorized by the States of Holland, this was not precisely true; and the Directors of the Dutch West India Company, in a letter of the 4th of April, 1652, expressed considerable surprise at the boldness of his action, fearing it might be resented by her Swedish Majesty. The subject was, in fact, discussed by the Royal Council of Sweden on the 18th of March, when “the Queen declared it to be her opinion that redress might fairly be required of the States-General, and the Chancellor of the Kingdom deemed the question well worthy of deliberation.” Two days before, also, a consultation was held on the condition of New Sweden, at which were present, by special summons, Postmaster-General Beier (who, since the death of Admiral Fleming, acted as superintendent[469] of the enterprise in Sweden), the book-keeper Hans Kramer (a zealous co-operator in the work), Henrik Gerdtson (only known as having been a resident of New Netherland), the assessor in the College of Commerce, and finally Lieutenant Schute, who gave a good report of the colony and the resources of the country, and attested the need of a greater number of emigrants. Of these, it was stated, plenty could be found “willing to go forth and settle;” and, in accordance with the judgment of the Queen and the sentiments of her Chancellor, it was resolved to commit the undertaking for the future to the care of the College of Commerce, and to order the Admiralty to prepare a vessel for another expedition to the Delaware. A few days later a ship was designated by her Majesty, namely, “Svanen,” but more than a whole year elapsed before the final execution of the project.
The situation of the colony, meanwhile, awakened great anxiety in the mind of the Governor. Not since the arrival of “Svanen,” between four and five years before, had any message or letter been received from Sweden, and the emigrants naturally began to fear that they had been abandoned by their sovereign. Some of them, therefore, left the country, while others were disposed to do so on a more favorable opportunity. According to a letter from Printz to Chancellor Oxenstjerna, dated Aug. 30, 1652, forty Dutch families had settled on the east side of the Delaware, although, like the rest of their compatriots in New Sweden, they were miserably provided for the pursuit of agriculture, and could only sustain themselves by traffic with the savages. In the latter particular, however, both Hollanders and English had great advantages over the Swedes, who having no cargoes of their own were forced to buy merchandise for barter of their rivals at double prices, or entirely lose their trade. This year, unfortunately, “the water spoiled the grain;” still, says Printz, the country “was in tolerably good condition, the freemen, with their cattle and other possessions, doing well, and the principal places being occupied and fortified as usual.” A vessel also had been built, of ninety or a hundred läster,[931] and was only waiting for sails and rigging, and some cannon, which cost too dear to purchase there. On the 26th of April, 1653, the Governor again wrote to the Chancellor, saying,—
“The people yet living and remaining in New Sweden, men, women, and children, number altogether two hundred souls. The settled families do well, and are supplied with cattle. The country yields a fair revenue. Still the soldiers and others in the Company’s service enjoy but a very mean subsistence, and consequently seek opportunity every day to get away, whether with or without leave, having no expectation of any release, as it is now five years and a half since a letter was received from home.[470] The English trade, from which we used to obtain a good support, is at an end, on account of the war with Holland; while the fur-trade yields no profit, particularly now that hostilities have broken out between the Arrigahaga and Susquehanna Indians, from whom the beavers were procured. The Hollanders have quit all their places on the river except Fort Casimir, where they have settled about twenty-six families. To attempt anything against them with our present resources, however, would be of no avail. More people must be sent over from Sweden, or all the money and labor hitherto expended on this undertaking, so well begun, is wasted. We have always been on peaceful terms with the natives so long as our cargoes lasted, but whenever these gave out their friendship has cooled; for which reason, as well as for the sustenance of our colonists, we have been compelled to purchase a small cargo, by drawing a bill to be paid in Holland, which we expect to discharge by bartering half of the goods for tobacco.”
Finally, on the 14th of July, Governor Printz wrote once more to Brahe concerning a speculation of the Dutch and English for supplying tobacco for Sweden, through the aid of a Virginia merchant sailing under a Swedish commission; and, to give further weight to his appeals on behalf of the colony, he sent home his son, Gustaf Printz, who had been a lieutenant in the settlement since 1648. The situation of the emigrants did not improve during the summer; and nothing yet being heard from Sweden, the Governor felt he could wait no longer, and determined to leave the country. When this resolution became known, some of the Swedes were inclined to remove to Manhattan and put themselves under the protection of Stuyvesant; but being refused permission by the Director-General until instructions should come from Holland, they seem to have abandoned the project. Before taking his departure, Printz promised the inhabitants that he would either himself return in ten months or send back a vessel and cargo, and appointed in his place, as Vice-Governor of the Colony, his son-in-law Johan Papegåja. In company with his wife and Hendrick Huygen, and some others of the settlers, he left the Delaware in the beginning of October, and, crossing the ocean in a Dutch vessel, by the 1st of December reached Rochelle, from whence he went to Holland early in 1654, and in April of that year at last arrived in Sweden.
The reiterated appeals of Governor Printz to his superiors had begun at length to produce their effect, and Aug. 13, 1653, Queen Christina ordered the Admiralty to equip the ship “Vismar” for the expedition to New Sweden which had been projected (and for which “Svanen” had been selected) the previous year. Three hundred persons were to take part in it, and rigging was to be procured for the vessel which had been built on the Delaware. The same day, also, the College of War was enjoined to supply ammunition for the defence of the settlement. The College of Commerce, which was now fully organized, had, by her Majesty’s desire,[471] assumed the direction of the colony, and the honor of restoring and actively conducting its affairs belongs to the President of that College, Erik, son of Axel, Oxenstjerna.
On the 25th of August Sven Schute was commanded to enrol fifty soldiers as emigrants, preferring such as possessed mechanical skill, sending them to Stockholm, besides two hundred and fifty persons, including some women, to be obtained in the forests of Värmland and Dal. Instead of the “Vismar,” the ship “Örnen” (the Eagle) was supplied by the Admiralty, which was ready to receive her cargo by autumn, and was put under the command of Johan Bockhorn, the mate of the ill-fated “Kattan;” while the West India Company fitted out “Gyllene Hajen,” which had borne the sixth expedition to New Sweden, to be commanded by Hans Amundson, who, as Captain of the Navy, was to superintend the construction of vessels and have charge of the defences of the colony. Schute was to accompany the expedition as “Captain in the country, and particularly over the emigrants to be sent out on ‘Örnen,’” both he and Amundson having been granted patents for land on the Delaware.[932]
Not aware that Printz had already left New Sweden, the Queen wrote a letter, December 12, permitting him to come home, but deprecating his doing so until arrangements could be made in regard to his successor; and the same day Johan Claesson Rising, the Secretary of the College of Commerce, was appointed Commissary and Assistant-Councillor to the Governor, at an annual salary of twelve hundred daler-silfver, besides receiving fifteen hundred daler-silfver for the expenses of his voyage, with the privilege of resuming his position in the College if he returned to Sweden.
He was also granted as much land in New Sweden as he could cultivate with twenty or thirty peasants, and received a Memoir from his sovereign, as well as Instructions from the College of Commerce, in twenty-four articles, signed by Erik Oxenstjerna and Christer Bonde on the 15th, prescribing his duties in the colony. He was to aid Printz in the administration of justice and the promotion of agriculture, trade, fishing, and so forth; and to endeavor to extend the settlement, encouraging the immigration of worthy neighbors of[472] other nations. The Dutch were to be peacefully removed from Fort Casimir and the vicinity, if possible, care being taken that the English did not obtain a foothold on the Delaware; and a fort might be built, if needed, at the mouth of the river. On the way to America another commission was to be executed by Captain Amundson, in obtaining from the Spaniards at Porto Rico compensation for “Kattan.”
The final preparations for the departure of the ninth expedition to New Sweden were made under the directions of the book-keeper Hans Kramer, in Stockholm, and Admiral Thijssen Anckerhelm at Gottenburg, where “Örnen” remained for several months awaiting the arrival of “Gyllene Hajen” from the capital. This did not occur, however, until the close of January, 1654; and the ship having met with such disasters at Öresund as necessitated her stopping for repairs before she could continue her journey, “Örnen” was forced to sail alone. On the 27th of that month the emigrants, numbering (with women and children) three hundred and fifty souls, swore allegiance to their sovereign and to the West India Company, and on February 2 weighed anchor for the Delaware. No fewer than a hundred families, who had sold all their property in expectation of uniting in the expedition, were obliged to stay behind for lack of room. Besides Commissary Rising and Captain Schute, Elias Gyllengren, who had accompanied Governor Printz to New Sweden, sailed on this vessel, with the commission of lieutenant.
Two Lutheran clergymen, Petrus Hjort and Matthias Nertunius, the latter of whom had embarked on the unfortunate “Kattan,” and Peter Lindström, a military engineer, from whose letters, journal, and maps we derive much information concerning the Swedish colony, likewise were of the company. After a very adventurous voyage, during which half of the travellers fell sick, and the ship was dismantled by a violent hurricane, and nearly captured by the Turks, “Örnen” arrived on the 18th of May in Delaware Bay, and two days afterward at Fort Elfsborg, now deserted and in ruins. On the 21st she cast anchor off Fort Casimir, then in charge of Gerrit Bikker and a dozen Dutch soldiers. Although in the general instructions of his superiors Rising was cautioned against engaging in hostilities with the Hollanders, such was not the personal counsel of Axel Oxenstjerna; and a letter of Erik Oxenstjerna, dated Jan. 18, 1654, expresses the opinion that the present was “an opportunity for action which it were culpable to neglect.” This probably accounts for the energy exhibited by the Commissary in inaugurating his administration of the affairs of the colony; for, immediately on reaching the Dutch[473] post, he sent Captain Schute with twenty soldiers to demand the surrender of the garrison. Not receiving a satisfactory reply, the Captain ordered Lieutenant Gyllengren to enter the place, where the latter soon triumphantly displayed the Swedish flag. The stronghold was named anew from the day of its capture (Trinity Sunday), Trefaldighets Fort (Trinity Fort). The next day “Örnen” sailed up to Christina, and on the 23d the inhabitants of that region assembled to hear the commands of their sovereign, and the Dutch settlers who were permitted to remain on the Delaware took the oath of fealty to Sweden,—an act which, with the surrender of Fort Casimir, was at once reported in a letter from Rising to Stuyvesant.
TRINITY FORT.
This follows the sketch given in Campanius, p. 76, copied from Lindström.
A meeting of the rest of the people for the same object was held at Tinicum on the 4th of June. Since the departure of Governor Printz the colonists had been greatly reduced in numbers through desertion and other causes, and Fort Nya Korsholm had been abandoned, and had afterwards been burned by the savages. Lieutenant Papegåja, therefore, cheerfully resigned the responsibility of the government to Commissary Rising, who retained him, however, as his counsellor, in conjunction with Captain Schute.
The new Governor spent several days in visiting the various settlements on the river, in company with Engineer Lindström, and on the 17th of June concluded a treaty of peace and friendship with the Indians, represented by ten of their sachems, at a council at Printzhof. The day after, “Lawrence Lloyd, the English commandant of Virginia,” took supper with Rising, and intimated the claim made by his nation to the Delaware, referring especially to the grant to Plowden, already spoken of. The Swedes[474] defended their title to the territory by an appeal to the donations and concessions of the natives. The Virginians subsequently desiring to buy land and settle it with colonists, Rising, remembering the encroachments of the Puritans in New Netherland, felt constrained to deny their request until special instructions on the subject should be received from Sweden. On the other hand, an open letter was addressed by the Governor, July 3, to all Swedes who had gone to Virginia, inviting them to return to the Delaware, and promising that they should then be granted permission to betake themselves wherever they wished. On the 8th of the same month still further recognition of the Swedish dominion over the west shore of the river, from Fort Trinity to the Schuylkill, was obtained from two Indian chieftains, who met Rising for that purpose at Fort Christina. The relations with New England at this period were quite friendly, and a shallop was despatched thither, under the charge of Jacob Svenson, to procure a larger supply of food. At the same time an “Ordinance” was promulgated, determining many details “concerning the people, land, agriculture, woods, and cattle,” designed to promote the internal welfare of the colony. The progress made during the first two months of Governor Rising’s administration was very satisfactory; and hopeful letters were addressed by him, July 11 and 13, to Erik and Axel Oxenstjerna, respectively, and a full Report of measures recommended and adopted, bearing the latter date, was rendered to the College of Commerce. “For myself,” says the Governor, “thank God, I am very contented. There is four times more ground occupied at present than when we arrived, and the country is better peopled; for then we found only seventy persons, and now, including the Hollanders and others, there are three hundred and sixty-eight.” Some of the old freemen, induced by the immunity from taxation which had been accorded to persons who occupied new land, requested fresh allotments. These relinquished ground already cleared, which was purchased for the Company and settled with young freemen, who were supplied with seed and cattle, subject to an equal division with the Company of the offspring and of the crops. Rising also deemed it advisable to found a little town of artisans and mechanics, and for that purpose selected a field near Fort Christina, which Lindström laid out in lots, naming the place Christinahamn (Christina Haven), where he proposed “to build houses in the autumn;” and among sites for cities and villages he mentions Sandhoeck, or Trinity, where about twenty-two houses had been erected by the Hollanders. The Dutch fort at the latter spot, which he had captured, was reconstructed by Captain Schute, who armed it with four fourteen-pounder cannon taken from “Örnen.” In accordance with the permission granted, Rising selected for himself a piece of “uncleared land below Fort Trinity;” and since this was rather remote from his place of residence, Christina, he requested the privilege of cultivating “Timmerön (Timber Island), with the land to Skölpaddkilen (Tortoise-shell Creek).”
“Örnen” sailed from New Sweden in July, carrying home some of[475] the older colonists, with Lieutenant Papegåja, who was deputed to give further information about the condition of the settlement. It was impossible to provide the vessel with a sufficient cargo, but Rising shipped some tobacco, which he had purchased in Virginia, to be sold on his private account in Sweden.
We now know that news of Printz’s departure from the Delaware was received soon after “Örnen” had left Gottenburg for America; and on the 28th of February, 1654, Queen Christina commissioned Rising as temporary Governor of New Sweden. By the same royal letter Hans Amundson was removed from the supervision of “the defence of the land and the forts,” and this duty was intrusted to Sven Schute, in unwitting anticipation of a request in Rising’s report of the following July. In consequence of incapacity exhibited on the voyage of “Gyllene Hajen” from Stockholm to Gottenburg, he was likewise replaced in the command of his vessel on the 4th of March, by Sven Höök, subject to the superior orders of Henrich von Elswich, of Lübeck, who was deputed to succeed Huygen as commissary in the colony, taking care of the cargoes and funds, and keeping the books of the Company.
In the hope of further developing the growth of the settlement, on the 16th of the same month Queen Christina granted a “privilegium for those who buy land or traffic in New Sweden or the West Indies,” in accordance with which, whoever purchased ground of the Company or of the Indians, with recognition of the jurisdiction of her Majesty was assured allodial enfranchisement for himself and his heirs forever; while subjects who exported goods which had already paid duty in the kingdom or dependencies of Sweden, should be free from all imposts on the Delaware, and were required to pay only two per cent (and nothing in Sweden) on what they exported from that river. On the 15th of April “Gyllene Hajen” was at last able to leave Gottenburg, with a number of emigrants and a quantity of merchandise, and arrived at Porto Rico on the 30th of June. Commissary Elswich was kindly received by the Spanish governor of the island, Don Diego Aquilera, and on presenting letters from his Catholic Majesty and Antonio de Pimentelli, the Spanish ambassador to Sweden, with his claim for damages for “Kattan,” he was offered 14,030 Spanish dollars as compensation from the Governor, but not deeming that sum sufficient declined to accept it, in view of the good-will of the Spaniards and the prospect of more satisfactory negotiations on the subject in the future. Amundson, who had been permitted to accompany the expedition with his family, to press his personal demands at Porto Rico, and settle as a private individual[476] upon the Delaware, died on the 2d of July, and was buried on the island. The ship continued her voyage in August, and arrived off the continent September 12, when, either through the rashness or the malice of the mate, she was conducted into a bay, believed to be the Delaware, which was in fact the present New York harbor,—an error not discovered till she had reached Manhattan. So favorable an opportunity to retaliate the seizure of Fort Casimir by the Swedish governor was not suffered to pass unimproved by the energetic Stuyvesant, who detained the vessel and cargo, and on the refusal of Rising to visit New Amsterdam, or restore or pay for the Dutch fort, the Dutch governor confiscated the goods, and equipped “Gyllene Hajen,” under the name of “Diemen,” for the Curaçoa trade, in the service of his West India Company. Most of the emigrants remained in New Netherland; and Commissary Elswich, who vainly protested against such hostile actions, did not arrive at the Delaware until the close of November.
On the occasion of the English Minister Whitelocke’s embassy to Sweden, in May, 1654, a convention was adopted for the observance of friendship between New Sweden and the English colonies in America, and for the adjustment of their boundaries. Probably in ignorance of this, during the ensuing summer the colonists of New Haven renewed their project of forming a settlement on the Delaware. By order of the General Court of July 5, Governor Theophilus Eaton addressed a letter on the subject to Governor Rising, to which the latter replied August 1, affirming the right of his sovereign to “all the lands on both sides Delaware Bay and River,” and referring to “a conference or treaty before Mr. Endicott, wherein New Haven’s right was silenced or suppressed.” This was deemed unsatisfactory by the Commissioners of the United Colonies, to whom the letters were submitted by Governor Eaton on the 23d of September, and the same day another letter was written by these gentlemen to the Governor of New Sweden, reciting their purchases of land from the Indians, and desiring explanations. These communications being read at a General Court at New Haven on the 2d of November, a committee was appointed to receive applications from persons willing to emigrate, a company of whom appealed to the Court for aid in their enterprise on the 30th of the following January. This was readily accorded, and one of the number visited the Delaware to ascertain the sentiment of the people residing there; but returning in March, announced “little encouragement in the Bay,” while “a report of three ships being come to the Swedes seemed to make the business more difficult.” Although the undertaking was favored by the town of New Haven both then and during April, no attempt appears to have been made to carry it on.
During the summer of 1654 occurred the abdication of Queen Christina and the death of her aged Chancellor, Axel Oxenstjerna; but these events entailed no diminution of interest on the part of Sweden in the welfare of her colony in America. Observing that the partners in the West India Company “had not entered into their work with proper zeal,” on the 23d[477] of December King Charles X. (Gustavus) instructed the College of Commerce “to admonish them to do their duty, under penalty of forfeiting their share of future profits,” and for their encouragement renewed the privilege of the monopoly of the tobacco trade in Sweden and her dependencies, which had been withdrawn Oct. 25, 1649.
In April, 1655, members of the Company, including Johan Oxenstjerna, son of the late chancellor, and Jöran Fleming, son of the late admiral, were summoned before the College of Commerce, now presided over by Olof Andersson Strömsköld, who at the same time became Director of the Company, to decide “whether they would contribute the capital needed to carry on the enterprise, or relinquish their pretensions.” The associates not relishing the latter alternative, the resolution was taken to disburse the last of their funds, and to try to induce other persons to join them in their work.
It was even proposed to form a new company, enjoying proprietorship of the land subject to the Crown of Sweden, with increased privileges and immunities,—the scheme for this (dated in May) being still preserved in the Archives of the kingdom, although it does not seem to have been adopted, since it lacks the royal signature, and is not comprised in the registry. On the 30th of July Johan Rising was commissioned by the College of Commerce “Commandant” in New Sweden,—the budget for 1655 also embracing a captain, a lieutenant, an ensign, a sergeant, two gunners, a corporal, a drummer, and thirty-six soldiers, a provost, and an executioner, with three clergymen, a commissary, an assistant-commissary, a fiscal, a barber-surgeon, and an engineer, at an annual expense of 4,404 riksdaler for the colony. In addition, certain employés were occupied in Stockholm, at a charge of 834 riksdaler. The Company likewise succeeded in fitting out the tenth and last Swedish expedition to the Delaware, under the command of the former Commissary, Hendrick Huygen, including Johan Papegåja, a Lutheran minister called Herr Matthias, six Finnish families from Värmland, and other emigrants, numbering in all eighty-eight souls, a hundred more being turned away for want of room. The vessel selected on this occasion was the “Mercurius,” which was ready to receive her cargo, consisting chiefly of linen and woollen stuffs and salt, in July, but was obliged to wait for cannon and ammunition, and did not sail from Gottenburg until the 16th of October. She bore a letter to Rising promising that another ship should very soon follow.
The efforts of the last two years to strengthen the Swedish dominion on[478] the Delaware were certainly sufficiently earnest to merit success; but they were made too late. Their inadequacy to the present extremity rather hastened the bursting of the storm which engulfed the political destiny of the settlement. The Dutch West India Company had never entirely abandoned their claim to jurisdiction over the shores of the “South River,” and in April, 1654, apparently apprehending danger from the expedition under Rising, determined to occupy Fort Casimir with a force of two hundred men, who had been enlisted for service in New Netherland against the English,—a duty for which they were not needed, in consequence of the recent conclusion of peace. The surrender of this fort by Bikker was severely censured by the Directors, who addressed letters to Stuyvesant, in November, authorizing and urging the immediate undertaking of an expedition projected by him, “to avenge this misfortune, not only by restoring matters to their former condition, but also by driving the Swedes at the same time from the river.” Documents were likewise called for, to be sent to Holland, confirmatory of the claim of the Dutch company to the territory on the Delaware, in anticipation, doubtless, of diplomatic controversies likely to arise between the governments of Sweden and the States-General. Before the receipt of these communications, however, Stuyvesant had gone on a voyage to the West Indies, whence he did not return to New Amsterdam until the middle of the following summer. Meanwhile the Dutch Directors wrote to him approving of his seizure of “Gyllene Hajen,” and informing him that they had chartered “one of the largest and best ships” of Amsterdam, carrying thirty-six guns and two hundred men, to unite in the enterprise against New Sweden, which was to be undertaken by the authorities of New Netherland immediately on her arrival, in view of the “great preparations making in Sweden to assist their countrymen on the South River.” At the same time the orders of November were modified, so that the Swedes might be permitted to retain the ground on which Fort Christina was built, “with a certain amount of garden-land for the cultivation of tobacco,” provided they considered themselves subjects of the Dutch “State and Company.”
The ship referred to, called “De Waag” (the Balance), reached New Amsterdam on the 4th of August, 1655, and Director-General Stuyvesant at once completed his preparations for the invasion of New Sweden. A small army of six or seven hundred men[933] was at length assembled, and distributed upon “De Waag,” commanded by the Director-General in person, and six other vessels, comprising a galiot, flyboat, and two yachts, each mounting four guns. The whole force sailed on the 26th of August, arriving off Delaware Bay the following afternoon, and casting anchor the day after before the old Fort Elfsborg. On the night of the 30th their presence was made known to the Swedes by a vigorous discharge of cannon, and by the capture of some colonists by a party who had landed at Sandhoeck.[479] The next morning the Dutch appeared in front of Fort Trinity. In consequence of intimations received from the Indians, and confirmed by the testimony of two spies who had been sent by Rising to Manhattan, the advent of the Hollanders was not unexpected, and the garrison had been increased to forty-seven men, while orders had been issued by the Governor to Captain Schute, who still commanded at that post, to fire upon the Dutch in case they should attempt to pass. This fact was communicated by that officer to persons sent by Stuyvesant to demand the surrender of the fort; and in a personal interview with the Director-General, Schute solicited the privilege of transmitting an open letter to Rising asking for further instructions. This was peremptorily denied him, although a delay was afterward granted till the next morning, for a response to the summons. Nevertheless during the night Schute contrived to get word to Christina about his perilous situation, and nine or ten men were despatched to his relief. These were intercepted, however, by the Hollanders, two only escaping capture by retreating to their boat and returning to their fort. At the same time a mutiny occurred among the garrison of Fort Trinity, and fifteen or sixteen men were disarmed and put under arrest. Two others deserted and reported the condition of affairs to Stuyvesant. Resistance now seeming worse than useless, Schute met the Director-General on “De Waag,” on the 1st of September, and consented to capitulate, on promise of security for the persons and private property of the officers, and the restoration to Sweden of the four iron guns and five field-pieces constituting the armament of the redoubt. The captain accordingly marched forth, with a guard of twelve men and colors flying, and the place was occupied by the Dutch. In consequence of the omission to stipulate a point of retreat for the garrison, on the 7th most of these were sent by Stuyvesant, on his flyboat, to New Amsterdam. The day of the surrender of Fort Trinity Factor Elswich presented himself before the Director-General, on the part of Governor Rising, “to demand an explanation of his conduct, and dissuade him from further hostilities,” but was compelled to return without receiving satisfaction. Measures were therefore immediately taken for the defence of Fort Christina, all the people available being assembled at that place, where they “labored by night and by day, strengthening the ramparts and filling gabions.” On the 2d of September the Dutch appeared in force on the opposite bank of Christina Creek, and on the 3d seized a Swedish shallop, and threatened to occupy a neighboring house. Lieutenant Sven Höök was sent by Rising to inquire their purpose, but he was detained by Stuyvesant on “De Waag.” By the 4th the Hollanders had planted gabions about the house referred to, and under cover of these threw up a battery; and on the 5th landed on the north side of Christina Creek, and erected batteries on Timber Island, at Christinahamn, and on the west side of the fort. They completed their investment of the place by anchoring their ships at the mouth of the Fiske Kil, on the southeast. Some volleys of shot, fired over-head from either side, assured Rising that he was entirely surrounded; and on the 6th a letter was brought by an Indian from Stuyvesant, “arrogantly claiming the whole river,” and requiring all the Swedes to evacuate the country, except such as were willing to remain under the protection of the Dutch. A council of war was immediately held, at which it was determined not to begin hostilities, but to act on the defensive, and, if possible, to repel assaults.
SIEGE OF CHRISTINA FORT.
This follows the rude plan given in Campanius, p. 81, extracted from Lindström’s manuscript account of the affair.
A. Fort Christina.
B. Christina Creek.
C. Town of Christina Hamn.
D. Tennekong Land.
E. Fiske Kil (now Brandywine Creek).
F. Snake Battery, of four guns.
G. Gnat Battery, of six guns.
H. Rat Battery, of five guns.
I. Fly Battery, of four guns.
K. Timmer Öland (Timber Island).
L. Kitchen.
M. Position of the besiegers.
N. Harbor.
O. Mine.
P. Reed flats.
Comp., Compagn.,—Companies of Dutch soldiers.
The next morning Factor Elswich, Sergeant Van Dyck, and Peter Rambo were sent to reply to Stuyvesant, with an assertion of the right of Sweden to the Delaware, exhorting him to refrain from acts which might lead to a breach between their sovereign and the States-General, and protesting his responsibility for all shedding of blood at Fort Christina. The Dutchman did not yield to their arguments, and on the 9th despatched a letter to Rising of similar import to that of the 6th, which was answered with a proposal that their boundaries be settled by their sovereigns, or by commissioners authoritatively appointed for that purpose. No regard was paid to this, however, by Stuyvesant, and the peculiar quasi siege was still continued, although no attempt was made to harm the garrison, notwithstanding, says Rising, there was not a spot upon the walls where they could have stood with safety. Meanwhile the Swedish force, which numbered only about thirty men, some of whom were sick and others ill-affected, noting the progress of the works of the enemy, and anticipating the speedy exhaustion of their supplies, began to entertain thoughts of surrender.
LINDSTRÖM’S MAP, 1654-1655.
[This is a reduction from the map given in Campanius, which is in itself a reduction from an original draft of the Swedish engineer. It is likewise given in Nouv. Annales des Voyages, Mars, 1843; in Memoirs of Pennsylvania Historical Society, vol. iii. part i.; in Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 154, etc. Armstrong, in establishing the position of Fort Nassau, examined the following maps, which include, he thinks, all early maps of the bay and river: De Laet’s “Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium et Virginia,” 1633; Blaeu’s Theatre du Monde, 1645, marked “Nova Belgica et Anglica Nova,” which apparently follows De Laet. Also, the map of Virginia by Virginia Farrer (in Vol. III.), dated at London in 1651, and bearing this legend: “This River the Lord Ployden hath a Patten of, and calls it new Albion, but the Sweeds are planted in it and have a great trade of Furrs.” Lindström’s manuscript map of 1654, twenty-seven inches long, in the Swedish Royal Archives, of which Armstrong saw a copy in the library of the American Philosophical Society (and another copy of which, made for the late Joseph J. Mickley, has been engraved in Reynolds’s translation of Acrelius). The map of Visscher, without date (? 1654), “Novi Belgii, Novæque Angliæ necnon partis Virginiæ tabula.” Vanderdonck’s 1654, given in the preceding chapter. The map in Ogilby’s America, and in Montanus’s Nieuwe Onbekende Weereld, 1671, both from the same plate, “Novi Belgii ... delineatio,” which follows Visscher and Vanderdonck. Dancker’s “Novi Belgii,” etc. Ottens’s “Totius Neobelgii ... tabula,” following Visscher. A map, “Edita Totius Novi Belgii cura Matthæi Seutteri.” Another, “Nova Anglia ... a Baptista Homerus (Homans?).” Again, “Pennsylvania, ... cum regionibus ad flumen Delaware sitis ... per M. Scutterum.” Arent Roggeveen’s chart, 1675, which Armstrong calls the “first comparatively correct map of the bay and river.” The three types in these maps are Lindström’s, Visscher’s, and Roggeveen’s; the others are copies more or less closely. Armstrong did not, however, quite thoroughly scan the field. De Laet’s map of 1633 appeared earlier in his 1630 edition, and is given in fac-simile in Vol. III, where will also be found the map accompanying The Relation of Maryland, 1635. Blaeu’s map appeared earlier in his Nieuwe Atlas, 1635. There is also the map of the Mercator-Hondius series, reproduced in Hexham’s English translation in 1636. Sanson’s map of 1656 is also sketched in Vol. III. A map entitled Pascaerte van Nieu Nederland is in Van Loon’s Atlas of 1661. There are also two maps showing the bay in Speed’s Prospect of the most famous Parts of the World, London, 1676, which very blindly follow the Dutch maps; and we do not get any better work till we come to Gabriel Thomas’s map of 1698, which is given in fac-simile in Vol. III.—Ed.]
On the 13th Rising and Elswich had an interview with Stuyvesant, and made a last appeal on behalf of the jurisdiction of their sovereign over the territory of New Sweden, but were answered as before by the Director-General. The Dutch now brought the guns of all their batteries to bear upon the fort, and the following day formally summoned the Swedish governor to capitulate within twenty-four hours,—a proposal to which the garrison unanimously acceded, and articles of surrender were drawn up on the 15th. In accordance with these, all artillery, ammunition, provisions, and other effects belonging to the Crown of Sweden and the South Company were to be retained by them; while officers, soldiers, ministers, and freemen were permitted to keep their personal goods and have liberty to go wherever they pleased, or remain upon the Delaware, protected in the exercise of their Swedish Lutheran religion. Such of the colonists as desired to return to their native country should be conveyed thither on suitable vessels, free of expense; while Rising and Elswich, by secret agreement, were to be landed in France or England. After accepting these conditions, the Governor of New Sweden was approached by the Director-General with a proposition singularly differing from that authorized, as stated, by the Directors of the Dutch West India Company; namely, that the Swedes should reoccupy their fort and maintain possession of the land higher up the river, while the Hollanders merely reserved for themselves that south of Christina Creek,—the two nations at the same time entering into an offensive and defensive alliance with one another. It is not easy to account for this action on the part of the victorious Dutchman, unless we attribute it to the news of the invasion of New Amsterdam by a[483] large body of Indians, just learned through a letter from his Council, urging his speedy return home, and the fear lest the Swedes might take advantage of the predicament to retake all their territory. The unexpected offer was reduced to writing at the desire of Rising, and was made the subject of a consultation with his people, who rejected it, however, fearing duplicity on the part of Stuyvesant, and dreading to incur the animosity entertained by the English and the Indians towards the Hollanders. They also thought they might thereby compromise the claim of their sovereign to the whole territory of New Sweden, and preferred to leave it to their “most worthy superiors,” as the Governor expressed it, “to resent and redress their wrongs in their own time, and in such way and with such force as might be requisite.” The delivery of this answer to the Director-General terminated negotiations. As had been stipulated, Rising, Elswich, Lindström, and other officers were allowed to remain in Fort Christina, while the common soldiers were quartered on Timber Island, until the time allotted for their departure for Manhattan. Those of the colonists who determined to stay on the Delaware were required to take oaths of allegiance to the States-General and the Dutch West India Company, and to the Director-General and Council of New Netherland. An article of the capitulation provided for the trial of Captain Schute for his surrender of Fort Trinity. This took place presently, at a courtmartial held by Governor Rising on Timber Island. The Swedish officer denied the charges preferred against him; and there is no evidence that he ever suffered punishment for them. During Stuyvesant’s sojourn in New Sweden, and particularly while he was besieging Fort Christina, the Dutch soldiers committed ravages upon the settlers, not only in this vicinity and around Fort Trinity, but at New Gottenburg, Printzdorp, Upland, Finland, and other points along the river, which were estimated by Rising at over 5,000 florins, involving incidental losses very much greater. On the 1st of October the Governor of New Sweden and his companions, among whom were Engineer Lindström and Factor Elswich, with the clergymen Nertunius and Hjort, embarked on “De Waag,” and “bade farewell” to the Delaware. After arriving at New Amsterdam, they sailed on three merchantmen in the beginning of November. Among the incidents of their voyage was the unfortunate loss of Lindström’s chest of instruments, maps, and professional papers, which fell overboard through the carelessness of the sailors, and sank to the bottom of the sea. Rising landed at Plymouth, England, from whence he went to London, on the 22d of December, reporting the conquest of New Sweden to Johan Leyonberg, the Swedish ambassador, while Lindström and his associates continued their course to Holland. After suffering many hardships, both parties finally reached their own country, and on the 17th of April certain of them appeared before the College of Commerce, to render their accounts and make their claims for services. On inquiry into the manner of the overthrow of the colony, it was determined to present a detailed report of it to[484] his Majesty, and the returned emigrants were instructed to appeal for the settlement of their demands to the Directors of the American Company. The funds of the latter were estimated, April 27, 1655, at 158,178 riksdaler, the chief items accredited, however, being “stock for building ships,” “the cargo of ‘Örnen,’” “damages for ‘Kattan,’” “the territory of New Sweden and its forts,”—securities which did not justify such a hopeful valuation. At the present period their indebtedness was stated at 19,311 riksdaler, their assets being augmented by claims against the Dutch West India Company for the seizure of “Gyllene Hajen,” and afterward by the receipts from the “Mercurius.” Their property was found to be insufficient to discharge their many obligations, and for several years demands continued to be presented on behalf of Printz, Rising, Anckerhelm, and others, which there is little reason to think were ever fully satisfied.
During the occurrence of these events the “Mercurius” was wending her way across the Atlantic, bearing the last hope of safety for the colony, whose subjugation by the Dutch was not learned by her passengers until their arrival in the Delaware, March 14, 1656. They were denied permission to land until commands were received from Director-General Stuyvesant, either to return at once to Sweden, or, in case they needed to lay in provisions and other commodities for a fresh voyage, to repair with their vessel to New Amsterdam. So unexpected a termination of their long and arduous journey was naturally most distasteful to the emigrants, and Commissary Huygen endeavored to change the purpose of the Dutch authorities by paying them a visit and addressing to them a petition on the subject. This was without avail, however, and he was obliged to order his ship, with people and cargo, to Manhattan. The command was disobeyed by the captain, who was compelled by Papegåja and other Swedes, who boarded the vessel, to put passengers and goods ashore on the Delaware, deterring the Hollanders from firing at them from Fort Casimir by carrying along some friendly Indians, whom the Dutch were afraid to hurt. On the 3d of May, therefore, two councillors were deputed to proceed to the South River on “De Waag,” accompanied by Huygen, to enforce the command of the latter; and in July the “Mercurius” was finally brought to New Amsterdam by the Commissary, who obtained leave to sell her cargo there by payment of a satisfactory duty. How many emigrants of this last Swedish expedition to the Delaware remained in New Sweden is not known.[934] The vessel bore back Herr Matthias, and probably Papegåja, and arrived at Gottenburg in September of the same year.
In conclusion, it remains for us to indicate, very briefly, the measures taken by the Government of Sweden to regain possession of their colony, or, at least, to obtain compensation for the loss of it. As early as March, 1656, the Swedish Minister (Harald Appelboom) presented a memorial to the States-General, demanding the re-establishment of the old situation on the Delaware or the payment of indemnity to the American Company;[485] and on the 3d of the following June Governor Rising submitted to his sovereign a plan for the reconquest of that river, supported by an array of arguments maintaining the right of Sweden to her settlement.
MAP OF THE ATLANTIC COLONIES.
This is the curious map given in Campanius, p. 52. It was probably suggested by, although it does not follow, a detailed and interesting manuscript map of the Atlantic coast from Cape Henry to Cape Ann, by Peter Lindstrom, 19¼ x 6⅞ inches in size, including “Virginia,” “Nova Suecia,” “Nova Batavia,” and “Nova Anglia,” which will soon be printed by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. [The New England region has some reminiscences of John Smith’s map of 1614, though that first explorer did not place Mount Massachusetts (Chevyot Hills,—that is, the modern Blue Hills of Milton) on the borders of Lake Champlain; but he did give the entities of London and Bristow to non-existing towns. The early Dutch maps are responsible for the curiously-shaped shoal off Cape Cod, and for the southern line of New England running west from Pye Bay (Nahant). There was, of course, a necessity of bringing “Massa Chuser” in some way above that line.—Ed.]
About this time, however, the King’s attention was absorbed by enterprises in Poland, and soon after by the first war with Denmark, and nothing was accomplished; but at a meeting of his Council, April 15, 1658, his Majesty[486] “decided, en passant, that New Sweden was well worth endeavoring to recover;” and in a decree concerning the tobacco trade, of the 22d of May, the monopoly of the West India Company was further defined, “chiefly, that the important colony of New Sweden might be preserved now and hereafter to the great advantage” of the kingdom, “and that the settlements of subjects in that region be not entirely abandoned.” Still nothing was attempted on behalf of the colony, doubtless in consequence of the breaking out of the second war with Denmark. The Company was dissolved and the tobacco trade enfranchised in 1662. The next year a fruitless demand upon the States-General for damages was made by the Swedish Regency,[935] which was followed, on the rise of difficulties between England and Holland in 1664, by the issue of orders to Appelboom to give heed to the negotiations of these powers, and to protest against the formal relinquishing of New Sweden to either nation before the indemnification of his own. During the latter year attention was still further attracted to the colony by the arrival in the spring at Amsterdam, on a Dutch ship from Christiania, of a hundred and forty Finns from the region of Sundsvall, who had been encouraged to emigrate by letters from relatives and friends who were living on the Delaware. The Swedish Government, not knowing of this correspondence, and supposing the Finns had been enticed by secret emissaries from Holland, instructed Resident Peter Trotzig and Appelboom to remonstrate against the enterprise, and to demand that the people should be returned “at the cost of those who had deceived them.” Nevertheless, the emigrants sailed in June for New Sweden in a vessel furnished by the city of Amsterdam; and the Swedish authorities were obliged to content themselves with requiring strict surveillance on the part of the governors of certain provinces in Finland to prevent such actions in the future. The matter was not referred to in the memorials addressed by Appelboom to the States-General the same month, although these boldly claimed restitution of the territory of New Sweden to the Swedish West India Company, with reimbursement of all damages sustained by it,—in support of which demands the Government also solicited the countenance and aid of France and England. This topic was renewed on occasion of the embassy of Isbrandt to Sweden; and at a conference held Nov. 16, 1665, after some attempts to defend the conduct of his countrymen on the Delaware, the Dutch envoy actually proposed that Swedes and Hollanders should endeavor, “junctis viribus,” to retake the territory from the English, who then controlled it. Isbrandt afterward requested proofs of the Swedish claims, for presentation to his Government. On Dec. 24, 1666, the College of Commerce[487] was commanded to furnish these evidences to Count Christoffer Delphicus von Dohna and Appelboom, who were appointed to treat with the States-General upon the subject. A paper was drawn up, therefore, by that body, Feb. 27, 1667, comprising the usual arguments and copies of documents, with specifications of the losses of the Swedish West India Company, including interest amounting to the sum of 262,240 riksdaler. On the other hand, the Dutch negotiators, among whom were Isbrandt and John de Witt, produced counter claims and complaints of the Dutch Company, and demanded that “the pretensions on both sides be reciprocally dismissed.” At the final convention at the Hague, July 18, it was “ordered and decreed” that these controversies “be examined as soon as possible by his Majesty’s envoy, according to the principles of justice and equity, and satisfaction then, immediately and without delay, be given to the injured party.” It could hardly be expected, however, that the Hollanders would pay claims on property no longer theirs, especially when the loss of New Netherland had well nigh ruined the Dutch West India Company, which ought, ordinarily, to have met the obligations thus incurred. That nothing was done is evident from the fact that the Swedish Government soon afterward exerted itself, with unrepining zeal, to obtain indemnity from the power now exercising dominion over their former territory. Before the terms of the Peace of Breda were known, instructions had been issued to Dohna “to inquire whether England or Holland was in possession of New Sweden, and treat with the proper nation for the restoration of it to Sweden;” and April 28, 1669, Leyonberg, still Swedish minister at London, was required, “without attracting attention, secretly, adroitly, and cautiously” to endeavor to discover what England designed to do with her new acquisition. Subsequently papers were drawn up, setting forth the grounds of the Swedish claim to the territory in dispute, and the English ambassador at Stockholm promised “to contribute his best offices with his sovereign” to procure its recognition. From a response of Leyonberg to his Swedish Majesty, dated July 24, 1669, we learn that the question had been mooted by him, but was always put aside with assertions of the rights of England, in view of the neglect of Sweden to demand her colony at the conclusion of peace. Concerning the condition of the settlement, he had heard great praise of “the diligence and industry, the alacrity and docility of the Swedes” then dwelling on the Delaware, and had been told “their lands were the best cultivated in all that region.” Since we do not meet with any evidence that the Swedish claims were ever again referred to, we presume that at last the subject was dropped, and that henceforth the American colony was universally regarded as finally lost to Sweden.
Thus terminates the history of New Sweden under Swedish sovereignty. Although for twenty-five years after the departure of the last governor the people whose immigration to our continent has been related were almost the only civilized residents on the shores of the Delaware, and were practically nearly as independent as their fathers under the rules of Queen[488] Christina and King Charles X. (Gustavus), they were now nominally subjects of their High Mightinesses the Lords States-General, and later of King Charles II. of England, and their career is properly included in accounts of the Dutch and English dominions of that epoch. Henceforth their connection with the mother country was confined to the limited ecclesiastical sphere of the Swedish Lutheran religion; and this was only ultimately brought to a close at the death of the Reverend Nicholas Collin, the last Swedish pastor of Gloria Dei Church in Philadelphia, in 1831, a hundred and seventy-six years after the conquest of New Sweden by Governor Stuyvesant. During all this period of perpetual contact with an enormously increasing population of other races, certain of the descendants of the Swedes who first cultivated this region sedulously observed ancestral customs, and preserved the knowledge and use of their maternal tongue within family circles. And if, on the other hand, intermarriage with their neighbors eventually confounded many of the old stock with English and German colonists of later immigrations, this merely extended the influence of that virtuous and industrious people, who became the progenitors of not a few citizens of note of several of our chief provinces and commonwealths. The colonization scheme we have endeavored to portray failed, without doubt, of the significance anticipated for it in the enlargement of the empire and the development of the trade and commerce of Sweden; but it formed the nucleus of the civilization which afterward acquired such expansion under William Penn and his contemporaries through the founding of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, and was the first impulse of that modern movement,—in strong contrast with the wild spirit of the ancient Scandinavian sea-kings and pre-Columbian discoverers of America,—which has contributed so large and useful a population to Illinois and Wisconsin and other Western States of our Republic.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
THE earliest information we possess concerning New Sweden is found in the charter granted by King Gustavus Adolphus in 1624 to the Australian Company.[936] During the ensuing decade were published other documents mentioned in the beginning of the preceding narrative.[937]
The subject is referred to in a few of the Resolutien van de Staten van Holland en West Vriesland. Beauchamp Plantagenet’s Description of the Province of New Albion,[938] the Breeden-Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien,[939] and the[491] Vertoogh van Nieu Nederland,[940] and Beschrijvinge van Nieuw-Nederlant[941] of Adriaen van der Donck give brief accounts of the settlement. Several statements with regard to it are to be found in the Historia Suecana of Johan Loccenius.[942] David Pieterszen de Vries[943] relates the circumstances of a visit he paid to it in 1643. Lieuwe van Aitzema[944] supplies copies of treaties and negotiations between Sweden and the States-General with respect to the dominion over the Delaware, an Antwoordt[945] of the latter to Resident Appelboom also appearing separately. Something of interest may be gleaned from De Hollandsche Mercurius. This, with sundry maps elsewhere referred to, constitutes, it is believed, all the contemporaneous printed matter which is still preserved to us.
A short account of the colony is contained in Samuel Puffendorf’s Commentarii de Rebus Suecicis, published at Utrecht in 1686. It was not, however, until 1702 that a book appeared professedly treating of the settlement. This was the Kort Beskrifning om Provincien Nya Sverige of Thomas Campanius Holm.[946] The fact that the author was a grandson[492] of the Rev. Johan Campanius Holm, who accompanied Governor Printz to New Sweden, both accounts for his interest in the topic and indicates the value of much of his material.
PRINTED TITLE OF CAMPANIUS.
This is chiefly drawn from manuscripts of Campanius’s grandfather and oral communications of his father, Johan Campanius Holm, who was with the former on the Delaware, and the writings of Governor Rising and Engineer Lindström, preserved among the Archives of the Kingdom of Sweden. From the latter are also taken a drawing of Fort Trinity, a plan of the siege of Fort Christina by the Dutch (both reproduced in the preceding narrative), and a pictorial representation of three Indians. There is likewise a map of New Sweden (appearing in this chapter) engraved by Campanius from a reduction (made by order of King Charles XI. of Sweden in 1696) of a map of the Swedish engineer, four Swedish ells in length and two in width, which was destroyed in the conflagration of[493] the royal palace at Stockholm, May 7, 1697. Unfortunately, some inaccuracies occur in the work, which have been repeated by later historians, both European and American.[947]
The Dissertatio Gradualis de Svionum in America Colonia of Johan Danielson Svedberg[948] cites Campanius, and makes the first mention of Papegåja as provisional Governor of New Sweden. The author was a nephew of Jesper Svedberg, Bishop of Skara, who had the supervision of the Swedish Lutheran congregations in America,[949] and cousin-german to Emmanuel Swedenborg, the heresiarch, and his brother Jesper Svedberg, who taught school for over a year at Raccoon in New Jersey.
In the diplomatic correspondence of John de Witt[950] mention is made of the attempts of Sweden to obtain compensation for the loss of her colony from the States-General.
The Dissertatio Gradualis de Plantatione Ecclesiæ Svecanæ in America of Tobias Eric Biörck[951] cites Campanius and speaks of all the governors of New Sweden, giving a particular account of Minuit from statements of the Rev. Provost Andreas Sandel, who was pastor of the Swedish Lutheran church at Wicacoa from 1702 to 1719, and married a descendant of early Swedish colonists. The author himself was born in New Sweden, being the son of the Rev. Provost Eric Biörck, who built the Swedish Lutheran church at Christina in 1698 (his mother being a scion of old Swedish families on the Delaware), and cousin to the Rev. Provost Andreas Hesselius,[952] who succeeded his father in the charge of the church at Christina in 1713, and who commends the writer in a letter prefixed to his work.
The Breviate, Penn vs. Baltimore,[953] contains extracts from several of the Dutch Records in the Secretary’s Office at New York, including Kieft’s letter to Minuit, dated May 6, 1638, Hudde’s Report to Stuyvesant of 1648, an Indian deed of sale to the Dutch of land on the east side of the Delaware, dated April 15, 1649, and so forth.
Anders Anton von Stiernman’s Samling utaf Kongl. Bref, Stadgar och Förordningar etc., angående Sveriges Rikes Commercie, Politie, och Œconomie uti gemen[954] and Monumenta Politico-Ecclesiastica[955] comprise documents relating to the Swedish West India Company and their colony.
Peter Kalm’s Resa til Norra America[956] imparts some information concerning the settlement gathered by that illustrious Swede from Maons Keen, Nils Gustafson, and other descendants of ancient Swedish colonists, during a visit paid by him to the Delaware in 1748-1749.
William Smith, in his History of New York,[957] gives a brief account of New Sweden, citing the Beschryvinghe van Virginia, Nieuw Nederlandt, etc. He says that the English who were driven from the Schuylkill in 1642 were Marylanders, without, however, indicating his authority for the statement, which cannot be corroborated.
In 1759 appeared the Beskrifning om de Svenska Församlingars Tilstånd uti Nya Sverige of the Rev. Israel Acrelius,[958] Provost over the Swedish congregations in America[495] and pastor of the church at Christina from 1749 to 1756. Although the greater part of this work is devoted to the subsequent history of the Swedes on the Delaware, the first eighty-eight pages of it relate to the period of the supremacy of Sweden over her colony, and contain the most complete and accurate account of the settlement till then published. The author cites and criticises Van der Donck and Campanius, and imparts fresh information derived from manuscripts in the Archives of the Kingdom of Sweden, Dutch Records in New York, and manuscripts of the Rev. Anders Rudman, pastor of the Swedish Lutheran congregation at Wicacoa from 1697 to 1701, and builder of the present Gloria Dei Church of Philadelphia.
Modeer’s Historia om Svea Rikets Handel[959] embraces facts relating to the Swedish West India Company.
Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654[960] mentions the convention entered into by Sweden and England for the observance of friendship between their colonies in America.
The Journal of John Winthrop, first Governor of Massachusetts, first printed at Hartford in 1790,[961] the second volume of Ebenezer Hazard’s Historical Collections, comprising “Records of the United Colonies of New England,” consisting of Acts of the Commissioners,[962] printed at Philadelphia in 1794, and the Rev. Benjamin Trumbull’s History of Connecticut, printed at Hartford in 1797, cast light on the relations between the colonies of New England and New Sweden.
In Professor Christoph Daniel Ebeling’s history of Delaware, in the fifth volume of his Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von America,[963] occurs a good summary account of New Sweden, compiled from nearly all the works then published.
The Rev. William Hubbard’s General History of New England[964] includes references to the settlements on the Delaware.
In 1825 appeared Carl David Arfwedson’s De Colonia Nova Svecia Historiola,[965] giving scarcely any account of the settlement itself, but containing a fuller notice of the origin of the enterprise, with the events which led to the formation of the Swedish West India Company. It is also especially valuable as comprehending several important documents relating to the history of New Sweden not elsewhere printed. Such are parts of Een Berättelse om Nova Suecia uthi America and Relation öfwer thet ahnfall thermed the Hollendske under P. Stüvesant, Directors öfwer N. Nederland, anförande then Swenske Colonien i N. Svecia, oförmodeligen, med fiendteligheet, öfwerfalla monde,[966] both by[496] Governor Rising, a paper concerning the Finnish emigration to America in 1664, referred to in the preceding narrative, and a short Promemoria angående Nya Sverige i America, all of which are comprised in the Palmskiöld Collections in the Royal Library of the University of Upsala. The work likewise includes a Series Sacerdotum, qui a Svecia missi sunt in Americam,[967] and a map of New Sweden.
Joseph W. Moulton’s History of New Netherland[968] contains nothing new except a reference to the Report of Andries Hudde among the Dutch Records in New York, and an estimate of the value of the writings of Campanius and Acrelius.
James N. Barker’s Sketches of the Primitive Settlements on the River Delaware[969] is based on earlier publications.
In The Register of Pennsylvania, edited by Samuel Hazard, volumes iv. and v.,[970] are printed manuscripts which are in the possession of the American Philosophical Society, and among them (particularly valuable) are translations from a French version of copies of Swedish documents procured at Stockholm by the Hon. Jonathan Russel, Minister of the United States to the Court of Sweden.
The Annals of the Swedes on the Delaware, by the Rev. Jehu Curtis Clay, Rector of the Swedish churches in Philadelphia and its vicinity,[971] shows no new matter save a short account of the colony from manuscripts of the Rev. Anders Rudman, translated by the Rev. Nicholas Collin.
Erik Gustaf Geijer’s Svenska Folkets Historia[972] makes slight references to the formation of the Ship and West India Companies of Sweden.
George Bancroft’s History of the United States[973] gives a brief account of the settlement, drawing more largely than former works upon the Argonautica Gustaviana, and magnifying the religious and political motives of Gustavus Adolphus and Axel Oxenstjerna in attempting the enterprise.
John Leeds Bozman’s History of Maryland[974] cites the statement in Smith’s History of New York, that the English residents on the Schuylkill who were dispossessed in 1642 were colonists from Maryland, but qualifies it by affirming that the Maryland Records make no mention of the settlement. Other references are made in the work to the relations between New Sweden and Maryland.
William Huffington’s Delaware Register and Farmers’ Magazine[975] contains a translation of a grant of land on the Delaware from Director-General Kieft to Abraham Planck and others in 1646 (referred to by Acrelius), preserved among the State Papers at Dover.
The first volume of the second series of the Collections of the New York Historical Society[976] has a translation of a Report of Andreas Hudde, Commissary on the Delaware, from the Dutch Colonial Records.
In 1843 appeared the Notice sur la Colonie de la Nouvelle Suède, by H. Ternaux-Compans,[977] believed to be the first and only French book on the subject. It gives a[497] summary history of the settlement, drawn from the Argonautica Gustaviana, Loccenius, Campanius, and Acrelius, and contains a copy of Lindström’s map.
A History of the Original Settlements on the Delaware, by Benjamin Ferris,[978] gives a very full account of New Sweden, extracted from works already published in English, and is interesting and valuable as identifying and describing many of the places mentioned.
The History of New Netherland, by E. B. O’Callaghan, M.D.,[979] imparts fresh information about the relations between the Swedes and Dutch on the Delaware, and gives a translation of a “Memorial delivered by His Swedish Majesty’s Resident to their High Mightinesses, in support of the good and complete Right of the Swedish Crown and its subjects to Nova Suecia in America, June, 1664,” from the original in Aitzema.
Handlingar rörande Skandinaviens historia, tjugondenionde delen,[980] contains some letters of the Swedish Government regarding New Sweden.
Samuel Hazard’s Annals of Pennsylvania[981] supply a comprehensive history of New Sweden, derived from several of the preceding works, and comprising new matter drawn from manuscripts of the American Philosophical Society, Albany Records, translated by Van der Kemp, the Holland and London Documents, procured by J. R. Brodhead, New Haven Court and Colony Records, Records of the United Colonies of New England, and Trumbull and other manuscripts.
The Documentary History of the State of New York, edited by E. B. O’Callaghan, M.D., vol. iii.,[982] gives a letter addressed to the Classis of Amsterdam, Aug. 5, 1657, by the Reformed Dutch clergymen at New Amsterdam, Johann. Megapolensis and Samuel Drisius, referring to the circumstances of the submission of the Swedes to Director-General Stuyvesant; and the same work, vol. iv.,[983] contains a description of New Netherland in 1643-1644, by the Rev. Isaac Jogues, S. J.,[984] mentioning the Swedes on the Delaware.
In Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society,[985] vol. vi., are published the report of a committee appointed by that body to make explorations and researches as to the site of Fort Nassau, with a letter on the same subject, and a paper, entitled “The History and Location of Fort Nassau upon the Delaware,” by Edward Armstrong, Recording Secretary of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The latter is clear upon the periods of occupancy of that stronghold by the Dutch, and is especially valuable as comprising an attempt to give a complete list of maps of the Delaware River previous to 1675.[986]
In Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. ii.,[987] is found the action of the General Court in 1644 on the petition of Boston merchants for a charter for a company to trade near the Delaware.
Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. iii.,[988] procured by John Romeyn Brodhead in England, include a letter of Jerome Hawley, of Virginia, to Secretary Sir Francis Windebanke, referred to in the preceding narrative, “A Declaration shewing the illegality and unlawfull proceedings of the Patent of Maryland,[498]” dated 1649, mentioning the great trade of the Swedes and Dutch with the Indians, and the singularly inaccurate “Relation of Mr. Garrett Van Sweeringen, of the City of St. Maries, concerning his knowledge of the seateing of Delaware Bay and River by the Dutch and Swedes,” subscribed in 1684.
John Romeyn Brodhead’s History of the State of New York[989] gives the best Dutch account of the relations between the Swedes and Hollanders, amply citing authorities on the subject. It also contains a map of New Netherland by the author.
Fredrik Ferd. Carlson’s Sveriges Historia under Konungarne af Pfalziska Huset[990] makes a brief reference to the colony, imparting fresh information from Printz’s letters and report of 1647, and the Minutes of the Royal Council, in the archives of Sweden.
Among Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vols. i. and ii.,[991] procured by J. R. Brodhead in Holland, are many papers concerning the relations between the Swedes and Dutch on the Delaware.
Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven[992] contain information with regard to attempts of inhabitants of New England to settle in New Sweden.
De Navorscher[993] for 1858 prints two letters from Johannes Bogaert, “Schrijver,” to Schepen Bontemantel, Director of the Dutch West India Company, dated Aug. 28 and Oct. 31, 1655 (N. S.), relating the arrival of the ship “De Waag” at New Amsterdam, and mentioning some details concerning the conquest of New Sweden by the Hollanders not elsewhere recorded.
In the Introduction to The Record of the Court at Upland (1676-1681),[994] by Edward Armstrong, a brief account of New Sweden is presented, with citations from copies of a letter and the Report of 1647 of Governor Printz in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; while the Editor’s Notes are valuable as identifying many places on the Delaware, and comprising personal references to several of the colonists.
The History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, by the late George Smith, M.D.,[995] contains a summary history of New Sweden, with corrections of former authors and additional information upon questions of topography, besides biographical notices of some of the Swedish inhabitants. Its illustrations include the reproduction of a part of Roggeveen’s map of New Netherland, an original “Map of the Early Settlements of Delaware County,” and a “Diagram” and “Draft of the First Settled Part of Chester, before called Upland.”
Professor Claes Theodor Odhner’s Sveriges Inre Historia under Drottning Christinas Förmyndare[996] is valuable for its account of the Swedish South, Ship, and West India Companies, and its statement of the origin of the scheme of colonizing the Delaware, drawn from original documents in the archives of Sweden.
G. M. Asher’s Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland[997] was “intended,” says the Preface, “to be as complete[499] a collection as the author was able to make it of the printed materials for the history and description of New Netherland.” It mentions several works connected with the history of New Sweden, particularly those of Willem Usselinx, whose character and aims in promoting the formation of the Dutch and Swedish West India Companies are cordially appreciated by the writer;[998] and its account of maps embracing the Delaware admirably supplements the essay of Armstrong already spoken of.
Although Francis Vincent’s History of the State of Delaware[999] contains no new information on New Sweden, it is worthy of notice as offering a good, if not, as the title announces, “a full account of the first Dutch and Swedish settlements.”
Professor Abraham Cronholm’s Sveriges Historia under Gustaf II. Adolf[1000] may be consulted with reference to the South Company and other subjects.
The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. xxviii.,[1001] contains an article on “The Swedes on the Delaware and their Intercourse with New England,” by Frederic Kidder, giving a résumé of the statements of earlier authors, and including an English translation of a Dutch copy of an “Examination upon the letters of the Governor of New England to the Governor of New Sweden,” in the presence of Governor Printz and others, Jan. 16, 1644, and letters of Governors Printz and Winthrop[1002] never before printed. The article was also published separately with heliotype fac-similes of the letters cited.
The Illustrated History of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, by William H. Egle, M.D.,[1003] imparts no fresh information on the early Swedish settlements on the Delaware; but it records the discovery in the autumn of 1873, in a grave near Washington, Lancaster County, in that State, of certain so-called “Indian relics,” one of which, now in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (represented in a cut in the book), so nearly resembles the helmet of the Swedish soldier of the seventeenth century (shown in a figure at the late Centennial Exhibition of Philadelphia), as to suggest the possibility that it may have been worn by a soldier of New Sweden. The book reproduces Campanius’s map of New Sweden after Nicolas Visscher.
In Historiskt Bibliotek, Ny Följd, I.,[1004] appeared a paper entitled “Kolonien Nya Sveriges Grundläggning, 1637-1642,” by C. T. Odhner, Professor of History in the University[500] of Lund, which gives the most complete account of the founding and early history of the colony of New Sweden yet written, based on the Oxenstjerna manuscripts and numerous other documents preserved in several departments of the archives of Sweden. At the end of this invaluable contribution to our knowledge of the settlement is given nearly the whole of Printz’s Relation to the Swedish West India Company of 1644, with its accompanying Rulla of all the people then living on the Delaware.
Documents relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. xii.,[1005] edited by B. Fernow, Keeper of the Historical Records of New York, consists of “Documents relating to the History of the Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware River, Translated and Compiled from Original Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State at Albany, and in the Royal Archives at Stockholm,”—a title sufficiently indicative of the scope and value of the book.
Pennsylvania Archives, second series, vol. v.,[1006] comprises a reprint of some papers concerning New Sweden extracted from Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vols. i., ii., and iii., and other sources; and the same series, vol. vii.,[1007] embraces a selection of similar matter from the twelfth volume of the same New York Documents.
Historiskt Bibliotek of 1878 contains “Kolonien Nya Sveriges Historia,” by Carl K. S. Sprinchorn,[1008] constituting a very worthy complement to Professor Odhner’s Kolonien Nya Sveriges Grundläggning, already spoken of. After briefly capitulating the statements of the latter treatise with regard to the origin of the enterprise, and the history of the first four Swedish expeditions to the Delaware, and the one from Holland under Swedish auspices, the author proceeds to give the only account yet written of the equipment of the last six expeditions from Sweden, with fresh details as to their fate, drawn chiefly from unpublished manuscripts in the archives of his country. He also supplies the Swedish version of the difficulties with the Dutch and English, and recites the several endeavors of Sweden either to recover possession of her colony or to obtain satisfactory compensation for her loss of it. In the Appendix are printed documents relating to purchases of land from the Indians, and the Report of Governor Rising, dated July 13, 1654. A map of New Sweden, which accompanies the dissertation, indicates the principal places and the boundaries of the settlement.
The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,[1009] vols. ii. et seq., contains a series of articles, by the writer of this essay, on “The Descendants of Jöran Kyn, the Founder of Upland,”—the only genealogical account of the posterity of an early Swedish settler on the Delaware yet printed. Besides speaking of persons who bore the family name, it includes sketches of, or references to, Captain Sven Schute, Lieutenant Anders Dahlbo, the Rev. Lars Carlson Lock, Doctor Timon Stiddem, and Justices Peter Rambo, Peter Cock, and Olof Stille, inhabitants of New Sweden whose offspring intermarried with members of the Kyn (or Keen) family, and supplies instances of matrimonial alliances between the latter and many distinguished Americans of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, and German ancestry, as well as noblemen and gentlemen of Europe.
Benjamin H. Smith’s Atlas of Delaware County, Pennsylvania,[1010] affords accurate maps of Tinicum, Upland, Marcus Hook, and their vicinities, indicating tracts of land originally held by Swedes, as publicly recorded. It also includes an excellent essay on land titles in the county, with translations of Swedish grants to Governor Printz and other settlers.
Some Account of William Usselinx and Peter Minuit, by Joseph J. Mickley,[1011] is valuable from the fact that “most of the materials used in it were taken from original unpublished documents preserved in the libraries of Sweden.”
The short paper entitled “Nya Sverige,” in Svenska Bilder,[1012] by R. Bergström, comprises little of interest not included in works above mentioned.
The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. vi.,[1013] contains a translation of the letter of Peter Minuit proposing the founding of New Sweden, given in a note to the preceding narrative, and an obligation of Jacob Svenson, “agent for the Swedes’ Governor of Delaware Bay,” and John Manning, of Boston, in favor of the Colony of Massachusetts, dated August 2, 1653, binding them not to carry certain provisions, obtained in New England, to either Dutch or French in those parts of America.
The above list of printed authorities on the history of New Sweden is designed to comprise all books within the knowledge of the writer which present either new facts or noteworthy opinions in relation to that subject. It only remains for him to add that all the unpublished manuscripts concerning the topic still extant are in Sweden, the greater part among the archives of the Kingdom at Stockholm, some among those of Skokloster, and others in the Palmskiöld Collections of the Library of the University of Upsala, and in the Library of the University of Lund. These embrace papers of Usselinx, correspondence of Oxenstjerna with Spiring, Blommaert, and Minuit, documents with regard to the Swedish West India Company and the equipment of the several expeditions to the Delaware, commissions and instructions for officers of the colony, letters and reports of the governors, and other records of the settlement, and diplomatic intercourse between Sweden and foreign nations about colonial questions of mutual interest.[1014] Copies of many of these (including nearly the whole of Lindström’s writings) have been procured by the late Mr. Mickley and other worthy antiquaries for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and are in process of translation for publication under the auspices of that body. From those manuscripts was extracted much of the material of a discourse on “The Early Swedish Colony on the Delaware,” read by the writer of this essay at the annual meeting of the same Society in May, 1881,[1015] and before the Historical Society of Delaware the following November; and from them has also been derived whatever appears in print for the first time in the preceding narrative.[1016]
INDEX.
[Reference is commonly made but once to a book if repeatedly mentioned in the text; but other references are made when additional information about the book is conveyed.]
Aa, Van der, Galerie, etc., 385.
authorities, 149;
MSS. about, 367;
controversial literature on its bounds, 154, 155;
called Larcadia, 88;
La Hontan’s map (1709), 153;
Lescarbot’s map, 152;
map, (1663), 148, (1684), 228;
map of, 384;
name first used, 149;
origin of, 149;
population, 142.
Acadia. See Nova Scotia.
Acadie. See Acadia.
Acapulco, 46.
Achiganaga, 187.
Achter Col, 408.
Acrelius, Israel, Nya Sverige, 494.
Agnese, B., map (1536), 38, 40, 73, 81;
(1543), 82;
(1554), 89;
(1564), 90.
Agniez. See Mohawks.
Agona, 57.
Agouhanna, 53.
Agramonte’s expedition, 5, 11.
Agreskoué, 284.
Ahmed map (1559), 78.
Aillon, L. V. d’, his voyage, 10, 414, 429.
“Aimable”, ship, 236.
Albanel, 270;
autog., 271.
Munsell’s books on, 435.
Alegambe, Mortes illustres, 306.
Alexander VI., Bull of, 56.
Alexander, Sir William, charter of, 142;
sources, 155;
Encouragement to Colonies, 62, 155, 378;
Mapp of New England, 155;
his coinage, 155;
portrait, 156.
country of, 298.
Allard, Atlas, 375;
Atlas minor, 376.
Allefonsce, Jean, 58;
account of, 59;
his Cosmographie, 60;
authorities on, 68;
Les voyages avantureux, 68, 72;
death, 68;
cartographical sketches, 74.
Alleghany range, iv, xi, xxvi.
Allègre, d’, 333.
Allerton, Isaac, 456.
Allouez, Claude, 174, 224, 238, 239, 286, 288;
Voyages, 315;
at Green Bay, 207;
at Lake Superior, 311;
autog., 311;
accounts by Shea and Margry, 315.
Altena, 404.
Alumet Island, 124.
Alverez, John, 69.
Ameda (tree), 54.
America, North, maps of northeast coast, 81;
maps of west coast, 35.
American Antiquarian, 201.
American Catholic Quarterly, 223.
American Church Review, 18.
Américanistes, Congrès des, 15, 18.
Amistigoyan, Fort, 258.
Amours, 335.
Amundson, Hans, 465, 466, 471, 475;
autog., 465.
Anacostans, 165.
Anckerhelm, Thijssen, 472;
autog., 472.
See Delawares, Susquehannahs.
Andiat, L., Brouage et Champlain, 131.
Andrada, Claros varones, 306.
Andrade’s Chronicle, 22.
André, 174.
Andros Tracts, 364.
Angos family, 4.
Angoulême, Lake of, 52, 84, 88, 92, 98, 378, 383.
Annales de philosophie chrétienne, 57.
Annales des voyages, 64.
Annapolis Basin, 138.
Annuæ Litteræ Societatis Jesu, 292, 300.
Annuaire de l’Institut Canadien, 361.
Anthony, Peter, 265.
See Ascension, Assumption.
Antilia, 41.
Anti-Rent troubles, 431.
Apes, region of, 202.
Apian, Philip, Erdglobus, 101.
Apianus, map (1540), 81.
Appalachian system, iv, 253.
Appelboom, H., 484.
Appleton, W. S., 361.
Arcangeli on Verrazano, 17.
“Archangel”, ship, 110.
Archer, Andrew, History of Canada, 368.
Archives curieuses, 150.
Archivio Storico Italiano, 17, 18.
Arctic regions, cold of, iii.
See Cod, Cape.
Arfwedson, C. D., Nova Svecia, 495.
at Mount Desert, 141;
in Acadia, 151.
Argenson, Governor, 168;
autog., 168.
Arkansas, Indians, 298;
river, 178.
Armovchiqvois, 152.
Armstrong, Edward, on the site of Fort Nassau, 437, 497;
on the Court at Upland, 498.
Arnould, Antoine, 291.
Aryan emigrations, xi.
Ascension Island, 51, 72, 75, 76.
See Anticosti.
Asher, G. M., Essay on Dutch Books, etc., 416, 498;
Bibliography of New Netherland, 439;
Bibliography of Hulsius, 442.
Asia connected with America, 36, 40, 43, 60, 73, 76;
passage to, 382;
the parent of civilization, i.
See Cathay.
“Asia”, ship, 411.
Asseline, David, La ville de Dieppe, 88.
Assemani, Abbé, 78.
Assendasé, 283.
Assenipoils, Lake, 249, 252.
Assikinach, Francis, on the Odahwah legends, 168.
See Assenipoils.
Assumption Island, 51, 76, 85, 94, 98, 100.
See Anticosti.
Astrolabe lost by Champlain, 124.
Atchaqua, 45.
Atlas Ameriquain, 155.
Atlas Contractus, 375.
Atlases, general, 369.
Attikamegues, 274;
mission, 267.
Atwater, Caleb, History of Ohio, 198.
Aubert, Père, 289.
Aubert, Thomas, on the Newfoundland coast, 4, 5, 64.
Aulnay, Sieur d’, 143;
autog., 143;
visits Boston, 145;
Australian Company, 443.
See South Company.
Auteuil, 335.
Autograph-hunters, 411.
Avezac, d’. See Davezac.
Avoine, Folle, 187.
Ayllon. See Aillon.
Baccalaos, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, (Baccalearum regio), 42, 43, (Baccalear), 45, 56, 62, 67, 74, 81, 82, 84, (Bacalliau), 85, (Baqualhaos), 86, 87, 88, (Bacalaos), 90, 91, (Bacalhao), 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101, 143, (Bacaillos), 152, 377, 378, 414;
Bacchus Island, 52.
Bache, Professor, 33.
Bacqueville. See Potherie.
Badajos, Congress of, 10.
Bailloquet, 270;
autog., 270.
Baird, C. W., History of Rye, 441.
Baldelli, Storia del milione, 82.
Baldwin, C. C., on the early maps of the West, 201;
Early Maps of Ohio, 224;
on Indian migrations, 298.
on Verrazano, 18;
on New Sweden, 496;
on Cartier, 65.
Banks, Thomas C., Case of Earl of Stirling, 155;
Baronia Anglia, 155.
Barcia, G. de, Ensayo chronologico, 17.
Bardsen, Ivan, 416.
Baribaud, 187.
Barker, J. N., Settlements on the Delaware, 496.
Barlow, S. L. M., his collection of Canadian maps, 201.
Barnard, D. D., 435.
Barnes, William, Albany, 435.
Barrois, 336.
Basque fisheries, 86.
Bauche, Marchioness de, 273.
Baudet, Leven van Blaeu, 437.
Baudoin, an Acadian priest, 161.
Baugis, Chevalier de, 339.
Baugy, Chevalier de, 186, 188.
Bayard, Nicolas, 411.
Baylies, F., History of the Old Colony, 160.
Beach, Indian Miscellany, 297.
Beaujeu, 234;
autog., 234;
his character, 241.
Beaulieu, 270.
Beaumont, 139.
Beaupré, Viscount of, 57.
Beaurain, J. de, 375.
Beaver. See Fur-trade.
Beaver Indians, 268.
Bedard, M. T. P., 361.
Beekman, J. W., 418.
Begin, Louis, 354.
Bégon, 349.
autog., 449.
Belknap, Jeremy, New Hampshire, 159.
Belleisle, 85, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 383.
Belle Isle, Straits of (Bella Ilha), 37, 47, 49, 72, 73.
Bellefontaine, 238.
Belleforest, 31;
Histoire universelle, 17;
Bellemare, R., 303.
Bellero, map, 38.
Bellin, 262;
his map, 64.
Bellinger, Stephen, 61.
Bellomont, Earl of, 356.
Belmont, Abbé, missionary, 275;
autog., 275.
Belmont, Histoire du Canada, 294, 358.
Belt of land surrounding the globe, 40, 43.
Bengtson, A., 484.
Benson, Egbert, 421.
Benton, Herkimer County, 421.
Benzoni, 255.
Berchet, Portolani, 84.
Bergeron, Voyages en Asie, etc., 68.
Bergström, R., Nya Sverige, 502.
Berkshire Hills, xxv.
Bermuda, 46, 78, 83, 89, 93, 95, 96, (Belmuda), 97, 98, 99, 373, 377.
Bernard, Recueil de voyages, 255, 256.
Bernard’s Geofroy Tory, 31.
Berry, William, his map, 390.
Bersiamites’ Missions, 267.
Bestelli e Forlani, Tavole moderne, 369.
Berthelot, Amable, Dissertation, etc., 9.
Berthier, 347.
Berthot, Colin, 187.
Bertius, Tabularum, etc., 102.
Bettencourt, C. A. de, Descobrimentos dos Portuguezes, 37.
Beyard, Nicholas, Journal, 365.
his Relation, 151, 292, 295, 300.
Bibaud, M., Histoire du Canada, 367, 368;
Bibliothèque Canadienne, 367.
Bibliothèque Canadienne, 367.
letters, 315;
Relation, 315;
autog., 315.
Bigot, Vincent, 273.
Biguyduce. See Castine.
Bikker, G., 472.
Binneteau, 288.
Biographie des Malouins, 65.
Biörch, T. E., Dissertatio, 493.
Birds, Island of, 47.
Black Mountains, iv, xxv, xxviii.
Atlas major, 375;
Atlas, 375;
maps of 1662 and 1685, 391;
atlases, 437.
Blanchard, Rufus, Discovery and Conquests of the Northwest, 200.
Blanck, J., 461.
Blanco, Cape, 46.
Block Island, seen by Verrazano, 7;
attacked by the French, 352.
Blome, Richard, Isles and Territories, 385, 430;
Present State, 430.
Blommaert, Samuel, 445, 446, 499;
autog., 445.
Blondel, Jehan, 64.
Blundeville, Exercises, 97.
Bobé, 262.
Bocage, Barbie du, 86.
Bockhorn, J., 471.
Boeotics (Indians of Newfoundland), 48.
Bogardt, Jost van, 453.
Bogardus, Everhard, 441;
autog., 441.
Boimare, Texte explicatif, 225.
Bois Brulé, 182.
Bollero map (1554), 89.
Bolton, West Chester County, 421, 441.
Bona Madre, Rio de, 83.
Bonavista, Cape, 47.
Bonde, A. S., 450.
Bonde, Christer, 471;
autog., 471.
Bone Island. See St. Croix Island.
“Bonne-Aventure”, ship, 64.
Bonnetty, 57.
Bonrepos, Description de la Louisiane, 255.
Booth, M. L., New York, 440.
Borben, Jacob, 447.
Bordone, 45;
Isolario, 77;
his map, 414.
Börsenblatt, 439.
Boston, Franquelin’s map, 162;
harbor, 110;
her merchants plundered, 352;
her merchants on the Delaware, 456, 460, 497;
proposed attack on by the French, 161, 351.
Boston Athenæum, 248.
Boston Public Library, 248.
Bosworth, Newton, Hochelaga, 304.
Botero, Giovanni, 102;
Relaciones, 378;
his map, 378.
Boucher, Pierre, 171, 271, 336;
Mœurs et productions de la Nouvelle France, 298.
Boucher de la Bruère, Le Canada, 368.
Boudan, 390.
Boulanger, Père le, 288.
Boullé, Nicolas, 164.
Bourbourg. See Brasseur de Bourbourg.
Bourdon, Jean, 385.
Bourgeois, Margaret, 294, 309;
autog., 309;
lives of, 309.
Bourne, History of Wells, 160.
Bouteroue, 366.
Bowen, Francis, Life of Phips, 160, 364.
Bowen, N. H., Isle of Orleans, 308.
Boyd, John, Canadian History, 368.
Bozman, J. L., History of Maryland, 496.
Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, 400.
Bradstreet, Simon, 159, 160, 365.
autog., 458.
Bras Coupé. See Tonty.
Brasseur de Bourbourg, Histoire du Canada, 296, 360, 367.
Bravo, Rio, 234.
visited by Thevet, 12.
Brebeuf, Jean de, 129, 133, 265, 266, 275, 277, 278, 305;
arrives, 301;
in the Huron country, 301;
account of, 307;
silver bust of, 307;
Bresil Island, 96.
Bressani, Père, 277;
captured, 305;
autog., 305.
Breton, Cape, 37, 38, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 202.
See Cape Breton.
Breton fishermen on the coast, 3, 16, 63.
Brevoort, J. C., 74, 93, 416, 417;
Verrazano the Navigator, 18, 25.
Brice, W. A., Fort Wayne, 198.
Briggs, Master, his map, 378, 383.
Brinton, D. G., on the Shawnees, 298;
Myths of the New World, 299.
Brockhaus buys Muller’s Collection, 439.
his character as an historian, 432;
History of New York, 432;
makes copies from French Archives, 366.
Bronze implements, viii.
Brooklyn, histories of, 441.
Broughton, Concent of Scripture, 102.
Brown, Henry, History of Illinois, 198.
Brown, General J. M., on the voyages on the coast of Maine, 107.
Brucker, J., Marquette, 222, 246.
Brulé, Etienne, 165;
in New York, 132.
Brunson, Alfred, 310.
Buache, Philip, 375.
Buade, Louis de. See Frontenac.
See Mississippi.
Buena Madre, River, 46.
Buena Vista (Newfoundland), 88.
Building-stones, x.
Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris, 245.
Bulletin de la Société Géographique d’Anvers, 375.
Butel-Dumont, 155.
Buteux, 269, 271, 274, 275, 305, 307;
autog., 271;
death, 308.
Butler, J. D., 245.
Butterfield, C. W., on Nicolet, 196, 304.
Cabot, Sebastian, 1;
section of, 84.
Caen, William and Emery de, 67.
Cahokias, 288.
Callières, Chevalier de, 160, 195.
Cambrai, Treaty of, 47.
Campanius, (Holm), Johan, 453, 464;
Campbell, J. V., Political History of Michigan, 199.
Canada, 51, 85, 89, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 373;
Archives of, 366;
bibliography of, 367;
documents concerning, at Quebec, 62;
in the English Record Office, 366;
extent of early colonists, xix;
general histories of, 367;
medals of, 361;
Canadian Antiquarian, 149.
Canadian Journal, 72, 168, 201.
Canadian Parliament, Catalogue of the Library of, 366.
Canadian, picture of a, 297.
Canadians, comparative physique of, xvi;
purity of blood among,xviii;
costume of early soldiers, 365.
Canandaigua, Lake, 125.
Canniff, William, Upper Canada, 368.
Cantino on the Cortereals, 13.
Cape Breton, 41, 58, 61, 69, 73, 74, 78, 373, 377, 383, 384, 388;
mapped by Allefonsce, 77;
missions, 301.
See Breton, Cape.
Cape. See names of capes.
Capiné, 255.
Caragouha, 264.
Carayon, Auguste, Bibliographie de la Compagnie de Jésus, 295;
autog., 295;
Bannissement des Jésuites, 294;
Chaumonot, 316;
Première Mission, 151, 292, 300.
Carillon, Fort, 119.
Carion, 331.
Carleill, Captain J., his Discourse, 57.
Carleton, Sir Dudley, 400.
Carli, Fernando, 17.
Carlson, F. F., Sveriges Historia, 498.
Carré, E., in Boston, 316.
Cartas de Indias, 38.
Carter-Brown Library, 248, 299.
“Cartier, Jacques”, by B. F. De Costa, 47;
his harbor, 94;
his bay, 98;
autog., 48;
first voyage, 63;
Discours, 63;
Relation originale, 63;
second voyage, 50;
his vessels, remains of, 55;
third voyage, 56;
ancestry, 62;
marriage, 62;
his manor-house, 63;
account of second voyage, 64;
Roffet text, 64;
his route, 64;
names of his companions, 64;
Brief Récit, 64;
epitome of his movements, 64;
death, 66;
his maps, 73;
his discoveries first appeared in a printed map (Cabot’s, 1544), 77;
traces of, in maps, 81;
on the St. Lawrence, 164.
Cartography. See maps.
Carver, the traveller, 262.
Caton, J. D., on the Illinois, 198.
Casgrain, Abbé, 130, 196, 306;
on Parkman, 158;
Œuvres, 359;
Tombeau de Champlain, 130;
Une paroisse Canadienne, 360.
Casimir, Fort, 404, 467, 468, 470, 472, 473, 478.
Cass, General Lewis, 198, 242, 366.
Cassell, United States, 384.
Castell, William, Short Discovery of America, 427.
See Pentagöet.
Cataraqui, River, 324.
Sea of, 72.
See Asia.
Cathérine de St. Augustin, 312;
life by Ragueneau, 312.
Catholic Telegraph, 222.
Catholic World, 222.
Catskill Mountains, xxv.
Caughnawaga, 284.
Cavelier, Jean, Journal, 236;
autog., 234;
Report, 241.
the “Griffin” built at, 183;
Cellarius, Speculum, 101.
Century Magazine, 44.
Cespedes, Yslario general, 24;
Navigacion, 378.
autog., 277;
murdered, 307.
Chaleur Bay, 49, 87, 92, 94, 98, 100.
Chalmers, George, 160.
Chamaho, 41.
Chambly, De, 147.
Chamcook Hill, 137.
Champdoré, 139.
autog., 346.
Champlain, 397;
account by E. F. Slafter, 103;
explores the New England coast, 107, 108;
on the Nova Scotia coast, 112;
his surveys, 113;
his descriptions, 113;
made lieutenant-governor, 113;
returns to Canada, 113;
autog., 119;
in France (1614), 124;
among the Hurons, 126;
again returns to France, 126;
carried to England (1629), 129;
authorities, 130;
his Des Sauvages (1603), 130;
Les Voyages (1613), 131;
his maps, 131;
Quatriesme Voyage, 131;
Voyages et descouvertures (1619), 132;
Les Voyages (1632), 132;
Treatise on Navigation, 133;
reprints, 133;
Brief Discours, 133;
English translations, 134;
his burial-place, 130;
at Port Royal, 138;
his maps, 378,
(1613), 382,
arrives, 301;
domestic life, 301;
marries, 164.
Champlain, Lake, map of, 391;
history of, 120.
Charlefort, 101.
Charles X. (Sweden), 476;
autog., 476.
Charles, Fort, 227.
Charlesbourg Royal, 57.
Charlevoix, P. F.-X. de, account of, 154;
Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 154, 262, 358, 367;
Shea’s translation, 358;
not partial to Montreal, 303.
Chateaux, Bay of, 89.
Chatham Harbor, 112.
Chats, 293.
Chaudière River missions, 273.
Chaulmer, Charles, Le Nouveau Monde, 296, 426.
Chaumonot, Joseph, 280, 281, 307, 316;
autog., 316;
life of, 316;
his autobiog., 292.
Chauveau on Garneau, 359.
Chauvigny, Magdalen de. See Peltrie.
his map, 30.
Chaves, Hieronymus, 81.
Chemoimegon Bay, 175.
Cheney, Mrs., Rival Chiefs, 154.
Cherokees, 298.
Chesapeake Bay, 217.
Chesepick, 377.
Chesnay, Aubert de la, 336.
Chevalier edits Sagard, 290.
Cheyennes, 211.
Chicago, 258;
Fort, 231;
Historical Society, 198;
was Marquette at?, 209;
River, 224.
Chickasaw Bluffs, 225.
Chilaga, 94, 95, 99, 100, 378.
Chinagua, 40.
Choisy, Abbé de, 141.
Chomedey, 303.
See Maisonneuve.
Choüacoet, 152.
Chouart, Medard, 189.
See Groseilliers.
Chouegouen, 293.
Christina, Queen (Sweden), 448;
autog., 448;
abdicates, 476.
siege of, 480.
Christinahamn, 474.
Christopher (bay), 46.
Chronologie de l’histoire de la paix, 131.
Church, Colonel Benjamin, 160;
his Expedition to the East, 160.
Cibola, 97.
Cigateo, 45.
See Japan.
Circourt, Comte, on Parkman, 158.
Clark, John S., 125;
on the Iroquois missions, 293.
Clark, J. V. H., Onondaga, 126, 309, 421.
Clarke, Peter, 298.
Clarke, Robert, Americana, 198.
Clarke, Samuel, Geographical Description, 430.
Clarke, Dr. William, 155.
Claudia Island, 377, 378.
Clay, J. C., Annals, 496.
Clément, Bibliothèque curieuse, 437.
Clément, Histoire de Colbert, 366.
Cleveland, R. H., 416.
Climate of North America, ii, vi, xii.
Cluvier, Philipp, 426.
Coal-mines, viii.
Coal-oil, ix.
Cocheco, 159.
Cock, P., 500.
Cock, P. L., 452.
on the old maps, 413.
Codfish called baccalaos, 3.
Cogswell, J. G., 17.
Colbert, 172;
and Frontenac, 321;
Lettres, etc., 366;
autog., 366;
life of, by Clément, 366.
See Mississippi.
Colden, Cadwallader, Five Indian Nations, 299, 359, 421;
autog., 299;
portrait, 299.
Coleccion de documentos ineditos, 30.
Coleccion de los viages, 30.
Collières, 347.
Collin, Rev. N., 488, 494, 496.
Colom, Arnold, 376;
Zee-Atlas, 376;
Ora Maritima, 376.
Colom, J. A., 379;
Pascaart, 376.
Colon, Donck, 419.
Columbus, Christopher, his map, 34.
Columbus, Ferdinand, his map, 37.
Colve, Anthony, 408;
autog., 409.
Combes, 299.
Comets, 310.
Comokee, 377.
Company of the Hundred Associates, 127, 134.
Condé, Prince de, 123.
Congress, Library of, 248, 299.
Connecticut River, 217;
Dutch and English on the, 405.
Continents, shape of, ii.
at Lake Superior, 202;
mines, 111, 164, 165, 171, 175, 178, 198, 215, 219, 221, 287, 313, 314;
near the Bay of Fundy, 105;
used by natives, viii;
in Connecticut, xxix.
Coppo, Piero, his map, 45.
Cordeiro, Luciano, on the Early Portuguese Discoveries in America, 15.
Corlaer, 342.
Coronelli and Tillemon, maps, 229, 232.
Correspondant, Le, 357.
Corssen, Arendt, 464.
Cortereal, voyages of, 1;
authorities on, 12;
confusion of accounts, 13, 14.
Corterealis, 35, 36, 39, 42, 74, 81, 82, 84, 86, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 373, 378.
Cortes, his treasure-ships, 5.
Costerus, 425.
Coudray, André, 354.
Courcelles or Courcelle, Seigneur de, 172, 366;
returns to France, 177;
expedition against the Mohawks, 283, 311.
Courtemanche, 365;
autog., 365.
Cousin, Jean, 31.
Couture, 238.
map of, 390.
Cowan, F. W., 425.
Coxe, Daniel, Carolana, 262.
Cramoisy Press, 312.
Crasso, Lorenzo, Elogii, 371, 372.
Cremer, 371.
Crépieul, Père de, 271.
Crespel, Père, 292;
Voyage, 292.
Creuxius, Historia Canadensis, 134, 170, 294, 296;
Crèvecœur, Fort, 184, 200, 224, 225, 227, 231, 232, 249, 253, 258, 261, 288.
Criminals sent to America, 51.
Croatoan, 45.
Cronholm, A., Sveriges Historia, 499.
Crown, William, 145.
Gomez at, 11.
Curaçao, 405.
Cusick, David, 298.
Dablon, Claude, 174, 280, 286, 338;
letter, 313;
at Green Bay, 207.
D’Adda, Girolamo, 36.
Dagyncourt, Guillaume, 64.
D’Aiguillon, Duchesse, 272, 302.
D’Ailleboust, Governor, 282;
autog., 282.
Dainville, D., Histoire du Canada, 367.
Dale, Sir Thomas, 142;
at Manhattan, 427.
Dalmas, 271;
autog., 271.
Daly, C. P., on Verrazano, 18.
Danckers, Jasper, 429;
Journal, 420;
map of New Netherland, 438.
Daniel, Père Antoine, 275, 277;
killed, 305.
D’Anville, J. B., 375.
Dapper’s Collection, 423.
D’Aulnay. See Aulnay.
Daumont, S. F., 174.
See Henri II.
Dauphiné, Nicolas du, 378.
“Dauphine”, ship, 6.
Atlas hydrographique de 1511, 38;
on Cartier, 64.
Davidson and Struvé, History of Illinois, 198.
Da Vinci’s map, 36.
Davion, 288.
Davis, A. McF., 211.
Davis, C. K., 248.
autog., 364;
his Diary in Quebec, 364.
Davis, W. T., Landmarks of Plymouth, 110.
Davity, Pierre, Description, 305, 426.
Davost, 275.
Dawson, J. W., Fossil Men, 53.
Dead River, 261.
Deane, Charles, on the Cabot map, 82;
on Verrazano, 18.
Death-rate, xvi, xviii.
De Ber, Mdlle. de, 365.
Decanisora, 327.
De Carheil, 283.
De Casson, 173.
De Chauvin, 106.
De Costa, B. F., on Verrazano, 18;
in Magazine of American History, 18;
his Verrazano the Explorer, 18, 27;
“Jacques Cartier”, 47;
Coasts of Maine, 138;
on the Globe of Ulpius, 19;
Cabo de Baxos, 61;
Motion for a Stay of Judgment, 69;
Sailing Directions of Hudson, 416.
Dee, John, map (1580), 96, 98.
De Fer, 390.
De Grosellier, 161.
See Groseilliers.
Deguerre, 222.
De la Barre, governor, 185.
De la Croix, 229.
De Laet, Johannes, as an authority, 417;
autog., 417;
translations of, 417;
his map, 378;
map of New France, 384;
Novus orbis, 417;
his library, 417;
West-Indische Compagnie, 417;
combats Grotius, 418;
his map of New Netherland, 433, 435, 436;
at Rensselaerswyck, 435.
Delaware Bay and River, 398;
early maps of, 481;
explored, 166.
Delaware colony, 412;
founded, 418.
Delaware country, 404.
Delaware Indians. See Andastes.
Delayant, Sur Champlain, 130.
map of routes of early explorers, 219.
De Meneval, autog., 160.
De Meulles, 229.
Demons, Isles of, 92, 93, 100, 373.
portrait, 136;
Champlain reports to, 113;
Commission, 299;
and the fur-trade, 121.
Dennis, Liberty Asserted, 361.
Denonville, governor, 189;
appointed governor, 343;
autog., 343;
campaign against the Senecas, 347;
authorities, 348;
his journal, 348.
Denton, Daniel, New York, 430.
Denys, Jean, 63;
in the St. Lawrence, 4;
chart of the St. Lawrence, 36.
Denys, Nicholas, 151.
Denys of Honfleur, 86.
De Peyster, J. Watts, Dutch at the North Pole, 138;
Early Settlement of Acadie by the Dutch, 138.
Des Plaine’s river, 178.
De Quen, John, 269.
Dermer, Captain, 110;
Brief Relation, 427.
Desceliers, Pierre, 83, 86, 87;
and the Henri II. map, 20.
Des Goutin, 161.
Des Granches, 62.
De Silhouette, 154.
Desimoni, Cornelio, on Verrazano, 18, 27.
Desmarquet, Histoire de Dieppe, 88.
D’Esprit, Pierre. See Radisson.
Detectio Freti Hudsoni, 378.
De Thou, Histoire de France, 31, 32.
Dethune, Exuperius, 268.
Deutsche Pionier, 248.
Voyagien, 418.
Atlas, 376;
Zee-Atlas, 376.
De Witt, Johan, Brieven, 493.
De Witts, 423.
Dexter, George, “Cortereal”, etc., 1.
autog., 161;
in Hudson’s Bay, 316;
in Louisiana, 239.
See Iberville.
Dieppe, Archives of, destroyed, 16;
great French captain of, 16;
navigators of, 4.
Dieulois, Jean, 64.
Dillon, J. B., History of Indiana, 198.
Dincklagen, L. van, 464.
Dinondadies, 267.
Diseases, xv.
Disosway, G. P., 441.
Divine, River, 178, 209, 212, 214, 216.
Divines, Les, 318.
D’Olbeau, Jean, 124, 264, 268.
Dollier and Galinée, 303;
their map, 203;
Voyage, 294.
Histoire de Montreal, 294, 302.
Dominicans in Virginia, 263.
Don, Nicolas, 62.
Doncker, Hendrick, Zee-Atlas, 376;
Nieuwe Zee-Atlas, 376.
licensed traders, 192;
and Denonville, 345.
Dornelos, Juan, 10.
D’Orville, 139.
Double, Cape, 48.
Douchet Island. See St. Croix Island and De Monts Island.
Douniol, Ch., Mission du Canada, 314.
Dourado, Vaz, 414; his map, 433.
Doutreleau, Père, 289.
Dover (N. H.), 159.
Drake, S. A., Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast, 136.
Drapeau, Stanilas, on Champlain’s tomb, 130.
Drisius, S., 497.
Drocoux, 222.
Druillettes, Gabriel, 174, 270, 273, 286;
among the Abenakis, 306;
in Boston, 306;
letter to Winthrop, 306;
Narré du Voyage, 306;
account of, 307.
Duchesneau, 161, 170, 335, 366;
autog., 334.
“Duchess of Gordon”, ship, 411.
Du Creux. See Creuxius.
Dudley, Robert, Arcano del Mare, 376, 385, 435;
map of Nova Francia, 388.
Dufresnoy, Lenglet, La Géographie, 375.
Duhaut, 238.
rescues Hennepin, 288;
licensed to trade, 186;
enforces the law, 188;
his Mémoire, 197;
Du Luth. See Du Lhut.
Dummer, Defence of the Colonies, 364.
Dumont, La Louisiane, 240.
Dunlap, William, History of New York, 431.
Duperon, Père, 281.
Du Plessis, 274.
Du Plessis, Pacifique, 124.
Du Ponceau, P. S., 492.
Dupont, 357.
Duport, Nicolas, 64.
Dupuis, 280;
among the Onondagas, 308.
Dupuy, 181.
Durantaye, 186, 189, 341, 347, 354.
Duro, C. F., Arca de Noé, 86.
Durrie, D. S., Bibliography of Wisconsin, 199;
Early Outposts, 199.
Dussieux, L., Le Canada, 367.
Dutch, the, on the Hudson, xxiv, xxv;
on the Maine coast, 138;
educated emigrants among them, 410;
their State-Papers, 416;
and New Plymouth, 428;
first arrived in New Netherland, 429.
Dutch. See New Netherland.
Géographie universelle, 375;
his maps, 390.
Duxbury Bay, 109.
Dwight, Theodore F., 33.
“Eagle”, ship, 412.
Earthquake (1663), 310.
Eastman, F. S., History of New York, 431.
Eastman, Captain Seth, 199.
Eaton, Governor Theophilus, 456, 476.
Ebbingh, J., 417.
Ebeling, C. D., America, 495;
his library, 495;
his maps, 201.
Ebers, Georg, on Oscar Peschel, 15.
Eggleston, Edward, 44;
on sites of Indian tribes, 298.
Egle, W. H., Pennsylvania, 499.
Egypt, i.
Ellicott, Andrew, 254.
Ellis, George E., Red Man and White Man, 296, 299;
on Parkman’s histories, 201, 296.
Elswich, Henrich von, 475, 476;
autog., 475.
“Emerilon”, galley, 51.
Engel, Samuel, Voyages, 262.
Engelran, 187, 195, 344; wounded, 348;
autog., 348.
English State-Paper Office, 410.
Erie, Lake, 227; maps of, 203, 204, 206, 208, (1674), 213, 214, 215, 217, 218;
latest explored of the lakes, 224;
mentioned (1688), 232;
(Du Chat), 234; (Herrie), 237;
(Conty), map (1683), 249: map (1697), 251;
(Conti), 259, 260; map (1655), 391, (1660), 389.
See Great Lakes.
Eries, 53;
country of, 298;
destroyed, 298.
Erondelle, Pierre, translates Lescarbot, 150.
Esopus, 407.
Espirito Bay (Bahia), 238.
Estancelin, Louis, Navigateurs Normands, 16, 63.
Estotiland, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 378.
Études réligieuses, 222.
Evans, Lewis, his map, 447.
Eyma, Xavier, 241.
Faffart, 182.
Fage, Robert, Description, etc., 428;
Cosmography, 428.
Fagundes, Joas Alvarez, 37, 74.
Faillon, Abbé, Colonie Française en Canada, 246, 302, 360;
an ardent Sulpitian, 302;
on Margaret Bourgeois, 309;
accounts of, 360;
Vie de N. Olier, 303;
Vie de Mdlle. Mance, 303;
Vie de Mdlle. Le Ber, 365.
Falconer, Discovery of the Mississippi, 226.
Faribault, G. B, Catalogue, etc., 367;
account of, 367;
and the Canadian Archives, 366.
Farrer, Virginia, 437.
Faust Club, 441.
Fénelon, Archbishop, 311.
Fergus, Robert, Historical Series, 198.
Ferland, Abbé, Cours d’histoire du Canada, 134, 157, 360;
accounts of, 360;
Registres de Notre Dame, 207.
Fernow, Berthold, “New Netherland”, 395;
edits State archives, 441;
Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, 500;
his work on the New York records, 412.
Ferris, Benjamin, Settlements on the Delaware, 497.
Figs in Canada, 72.
Figurative map, 433.
Finnish emigration, 496.
Fischer, Professor Theodor, 89.
Fisher, J. F., 299.
Fisheries, xxi;
at Newfoundland, 61.
Fishing stages, 3.
Firelands Historical Society, 198.
Five Nations, plans for subduing the, 130.
See Iroquois.
Fleet, Captain Henry, 165.
autog., 447.
Fleming, Jöran, 477;
autog., 477.
Fletcher, Governor Benjamin, 365;
autog., 365.
mapped by Allefonsce, 75;
mentioned, 93, 95, 98, 101, 197, 227, 373, 377.
See Verrazano.
Florio, John, translates account of Cartier’s voyage, 63.
Fluviander, Israel, 463.
Folsom, George, 151, 427, 441.
Foucault, 288.
Fongeray, 139.
Foppens, J. F., Bibliotheca Belgica, 371, 372.
Force, M. F., on the Indians of Ohio, 298.
Forests, value of, vii;
distribution, xiv.
Universale Descrittione, 88;
his map (1562), 92.
Fort Crèvecœur. See Crèvecœur.
map, 159.
See Portland.
Fourcille, Chevalier de, 187.
France, Mer de, 85.
France Royal, 58.
France, royal geographers of, 375.
Francesca. See Francisca.
See New France; Francisca.
autog., 23.
Francis, Convers, Life of Ralle, 274.
Francis, John W., on New York, 409.
Francisca (Canada), 28, 38, 39, 41, 45, 67, 74, 84.
See New France.
Franciscans, 289;
in Canada, 265;
in Florida, 263.
Franciscus, monk, his map, 45.
Frankfort globe, 36.
Franquelin, maps, (1679, 1681), 211, 226, (1682), 227, (1684), 227, 228, (1688), 170, 229, 230, 231;
plans of Quebec, 321.
Franquet, Voyages, 366.
Freels, Cape, 36.
Freire, Joannes, map (1546), 84, 86.
autog., 268.
French archives. See Paris.
French colonization impeded by the commercial spirit, 106.
French, Historical Collections of Louisiana, 241.
Frère, Edouard, Bibliographe Normand, 201.
Freschot, Casimiro, 250.
Frisius, Laurentius, map of, 36.
Frison, Gemma, 101.
Frogs, 429.
Frontenac, made governor, 177, 318;
autog., 177, 326, 364; at Lake Ontario (1673), 179, 329;
recalled (1682), 185;
mentioned, 291;
arrives, 314;
and his times, 317;
married, 318;
and La Salle, 324;
and Perrot, 330;
recalled, 337;
again appointed governor (1689), 351, 361;
his titles, 357;
his youth, 357;
letters to, 366;
his lodging, 354;
his last campaign against the Iroquois, 355, 365.
Frontenac, Fort, established, 180;
plan of, 222;
Frontenac, Lake, 208.
Fumée, 31.
Fundy, Bay of, in maps, 90;
called “Grande Baye Françoise”, 140;
map, (1609), 152, (1709), 153;
called Golfo di S. Luize, 388.
Furman, G., Long Island, 441;
Notes of Brooklyn, 441.
Fur trade, in Canada, xxi, 105, 112, 113, 122, 127, 164, 168, 170, 181, 183, 192, 199, 327, 330, 336, 339, 340, 343, 349, 353, 397;
in New England, xxv;
Furlani. See Forlani.
Gaffarel, Paul, edits Thevet, 31, 32.
Gaillon, Michael, 59.
Gale, George, Upper Mississippi, 200, 298.
Galinée, Abbé de, 173, 245, 266,
his map, 205;
his Journal, 205.
Gallaeus, Philippus, map (1574), 95;
Enchiridion, 95.
Galvano, Antonio, 14;
his Tratado, 14;
edited by Bethune, 14.
Gamas, Golfo de los, 100.
Gamort, 64.
Gandagare, 280.
Ganentaa, 280.
Gannagaro, 347.
Ganneaktena, 283.
Garacontie, 282, 283, 311, 328.
Gardner, A. K., 418.
Garneau, Alfred, 359.
Garneau, F. X., 359;
Histoire du Canada, 157, 158, 359, 367;
Garnier, Charles, 305.
Garnier, Julian, 283.
murdered, 307.
Garreau, Père Leonard, 277, 282, 286, 305;
autog., 277;
murdered, 308.
Champlain at, 105;
mission, 267.
map, (1548), 86, 88, (1550), 86;
Gastaldo. See Gastaldi.
Gaudais, 366.
Gaulin, 269.
Geddes, George, 125.
Geijer, E. G., Historia, 496.
Gendron, Quelques particularites, 247, 305.
Genealogy in New York, 410.
Genestou, 139.
Genoa, Società Ligure, Atti, 18.
Gens de mer, 166.
Geographical Magazine, 18.
George, Fort (New York), 411.
George, Lake (St. Sacrament), 312.
Gerdtson, H., 469.
Gérin-Lajoie, 366.
Germans in Pennsylvania, characteristics, xix.
Gerrard, J. W., Old Streets of New York, 440.
Gerritsz, Hessel, 417.
Ghymm, Walter, on Mercator, 371.
Gibbons, Edward, 145.
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, map, 96.
Gillam, Captain Zachary, 172.
Giornale Ligustico, 38.
Girava, Cosmographia, 90.
Glacial action, xii.
Glandelet, Abbé, 357.
Gloucester Harbor, visited by Champlain, 111.
Gobat, G., 307.
Goes, Damiano de, Chronica, 14, 15.
Gomar, 423.
Gomara, as an authority, 11;
on the Cortereals, 13;
Historia general, 68.
Gomez, 9, 38, 82, 85, 87, 93, 413, 414;
Murphy on, 21;
and Ribero’s map, 21.
Goodrich and Tuttle, History of Indiana, 198.
Goos, P., Lichtende Colomme, 376;
Atlas de la mer, 376.
Gorges, Ferdinando, 165;
Briefer Narration, 430;
America painted to the Life, 430.
Gosselin, E., 60;
Documents de la marine Normande, 61;
Nouvelles glanes historiques, 61, 65.
Gottfriedt, J. L., Archontologia Cosmica, 426;
map, 390.
Gould, B. A., the astronomer, xvi;
his Statistics of American Soldiers, xvii.
Goyer, Olivier, 357.
Graffenreid, Baron de, xxviii.
Grandfontaine, 161.
Granville, 347.
Gravier, Gabriel, on Joliet’s earliest map, 209;
Découvertes de La Salle, 245;
La Salle de Rouen, 245;
on La Hontan, 262.
Gravier, Jacques, Relation, 316;
autog., 316.
Gray Friars, 264.
“Great Hermina”, ship, 51.
Great Lakes (see Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior), authorities on the discovery of, 196;
levels of, 224;
map of, 228.
Green, John, 154.
Green Mountains, xxv.
Greene, G. W., on Verrazano, 17;
his Historical Studies, 17.
Greene, J. H., reviews Sparks’s Marquette, 201.
Greenhow, R., 199.
Greenland, 2, 3, 36, 37, 89, 101;
in early Portuguese maps, 16.
Greenough, Robert, 312.
Gregson, Thomas, 456.
Grenolle, 165.
Griffin, A. P. C., on the bibliography of Western Explorations, 201.
Griffin, M. J., 297.
“Griffin”, bark, built on Niagara River, 183, 223;
lost, 183.
Gripsholm, 462.
Groseilliers, 168, 171, 174, 197;
goes to Boston, 171.
Grotius, on the Origin of the American Indians, 418.
Grovelat, 82.
Grozelliers. See Groseilliers.
Guanahani, or Guanahana, 97, 101.
Guast, De. See De Monts.
Gudin, Th., 241.
Guendeville, Nicolas, 257.
Guercheville, Comtesse de, 141, 264.
Guerin, Jean, 170.
Guerin, Navigateurs Français, 134, 241.
Guesnin, Hilarion, 268.
Guiana, Beschryvinghe van, 378.
Guignas, Père, 289.
Guimené, Prince de, 265.
Guincourt, 58.
Gulf Stream, iii.
Gunnarson, S., 450.
Gustafson, Nils, 494.
autog., 443.
Gutierrez, Diego, 81;
map (1562), 90.
Gurnet, 109.
Gyles, John, Memoirs, 159.
Gyllengren, E., 453, 472, 473.
Hachard, Madeleine, 241.
Hacket, M., 31.
Hagaren, King, 226.
Hager, A. D., 198;
on Marquette at Chicago, 209.
Hakluyt, 151;
Navigations, 17.
Hale, E. E., on Dudley’s Arcano, 435.
Hale, Horatio, on the Iroquois, 299;
Iroquois Book of Rites, 299.
Hale, Nathan, 155.
“Half-Moon”, vessel, 397.
Haliburton, Thomas C., Nova Scotia, 155.
Hall, E. F., 371.
Hall, Ralph, his map of Virginia, 374.
Hallam, Literature of Europe, 375.
Hamilton, Alexander, his Artillery Company, 412.
Hannay, James, History of Acadia, 138, 157.
Harlem, 441.
Harmansen. See Arminius.
Harper, John, Maritime Provinces, 368.
Harrassowitz, Otto, 439.
Harrison, W. H., Aborigines of the Ohio, 298.
Harrisse, Henry, reviews Murphy’s book on Verrazano, 18;
his Notes sur la Nouvelle France, 35, 295, 366;
his collection of Canadian maps, 201;
and Margry’s Collection, 242;
list of maps in his Notes, etc., 201;
opposes Margry’s views, 246.
Hart, A. M., Mississippi Valley, 199.
Hartford (Conn.), 401.
Hartgers, Joost, Beschrijvinghe van Virginia, 422.
Harvard College Library, 248, 299;
maps in, 201.
Harvey, Henry, Shawnee Indians, 298.
Hassard, J. R. G., 358.
See Hattoras.
Hatton, Newfoundland, 65.
See Hatarask.
Hawley, Charles, Cayuga History, 294, 309.
Hawley, Jerome, 497.
Hazard, Samuel, Annals of Pennsylvania, 497;
Register of Pennsylvania, 496.
Hazart, on Dutch Church History, 306.
Hebert, Louis, 126.
Hemant, 183.
Henlopen, Cape, 453.
Hennepin, Louis, arrives in Canada, 180;
account of, 247;
Description de la Louisiane, 197, 248;
papers on, by Rafferman, 248;
at Fort Frontenac, 223;
and La Salle, 250;
his map (1683), 249;
New Discovery, 128;
title of, 256;
Nouvelle Découverte, 250;
map (1697), 251;
Nouveau Voyage, 240, 255, 256;
Voyage curieux, 254;
Discovery of a Large Country, etc., 255;
his books, 292.
Hennin, De, Essai sur la Bibliothèque du Roi, 82.
Henri II., map called by his name, 20;
made by Desceliers, 20, 77, 83, 85.
See Dauphin.
Henri IV., interested in Champlain’s voyage, 104;
assassinated, 122;
autog., 136.
Henry (Dauphin), autog., 56.
Heptameron of Marguerite, 66.
Heriot, George, History of Canada, 367.
Hermanson, B., 458.
Héroard, Jean, 357.
Herrera, Hechos de las Castellanos, 29;
Historia, 13;
Las Indias, 378.
Hesperian, The, 199.
Hesselius, Andreas, 493.
Hewett, General Fayette, xviii .
Hexham, Henry, editor of Mercator, 374.
Heylin, Peter, Cosmographie, 384, 385, 428;
Microcosmus, 428.
Hilderberg Hills, xxv.
Hildreth, S. P., Ohio Valley, 199.
Hill, A. J., 199.
Hispaniola, 41.
See Santo Domingo.
Historical Societies of the Northwest, 198.
Hjort, P., 472.
Hoar, George F., 242.
Hochelaga, 52, 53, 77, 85, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 163, 377, 385;
extent of, 72;
(Ochelaga), 87;
plan of, 64;
site of, 304;
view of, 90.
Hoffman, C. F., Pioneers of New York, 410.
Hoggenberg, Francis, 371.
Hojeda, 10.
Holden, A. W., Queensbury, 421.
Hollandsche Mercurius, 491.
Hollender, Peter, 449;
autog., 449.
Holm. See Campanius.
Homann, 262.
maps, 92.
Homes, H. A., on the Pompey Stone, 434.
Hondius, Jodocus, succeeds Mercator, 372, 378;
dies, 374.
Hondius-Mercator Atlas, 374.
Honfleur, Navigators of, 4.
Honguedo, 78.
Honter globe, 36.
Hoochcamer, H., 450.
Hood, Thomas, his map, 38, 414.
autog., 475.
Hope, Fort, 401.
Horologgi, 31.
Horse, xv.
Hosmer, H. L., Maumee Valley, 198.
Hough, F. B., Pemaquid Papers, 159.
Houghton County Historical Society (Michigan), 198.
Howe, Henry, Historical Collection of Ohio, 198.
autog., 461.
his American voyages, 397, 424, 428;
authorities, 416.
Hudson Bay, English at, 186, 345;
map (1709), 259;
routes to, 309;
mentioned, 101, 172, 228, 309, 316;
company, 172;
the San Antonio of the Spaniards, 11, 429;
settlements,xxv;
in the old maps, 413;
name first applied, 427.
Huet, 274.
Huffington, William, Delaware Register, 496.
Hulsius, Levinus, his Sammlung, 426, 442.
Hulter, Johan de, 417.
Humboldt’s study of Maps, 33.
Hundred Associates, 302.
Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, 201.
Huppé, 354.
Hurault, Philippe, 357.
Hurlbut, H. H., 246;
Chicago Antiquities, 198;
on Marquette at Chicago, 209.
Huron Country, 298;
(1688), 231, 232, 233, (1709), 259, (1703), 260;
called Michigane, 203;
D’Orleans map (1683), 249;
maps of, 208, 213, 214, 215, 218;
map of (1660), 389;
map of (1656), 391.
missions, 124, 267, 275, 301, 302, 305, 307, 310, 315;
migrations, 197;
prayer, 302;
among the Iroquois, 280;
at Isle d’Orleans, 308;
colonized near Quebec, 307, 315;
Champlain among the, 126;
described by Champlain, 132;
defeated by the Iroquois, 277;
at Mackinaw, 176;
join the Ottawas, 175;
Sagard among the, 196.
Huygen, H., 448, 454, 462, 470, 477;
autog., 448.
See D’Iberville.
Ice period, xii.
Il genio vagante, 250.
Illinois, histories of, 198.
their country, 179;
missions, 268.
Illinois, Lac des. See Michigan.
Illinois River, 258.
India, passage to, 10, 50, 51, 55, 59, 72, 84, 123, 164, 167, 171, 172, 173, 202, 396, 397, 414, 426.
Indian corn, xiii.
Indiana, Historical Society, 198;
histories of, 198.
Indians, life and customs, 290;
map of, 298;
of Canada, 263;
described by Champlain, 131;
carried to France by Cartier, 57;
converted, 299;
and the Dutch, 399, 406, 407, 421;
geographical distribution of, 163;
habits, 301;
languages, 301;
on the Massachusetts coast, 110;
mythology of, 299;
in New England, xxiv;
Parkman’s account of, 297;
and Potherie, 358;
Inga, Athanasius, West-Indische Spieghel, 416.
Intendant of justice, 172.
International Magazine, 295.
Iowa, Historical Society, 199;
histories, 199.
Ioway (Ayoes), River, 169.
Irondequoit Bay, 193.
Iron mines, viii, xxix, 106, 209, 219.
and Algonquins, respective locations of, 299;
Book of Rites, 299;
attacked (1615), by Champlain, 120, 124, 125, 132;
route to attack them, 125;
their country, 298;
map of, 281;
modern map of, 293;
missions in, 293;
French claims to, 349;
attempted treaty (1688), with the French, 350;
Dunlap’s map of their country, 421;
relations with Dongan, 340;
with the Dutch, 167;
wars with the French, 167;
peace with the French, (1654), 168;
embassy to the French, 310;
and Eries, war of, 308;
their idol, 204;
threatened by La Barre, 189;
relations with La Barre, 339;
their legends, 299;
origin of their confederacy, 299;
mission, 279, 296, 305, 311, 313;
numbers of, 309;
defeated by Ottawas, 175;
peace with (1652), 308;
and Huron wars, 305;
Irving, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, 410.
Isabella (Cuba), 34.
I-Santi Indians, 181.
Iselin, I. C., 372.
Isle aux Coudres, 52.
Isle Gazees, 78.
Isle of Birds, 51.
Isle of Demons, 66.
Isle Percée, 268.
Isle Royale, 217.
Isles aux Margoulx, 48.
Isles of Shoals, discovered by Champlain, 111.
Issati Indians, 181.
Iucatan. See Yucatan.
Jacobsz or Jacobsen, A., his maps, 378, 383, 434.
Jacobsz, Theunis, 376.
Jahrbuch des Vereins für Erdkunde in Dresden, 38.
Jahresbericht des Vereins für Erdkunde in Leipzig, 38.
Jaillot, Bernard, 375.
Amérique, 385;
Neptune Français, 377.
Jal, Dictionnaire critique, 357.
Jamay, Denis, 124.
James, Fort, 313.
See New York.
James’s Bay, 171.
Jamet, Denys, Lettre, 300.
Jannson, Johan, 374, 378, 384;
his Atlas, 374;
Atlas contractus, 437;
Novus Atlas, 437;
sketch of his map, 385;
atlases, 437.
Jansen, Jan, van Ilpendam, 452.
Jefferys, the geographer, 155.
Jenner, Thomas, Foreign Passages, 430.
Jesuits, Journals of, 306;
Martyrs, Shea’s History of, 305;
missions in Ohio, 198;
missions in Michigan, 199;
in Acadia, 292;
authorities, 292;
various reprints and supplements, 292;
bibliography of, 295;
judged by Parkman, 296;
by Charlevoix, 296;
by Shea, 296;
fac-simile of a title, 310;
in Acadia, 151;
their character, 296;
and Poutrincourt, 150;
retired from Lake Superior, 176;
list of, among the Hurons, 307;
maps of, 205;
in the Northwest, 222;
Voyages et Travaux, 314.
Jesuit College (Georgetown), 299.
Jocker, E., 223.
Jode, Corneille de, 369.
Jogues, Isaac, 276, 277, 279, 285, 305, 421;
at Sault Ste. Marie, 302;
portrait, 306;
life by Martin, 294;
autog., 421;
death, 306;
papers, 306.
Johnson, Jeremiah, 419, 420, 491.
Johnston, Bristol and Bremen, 138.
sent by Frontenac westward, 177;
Marquette joins him, 178;
authorities, 201;
meets La Salle, 204;
his canoe overset, 179;
his maps, 179;
his letter to Frontenac, 179;
as the discoverer of the Mississippi, 246, 315;
earliest map (1673-1674), 208, 209;
explorations, 207;
his personal history, 207;
his so-called “larger map”, 211, 212, 213;
letter to Frontenac, 210, 211;
route by the Wisconsin, 211;
his “carte générale”, 211, 218;
his letters, 209;
his accounts of his discoveries, 209;
fac-simile of letter, 210.
“Joly”, ship, 234.
Jomard, map, 89.
Jones, J. P., 226.
Jonge, T. C. de, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsch Zeewesen, 418.
Jordan River, 45.
Josselyn, John, Voyages, 429.
Journal des Savans, 237.
Journal général de l’Instruction publique, 196.
Joutel, 235;
his Journal, 240;
Journal historique, 240;
at Lavaca River, 238;
goes with La Salle, 238.
Juchereau, Françoise, 335;
Judæis, Cornelio, map, (1589), 95, (1593), 97, 99;
Speculum Orbis, 99.
Juet’s Journal, 416.
Juvencius, Josephus, Canadicae missionis Relatio, 300;
Historiæ Societatis Jesu, 151, 300.
Juvency. See Juvencius.
his maps, 384.
Kalbfleisch, C. H., 299.
Kalm, Peter, Resa, 494.
Kankakee River, 188, 200, 224.
Kapp, Frederick, on Minuit, 502.
Karegnondi (Huron Lake), 391.
Katarakoni River, 180.
Kauder, Christian, 268.
Kaufmann, 371.
Keen, Gregory B., “New Sweden”, 443.
Keen, Maons, 494.
Keith, Sir William, British Plantations, 3.
Kelton, D. H., on Mackinaw Island, 199.
Kennebec River, 108, (Quinebeque), 383.
Kentucky, English stock in, xvii;
the physical proportions of, xvi, xviii;
death-rate, xviii.
Kerkhistorisch Archief 421.
Ketchum, Buffalo, 421.
Keulen, Johan van, Zee-Atlas, 376.
Keye, Otto, 422;
Het waere Onderscheyt, 422, 423.
Kidder, Frederic, on the Swedes on the Delaware, 499.
autog., 441;
his recall, 405.
Kikapous, 178.
King, Rufus, 300.
Kip, W. I., Early Jesuit Missions, 294.
at Tadoussac, 127;
captures Quebec, 128.
Kirke, Henry, First English Conquest of Canada, 128, 158.
Kling, Måns, 448, 451, 452, 453, 455;
his map, 437.
Knapp, H. S., Maumee Valley, 198.
Knickerbocker Magazine, 222.
Kohl, J. G., his study of maps, 33;
his collection of maps in Department of State in Washington, 33, 201;
maps in Coast Survey Office, 34;
in the American Antiquarian Society’s Library, 35;
Cartographical Depot, 35;
Discovery of Maine, 15;
on the Cortereals, 15;
his Geschichte der Entdeckung Amerikas, 35.
Kondiaronk, 350.
Koopman, 371.
autog., 469.
Krober, A. N., 447.
Kryn, 283.
Kunstmann, Friedrich, Entdeckung Amerikas, 15;
his descendants, 500.
See Keen.
La Barre, Le Febvre De, 337;
autog., 337;
and the Senecas, 342.
La Chesnay, 354;
site of, 303.
La Chine, 303;
La Cosa, map, 35.
La Croix, Algemeene Wereldt-Beschrijving, 439.
La Crosse, J. B., 271.
La Famine Bay, 293.
La Ferte, 188.
La Fortune, 187.
Lafreri, Tavole moderne, 93.
La Galissonière, 154.
La Hontan, Baron, 342;
account of, 257;
Nouveaux Voyages, 257;
Mémoires de l’Amérique, 257;
New Voyages, 257;
Dialogue, 257;
map (1703), 260;
Supplément, 257;
Lamonde, 181.
La Montagne, J., 464.
La Motte, 182.
La Motte Bourioli, 139.
La Motte-Cadillac, Mémoire sur l’Acadie, 159.
La Noue, 365.
La Plata, 40.
La Potherie, 159.
La Prairie, 284.
La Rochelle, archives of, destroyed, 16.
La Salle, Sieur de, his birth, 242;
his character, 222;
in Canada, 180;
at Fort Frontenac, 180;
explorations (1678), 181, 202;
at Niagara, 182;
on the Ohio, 207;
at the Chicago portage(?,), 207;
did he discover the Mississippi?, 207, 245;
at St. Joseph’s River(?,), 207;
his route, 212, 214, 224, 232, 233, 241;
reaches the Gulf of Mexico, 225;
at Fort Miami, 225;
at Michillimackinac, 225;
superseded, 226;
restitution made, 234;
expedition to Texas, 236;
founds a colony, 237;
on Lavaca River, 238;
starts northward (1686), 238;
relations with Hennepin, 250;
with Denonville, 226;
with Frontenac, 324;
with La Barre, 339;
his life by Sparks, 242;
by Parkman, 242;
his letters, 244; his will, 241.
La Salle, Nicholas de, 226.
La Taupine, 179.
La Tour, Abbé, Vie de Laval, 309, 358.
La Tour, Charles de, 142, 143;
autog., 143;
visits Boston, 144;
attacks D’Aulnay, 145;
La Tour, Stephen de, 145.
La Tourette, Greysolon de, 194.
La Tourette, Fort, 189, 229, 230.
La Valterie, 347.
L’Archevêque, 239.
Labadists, 429.
Labrador, 37, 39, 43, 45, 48, 74, 75, 78, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101;
on the early maps, 16.
Laconia, 165.
Lafitau, Père, Mœurs des Sauvages, 294, 298;
autog., 298.
Lafitau, Des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde, 15.
Lafontaine, L. H., 303.
La Hêve, Cape, 136.
Laisné de la Marguerie, 302.
Lake of the Two Mountains, 312.
Lalande, 280.
Relations and Letters, 300, 301, 309.
autog., 278;
death of, 307.
Lalemant, Hierosme, Relations, 305, 306, 310;
in the Huron Country, 302, 305.
Lamb, Martha J., New York, 440.
Lamberton. George, 451.
Lamberville, 346.
Lamberville, Jean de, 283, 340, 346;
autog., 285.
Lambrechtsen, N. C., Kort Beschrijving, 416, 431.
Lampe, B., 424.
Langen, J. G., 256.
Langenes, Caert-Thresoor, 102;
Handboek, 102.
Langevin, E., on Laval, 309.
Langren, A. Florentius à, 99.
Langton, John, 201
Lanman, James H., History of Michigan, 198.
Lapham, I. A., History of Wisconsin, 199.
Latitude and longitude in Champlain’s map, 131.
Laudonnière, 17.
Laure, Michael, 271.
Lauson, Governor, 303.
Lauverjeat, 273.
Lavaca River, 238.
Laval, Bishop, 247, 267, 309, 312, 334;
autog., 309;
Parkman on, 309;
portraits, 309;
lives of, 309;
La Tour’s life of, 358.
Laval University, 222.
Laverdière, Abbé, 130, 133, 196, 306, 360;
edits Champlain, 360.
Lavvradore. See Labrador.
Law, John, Vincennes, 198.
Law, Judge John, 222.
Lazaro, Luiz, map by, 37.
Le Beau, Voyage curieux, 299.
Le Boeme, Louis, 176.
Le Caron, Joseph, 124, 125, 264, 279.
Le Clercq, Christian, 234, 268;
Établissement de la Foy, 255, 291;
translated by Shea, 291;
Histoire des Colonies Françaises, 291;
map in his Établissement de la Foy, 390;
Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, 292;
attacks the Jesuits, 292.
Le Cordier, 393.
Le Gardeur, René. See Beauvais.
Le Jeune, Paul, 196, 271, 274;
Relations, 301, 302, 308, 309;
Journal, 301;
portrait, 272.
Le Journal des Jésuites, 196.
Le Maire, Jacques, 187.
Le Mere, 187.
Lemercier, François, 280;
Relations, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313;
in the Huron country, 301, 302;
autog., 311.
Lemoine, J. M., Rues de Québec, 321;
Quebec Past and Present, 118;
Picturesque Quebec, 126.
Le Moyne, Simon, 280, 281, 282, 283;
autog., 308;
Letters, 309;
in the Mohawk country, 308, 309;
at Onondaga, 308;
among the Senecas, 310.
Le Rouge, 375.
Le Roux, 254.
Le Sage, S., on the Recollects, 292.
Le Testu, Guillaume, Cosmographie, 90;
his map, 77.
Ledyard, L. W., 125.
Leipzig, Verein für Erdkunde, Jahresbericht, 15.
Leisler, Governor, 159.
Lelewel, account of, 375.
on the bibliography of Champlain, 133;
prints Marquette’s accounts, 294.
Lenox globe, 36.
Contributions, 295;
Jesuit Relations, 295.
Lery, Baron de, 31;
Lescarbot, Marc, 149;
La Conversion des Sauvages, 150;
Relation dernière, 150;
Le bout de l’an, 150;
his maps (1609), 150, 152, 378;
map of the Upper St. Lawrence, 304;
career, 149;
Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 149;
Les Muses, 150;
on the Nova Scotia coast, 112.
Les véritables motifs, 302.
Leverett, John, expedition to Acadie, 145;
autog., 145.
Levot, 241.
Leyzeau, Pierre, 354.
L’Héroine Chrétienne, 303.
Licking County Pioneer Historical Society, 198.
Liens, Nicholas des, 78;
Liljehöck, P., 455.
Limestone regions, xiii.
Lindstroem, Peter, 472, 473, 483, 485, 494;
autog., 472;
His writings, 502;
Histoire de la Navigation, 414.
Liotot, 238.
Liquor, sale of to Indians, controversy over, 267.
“Little Hermina”, ship, 51, 54.
Livingston, William, 430.
Livot, Biographie Bretonne, 65.
Lloyd, Lawrence, 473.
Loccenius, J., Historia Suecana, 491.
Lodowick, Charles, 365.
Loew, 102.
fac-simile, 44.
Long Island, Dutch and English on, 404, 409;
antiquities of, 441;
bibliography of, 441;
histories of, 441.
Long Island Historical Society, 409.
Long river of La Hontan, 258, 260;
map of, 261.
Longueil, 347.
Lossing, B. J., Hudson River, 435.
Louis XIV., autog., 323;
and Canada, 172.
Louis de Sainte Foy, 266.
See Claudia Island.
Lovelace, Governor, 313.
Loyal, Fort, attacked, 39.
See Fort Loyal and Portland.
Loyard, 273.
Luce, Loys, 64.
Lucifer, C., 465.
Lucini, A. F., 435.
Luis, Lazaro, his map, 37.
(1642), 302.
Lutheri Catechismus, 459.
Luyt, Johannes, Introductio ad Geographiam, 375.
Lyndsay, Lord, 442.
Lyonne, Martin de, 268, 307, 308.
Macauley, James, State of New York, 431.
Macgregory, Major, 193.
Machiaca, 45.
Machias (Me.), 143.
Mackerel, 50.
Mackinac, Hurons at, 278;
Mackinaw, history of, 199;
Hurons at, 176.
MacMullen, John, History of Canada, 367.
Madeleine River, 168.
Madockawando, 146.
Maffeius (1593), map, 95.
Magaguadavic River, 137.
Magasin Encyclopédique, 86.
Magazine of American History, 31.
Magellan’s Straits, 40, 41, 42, 43;
voyage, 10.
Maggiollo. See Maiollo.
Magliabechian Library, 17.
Magninus, Geographia, 95.
Maillard, A. S., 269.
Maillard, Jehan, 71.
Maillard, Thomas, 72.
war in, 159.
Maingart, Jacques, 51.
Maiollo, map of, 27, 38, 39, 73.
Mairobert, Discussion summaire, 155.
Maisonneuve, Père, 275.
Maisonneuve, Sieur de, 53, 303.
not produced in Canada, xxii.
Major, R. H., Prince Henry the Navigator, 245;
on Verrazano, 18.
Mallebar, Cape, 143.
Mallet, A. M., L’Univers, 375.
Malte-Brun, Annales, 64.
Man, origin of, xi.
Mance, Mdlle., 294.
origin of name, 433.
Manitoulin Island, 174;
Manitoumie, 221.
Manning, John, 502.
Manno and Promis, Notizie di Gastaldi, 93.
Maps, difficulties with coast-names, 33;
of eastern coast of North America, 33;
of the lakes and the Mississippi, 201.
Mar del Sur, 43, 93.
autog., 316.
Margry, Pierre, his collections and theories, 241;
Les Normands dans les vallées d’Ohio, 196, 241;
Congress assists him, 242;
his Mémoires et documents, 242;
on Allouez, 315;
controversy over the discovery of the Mississippi, 245;
criticised by R. H. Major, 245;
assists Faribault in collecting documents, 366;
Navigations Françaises, 68.
“Marie de Bonnes Nouvelles”, 64.
Marie de l’Incarnation, 314;
accounts of, 314.
Marie de St. Joseph, 308.
Marion, La Fontaine, 192.
Markham, William, 498.
Marmette, Joseph, François de Bienville, 36
Marquadas, J., Tractatus, 490.
at Chicago (?,), 209;
letter, 313;
autog., 313;
at St. Esprit, 207;
translated in Shea’s Discovery of the Mississippi, 294;
report of his expedition, 217, 219;
compared with Joliet’s, 219;
(spurious), map, 220;
given in Thevenot, 220;
his later history, 220;
Marsh, George P., 495.
Marshall, O. H., 125, 242, 295, 299, 348;
on the “Griffin”, 223;
La Salle’s Visit to the Senecas, 205.
Martha’s Vineyard seen by Verrazano, 7.
Martin, Claude, 314.
Martin, Felix, 294.
Martin, Henri, 245.
Martin, Père, 305;
Vie de Brebeuf, 307.
Martyr, Peter, on Verrazano, 25;
Decades, 29;
Opus Epistolarum, 29.
Massachusetts Archives, documents collected in France, 366, 367.
Massachusetts Bay, discovered by Allefonsce, 60.
Masse, Enemond, 129, 133, 264, 265, 266, 273, 300, 301;
death, 306.
Mather, Cotton, 316;
Magnalia, 159.
Matkovic, Schiffer-Karten, 84.
Matthias, 477.
Mauclerc, astronomer, 16.
Maumee Valley, 198.
Maurault, Histoire des Abênaquis, 150.
May River, 45.
McGregory, 347.
Mead, Construction of Maps, 369.
Medina, Pedro de, Arte de Navegar, 83;
map (1545), 83;
Libro de Grandezas, etc., 83;
L’Art de Naviguer, 378.
Medrano, S. F. de, 255.
Megapolensis, Johannis, 419, 420, 497;
autog., 420;
Een kort Ontwerp, 421;
accounts of, 421.
Megiser, Septentrio Novantiquus, 377.
Meiachkwat, Charles, 269, 273.
Melendez at St. Augustine, 263.
Melton, Edward, Zee en Land Reizen, 423.
Melyn, Cornelis, 425;
autog., 425.
Membré, Zénobe, 223, 225, 234, 288;
his Journal, 254.
Mémoires des Commissaires, 154.
Menard, Père, 170, 280, 281, 286, 305, 309;
Mennonists, 423.
Menomonees, 268.
Menou, Charles de, 143.
Mer de Canada, 75.
Mercator, Gerard, portrait, 371;
notice by Ghymm, 371;
his Atlas, 371;
life by Raemdonck, 371;
Atlas minor, 374;
Atlas novus, 374;
English editions, 374;
globes, 99;
map, (1538), 74, 81, (1541), 74, 81, (1569), 78, 94;
his projection, 369.
Mercator, Michael, his map, 377.
Mercure de France, 307.
Mercure François, 131, 134, 150, 300;
sets of, 300.
Mercure gallant, 226.
Mermet, 288.
Metabetchouan, 271.
Metellus, America, 369.
autog., 337.
Meurcius, Jocobus, 390.
physiography, vi.
See Temistitan, New Spain.
Mexico, Gulf of, maps, 34;
reached by La Salle, 225.
Mézy, 172;
autog., 172.
Miami River, 224.
missions to, 268
Michaelius, Rev. Jonas, 421.
Michel, Jean, 143.
“Michel”, ship, 64.
Michelant, H., 63.
Michigan. See Great Lakes.
Michigan, 235;
different names of, 229;
Historical Society of, 198;
histories of, 198;
Lake (Lac des Illinois), 170, 206, 212, 214, 215, 218, 231, 232, 233, 237, 251, 252, 260;
(Dauphin), map of, 249;
discovered, 166;
map (1709), 258;
map (1656), 391;
peninsula first mapped out, 205;
Pioneer Society, 198.
Mildmay, W., 154.
Miles, H. H., History of Canada, 368.
Mille Lacs, 169;
this region taken possession of, 195.
Millin, Magazin encyclopédique, 19.
Mills, A., 102.
of North America, viii.
Minet’s Map of Louisiana (1685), 237.
Minnesota, Historical Society of, 199;
bibliography of, 199;
histories of, 199.
Minnesota River, 195
Minuit, Peter, 398, 403, 441, 445, 447, 493, 502;
Miramichi, 153;
Bay, 49.
Miscou, 266.
Missio Canadensis, 300.
Missions in Canada, sources of their history, 290;
of the Catholics, 199;
to the Indians, 263;
among the Iroquois, map of sites of, 293.
See the names of orders, of priests, and of mission sites.
Mississippi River, 167, 258, (Meschasipi), 251, 253;
reported by Allouez, 286;
report of, from the Indians, 207, 313;
extent of its system, viii;
French possession of, xxiii;
reached by Joliet, 178;
named Buade, 178;
called Colbert, 206;
various names of, 209;
map (1684), 228.
Mississippi Valley, physical characteristics of, iii, iv;
histories of, 199;
French forts in, 199;
French discovery in, 199;
called “Colbertie”, 211;
map (1672), 221.
Missouri River, 237;
early notices, 226.
Modeer, Historia, 495.
Mohawk Valley, xxv;
early settlements in, 412.
missions, 281.
Mohegan war (1669), 313.
Moingona, 262.
Moll, Herman, 262.
Moluccas, 40.
Moncacht-Apé, 211.
Monette, J. W., Valley of the Mississippi, 199.
Monomet, 109.
Monro, Alexander, British North America, 368.
Monseignat, autog., 364;
Mont Joliet, 179.
language of, 133;
Montalboddo, Pæsi, etc., 12.
Nieuwe Weereld, 423;
Die Unbekante neue Welt, 423,
(Van den Bergh), 374.
See Ogilby.
Montespan, Madame, 318.
Montgolfier, account of Margaret Bourgeois, 309.
Montigny de St. Cosme, 316.
Montigny, Francis de, 288.
Montpensier, Mémoires, 357.
Faillon on, 360;
founded, 302;
Frontenac at, 325;
mission at, 274;
site of, 164;
Société Historique de, Mémoires, 303;
and vicinity, map by La Potherie, 303.
Moon. See Lunar.
Moore, Frank, 441.
Moore, J. B., 441.
Morasses, xiii.
Moreau, L’Acadie Françoise, 156.
Moreau, Mémoire, 155.
Morel, Thomas, 311.
Morgan, H. J., Bibliotheca Canadensis, 359, 367.
Morgan, Lewis H., 163;
League of the Iroquois, 297, 421.
Morrel, Oliver. See Durantaye.
Morton, Thomas, New English Canaan, 40, 384.
Mound-Builders, 53.
Mount Desert Island, 107, 264.
Moulton, J. W., New Netherland, 496.
Muilkerk, B. van D., 499.
Muller, Frederick, of Amsterdam, 439;
his catalogues, 439.
Muller, J. U., Vorstellung der gantzen Welt, 376.
Mundus Novus (South America), 40.
Munsell, Joel, his labors, 435;
Collections, 435.
Münster, Sebastian, 82;
Cosmographie (1574), 414;
map, (1532), 36, (1540), 38, 41, 81, (1545), 83, 84, (1598), 95.
Murdock, Beamish, Nova Scotia, 142, 156.
Murphy, Henry C., 248, 295, 299, 419, 421, 425, 429, 432, 491, 498;
autog., 418;
his case against the genuineness of the Verrazano voyage stated, 19;
examined, 22;
his intended History of Maritime Discovery in America, 22;
his death, 22;
accounts of, 22;
his library, 22;
Voyage of Verrazzano, 18.
Myritius, Opusculum, 96;
map (1590), 96.
Mythology of the Indians, 299.
Nahant, 485.
Nassau, Fort, 398, 400, 402, 437, 448;
abandoned, 468;
site of, 497.
Natiscotec Island, 51.
Navarrete, Bibliotheca maritima, 62;
Coleccion, 30.
Navigation, treatise on by Champlain, 133.
Neill, Edward D., “Discovery along the Great Lakes”, 163;
papers in the Minnesota Historical Society’s Collections, 199;
History of Minnesota, 199;
Minnesota Explorers, 199;
on Menard, 310;
Founders of Maryland, 165;
Writings of Hennepin, 250, 254.
Nekouba, 270.
Nelson, Fort, 259.
Nemiskau, 271.
Neptune Français, 377.
Nertunius, M., 472.
Netscher, P. N., Les Hollandais au Brésil, 418, 499.
country of, 298.
Neutral Island. See St. Croix Island.
New Amstel, 404.
New Amsterdam taken (1673), by the Dutch, 408;
again given up to the English, 409;
early accounts of, 439;
early records, 439;
Indian incursions towards, 440;
Stadthuys, 441.
See New York.
New Dominion Monthly, 67.
New England, physical characteristics of, xxiv;
Indians of, xxiv;
climate, xxiv;
importance of, xxv;
an island, 429;
De Laet’s map of, 436;
Swedish map of, 485;
map of coast, by Allefonsce, 75;
explored by Champlain, 107.
See names of the States.
visited before Columbus, 3;
authorities, 4;
early maps of, 73;
fishing vessels at, 58;
Lescarbot’s map of, 379;
Mason’s, 379.
See Baccalaos.
New France, 61, 77, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101;
archives of, 356;
map, 228;
its position seemed to assure control of the continent, xx;
soil and climate against it, xxii;
its colonists compared with New Englanders, xxii.
See Francia;
New Gottenburg, burned, 460.
New Netherland, Asher’s list of maps of, 437;
anthology of, 432;
bibliography of, 439;
best collection of books on, in the Lenox Library, 439;
to be purchased by France, 172;
history of, 395;
records of, 410.
See New York.
New Orange, 408.
Newport, Verrazano at, 8.
See Nova Scotia.
See Mexico;
New Sweden, 306, 443;
eclectic map of, 501;
the English expelled from, 452;
and the Indians, 457;
map by Lindstroem, 481;
map by Visscher, 467;
attacked by Stuyvesant, 467;
and Maryland, 496;
unpublished documents, 502;
lost to Sweden, 487;
authorities, 488;
fac-simile of title of the Manifest, 489.
See Swedes.
New York (province), Archives of, depredated, 411;
O’Callaghan’s Calendar, 411;
Documents relative to Colonial History, 356, 409;
missions in, 309.
See New Netherland.
New York (city), histories of, 440;
called Menate, 219;
map of town (1666), 440;
original grants, 441;
early farms, 441;
view of fort, 441.
New York Freeman’s Journal, 245.
New York Harbor, Verrazano in, 7;
early visitors, 396.
New York Historical Society, origin of, 409.
New York State Library, 299.
New York Weekly Herald, 222.
Niagara, block-house at, 223;
first mentioned, 302;
Hennepin’s view of Falls, 240, 247, 248, 254;
history of the Falls, 247;
name of, 247.
Nicholas, Louis, 271.
Nicholas, Père, 286.
Nicolet, Jean, 166, 167, 302, 304;
account of, by C. W. Butterfield, 304;
death, 196;
at Green Bay (1634-1635), 196.
Nicolosius, 385.
Niles, French and Indian Wars, 160.
Noel, Jacques, 73.
Noiseaux, 220.
“Nonsuch”, ship, 172.
“Normandy”, ship, 6.
Normans, early on the Newfoundland banks, 63.
Norridgework mission, 274.
North, Frederic, 354.
North America, physiography, ii;
effects on colonists, x;
eastern coast, maps of, 33.
North Carolina, failure of colonization, xxii, xxviii;
physical characteristics, xxvii;
poorness of tide-water population, xxviii.
North River. See Hudson River.
Northwest Passage, 35.
See India.
Norumbega, 53, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 152, 373, 384;
(Anorombega), 81;
Cape of, 69;
an island, 77;
(Norimbequa), 67;
(Norvega), 378; River, 70, 77;
town of, 71.
Notre Dame, Congregation of, at Montreal, 309.
Nouguère, La, 332.
Nouvelle Biographie générale, 241.
Nouvelle Biscaye, 384.
Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, 19.
Nova Andulasia, 42.
See New France;
Nova Galitia, 42.
Nova Gallia, 27, 67.
See New France.
See New Spain.
explored by Champlain, 106;
geographical history of, 154;
records of, 159;
Historical Society, 159.
See New Scotland.
Novus Orbis (South America), 41.
Novum Belgium, 426.
See New York.
Nya Elfsborg, 454.
Nya Göteborg, 454.
Nyenhuis, Bodel, 439.
on the Jesuit Relations, 295;
his studies in New York history, 431;
History of New Netherland, 431, 497;
Register, 431;
edits Documents of New York, 412;
Ochunkgraw, 166.
Odhner, C. T., 499, 500, 502; Historia, 498.
Ogdensburg, 285.
See Montanus.
Ohio River, 178, 216, 217, 227, 231, 233, 251;
(Ouye), 253;
(Hohio), 253;
early maps of, 224.
Ohio (State), bibliography of, 198;
histories of, 198.
Ohio Historical Society, 198.
Ohio Valley, history of, 199.
Ohio Valley Historical Series, 198.
Ojibways, 175.
Old-town Indians, 274.
Oldenbarnevelt, 396, 397, 423.
Oliva, Johannes, map, 379.
Onderdonk, Henry W., Hempstead, 441.
Oneida, Lake, 125.
Oneidas, 311.
books on, 309;
mission, 308;
abandoned, 308.
Onondagas, 293.
Onontio, 326.
called Frontenac, 208, 213, 214, 215, 218, 237, 259, 260;
called St. Louis, 234;
map, (1656), 391, (1660), 389, (1662), 281, (1666), 312, (1670), 203, (1697), 251;
Swedish map, 485.
See Great Lakes.
Orange, Fort, 217, 281, 308, 398, 417.
See Albany.
Orbellanda, 92.
Orbis Maritimus, 374.
Orleans, Cape, 49.
Orono, 274.
Ortelius (Ortels), 424;
portrait, 372;
autog., 372;
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 94, 369;
gives no Verrazano map, 18.
Osorius, Hieronymus, De rebus Emmanuelis, 15.
Ossossare mission, 275.
Otis, Charles P., translates Champlain, 134.
Otréouati, 340.
explored by Champlain, 124;
called Utawas, 164;
river route, 173;
early maps of, 202.
country of, 298;
at Manitoulin, 176;
called Outaouacs, 168;
at Quebec, 308.
See Outaouacks.
Ottens, Neobelgii tabula, 482.
Oumamis, 271.
Oumamiwek, 270;
missions, 267.
Outaouaks, 310;
missions, 315.
See Ottawas.
Outrelaise, D’, 318;
river, 178.
autog., 444.
Oxenstjerna, Erik, 471.
Oyster River (Me.), attacked, 160.
Ozark Mountains, iv.
Pacific Coast, climate of, v.
called Mare pacificum, 41, 42.
See South Sea;
Padilla, 263.
Paesi nouamente retrouati, 12.
Pain, Felix, 269.
Palastrina. See Salvatore.
Palfrey, J. G., 367;
New England, 299.
Palmas, Rio de, 98.
Palmer, P. S., History of Lake Champlain, 120.
Papegåja, Johan, 458, 462, 463, 470, 473, 475, 477, 484, 493;
autog., 458.
missions, 267.
Papineau, 366.
Paria, 41.
copies from them in America, 356, 366.
Parkman, Francis, portrait, 157;
autog., 157;
Pioneers of France, 65, 134, 158;
translations, 158;
estimate by Casgrain, 158;
Discovery of the Great West, 241, 242, 243;
and Margry’s Collection, 242;
reviewed by G. E. Ellis, 201, 296;
on Cartier, 65;
on Hennepin, 250;
on the Hurons, 305;
his manuscript collections, 367;
his collection of maps, 201;
Old Régime, 300.
Pasqualigo, Pietro, 13.
Passamaquoddy Indians, 274.
Pastoret, map by, 82.
Patalis Regio, 42.
Paullus, Orbis terraqueus, 375.
Paulo, Cape, 73.
Pavonia, 402.
Peabody, W. B. O., on the Jesuits, 297.
Pearson, J., Albany, 435.
Peet, S. D., 298;
on Mr. Baldwin’s maps, 201.
Peltrie, Madame de la, portrait, 314;
death of, 314;
accounts of, 314.
papers, 159;
sources of history, 159;
traces of the Dutch at, 138;
map of, 160.
expedition, 239.
Penn vs. Baltimore, 494.
mission, 274.
Penobscot River, 93;
river in the old maps, 413, 414.
See Norumbega.
“Pensée”, ship, 64.
map of, 146.
Peorias, 288.
Peré, 173, 178, 187, 189, 204.
Perkins, F. B., Check List of American Local History, 441.
Perkins, J. H., 262;
Annals of the West, 199;
on Sparks’s La Salle, 254;
Memoir and Writings, 254.
Perrault, Julian, 268;
at Cape Breton, 301.
Perrot, François, 329.
Perrot, Governor of Acadia, 344.
Perrot, Nicholas, 173, 174, 189, 308, 352;
Mémoire sur les Mœurs, 197, 298, 359;
gives a soleil to the mission at the Bay of Puans, 191;
his geography, 199;
on the Upper Mississippi, 194.
Perryville (N. Y.), 125.
Peschel, Oscar, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, 15;
his death and account of, 15;
Geschichte der Erdkunde, 40.
Petavius, History of the World, 384.
Petrée. See Laval.
Petroleum, ix.
Petun Hurons, 168, 170, 276, 278.
conquers Acadia, 146;
portrait, 147;
autog., 364;
attack on Quebec, 353.
Physiography of North America, i.
autog., 285.
Pieskaret, 275.
Pietersen, David, 400.
Pigafetta on Magellan, 30.
Pilestrina, Salvatore de, 413.
Pinard, Chronologie, 357.
Pinho, Manuel, 87.
Pioneer Collections, 198.
Piscator. See Visscher.
Pius IV., his geographic gallery, 40.
Placentia, 257.
his map, 414.
Planck, Abraham, 496.
Plantagenet, B., New Albion, 427, 490.
Plantin, Christophe, 371.
Plowden, Sir Edmund, 427, 428, 437;
and New Sweden, 457.
Plymouth, ancient landmarks of, by Davis, 110;
Bay, 109;
expedition from, to Maine, 143.
Physical proportions of Americans, xv.
Point St. Ignace, 207.
Poisson, du, Père, 289.
Poncet, Père, 279.
returns to Canada, 116.
Poore, Ben: Perley, 366.
Popellinière, 374;
Les trois mondes, 95.
Popham Memorial, 138.
Popple’s Atlas, 262.
Porcacchi, L’Isole, 95;
Poro, Girolamo, 369.
Port Brest, 48.
Port Royal, 44, 45, 107, 152, 383, 388;
Lescarbot’s map of, 140;
Champlain’s map of, 141;
attacked by Argall, 142;
plan of buildings, 144;
settled, 138.
Port St. Louis, 109.
Portages, xxi;
between the lakes and the Mississippi, 200, 224;
how indicated on maps, 202.
Potherie, Bacqueville de la, Histoire de l’Amérique, 197, 299, 358.
See Loyal, Fort.
Portneuf, 160.
Portolanos, 376
Portuguese, early discoveries in America, 15;
chart (1503), 35;
map (1520), 73;
portolano (1514-1520), 36.
Poualak, 169.
Poutrincourt, Jean de, 106, 138, 141, 150, 300.
Powelsen, Jacob, 450.
Prairies, as tillage ground, xiv.
Prato, Cape, 50.
Premontré globe, 45.
Prevert, 104.
Prime, N. S., Long Island, 441.
Prince Edward Island, 49, 69, 75.
Printz, Gustaf, 464;
autog., 470.
Printzdorf, 463.
Progressus fidei, 308.
River of the, 258.
Publick Occurrences, 363.
Puffendorf, Samuel, Commentarii, 491.
Pye Bay, 485.
Quad (Quaden, or Quadus), Mathias, 372;
Geographisches Handbuch, 101, 372;
Fasciculus geographicus, 372;
map (1600), 101.
Quebec, origin of name, 114;
archives, 356;
bishop of, 309;
Cartier’s fort, 55;
founded by Champlain, 114;
view (1613), 118;
plan (1613), 115;
picture of, 128;
fort at, 126;
surrendered (1632), 134;
Frontenac at, 319;
fortifies it, 353;
attacked by Phips (1690), 361, 363;
medal, 361;
La Hontan’s pictures, 362, 363;
plan of attack, 354;
early plans, 320;
view by Potherie, 320;
missions at, 271.
Quebec, Hospital de la Miséricorde, 307.
Quebec, Hôtel Dieu, 314.
Quebec, Literary and Historical Society of, 366;
its publications, 366.
Quebec, Réligieuses Hospitalières de, 302, 311.
Quebec, Seminary of, 267, 316;
its missions, 294.
Québec, Les Ursulines de, 308.
Quens, Jean de, Relation, 308.
Quetelet, Histoire des Sciences, 374.
Queylus, Abbé de, 309.
Quieunonascaran, 265.
Quinsay, 41.
Quint, Alonzo H., 159.
missions, 284.
Quivira, 93.
Raso, 37, 38, 82, 86, 90, 92, 95, 98, 377;
Rassa, 84;
Rasso, 39;
Ratz, 78.
Raemdonck, J. van, Gerard Mercator, 369, 371.
Raffeix, Pierre, 232;
autog., 232;
of Ontario and Erie, 232, 234.
Rafferman, H. A., on Hennepin, 248.
Rafn, Antiquitates Americanæ, 416.
Ragueneau, Paul, 281;
on Cathérine de St. Augustin, 312;
map by, 302;
autog., 307.
Rainfall in North America, vii.
autog., 273;
Francis, Life of Rale, 274.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 400.
Ramé, A., 63;
Documents inédits, 60.
Rameau, Une colonie féodale, 156.
Ramusio on Cartier, 63;
on the Cortereals, 14;
on the early fisheries, 63;
as an editor, 23;
on Gastaldi’s map, 77;
his Navigationi, 90.
Rancourt, Joseph, 354.
Randolph, Edward, 410.
Ransonet, on Margaret Bourgeois, 309.
Rasieres, 418.
Rasle. See Rale.
Rat, the (an Indian), 257, 350.
sent to Lake Superior, 181;
autog., 279.
autog., 142.
Recollects, 124, 264, 265, 285, 290, 300;
and Champlain, 132;
among the Hurons, 307;
recalled, 288;
accompany La Salle, 288;
in Quebec, 354.
Recueil de Traités de Paix, 129.
Reinel, Pedro, his chart, 16, 36, 73.
Relations de la Louisiane, 255.
Réligieuses Ursulines, 308.
See Quebec.
Remi, Daniel de. See Courcelles.
Renselaer, Kilian van, 400;
autog., 400.
See Van Renselaer.
map of, 435;
settlers at, 435.
Rensselaer, Stephen van, 435.
Repentigny, De, 188.
Retor, François, 354.
Revue Canadienne, 292.
Revue contemporaine, 241.
Revue critique, 18.
Revue des questions historiques, 134.
Revue de Rouen, 240.
Revue maritime, 245.
Reyard. See Beyard.
Reynolds, John, History of Illinois, 198.
Reynolds, William M., 494.
Ribault, 17.
Ribero, map, 25, 30, 38, 73, 413, 414;
Ribourde, Gabriel de la, 288.
Rich, Point, 48.
Richard, Andrew, 268.
Richardeau, Abbé, 314.
Richelieu, Cardinal, 127;
reflected on by Champlain, 133.
(des Iroquois), 304;
map of, 311;
Ridpath, United States, 438.
Riker, James, Harlem, 441;
History of Newton, New York, 441.
autog., 471.
Rivers in North America, vii.
Rivière Longue. See Long River.
Robertson, R. S., 224.
Roberval, Jean François de, 56, 58, 93, 135;
his doings, 65;
death, 66;
his niece, 66.
Rocoles, J. B. de, 305.
Rogers, Earls of Stirling, 155.
Roggeveen, Arent, Burning Fen, 376;
map of the Delaware, 482.
Roland, F. N., 356.
Rooseboom, Johannes, 347.
Roseboome, Captain Thomas, 192.
Rosier, Cape, 146.
Rotz, Johne, Boke of Idrography, 82;
Rouen, American savages in, 16.
Rougemont, Philip, 54.
Royale, Isle, 229.
Rufosse, Jacques de, 64.
Rupert, Prince, 171.
Ruscelli, Girolamo, 40;
Russell, Jonathan, 496.
Ruttenber, E. M., Hudson River Tribes, 421.
Ruysch’s map, 73.
Rye (N. Y.), 441.
Rymer’s Fœdera, 166.
Ryswick, Peace of (1697), 149, 356.
Sabine River, 236.
Sable Island, 63, 86, 93, 136, 377, 383, 384, 388;
account of, by Gilpin, 63;
early cattle on, 5.
“Sacre”, ship, 16.
Sacrobusto, Sphera del Mundo, 81.
Sagard, 300;
Histoire du Canada, 290;
Sagean, Mathieu, 226;
his Relation, 226.
Saggiatore, 17.
Saguenay, 51, 59, 60, 67, 72, 73, 75, 85, 87, 94, 97, 98, 114, 304, 309, 312, 314, 373, 378, 385;
explored by Champlain, 104;
country of, 56.
Sainte Anne du Petit Cap, 311.
Sainte Anne, Fort, 312.
St. Anthony, Falls, 230, 248, 252;
Harbor, 48.
St. Antoine, Fort, 189, 195, 229.
St. Barnabas, 48.
St. Castine, Baron de, 146, 147, 160;
autog., 146.
St. Castine the younger, 147.
St. Catherine Harbor, 47.
St. Charles River, 52.
St. Clair Lake, 163.
St. Côme, 288.
St. Croix Island, Argall’s visit to, 142;
map of, 137;
plan of buildings, 139.
St. Croix River (Acadia), 107, 152, 385.
St. Croix River (branch of the Mississippi), 168, 169.
St. Esprit mission, 200, 212, 216, 286.
St. Foi, Premier Ursulines, 308.
St. François de Sales mission, 267, 273, 315.
St. François River, 312.
St. François-Xavier mission, 284.
St. Germain-en-Laye, treaty of, 129, 142.
St. Ignace mission, 287.
St. Ignatius, 395.
St. Ignatius, a Huron town, 277.
St. John (Island), 39, 69, 73, 377.
St. John River (New Brunswick), 143.
St. John’s College, Fordham (N. Y.), 299.
St. John’s mission, 293.
St. John’s River (Newfoundland), 48.
destroyed, 194.
St. Joseph’s, 272;
Island, 278;
mission, 293.
St. Lawrence, Allefonsce’s map of, 74.
Cartier’s, 67.
in Allefonsce’s map, 77;
map by Bellin, 64;
map, (1663), 148, (1709), 153;
visited by the Spaniards, 74.
St. Lawrence River, 75, 93, 163;
Lescarbot’s map of, 117.
St. Lawrence Valley, its characteristics, xxi, xxii;
in relation to military movements, xxiii.
St. Louis, a Huron town, 277.
St. Louis, Fort, 188, 226, 231.
St. Louis, Fort (Lavaca River), 238.
St. Louis, Fort, on the Richelieu, 312, 313.
St. Louis, Lac, 312.
St. Louis, Lake.
See Ontario.
St. Loys, Cape, 50.
St. Lunario Bay, 49.
Saint Lusson, Sieur, 174, 314;
takes possession of the Lake Country, 175.
navigators of, 4.
St. Martin’s Creek, 50.
St. Mary’s Bay, 106.
St. Mary’s mission, 276.
St. Michael’s mission, 293.
St. Paul, Cape, 67.
St. Paul (Cape Breton), 55.
St. Peter’s, Cape, 49.
St. Peter’s Channel, 50.
St. Pierre River, 195.
St. Roman, Cape, 98.
St. Sacrament. See George, Lake.
St. Savior, 264.
St. Servans, Harbor, 48.
St. Simeon, 354.
St. Simon, Denis de, 271;
Mémoires, 357.
St. Stephen’s mission, 293.
St. Sulpice, site of, 303.
St. Theresa Bay, 310.
Ste. Theresa Fort, 313.
Ste. Ursule, La Gloire de, 308.
St. Valier, Jean de, Relation, 315, 316, 346;
Estat Présent, etc., 315, 348;
Bishop, 316.
Salmon, 30.
Salmon Falls, 159;
attacked, 352.
Salt Springs, 308.
Saltonstall, Wye, 374.
Salvat de Pilestrina, 36.
Salvatore de Palastrina, 36.
San Antonio, River, 11.
“San Antonio”, ship, 10.
San Francisco, 46.
San Juan Island, 49.
San Miguel, 46.
Sandel, P. A., 493.
Sandelands, James, 498.
Sandrart, J. de, 385.
Sandusky, 267.
Sandy Hook on the old maps, 413.
Sankikan, 457.
Sanson, Adrien, 375.
Sanson, Guillaume, 375.
Sanson, Jacques, 354.
Sanson, Nicolas, his maps, 385, 390, 391;
Atlas, 375;
L’Univers, 375.
Sanson et Jaillot, Atlas nouveau, 375.
Saonchiogwa, 282.
Saquish, 109.
Saskatchewan, iii.
Sauks, 175.
Sault au Récollet, 266.
Sault St. Louis mission, 285.
Sault Ste. Marie, 165, 200, 216;
mission, 268.
Saulteurs, 175.
Savage, Major Thomas, on the attack (1690) on Quebec, 363;
autog., 364.
Say and Seal, Lord, 401.
Scanonaenrat, 278.
Schendel, Gillis van, 435.
Schenectady attacked, 352, 364.
Schenk, P., 385.
Schluter, P., 429.
Schmeler, J. A., 36.
Opusculum Geographicum, 46.
Schoodic River, 137.
Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois, 297;
Indian Tribes, 297.
Schout-fiscal, 402.
Schouten, Journal, 415.
Schute, Sven, 454, 462, 465, 466, 469, 471, 473, 475, 478, 483, 500;
autog., 454.
Schuyler, John, 353.
Schuyler, Peter, 355;
his report, 365.
Schuyler, Phil, autog., 365;
his Journal, 365;
at La Prairie, 364.
Scurvy, 54.
Scutterus, map of Pennsylvania, 482.
Seal-hunting, 52.
Sedgwick, Robert, expedition to Acadie, 145;
autog., 145.
Seignelay, 337;
autog., 337;
Minister for the Colonies, 185.
Sénat, Père, 289.
Senecas, 308;
attacked by Denonville, 347;
authorities, 348;
missions, 310;
fort, 348;
and La Barre, 341.
See Iroquois.
Senex, John, 262.
Sequamus, Metellus, on the Spanish discoveries, 15.
Seven Cities (island), 98, 101.
Seven Cities (towns), 101.
Sewall’s Ancient Dominions of Maine, 138.
Shaler, N. S., “Physiography of North America”, i.;
Kentucky Geological Survey, xvi.
Shaw, Norton, 134.
Shawnees, 298.
Shea, J. G., 125;
Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes, 199, 296;
Mississippi Valley, 199;
translates Charlevoix, 358;
edits Colden, 421;
edits The Commodities of Manati, 435;
his “Cramoisy Series”, 296, 315;
his list of Iroquois missionaries, 296;
on Dreuillettes in Boston, 306;
edits Hennepin’s Description of Louisiana, 248, 250;
on the Jesuit martyrs, 305;
“The Jesuits, Recollects, and the Indians”, 263;
on the Jesuit Relations, 294;
edits Jogues’ letters, 306, 421;
edits Jogues’ Novum Belgium, 306;
on La Hontan, 257;
on La Salle’s Texan colony, 239, 240;
on Leclercq, 291;
translates Établissement de la Foy, 291;
on Margry, 246;
Bursting of Margry’s La Salle Bubble, 245;
on O’Callaghan, 432;
Peñalosa, 237;
Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness, 292;
on Wisconsin tribes, 310.
Sheepscot River, 108.
Sheldon, E. M. Early History of Michigan, 198, 311.
Ship Company, 444.
Ships, Dutch, picture of, 415.
Shirley, William, 154.
“Sibille”, ship, 64.
Sierra Nevada, iv.
Sillery founded, 303;
mission at, 267, 271, 272, 315.
Silver mines, 106.
See Mines.
Simon, Père, 274.
Sioux, 169, 175, 176, 181, 182, 211;
receive Accault, 184;
Sirenne, 273.
Skörkil Fort, 462.
Slafter, E. F., “Champlain”, 103;
edits Champlain’s works, 134;
Sir William Alexander, 155.
Slavery, the result of tobacco culture, xiv, xxvii;
extended by cotton-raising, xxvii.
kidnapping of, 11;
from Labrador, 2.
Slom, Måns, 461.
Sloughter, Governor, 410.
Sluyter, Peter, 429.
Smith, Buckingham, on Verrazano, 18;
his Inquiry, 18;
accounts of, 18;
finds the Ulpius globe, 19;
Coleccion, 56.
Smith, B. H., Atlas of Delaware County, 500.
Smith, C. C., “Acadia”, 135.
Smith, George, Delaware County, 498.
Smith, John, 414.
Smith, P. H., Duchess County, 441.
Smith, William, History of Canada, 306, 367.
Smith, William, History of New York, 430, 494.
Smith, W. R., History of Wisconsin, 199.
Snöhvit, J. K., 453.
Snow-shoes, 331.
Soenrese, 284.
Soil, endurance of, ix;
Soissons, Count de, 123.
Sorel, 336.
Souel, Père, 289.
Source, Thaumur de la, 316.
Sourin, 139.
South Carolina, population of, xxviii;
upland districts, xxix.
South Company, 444, 452.
South Mountains, xxv.
South River (Delaware), 423.
Joliet to discover the, 179.
See Pacific.
Southampton, Earl of, 110.
See Hayti.
Spalding, Archbishop, Miscellanea, 299.
Spaniards, their commerce preyed upon by the French, 5, 6;
early on the northeast coast, 9, 10;
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 74;
in the Hudson, 433.
Sparks, Jared, 367;
Life of La Salle, 242;
Life of Marquette, 220;
manuscripts, 160.
Speed, Prospect, 378;
map of Delaware Bay, 482;
map, 384.
autog., 445.
Spirito Santo Bay, 251.
Spirito Santo, Rio de, 98.
Squier, Aboriginal Monuments of New York, 348.
(Tadacona), 87.
Standish, Miles, 144.
Starbäck, C. G., 502.
Starved Rock, 226.
Stature, comparative, xvi.
Steendam, Jacob, 432.
Stevens, Henry, buys Muller’s Collection, 439.
Stewart, George, Jr., “Frontenac and his Times”, 317.
Stiddem, T., 500.
Stiernman, A. A. von, Samling, 494.
Stiles, History of Brooklyn, 441.
Stille, O. P., 452.
Stirling, Earldom of, 155.
Stobnicza map, 36.
Stöcklein, Brief-Schriften, 316.
Stoddard’s Sketches of Louisiana, 254.
Stone, W. L., New York, 440.
Stone Age, 53.
Strahl, Gustaf, 452.
Street, Alfred B., Frontenac, 361.
Strickland, W. P., Old Mackinaw, 199.
Strozzi Library, 17.
Stuart, James, at Cape Breton, 128.
arrives, 405;
autog., 406;
portrait, 441;
his house, 441;
pear-tree, 442;
hisjourney to Esopus, 442.
Subercase, 351.
Sulpitians, 205, 266, 275, 290, 309, 329, 360;
martyrs, 305;
authorities, 294.
Sulte, Benjamin, Histoire des Canadiens-Français, 368;
on Nicolet, 196;
Mèlanges, 138.
Sun. See Solar.
Superior, Lake, 261;
heliotype of, 313;
Whitney’s Geological Report of, 313;
map, (1656), 391, (1683), 249;
early described, 165;
maps of, 208, (1674), 212, 214, 215, 218, (1697), 251, 252;
reached, 168;
called Tracy, 206;
traders on (1658), 309, (upper lake), 260;
map, (1688), 230, (Tracy), 232, 233, (1709), 258.
See Great Lakes.
Susquehanna River, 165.
Svedberg, Bishop, America illuminata, 493.
Svedberg, Jesper, 493.
Svedberg, J. D., Dissertatio, 493.
Svenson, Jacob, 453, 474, 502.
Swamps, xiii.
Swanenburg, 408.
Sweden, South Company of, 403.
Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 493.
Swedes on the Delaware, 404, 443.
See New Sweden.
Swiss in Tennessee, xix.
Sylvanus’ map, 36.
Sylvius, L., 425.
Tablelands, iv.
Tadoussac, 143, 269, 303, 312, 384;
Champlain at, 104;
plan of, by Champlain, 114;
Tailhan, J., 246;
Tallemant des Réaux, 357.
and Western explorations, 205;
his house, 354.
Tamaroas, 288.
Tanner, Societas Jesu, 306.
Tarcotte, L. P., Histoire de l’ile Orléans, 308.
Taylor, James W., History of Ohio, 198.
Teananstayae mission, 276, 277.
Tehgahkwita, 283.
Teissier, F., Les Français au Canada, 368.
Temistitan, 40, 42, 93.
See Mexico;
Temperature, range of, xii.
Terceira, Island, 1.
Ternaux-Compans, Archives des Voyages, 63;
La Nouvelle Swède, 496.
Thevenot, gives Marquette’s narrative, 219;
gives map, 220.
Thevet, André, 30;
his claim, 11;
his Singularitez de la France, 30, 31, 50;
Thomas, Gabriel, map of, 482.
Thomassy, De la Salle, 225;
Géologie pratique de la Louisiane, 224;
on the Verrazano map, 19.
Thompson, B. F., Long Island, 441.
Thomson, P. G., Bibliography of Ohio, 198.
Thorndike, Colonel Israel, 201.
Thorne, Robert, his map, 45.
Thornton, J. W., Ancient Pemaquid, 159.
his map, 200.
site of, 311.
See Thyle.
Thurloe, State Papers, 430.
Relation, 159.
See Thule.
Ticonderoga, 119.
Tiele, P. A., Mémoire bibliographique, 439, 442;
Nederlandsche Pamfletten, 439.
Tienhoven, Van, 420.
Tienpont, A. J., 398.
Tierra del Fuego, 43.
Tillage, labor of, in New England, xii.
Tilly, 335.
Timistitan, 46.
See Temistitan.
Tin mines, viii.
See Mines.
Tinicum, 454.
Tinot, Cape, 75.
Tionontates, 276.
Tobacco, 168;
introduced into France, 32;
in New Sweden, 454, 458, 459, 462;
its influence, xiv;
in Virginia, xxvii, 475.
Toledo, Historical and Geographical Society of, 198.
Tonty, Henri, 188, 194, 225, 347;
joins La Salle, 182;
autog., 182;
at Crèvecœur, 224;
with Denonville, 193;
seeks La Salle, 238;
tries to rescue his colony, 239;
on Lake Michigan, 223;
sketch of the Mississippi, 239;
disowns the Dernières découvertes, 240.
Toreno, Nuño Garcia de, map (1534), 37, 91.
Tortugas, 42.
Townshend, Charles, 154.
Tracy, attacks the Mohawks, 283, 312;
voyage of, 310;
autog., 311.
Tracy, Lake, 206.
Trigant, 302.
Trinity Fort, 473;
view of, 473;
the Dutch before, 478;
captured by the Dutch, 479.
Trouvé, 267;
autog., 266.
Troyes, Chevalier de, 345.
Trübner’s Literary Record, 439.
Turcotte, Louis P., Les Archives du Canada, 366.
Turenne, 318.
Turgis, Charles, 268.
Turkey (bird), xv.
Turner, Nathaniel, on the Delaware, 451.
Tuttle, C. W., 155;
History of Canada, 368;
(with Durrie, D. S.), History of Iowa, 199;
History of Michigan, 199;
Wisconsin, 199.
Ulpius, Euphrosynus, his globe, 19, 28, 40, (fac-simile), 42, 76, 81, 82, 414.
Ulster County Historical Society, 409.
“Union”, ship, 400.
United States Catholic Magazine, 306.
Upland, 455;
records of, 498.
Upper Canada, Historical Society of, 368.
Uricoechea, Mapoteca Colombiana, 375.
Usselinx, Willem, 396, 403, 415, 443, 490, 491, 499, 502;
autog., 443;
Argonautica Gustaviana, 417, 490;
Advice, etc. 417.
Utrecht, treaty of, 135.
Uzielli’s Elenco, etc., 38.
Vaaz, Jhan, 87.
Vaillant, 349.
Valck, his maps, 385.
Valentine, D. T., New York, 440;
New York City Manual, 418.
Vallard, Nicolas, map, 76, 86.
Van Bogardt, Jost, 450.
Van Curler, Arent, 312.
autog., 454.
Van Horst, M. M., 450.
Van Hulst, Felix, Notice sur Hennepin, 247.
Van Loon, Zee-Atlas, 376;
map of New Netherland, 482.
Van Meteren, Emanuel, 416;
Histoire, 424.
Van Rensselaer, Kilian, arrives, 419;
his family, 419.
See Rensselaer.
Van Sweeringen, G., 498.
Van Twiller, Wouter, 401;
autog., 401.
Vann Vliet, C., 449.
Vandeput, Captain, 411.
Van den Bosch, 425.
Van der Aa, map of New Holland, 438.
Van der Donck, Adrien, 416, 491;
account of, 419;
autog., 419;
Beschrijvinge, etc., 420;
life and family, 420;
his writings, 419;
his Vertoogh, 419;
his map, 500.
Van der Kemp, Francis, 412.
Van der Wulf, J. K., Tractaten, 439.
Varennes, 336.
attacks the Oneidas, 355.
Vaugondy, Robert de, 375;
Histoire de la Géographie, 375.
Vaulx, Jacques de, map, 79;
Œuvres, 79.
Vega, Garcilasso de la, 255.
Velasco, 74.
Vemey, Abbé, 359.
Verheerlickte Nederlant, 422.
Verenderye, La, 289.
Vermillion Sea, 175, 178, 179, 185, 208, 209, 228.
See California, Gulf of.
Verrazano, Giovanni da, 415, 416;
account of, 5;
his landfall, 6;
in New York Harbor, 7;
returns to Dieppe, 9;
in the St. Lawrence, 9;
authorities on his voyage, 17, 18;
his letter, 17;
autog., 25;
influence of, in later maps, 19;
doubt regarding the voyage, 18.
Verrazano, Hieronimo da, his map, 18, 25, 26, 37.
Verreau, Abbé, 205, 222, 246, 302, 314, 366;
Abbés de Fénelon, 312.
Vetromile on the Indians of Acadia, 150;
Abnakis, 150.
Vicuna, xv.
Viegas, Gasper, chart of, 46.
Viel, Nicholas, 265.
Viele, Arnold, 340.
Viele, E. L., 435.
murdered, 310;
autog., 310.
Vignan, Nicholas de, 123, 124.
Villebon, 160;
autog., 160.
Villeneuve, 354.
Villieu, 160.
Vimont, Relations, 302, 303, 305.
Vincennes (Ind.), Catholic Archbishop of, 299.
Vincent, Francis, History of Delaware, 499.
fitness for colonization, 151;
Hall’s map of, 374;
Swedish map of, 485;
water front, xxvii;
tobacco its staple, xxvii.
Virginians of English stock, xvii;
their physique, xvii;
increase of population, xix.
Visscher, N., Atlas minor, 375, 438;
map by, 390;
map of New Sweden, 467;
map of New Netherland, 438;
map, sketch of, 385.
Vitelleschi, 301.
Vitray, 354.
Viverius, 102.
Volpellio, map (1556), 90, 99.
Von Murr, his Behaim, 18.
Von Sybel, Historische Zeitschrift, 502.
Vos haven, 391.
Voyageurs, 164.
Vries, de, David Pietersen, 400, 401.
Wabash, 232;
called Ouabach, 224, 237, 261.
Wadsworth, Benjamin, 355.
Wagenaar, Jean, Vaderlandsche Historie, 425.
Walker, A., “A forgotten Hero”, in Frazer’s Magazine, 66.
Wallabout, 400.
Walley, John, 353;
autog., 364;
his narrative of the attack on Quebec, 363.
Walloons in New Netherland, 400.
Walruses, 30.
Wampum, 55.
Warburton, Eliot, Conquest of Canada, 364.
Warwick, Earl of, his grant, 401.
Wasa, 462.
Washburn, J. D., on Verrazano, 18.
Wassenaer, N. J. de, 424;
Hist. Verhael, etc., 416, 424.
Watson, J. F., Annals of New York, 440;
Annals of Philadelphia, 440.
Watson, History of Essex County, N. Y., 125.
Watteau, Père, 288.
Weise, History of Troy, 435.
Wells, Edward, New Sett of Maps, 393.
Wells (Me.), attacked, 160;
Bourne’s History, 160.
West India Company (Dutch), 396, 397, 398, 402, 410, 414;
object of, 418;
history of, 418;
its flag, 418;
hostile feeling against, 422, 423.
West Indies, Champlain in, 133.
Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society, 198.
Westminster, treaty of, 145.
Weymouth, George, 110.
Whale, white, 52.
Wheeler, History of Castine, 147.
Whipple, Joseph, Geographical View, 155.
White, John, his map, 45.
White Mountains, iv.
Whitelock in Sweden, 476.
Whitelocke, Bulstrode, Journal, 495.
Whittlesey, Colonel Charles, 207, 242.
Wieser, Magalhâes-Strasse, 45.
Willem Hendrick, Fort, 408.
Willemsen, S., 463.
Willemstadt, 408.
Williams, J. F., History of St. Paul, 199.
Williams, Roger, and the Dutch, 428.
Williamson, History of Maine, 138.
Willis, William, Portland, 159.
Wilmere, Alice, 134.
Winchester, Colonel W. P., 367.
Winckelmann, H. J., 426.
Windebanke, Sir Francis, 448.
Winnebago, Lake, 224.
Winnipeg, 166.
Winsor, Justin, “Baron La Hontan”, 257;
bibliography of the Jesuit Relations, 295;
“Cartography of the Northeast Coast of North America”, 81;
“Father Hennepin”, 247;
“General Atlases”, 369;
“Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle”, 201;
“Maps of Eastern Coast of North America”, 33;
“Maps of the Seventeenth Century”, 377.
Winthrop, Fitz-John, expedition against Montreal, 352;
autog., 364.
Winthrop, John, 456;
History of New England, 156;
editions of, 428.
Winthrop Papers, 364.
Wiquefort, Ambassadeur, 424.
Wisconsin, Historical Society, 199;
bibliography of, 199;
histories, 199.
Wisconsin River, 167, 184, 196, (Miskonsing), 209, 232, 251, 252, (Ouariconsing), 258.
Wolfe, J. D., 19.
Wolfenbüttel MS., 46.
Wolfgang, S., Atlas minor, 376.
Wrangel, H., 453.
Wright, Edward, Certaine Errors of Navigation, 369, 385.
Wuttke, H., Geschichte der Erdkunde, 38, 88.
country of, 298.
Wytfliet, Cornelius, Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ augmentum, 101, 369;
fac-simile of title, 370;
Yates and Moulton, History of New York, 431.
Yazoos, 268.
Yonkers, 419.
York (Me.), captured, 160.
Young, Rev. Alexander, D.D., 151.
Young (Yong), Captain Thomas, 165.
Yucatanet, 27.
Yucatania, 67.
Zaltieri map (1566), 93.
Zee-Atlases, 376.
Zeehelm, H. G., 486.
Zeitschrift für allgemeine Erdkunde, 35.
Zeni, 101.
Zipangu, 41.
See Cipango.
Zorzi, Paesi, etc, 12.
Zurla, P., Antiche mappe, 414;
di Marco Polo, 82.
Zuyder Zee, 391.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Egypt may perhaps afford an exception; but it is probable that the germs of its civilization came from Asia. All its relations are essentially Asiatic.
[2] It is likely that some part of the Aryan folk found their way to the Pacific shore in Corea and elsewhere; but the Aryan migrations setting to the East must have been uncommon, and the chance of Caucasian blood reaching America by this route small.
[3] I have elsewhere (Introduction to the Memorial History of Boston) noticed the fact that this difficulty in clearing the glaciated soils led the early settlers of New England to use the poorer soils first. Along the shore and the rivers there is a strip of sandy terrace deposits, the soils of which are rather lean, but which are free from boulders, so that the labor of clearing was relatively small. All, or nearly all, the first settlements in the glaciated districts were made on this class of soils.
[4] The slow progress of our agricultural exports during the first two hundred years of the history of this country, is in good part to be explained by the stubborn character of the soil which was then in use. The only easily subdued soils in use before 1800 were those of Virginia and Maryland. The sudden advance of the export trade in grain during the last fifty years marks the change which brought the great areas of non-glaciated soils of the Mississippi Valley and the South under cultivation.
[5] It is an interesting fact that while America has given but one domesticated animal to Europe, in the turkey, it has furnished a number of the most important vegetables, among them maize, tobacco, and the potato. The absence of strong domesticable animals in America doubtless affected the development of civilization among its indigenous people. The buffalo is apparently not domesticable. The horse, which seems to have been developed on North American soil, and to have spread thence to Europe and Asia, seems to have disappeared in America before the coming of man to its shores. The only beast which could profitably be subjugated was the weak vicuna, which could only be used for carrying light burdens. But for the help given them by the sheep, the bull, and the horse, we may well doubt if the Old-World races would have won their way much more effectively than those of America had done.
[6] See for special information on these points the Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers. By Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Cambridge, 1869, p. 655. It is impossible to give here any sufficient extracts from this voluminous report. The reader is especially referred to chapters viii., ix., and x., for confirmation of the general statements made above.
The following table, compiled from Dr. Gould’s report, is extracted from the “General Account of Kentucky” in my Reports of Progress of Kentucky Geological Survey, new series, Frankfort, Kentucky, 1877, vol. ii. p. 387:—
TABLE OF MEASUREMENTS OF AMERICAN WHITE MEN COMPILED FROM REPORT OF THE SANITARY COMMISSION, MADE FROM MEASUREMENTS OF THE UNITED STATES VOLUNTEERS DURING THE CIVIL WAR. BY B. A. GOULD.
Key to table;
A - Mean weight in pounds.
B - Mean circumference around forehead and occipit.
C - Proportion of tall men in each 100,000.
| Mean Height. | A | Mean Circumference of Chest. | B | C | |||
| Nativity. | No. of men. | Height in Inches. | Full inspiration. Inches. | After each inspiration. | |||
| New England | 152,370 | 67.834 | 139.39 | 36.71 | 34.11 | 22.02 | 295 |
| N. Y., N. J., Penn. | 273,026 | 67.529 | 140.83 | 37.06 | 34.38 | 22.10 | 237 |
| Ohio, Indiana | 220,796 | 68.169 | 145.37 | 37.53 | 34.95 | 22.11 | 486 |
| Mich., Mo., Illinois | 71,196 | 67.822 | 141.78 | 37.29 | 34.04 | 22.19 | 466 |
| Seaboard Slave States | ... | ... | 140.99 | 36.64 | 34.23 | 21.93 | (*)600 |
| Kentucky, Tenn. | 50,334 | 68.605 | 149.85 | 37.83 | 35.30 | 22.32 | 848 |
| Free States west of Miss. R. | 3,811 | 67.419 | ... | 37.53 | 34.84 | 21.97 | 184 |
| British Maritime Provinces | 6,320 | 67.510 | 143.59 | 37.13 | 34.81 | 22.13 | 237 |
| Canada | 31,698 | 67.086 | 141.35 | 37.14 | 34.35 | 22.11 | 177 |
| England | 30,037 | 66.741 | 137.61 | 36.91 | 34.30 | 22.16 | 103 |
| Scotland | 7,313 | 67.258 | 137.85 | 37.57 | 34.69 | 22.23 | 178 |
| Ireland | 83,128 | 66.951 | 139.18 | 37.54 | 35.27 | ... | 84 |
| Germany | 89,021 | 66.660 | 140.37 | 37.20 | 34.74 | 22.09 | 106 |
| Scandinavia | 6,782 | 67.337 | 148.14 | 38.39 | 35.37 | 22.37 | 221 |
* Slave States, not including Kentucky and Tennessee.
[7] The following statement concerning the history of this brigade during the campaign of 1864 was given me by my friend, General Fayette Hewett, who was adjutant of the command:—
“On the 7th of May, 1864, the Kentucky Brigade marched out of Dalton 1140 strong. The hospital reports show, that, up to September 1, 1,850 wounds were taken by the command. This includes the killed; but many were struck several times in one engagement, in which case the wounds were counted as one. In two battles over 51 per cent of all engaged were killed or wounded. During the whole campaign there were not more than ten desertions. The campaign ended with 240 men able to do duty; less than 50 were without wounds.”
[8] It is worth while to notice that this Dutch colony never had the energetic life of the English settlements, which may be in part attributed to the effort to fix the Continental seigniorial relations upon the land. It failed here as it failed in Canada, but it kept both colonies without the breath of hopeful, eager life which better land-laws gave to the English settlements. Nothing shows so well the perfect unfitness of all seigniorial land-systems to the best development of a country as the entire failure which met all efforts to fix it in American colonies.
[9] [See Vol. III. chap. i.—Ed.]
[10] [See Vol. II. chap. i.—Ed.]
[11] [We have no record of the results from this expedition, if it ever took place. Navarrete, Viages, iii. 42. Charlevoix says, “It is constantly admitted in our history that our kings paid no attention to America before 1523 [1524],” when Francis I. authorized the expedition of Verrazano. Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 107.—Ed.
[12] [Cattle, which many years later were found on Sable Island, were supposed to be descendants of some which Léry landed there. Lescarbot, Nouvelle France, 1618, p. 21, is said to be the only authority for this expedition. Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 107; Kohl, Discovery of Maine, p. 203; D’Avezac in Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, 1864, vol. iii. p. 83; Harper’s Monthly, xxxiv. 4.—Ed.]
[13] [See Vol. II. for accounts of the predatory excursions against the Spaniards.—Ed.]
[14] [Some, however, have thought it to be Martha’s Vineyard. Cf. Brodhead’s New York, i. 57; Hist. Mag., ii. 99; Mag. of Amer. Hist., February, 1883, p. 91.—Ed.]
[15] [It is accepted by Asher, in his introduction to his Henry Hudson. An ancient cannon found in the St. Lawrence has even been connected with a shipwreck experienced by Verrazano there. Cf. Amable Berthelot, Dissertation sur le Canon de Bronze trouvé en 1826 sur un banc de Sable dans le Fleuve Saint Laurent. Quebec, 1827.—Ed.]
[16] Lok’s translation, fol. 317.
[17] See Vol. II.
[18] Paesi nouamente retrouati, et nouo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato. The volume has often been catalogued under the name of Vespucius (the only name that appears upon its titlepage). It has been ascribed to Zorzi on the authority of a note by Humboldt in his Examen critique, iv. 79. Harrisse, in describing the book (Bibliotheca Americana vetustissima, no. 48, pp. 96d-99), accepted this statement; but in the Appendix to the volume, at p. 469, he says that M. d’Avezac has pointed out that Zorzi collected only some additional manuscript matter in a copy in the Magliabechian Library. Harrisse, therefore, in the Additions to his Bibliotheca, published in 1872, reinserts the title (no. 26, pp. 34-38), and credits the volume to Montalboddo. There is a copy in Harvard College Library, dated Nov. 17, 1508, which is supposed to be of the second edition. The work was translated into French, German, Dutch, and Latin. There is a bibliography of the book in the papers on “Ptolemy’s Geography,” sub anno 1511, in the Bulletin of Harvard University, 1882-1883. [Cf. Vol. II. Index, and Bib. Am. Vet. Add. nos. 48, 71.—Ed.]
[19] Jean et Sébastian Cabot, pp. 256-266.
[20] Primera y segunda parte de la historia general de las Indias, con todo el descubrimiento y cosas notables que han acaecido dende que se ganaron ata el año de 1551. Folio. [See Vol. III. p. 27.—Ed.]
[21] Chap. xxxvii. fol. 43, ed. of Antwerp, 1554.
[22] Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano. 4 vols. folio. Madrid, 1601-1615.
[23] Delle navigationi et viaggi, raccolte da M. Gio. Battista Ramusio. 3 vols. folio. Venice, 1550-1559.
[24] Tratado que compôs o nobre & notauel capitão Antonio Galuão, dos diuersos & desuayrados caminhos, por onde nos tempos passados a pimenta & especearia veyo da India as nossas partes, & assi de todos os descobrimentos antigos & modernos, que sũo feitos ate a era de mil & quinhentos & cincoenta. Com os nomes particulares das pessoas que os fizeram: & em que tempos & as suas alturas, obre certo muy notauel & copiosa. There is no date on the titlepage, but the colophon says that the book was “printed in the house of John Barreira, printer to the King our Lord, the 15th of December, 1563.”
[25] The Discoveries of the World, from their first originall unto the year of our Lord 1555. 4to, London, 1601.
[26] [Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 241; vol. ii. no. 1; vol. iii. no. 469; Sabin, Dictionary, vol. vii. p. 143.—Ed.]
[27] Chronica do felecissimo Rey D. Manoel, dividada en 4 partes, folio. Lisbon, 1565-1567.
[28] Discoveries of the World (Hakluyt Society’s ed.), pp. 182, 183. The amended translation reads: “He traversed the greater part of Europe by his own free will; a thing worthy of praise and remembrance, since he enlightened his country with many things unknown to her.”
[See Vol. II. on the bibliography of Galvano—Ed.]
[29] I cite from the third edition, published at Lisbon in 1749, apparently an exact reprint of an earlier one. Its title reads: Chronica de serenissimo senhor Rei D. Manoel, escritas por Damião de Goes. A copy is in the Boston Public Library.
[30] De rebus Emmanuelis, regis Lusitaniæ virtute et auspiciis gestis ... libri duodecim. Folio. Cologne, 1571. There were several editions of this work (1581, 1597, etc.), and it was translated into French quite early; into Dutch in 1661-1663; into English by James Gibbs in 1752, and into Portuguese in 1804. Harvard College Library has a copy of the edition of Cologne, 1586, which contains, in addition to the History, a long Preface and Commentary by Metellus Sequanus about the discoveries and navigations of the Spanish and Portuguese.
[31] [Peschel, who did conspicuous service in this field, was born in 1826, and died in 1875. Georg Ebers delivered a “Denkrede” at his death, which is printed, accompanied by a portrait, in the Jahresbericht des Vereins für Erdkunde in Leipzig, 1875.—Ed.]
[32] Die Entdeckung Amerikas, note 115, p. 93. [See Vol. III. p. 217.—Ed.]
[33] Ibid., notes 119, 120, p. 93.
[34] [Cf. also Lafitau, Histoire des découvertes ... des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde. Paris, 1733. 2 vols. 4to.—Ed.]
[35] Compte rendu of the Congress, i. 232-324 and 469-480.
[36] [There is a sketch of this chart on a later page.—Ed.]
[37] Discovery of Maine, p. 181. [See Vol. III. p. 56.—Ed.]
[38] Navigationi, iii. 423-433.
[39] Recherches sur les voyages et découvertes des navigateurs Normands. 8vo, Paris, 1832. M. Estancelin gives (pp. 216-240) a translation of the Italian version of the great captain’s discourse. He thinks that it may have been written by Pierre Mauclerc, the astronomer of the “Sacre,” one of Parmentier’s vessels; but MM. d’Avezac and Margry attribute it to Pierre Crignon, who was also of Parmentier’s company. See Introduction to the Bref Récit of Jacques Cartier, p. vii; and Margry’s Les Navigations Françaises, pp. 130, 199. The Journal of the Sumatra voyage was found by M. Estancelin among the papers of a M. Tarbé at Sens, who inherited it from his brother, a merchant at Rouen; see Recherches, pp. 191, 192. M. Harrisse (Jean et Sébastien Cabot, pp. 301-303) describes two other manuscripts relating to Parmentier’s voyage, the more important of which will be published in the series of Voyages of which the Cabot is the first volume. Cf. Murphy, Verrazzano, p. 85; Hakluyt, Westerne Planting, p. 197.
[40] Eusebii Chronicon, Paris, 1512, fol. 172; cf. Murphy’s Verrazzano, p. 62. Stephanus was the printer of this Chronicon, and 1511 is found in some copies, or in what is, perhaps, another edition. Cf. Harrisse, Bib. Am. Vet. no. 71; Additions, nos. 43, 54; Muller (1872), no. 571.
[41] Margry, Les Navigations Françaises, appendix, ii. 371 et seq.
[42] Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 106. See the Editorial Note at the end of this chapter.
[43] Navigationi, iii. 420-423.
[44] Collections, 2d ser., i. 37-68.
[45] Divers Voyages (Hakluyt Society’s ed.), pp. 55-90; Principal Navigations, iii. 295-300; again in the 1809 edition. Hakluyt omits this narrative in his single volume of Navigations, published in 1589. [On the Hakluyt publications, see Vol. III., Index.—Ed.]
[46] Pages 197-228. It is also reprinted by Murphy in his Verrazzano, and by Conway Robinson in his Discoveries. The Italian was given in 1853 in the Archivio Storico Italiano, v. ix, Appendix, with an essay on Verrazano by Arcangeli.
[47] Lescarbot, Charlevoix, and others speak of it. The earliest French mention in print is said to be that of Belleforest, in his Histoire universelle du monde, 1570. It was repeated in his 1575 edition; and more at length in his Cosmographie universelle de tout le monde. Ribault, whose expedition took place in 1562, and Laudonnière (1564-1565) both speak of it. But the work of the latter was not printed until 1586, and it has been supposed that the editio princeps of Ribault is the English translation published in 1563. Hakluyt’s statement, in his Discourse concerning Westerne Planting (Maine Historical Society, 2d ser., ii. 20), that Ribault’s narrative was “extant in printe bothe in Frenche and Englishe,” makes it quite possible, however, that the mention in Belleforest is not the earliest printed one. Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 107.
Among the English authors Hakluyt should be particularly mentioned. He speaks in the Dedication of his Divers Voyages (Hakluyt Society’s ed., p. 11) of Verrazano having been “thrise on that coast” [the American], and of an “olde excellent mappe which he gaue to king Henrie the eight;” giving also a representation of Lok’s map, made “according to Verazanus plat.” In his Discourse on Westerne Planting, first published by the Maine Historical Society in 1877, he says (pp. 113, 114): “There is a mightie large olde mappe in parchemente, made, as yt shoulde seme, by Verarsanus ... nowe in the custodie of Mr. Michael Locke;” and again, of “an olde excellent globe in the Queenes privie gallory at Westminster, which also semeth to be of Verarsanus makinge.”
Herrera condenses the account of the voyage from the letter published by Ramusio; De Barcia (Ensayo chronologico para la historia general de la Florida, 1723) also gives it. This latter identifies Verrazano with the corsair, Juan Florin. Dr. Kohl gives an interesting account of Verrazano’s voyage, with a valuable Appendix on maps, in the eighth chapter of his Discovery of Maine.
[48] [See accounts of Mr. Smith in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1873, p. 89, and the American Antiquarian Society’s Proceedings, April, 1871. There has been some discussion of the controversy in the same publication by Charles Deane and J. D. Washburn, April and October, 1876. Cf. Duyckinck, Cyc. of Amer. Lit. Supplement, pp. 7, 157.—Ed.]
[49] See Judge Daly’s letter in the Journal of the American Geographical Society, vol. iii. p. 80.
[50] [Harrisse has enumerated the sources in his Cabots, p. 279. De Costa’s bibliography first appeared in the Magazine of American History, January, 1881.—Ed.]
[51] Third series, vol. xxvi. pp. 48-68; cf. also his note to M. Gravier in the Compte rendu of the “Américanistes,” 1877, p. 536.
[52] This Appendix is printed in the Atti, xv. 355-378.
[53] [It is worthy of note that Ortelius in 1570, aiming to enumerate all available maps for his purpose, makes no mention of any map by either of the Verrazanos.—Ed.]
[54] Fifth series, xxxv. 269-272. The communication runs through four numbers of the Annales, beginning with that of October, 1852; its title is Les papes géographes et la cartographie du Vatican. These papers were published separately the same year under the same title.
[55] Verrazano the Navigator, pp. 124, 125.
[56] The article was reprinted as a chapter of the author’s Verrazano the Explorer.
[57] Vol. vi. pp. 203, 204. Mr. Murphy reproduces this map in his Voyage of Verrazzano, p. 114.
[58] This paper forms a chapter of Verrazano the Navigator, pp. 64-82. [An extract from this globe is given on a later page.—Ed.]
[59] Discovery of Maine, pp. 290-299; Verrazano the Navigator, pp. 140-142; Verrazano the Explorer, pp. 50-56.
[60] The Voyage of Verrazzano, pp. 8, 9.
[61] Ibid., p. 10.
[62] Ibid., p. 14. Cf. De Costa, p. 21, n. 3.
[63] Ibid., pp. 25, 26.
[64] Mr. Major has deciphered the following legend on this map, which settles its date: “Faictes à Arques par Pierre Desceliers, presbre 1546.” See Harrisse’s Jean et Sébastien Cabot, p. 216, and also a sketch of the map on a later page.
[65] Voyage of Verrazzano., p. 69.
[66] Ibid., pp. 76-79.
[67] Ibid., pp. 126-133.
[68] Voyage of Verrazzano, p. 145.
[69] [He calls it “A Chapter in the Early History of Maritime Discovery in America.” Scholars regret that his death, Dec. 2, 1882, prevented the completion of such a comprehensive work, which was to be the crowning labor of his literary life. There are accounts of Mr. Murphy (with portraits) in Stiles’s Brooklyn, ii. 266; New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, January, 1883; Democratic Review, xxi. 78; xl. 193. His library was particularly rich in editions of Ptolemy and other early works of geography and exploration. Cf. Duyckinck, Cyc. of Amer. Lit. Supplement, 154.—Ed.]
[70] Major, in Geographical Magazine, iii. 188.
[71] Voyage of Verrazzano, pp. 139, 163.
[72] Revue critique, January, 1876.
[73] M. Desimoni also prints these documents; Atti, xv. 176.
[74] Verrazano the Explorer, preface.
[75] See Hakluyt’s Discourse on Westerne Planting, printed by the Maine Historical Society and also Mr. Deane’s note at p. 216 of that volume.
[76] Verrazano the Explorer, pp. 14-19, 21, n. 3.
[77] Ibid., pp. 9-12.
[78] Atti, xv. 124, 146, 147.
[79] Geographical Magazine, iii. 187.
[80] Geographical Magazine, iii. 187.
[81] Discovery of Maine, p. 253; and cf. also Desimoni in Atti, xv. 120.
[82] Verrazano the Explorer, p. 35.
[83] Discovery of Maine, p. 269.
[84] See post, p. 29.
[85] Vol. x. 1866, p. 229.
[86] Jean et Sébastien Cabot, pp. 284-287; Harrisse cites the passages about Gomez.
[87] Geographical Magazine, iii. 187.
[88] Dr. De Costa considers this question of the deduction of the letter from the Ribero map, and gives on one sheet a sketch of the coast from the Verrazano map, and the same coast according to Ribero. See Verrazano the Explorer, pp. 22-25. M. Desimoni devotes a section of his paper to the same question. Atti, xv. 126-130.
[89] Martyr, Opus epistolarum, ed. 1530, fol. cxciiii.
[90] Verrazano the Explorer, p. 44.
[91] [There is an interesting memoir on the history of the successive French flags in the Revue des questions historiques, x. 148, 404; xvii. 506.—Ed.]
[92] For Mr. Brevoort’s account and description of this map, see his Verrazano the Navigator, pp. 122-139.
[93] [The Editor has traced the cartographical history of the Western Sea in a Note following this chapter.—Ed.]
[94] Verrazano the Explorer, pp. 43-63.
[95] Atti, xv. 169-176. In a “revised extract from the Verrazano map, 1881,” prepared after the publication of his book, Dr. De Costa accepts all, or very nearly all, of M. Desimoni’s corrections, which are, however, not of much moment.
[96] [These legends are shown on the fac-simile of Desimoni’s reproduction, given on a later page.—Ed.]
[97] M. Desimoni’s paper is printed in the Atti of the Genoese Society, xv. 355-378. Mr. Brevoort was the first in this country to call attention to this Maggiolo map, in the Magazine of American History for February, 1882. He furnished a second article on the subject in the number of the following July. This map is given on a later page.
[98] Oviedo de la natural hystoria de las Indias. Con preuilegio de la S. C. C. M. On the verso of the titlepage, Sumario de la natural y general istoria de las Indias, que escriuio Gōçalo Fernādez de Oviedo, alias de Valdes, natura de la villa de Madrid, vezino y regidor de la cibdad de santa Maria del antigua del Darien, etc. The colophon states that the book was printed, at the author’s cost, by “Remō de Petras,” at Toledo, and finished Feb. 15, 1526. There is a copy in Harvard College Library.
[99] The Decades of the newe Worlde, or west India, ... wrytten in the Latine tounge by Peter Martyr of Angleria, and translated into Englysshe by Rycharde Eden. 4to, London, 1555. This volume contains Martyr’s first three decades, a translation of Oviedo’s Sumario, and parts of Gomara, Ramusio, Pigafetta, Americus Vespucius, Münster, and others. My citation is from fols. 213, 214.
[100] De orbe nouo Petri Martyris ab Angleria Mediolanensis Protonotarii Cæsaris Senatoris decades. Folio, Complutum (Alcala), 1530.
[101] Opus episcolarū Petri Martyris ... nūc pmū et natū & mediocri cura excusum. Folio. Copies of both books are in Harvard College Library.
[102] Dec. vi. c. 10, fol. xc. The translation is from Lok’s De orbe novo. 4to, London, 1612, fol. 246.
[103] Dec. viii. c. 10, fol. cxvii; Lok’s translation, fol. 317.
[104] Opus epistolarum, book xxxvii. fol. 199.
[105] Hist. gen. de las Indias, Antwerp, 1554, c. xl. fol. 44.
[106] Hechos de las Castellanos, Madrid, 1730; Dec. iii. p. 241.
[107] Galvano (Hak, Soc. ed.), p. 167.
[108] See ante, p. 24.
[109] Chap. viii. There are other modern examinations of these accounts, more or less minute, in Biddle’s Cabot, book ii. chap. 8; in Asher’s Introduction to his Henry Hudson, p. lxxxvii; in Buckingham Smith’s paper, 1866, before the New York Historical Society, epitomized in Hist. Mag., x. 229, and p. 368 for authorities; in Murphy’s Verrazzano, p. 117; and in Brevoort’s Verrazano, p. 80. Harrisse, in his Cabot, p. 282, gives the authorities.
[110] See Harrisse, Bib. Amer. vetus., nos. 134, 192, 215, and p. 249. The whole voyage was published in French at Paris, l’an ix. (1801). Gomez’ desertion is told at p. 43 of this edition. An English translation of Pigafetta is in Pinkerton’s Collection of Voyages, London, 1808-1814, vol. xi. p. 288 et seq. [Cf. the chapter on Magellan in Vol. II.—Ed.]
[111] Coleccion de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los Españoles. 5 vols., Madrid, 1825-1837. See on this point his Noticia historica to the Viages menores in vol. iii.
[112] Navarrete, iii. 77.
[113] Ibid., pp. 122-127.
[114] Ibid., pp. 153-160.
[115] Ibid., p. 179.
[116] Coleccion de documentos ineditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organizacion de las antiguas posessiones españolas de America y Oceania. 22 vols., 8vo, Madrid, 1864-1874. This Agreement is in the last volume, pp. 74-78.
[117] New York and London, 1843, pp. 417-419.
[118] [See Vol. III. p. 16; and the present volume, chap. viii.—Ed.]
[119] Discovery of Maine, p. 302.
[120] Discovery of Maine, pp. 307-315. [Cf. the Editorial Note on the maps, 1535-1600, following the succeeding chapter.—Ed.]
[121] Les singularitez de la France antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique; & de plusieurs terres & isles découvertes de nostre temps. Par F. André Thevet, natif d’Angoulesme. 4to. Paris, 1558. [Copies are worth between three and four hundred francs,—Maisonneuve in 1881 pricing it at 400 francs. Quaritch held a copy in 1883 at so high a price as £60. The cuts are well done, and Gaffarel thinks them the work of Jean Cousin.—Ed.] La cosmographie vniverselle d’André Thevet, cosmographe dv roy. Illustrée de diuerses figures des choses plus remarquables vevës par l’auteur, et incogneües de noz anciens & modernes. 2 vols., folio, Paris, 1575. It has 204 pages on America; cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 599. Mr. Brevoort says that he has a copy of the Singularitez with the date 1557; see his Verrazano, p. 112. [Another copy of this date (1557) is shown in the Huth Catalogue, vol. iv. p. 1464, which says that its collation agrees with Brunet’s collation of the copies dated 1558. A copy of the 1557 date brought $17 in Boston in 1844. Both books are in the Astor Library.—Ed.]
[122] [Published at Anvers, 1558. The cuts are but poor copies of those in the Paris edition; cf. Bernard’s Geofroy Tory, Paris, 1865, p. 320. Leclerc thinks it rarer than the Paris edition of the same year, because Ternaux does not mention it. (Brinley Catalogue, vol. i. no. 150.) Harvard College Library has this edition, which Quaritch prices at £7 7s.—Ed.]
[123] Historia dell’ India America detta altramente Francea antartica, Venice, 1561. There were other editions in 1567 and 1584. [This edition is worth about £5. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 236; Muller (1877), no. 3,194; Stevens, Historical Collections, vol. i. no. 995. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 359, says the 1584 is the 1561 edition with a new title. There is a copy in the Astor Library.—Ed.]
[124] The New found Worlde, or Antarctike, London, 1568. [There is a copy in Harvard College Library. Field (Indian Bibliography, no. 1,547) says it has sold for ten guineas. It is in Gothic letter, and has a portrait of Thevet. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 272.—Ed.]
[125] De Thou, Histoire de France, liv. xvi.
[126] At pages 415-420. Wytfliet had also adopted it.
[127] Northmen in Maine, pp. 63-79; cf. J. H. Trumbull in Historical Magazine, April, 1870, p. 239, confirming De Costa.
[128] Vol. III. p. 197.
[129] See Vol. III. p. 209.
[130] Verrazano, p. 29.
[131] For 1855, p. 374; and for 1856, pp. 17, 18, 319-324.
[132] He later published in the Zeitschrift für allgemeine Erdkunde, neue Folge, vol. xv., an account of discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, 1492-1543.
[133] This was earlier in the possession of Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institution, in whose Report for 1856 Dr. Kohl printed a plan for a Cartographical Depot, in connection with the Government. Cf. also American Antiquarian Society’s Proceedings, October, 1867; April, 1869; April, 1872.
[134] He had already, in 1861, published a Geschichte der Entdeckungs Amerikas,—a popular account which was translated by R. R. Noel as a Popular History of the Discovery of America, and published in London in 1862.
[135] Vol. III. p. 8.
[136] The Waldseemüller (Ptolemy) map of 1513, called sometimes “The Admiral’s map,” and known to have been engraved several years earlier, is believed to have been on sale in 1507 (Lelewel, ii. 143), and to have been really drawn in 1501-1504. La Cosa is said to have complained of Portuguese explorations in that neighborhood in 1503. [This new Cantino map has since been described in Vol. II.]
[137] Cf. also Harrisse’s Cabots, pp. 141, 162; Kohl, Discovery of Maine, p. 177; J. A. Schmeller’s “Ueber einige ältere handschriftliche Seekarten” in the Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften, iv. 247.
[138] Vol. II.
[139] Vol. III. p. 212.
[140] Ibid. p. 13.
[141] Now pronounced the work of another. See The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, compiled and edited from the original manuscripts by Jean Paul Richter, London, 1883, where (vol. ii. p. 224) it is said that the Marchese Girolamo d’Adda has brought proof to this end.
[142] Vol. III. p. 214.
[143] Ibid.
[144] Ibid. p. 201.
[145] This chart is given in the atlas (no. iv.) to Kunstmann’s Entdeckung Amerikas; in Stevens’s Notes, etc., pl. v.; in H. H. Bancroft’s Central America, vol. i. 133 (erroneously); and in part in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, pl. x. A portion of it is sketched in Vol. III. p. 56. Harrisse (Cabots, p. 167) puts it after Balboa’s visit to Panama in 1516-1517, and before 1520, because it shows no trace of Magellan’s Straits. A map of Laurentius Frisius, 1525 (Kohl Collection, no. 102), represents the southern part of what appears to be Greenland, with an island marked “Terra laboratoris” lying west of its extreme point, while the edge of “Terra nova contemti” (Corterealis) is seen further west.
[146] In Kohl’s Die beiden ältesten General-Karten von Amerika, with a section in his Discovery of Maine. Harrisse ascribes it to Nuño Garcia de Toreno. A full consideration of this and of the Ribero map belongs to Vol. II.
[147] Magazine of American History, 1883, p. 477. For Maiollo’s cartographical skill, see Heinrich Wüttke’s “Geschichte der Erdkunde” in the Jahresbericht des Vereins für Erdkunde in Dresden, 1870, p. 61. There are other notes of Maiollo’s work in the Giornale Ligustico, 1875; in D’Avezac’s Atlas hydrographique de 1511, p. 8; in Uzielli’s Elenco, etc.; and in Harrisse’s Cabots, p. 166.
[148] Vol. III. p. 218. Harrisse, Cabots, p. 188, gives a considerable essay on Agnese’s maps. Agnese lived and worked at Venice from 1536 to 1564.
[149] Verrazzano, p. 103.
[150] See Vol. III. pp. 199, 201; cf. also the Münster map of 1544, as given by Lelewel, Géographie du Moyen-Âge, pl. 46.
[151] See the preceding text, and Vol. III., p. 214.
[152] Cf. also Lelewel, p. 170; Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde, p. 371; H. H. Bancroft, Central America, i. 148.
[153] Géographie du Moyen-Âge, Epilogue, p. 219.
[154] Les Papes géographes, pp. 26, 65; cf. Lelewel, ii. 170.
[155] Mr. Brevoort has given an account of this collection in his Verrazano, p. 122.
[156] But compare Morton (New English Canaan, Adams’s edition, p. 126), who says, “What part of this mane continent may be thought to border upon the Country of the Tartars, it is yet unknowne.” This was in 1636-37.
[157] Vol. III. pp. 39, 40. Perfect copies of the Divers Voyages are very rare, and its two maps are often wanting. The two British Museum copies have them, but the Bodleian copy has only the Lok map, and the Carter-Brown copy is in the same condition; other copies are in Harvard College Library (map in fac-simile), in the Murphy Collection, and in Charles Deane’s. The Lok map is given in fac-simile, somewhat reduced, in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 288; and (full-size) in the reprint of the Divers Voyages by the Hakluyt Society. A sketch of it is given in Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, p. 290, and in Fox Bourne’s English Seamen. It of course mixes with Verrazano’s plot much other and later information.
[158] Vol. III. p. 123.
[159] See also what is called “The Jomard map of 155-(?)” delineated on a later page.
[160] Lelewel, pl. 46; H. H. Bancroft’s Central America, i. 144. An engraved map by Bordone, in 1534, represents what seems to be North America, calling the vaguely rendered northeastern coast “Terra delavoratore,” while a passage to the west separates a part of South America.
[161] See Vol. III. p. 214.
[162] Lelewel, pl. 46.
[163] See Vol. III. p. 17.
[164] Kohl, in a marginal note, thinks this may refer to Verrazano; he dates the map about 1530.
[165] There is a copy in the Kohl Collection.
[166] Cabots, p. 185.
[167] Paris, 1867, p. 20.
[168] Dr. Kohl (p. 326) says that Alezay was an island near the present Prince Edward, and that the latter was called Brion, having one of its capes named “Orleans,” still found on old maps. But Orleans is also found on the mainland of New Brunswick. Prince Edward Island appears on the Henri II., or the Dauphin’s map (1546), as “Alezay.” The “Cabot” map (1544) calls Prince Edward Island “ya de S. Juan.” Allefonsce (1542), in maps and Relations, calls it “Saint Jehan.” At this point the student should consult Hakluyt, iii. 205.
[169] Thevet, in his Singularitez de la France antarctique, Anvers, 1558 (f. 147), says that the people found here were almost contrary to the first, as well in language as in manner of life (“tant en langue que maniere de viure”). See Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 113. Thevet had consulted the Discours du voyage at p. 53.
[170] See Vol. III. pp. 185, 186.
[171] Hakluyt says that the Indian name of the island (vol. iii. p. 214) was Natiscotec; while Jean Allefonsce invariably makes the mistake of calling it Ascension Island.
[172] In 1642 the Sieur Maissonneuve selected the site for Montreal; see Champlain’s Œuvres, 1870 (Des Savvages), ii. 39. On Norumbega, see the present work, Vol. III. p. 169. On Hochelaga, also, see Professor Dawson’s Fossil Men and their Modern Representatives: an Attempt to Illustrate the Characters and Conditions of Prehistoric Men in Europe by those of the American Race. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1880, chaps. ii. and iii. By his excavations, Dr. Dawson has brought to light relics of the Hochelagans, whose ethnic relations he has studied, finding evidence which convinces him that they were representatives of a decaying nation to which the Eries and others belonged, and that originally they were connected with the Mound-Builders. He uses their history in combating some views entertained respecting the antiquity of the Stone Age.
[173] Professor Dawson, speaking of the account in the narrative, which says “that the most precious thing that they have in all the world they call esurguy, which is white, and which they take in the said river in cornifats,” explains that esurguy is “probably a vulgar local name for some shell supposed to resemble that of which these Indians made their wampum. I would suggest that it may be derived from cornet, which is used by old French writers as a name for the shells of the genus Voluta, and is also a technical term in conchology. In this case it is likely that the esurguy was made of the shells of some species of Melania or Paludina, just as the Indians on the coast used for beads and ornaments the shells of Purpura lapillus and of Dentalium, etc. It is just possible that Cartier may have misunderstood the mode of procuring these shells, and that the [his] statement may refer to some practice of making criminals and prisoners dive for them in the deeper parts of the river.”—Fossil Men, etc., p. 32, n.
[174] When Champlain was at Quebec he thought that he identified the site of Cartier’s fort, where he found hewn timber decayed and several cannon balls near the St. Charles and the Lairet. Œuvres, iii. 155. [Lescarbot and Sagard also mention the remains. Faillon (Histoire de la Colonie Française, i. 496) discusses the site of Cartier’s wintering-place. Lemoine (Picturesque Quebec, p. 484) speaks of the remains of one of Cartier’s vessels being discovered in 1843, some parts of which were carried to St. Malo.—Ed.]
[175] The Voyage of Verrazzano, p. 163, and Verrazano the Explorer, p. 25.
[176] Buckingham Smith’s Coleccion de varios documentos, Londres, 1851, p. 107; also Harrisse, Jean et Sébastien Cabot, p. 146.
[177] Possibly he had only three; see Coleccion, etc., p. 107. That he had five is the statement of Hakluyt. The Spaniards understood that Cartier had thirteen ships, Smith’s Coleccion, p. 107. Hakluyt is perhaps in error where he asserts that it was agreed to build five ships. Two of the ships actually sailing with this Expedition were the “Great Hermina” and the “Emerilon.”
[178] [In the Archives of St. Malo (1538) is a record of the baptism of three savages brought there by Cartier. Massachusetts Archives, Documents collected in France, i. 367. Faillon (Histoire de la Colonie Française, i. 524) believes that the Indians found on the St. Lawrence were Iroquois, who were succeeded in Champlain’s time by Algonquins. Bonnetty in the Annales de philosophie Chrétienne, September, 1869, has discussed the question: “Quels étaient les sauvages que rencontra Cartier sur les rives du Saint-Laurent.” Captain J. Carleill, in his undated tract (of about 1583) called Discourse upon the Entended Voyage to ... America (Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 350), refers to Cartier’s abduction of the Indians as putting “the whole countrey people into such dislike with the Frenche, as neuer since they would admit any conversation or familiaritie with them, until of late yeares.”—Ed.]
[179] It might indeed be supposed that Roberval, instead of reaching Canada in the autumn of 1541, wintered on the Atlantic coast, and thus met Cartier at Newfoundland in 1542. Indeed, Sir William Alexander says, in his Encouragement to Colonies (p. 15), that Roberval lived “one winter at Cape Breton;” but for the statement he gives no authority, while his style is loose, and by Cape Breton he probably meant Canada, since Roberval would have sailed direct from Cape Breton to the St. Lawrence, instead of circumnavigating Newfoundland.
[180] Hakluyt, in his translation of Allefonsce (iii. 242), reads: “Fort of France Roy, built in August and September, 1542.” The manuscript of Allefonsce, however, does not give the year, though the fact is stated. Hakluyt may have put in the date.
[181] Premier établissement de la foy dans la Nouvelle France. Paris, 1691, i. 12, 13.
[182] Murphy’s Voyage of Verrazzano, p. 39, n. On the sense of the terms discoperto and decouverte, see Verrazano the Explorer, pp. 39, 40.
[183] Allefonsce says: “Ces terres tiennent à la Tartarie, et pense que ce se soit le bout de l’Asie selon la rondeur du monde.” The commission of Francis I. to Cartier reads: “Des terres de Canada et Ochelaga, faisant un bout de l’Azie du costé de l’Occident.” Ramé’s Documents inédits, p. 13.
[184] The entire manuscript, so far as it relates to America, was copied for the writer, with all the maps, by a competent person, under the supervision of the late M. d’Avezac. This copy was used in Mr. Henry C. Murphy’s Voyage of Verrazzano, published in New York in 1875.
[185] Garneau, in his Histoire du Canada, heads one of his chapters, “Abandon temporaire du Canada, 1543-1603.”
[186] Cf. Édits, ordonnances royaux, etc., du Conseil de l’État du Roi (1540-1578) concernant le Canada. 2 vols. 1803-1806. Quebec; revised edition, 1854, 1855.
[187] See page 13 of Documents authentiques et inédits pour servir a l’histoire de la marine Normande et du commerce Rouennais, pendant les xvie et xviie siècles. Par E. Gosselin, Greffier Archiviste de Palais de Justice de Rouen. Rouen, Imprimerie de Henry Boissel, 1876. 8vo, pp. xv, 173. Also his Nouvelles glanes historiques. Rouen, 1873, p. 7.
[188] Documents, p. 13.
[189] Ibid.
[190] Ibid., p. 14: “5 Louchets à 12 solz pièce; 50 houseaux à 10 solz pièce; 25 manes à 16 solz pièce; 25 haches à faire bois à 12 solz pièce; 50 serpes à couper bois à 6 solz pièce,—le tout pour porter en la Nouvelle France, ou le Roy envoie presentment pour son service.”
[191] Documents, p. 14.
[192] See Inventio Fortunata, B. F. De Costa, p. 12.
[193] See Hakluyt’s Discourse of Westerne Planting, p. 26; and Cabo de Baxos, p. 6; also, a note on the Cardinal, by M. Gravier, in the Magazine of American History, ix. 214.
[194] Lescarbot’s Nouvelle France, pp. 422-426.
[195] Discourse, etc., p. 26.
[196] Principal Navigations, iii. 236.
[197] Hakluyt in his third volume gives accounts of several English voyages to the St. Lawrence, 1593-1597.
[198] Navarrete, Bibliotheca maritima, i. 396.
[199] [There is a view of this manor in the Relation originale, Paris, 1867. In the Massachusetts Archives, Documents collected in France, i. 263, is a paper on the genealogy of Cartier, by M. Cunat, of St. Malo, communicated to Mr. Poore by M. d’Avezac. This and various other copies of papers (many of which have of late years been printed) relating to Cartier are preserved in the office of the Régistraire de la Province de Québec. In 1883 the Chambre of the Province ordered a list made of the documents relating to Canadian history in that office, which was in March furnished by the secretary, J. Blanchet, and printed as no. 62 of the legislative documents. It shows about one thousand documents from the time of Cartier to the American Revolution.—Ed.]
[200] See Transactions of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society, 1862, which contains valuable articles (p. 141).
[201] Edition of 1728; dec. iii. l. x. cap. 9.
[202] Vol. iii. p. 809.
[203] Herrera (Historia general, Madrid, 1601, dec. ii. l. v. c. 3, seemingly under the year 1519) reports “fifty ships, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, fishing;” but the true date is 1527. Oviedo indicates the date in his Historia general de las Indias (Madrid, 1851), 611. See Brevoort’s Verrazano the Navigator, pp. 147, 148, and the Northmen in Maine, on Rut’s voyage, p. 55.
[204] Nouvelle France, 1612, p. 22.
[205] Cf. J. B. Gilpin, Lecture on Sable Island, Halifax, 1858, 24 pages.
[206] Vol. iii. fol. 369.
[207] [Cf. Harrisse, Notes, etc., no. 5. There are copies of this in the Carter-Brown Library (Catalogue, vol. i. no. 331); in the Huth Collection (Catalogue, vol. i. p. 267); and in the Grenville Collection, British Museum. This narrative was followed by Pinkerton and Churchill in their Voyages.—Ed.]
[208] Vol. iii. p. 201.
[209] The following is the title: Discours dv voyage fait par le Capitaine Iaqves Cartier aux Terres-neufues de Canadas, Norembergue, Hochelage, Labrador, et pays adiacens, dite nouuelle France, auec particulieres mœurs, langage, et ceremonies des habitans d’icelle.—A Roven, de l’imprimerie de Raphæl du Petit Val, Libraire et Imprimeur à l’Ange Raphæl, M.D.XCVIII., avec permission du Roy. This has been reprinted at Quebec in the Voyages de découverte au Canada, 1534-1552, published under the direction of the Literary and Historical Society, Cowan, 1843, and at Paris by Tross, 1865. It is followed in Ternaux-Compans (Archives des voyages, Paris, 1840), and is used in Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France, livre iii. chaps. 2-5; and of this last text Harrisse (p. 2) says, “Ce n’est qu’une médiocre reproduction de celui de Petit-Val,” a publisher of Rouen.
[210] See Harrisse’s Notes pour servir, etc., Paris, 1872, p. 11. Harrisse found copies in the National and Sainte-Geneviève libraries of Paris, and says it follows a text not now known; and that Hakluyt in his Principall Navigations followed still another text.
[211] Relation originale du voyage de Jacques Cartier au Canada en 1534: Documents inédits sur Jacques Cartier et le Canada (nouvelle série), publiés par H. Michelant et A. Ramé, accompagnés de deux portraits de Cartier, et de deux vues de son manoir. Paris, Tross, 1867. The original manuscript bears the erroneous date of 1544.
[212] Ante, p. 49.
[213] In neither of these narratives do we find any reference to those who preceded Cartier in the New Land; nor even, except in two cases, is there a passing allusion to contemporary voyages; yet both Normans and Bretons were active. Again, there is no mention of any map or chart.
The Normans and Bretons probably sailed to the banks of Newfoundland before Cabot made Prima Vista. An early mention of their voyages is that of the Gran Capitano Francese of 1539, found in Ramusio (Raccolta, 1556, iii. 359), where they are spoken of as frequenting the northern parts thirty-five years before, and giving a well-known headland its present name of Cape Breton. [This “gran capitano” is held by Estancelin in his Navigateurs Normands to be Jean Parmentier of Dieppe, and Pierre Crignon is named as the writer of the somewhat confused routier and narrative given in Ramusio. Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 132; Major’s Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Introduction; and Murphy’s Verrazzano, p. 85. Harrisse (Cabots, p. 249) also discusses the question of the Capitano’s identity.—Ed.] Ramusio also (iii. 359) refers to Jean Denys and the pilot Gamort, of Rouen, who sailed to Newfoundland in a ship of Honfleur about the year 1506. Ramusio (iii. 359) also mentions that Thomas Aubert of Dieppe voyaged thither in the “Pensée” in 1508.
Gosselin shows that in 1508 other ships sailed to Newfoundland, and that they were generally of a tonnage from sixty to ninety tons. “I cite, among others,” he says, “‘Bonne-Aventure,’ Captain Jacques de Rufosse; the ‘Sibille’ and the ‘Michel,’ belonging to Jehan Blondel; and then the ‘Marie de Bonnes Nouvelles,’ equipped by Guillaume Dagyncourt, Nicolas Duport, and Loys Luce, associated citizens, the command of the ship being given to Captain Jean Dieulois” (Documents, etc., p. 13). In view of those cases, which appear to be a few of many, how poor is the appearance of that scepticism which has so long led writers to look askance at the statements of Ramusio concerning Aubert and the “Pensée”! The records of Normandy and Brittany are doubtless rich in facts relating to obscure points of American history.
[There is in Mr. Parkman’s Collection (vol, i. p. 89), among the copies made for him in France by Mr. Poore, a map of the St. Lawrence Gulf, with the route of Cartier in 1534 pricked out. The map is signed N. B.; and I suppose it to have been made by Bellin, the map-maker who supplied Charlevoix with his maps. Faillon (Histoire de la Colonie Francaise, i. 523) argues that all three of the Relations as we have them were the work of Cartier himself. Ramé gives a copy of an ancient register at St. Malo, said to be in Cartier’s hand, which preserves the names of his companions.—Ed.]
[214] “Brief Recit & succincte narration de la nauigation faicte es ysles de Canada, Hochelage, & Saguenay, & autres, auec particulieres meurs, langaige, & cerimonies des habitans a’icelles; fort delectable à veoir [vignette]. Avec priuilege. On les uend a Paris au second pillier en la grand salle du Palais, & en la rue neufue Nostredame a l’enseigne de lescu de frāce, par Ponce Roffet dict Faucheur, & Anthoine le Clerc, frères, 1545.” Reprinted at Paris by Tross in 1863, with a collation of the three manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale, which are described in an “Introduction historique par M. d’Avezac,” substantially reprinted in Malte Brun’s Annales des voyages, July, 1864. These manuscripts are numbered, according to Harrisse (Cabots, p. 79), “Fonds Moreau, 841,” and “Fonds français, 5,589, 5,644, 5,553.” The Tross reprint is also accompanied by a fac-simile of a plan of Hochelaga, taken from the version of Ramusio, and a map of “Nova Francia” (given on another page), used by the Italian editor to illustrate an accompanying piece, the “Discorso d’vn gran Capitano” (iii. 352) shown in Verrazano the Explorer (p. 54) to have been modelled in part from the map of Verrazano. There appears to be but one copy of the Brief recit, 1545, known at present. This is in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum. A second copy was found by Tross, and was lost in the ship on its way to America. Muller at one time advertised a copy at $125. See Sabin, Dictionary, vol. iii. no. 11,138; Harrisse, Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, no. 267. It is reprinted in Kerr’s (vol. vi.) and Pinkerton’s (vol. xii.) Voyages.
[215] In vol. iii.
[216] Page 3.
[217] Vol. iii. p. 212.
[218] Hakluyt speaks of “the Frenche originall which I sawe in the King’s Library at Paris, in the Abbay of St. Martine,” and says that Donnaconna had been in “his barke” to that “contrie where cynamon and cloves are had.” See Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, p. 112.
[219] Vol. iii. p. 232.
[220] Vol. iii. p. 240.
[221] Page 412.
[222] Edition of 1883, vol. i. p. 17.
[223] “The division of authority between Cartier and Roberval defeated the undertaking. Roberval was ambitious of power, and Cartier desired the exclusive honor of discovery. They neither embarked in company nor acted in concert. In May, 1541, Cartier sailed from St. Malo. Arrived at the scene of his former adventures, near the site of Quebec, he built a fort; but no considerable advances in geographical knowledge appear to have been made. The winter passed in sullenness and gloom. In June, 1542, he and his ships returned to France, just before Roberval arrived with a considerable reinforcement. Unsustained by Cartier, Roberval accomplished no more than a verification of previous discoveries. Remaining about a year in America, he abandoned his immense vice-royalty.”
There is, however, no good proof of these charges. At the time when Roberval is represented as contending with Cartier, the former must have been in Canada. We have no proof of any conflict of authority. Facts recited in the present chapter do not appear to have been known to Mr. Bancroft. Kohl (Discovery of Maine, p. 343) appears to have known nothing beyond what is found in Hakluyt with reference to the meeting at St. John’s. Parkman (Pioneers of France, p. 202, edition of 1882) says that Roberval sailed for Canada in April, 1542, and that, soon after reaching St. John’s, “he descried three other sail rounding the entrance to the haven, and with wrath and amazement recognized the ships of Cartier.... The Viceroy ordered him to return; but Cartier escaped with his vessels under cover of night, and made sail for France.” See also Gay’s Popular History of the United States, i. 188; and, on these voyages, Biographie des Malouins célèbres, Paris, 1824; St. Malo illustré par ses marines, by Cunat, Paris, 1857; Biographie Bretonne, by Livot, Vannes, 1858. Also, D’Avezac’s edition of the voyage of 1545, Paris, 1863, f. xiii. This author does not appear to have known that Roberval sailed in 1541, instead of 1542. Hatton, in his Newfoundland, London, 1883, p. 14, also goes very wide of the mark.
[224] Harrisse, Notes, pp. 243-253.
[225] Ibid.
[226] Ibid., pp. 259-264.
[227] Ibid., pp. 254-258.
[228] Ibid., pp. 268-271.
[229] Ramé, Documents inédits, p. 12; and the Transactions of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society, 1862, p. 116.
[230] Documents inédits, p. 12; Transactions, etc., p. 120.
[231] Gosselin’s Nouvelles glanes historiques Normandes (Rouen, 1873), p. 4; forming a limited edition of Documents inédits.
[232] Harrisse, Jean et Sébastien Cabot, p. 212.
[233] Hakluyt, iii. 232.
[234] Nouvelles glanes, p. 6.
[235] Ibid., p. 6.
[236] Ibid., p. 6.
[237] Ibid., p. 6, and Hakluyt, iii. 240.
[238] Hakluyt, iii. 241.
[239] Harrisse, Notes, p. 272.
[240] Cosmographie of Allefonsce; Hakluyt, iii. 241.
[241] Ibid., p. 240.
[242] Transactions, 1862, p. 93.
[243] Ibid., p. 241.
[244] Transactions, p. 90.
[245] “Jacques Cartier, après avoir réclamé 4,500 livres pour L’Hermine et L’Emerillon, ajoute: ‘Et on ce qui est du tiers navise, mettre pour 17 mois qu’il a été au dit voyage du dit Cartier, et pour huit mois qu’il a été à retourner quérir le dit Robertval au dit Canada, au péril de nauleige, ce seront 2,500 livres, et pour les deux autres qui fuerint au dit voyage, six mois à cent livres le mois, sont douze cent livres.’” (Transactions, etc., 1862, p. 93.) See also Documents inédits, p. 28.
[246] Transactions, p. 93. Harrisse (Jean et Sébastien Cabot, p. 215) suggests that Cartier brought Roberval home in the month of June, 1544. This, however, was not so, as Cartier had actually returned prior to April 3, 1544.
[247] Transactions, p. 94.
[248] Cf. A. Walker on “A Forgotten Hero” in Fraser’s Magazine, 1880, p. 775.
[249] Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 131; also, Le Clercq, Établissement de la foy, i. 14.
[250] An episode in the voyage of Roberval, not alluded to by Hakluyt, is preserved in Thevet’s Cosmographie universelle, Paris, 1575. Thevet drew his accounts of New France partly from the navigators and partly from his imagination, deliberately inventing facts where he deemed it necessary, being upon the whole a mendacious character. Nevertheless he was well acquainted with Roberval and Cartier, and is said to have lived six months with the latter at St. Malo. [The Northmen in Maine, by Dr. De Costa, p. 63, and Biographie universelle, 1826-1827, vol. xxv.; also, vol. xlix. on Villegagnon.] This episode covers the case of Roberval’s niece, who in 1541 went on the voyage with him, becoming the victim of a young man who followed her from France. As punishment, she was put ashore with her old nurse on an island called the Isle of Demons, which figures prominently in the map found in the Ptolemy of Ruscelli, her lover being allowed to join them. On this island both of her companions died. After more than two years she was rescued by a fishing-vessel, and carried to France. Her story was first told in the Heptameron of Marguerite, published at Paris in 1559, forming number lxvii: “Extrême amour et austérité de femme en terre étrange.” Thevet, in his Cosmographie (ii. 1019), recasts the story, and says that he had the account from the princess herself, who, in a little village of Périgord, met the young woman, who had sought an asylum there from the wrath of her uncle Roberval. In his Grand insulaire, a manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Harrisse, Notes, p. 278), which antedates his Cosmographie, Thevet also has a version of the story. In the latter work it is given in connection with the fabulous account of a Nestorian bishop. It is illustrated by a picture of the woman on the Isle of Demons shooting wild beasts.
[251] Vol. iii. p. 232.
[252] [There have been various theories regarding the origin of the name Canada, for which see Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française, i. 14; Warburton’s Conquest of Canada (New York edition), i. 54; Historical Magazine, i. 153, 188, 217, 315, 349, and ii. 23; B. Davis in Canadian Naturalist, 1861; Magazine of American History, 1883, p. 161; and Canniff’s Upper Canada, p. 3. There seems to have been a belief in New England, at a later day, that “Canada” was derived from William and Emery de Caen (Cane, as the English spelled it), who were in New France in 1621, and later. Cf. Morton’s New English Canaan, Adams’s edition, p. 235, and Josselyn’s Rarities, p. 5; also, J. Reade in his history of geographical names in Canada, printed in New Dominion Monthly, xi. 344.—Ed.]
[253] Pages 87, 88, 105.
[254] This began with Charlevoix, who (Shea’s edition, i. 129) says: “The King, by letters-patent inserted in the Etat ordinaire des guerres, in the Chambre des Comptes at Paris, dated Jan. 15, 1540, declares him Lord of Norimbequa, Saguenay, Newfoundland, Belleisle, Carpon, Labrador, Great Bay, and Baccalas, giving him all these places with his own royal power and authority.” This is questioned by Parkman (Pioneers of France, p. 197); and in his note to Charlevoix’s statement, Dr. Shea says that Parkman “confounds his commission and patent,” referring to Lescarbot’s edition of 1618, which, however, does not bear out the statement, recalled later. Allefonsce says (Hakluyt, iii. 239), “The extension of all these lands upon just occasion is called New France. For it is as good and temperate as France, and in the same latitude.”
[The appellation of New France, according to Parkman (Pioneers of New France, p. 184), was earliest applied, just succeeding the voyage of Verrazano; and the Dutch geographers, he says, are especially free in the use of it, out of spite to the Spaniards. Faillon, in his Histoire de la Colonie Française, i. 511, errs in tracing its earliest use to Cartier’s second Relation, where, writing in the third person, he says, “aux terres neuves, par lui [nous?] appellées Nouvelle France.” Shea, in his Charlevoix, ii. 20, finds the “Nova Gallia” of the globe of Euphrosynus Ulpius (1542) as early a use as any of those which he records. Charlevoix himself had not traced it back of Lescarbot (1609).—Ed.
[255] See chap. xii. of La historia general de las Indias y nueuo mundo, con mas la conquista del Peru y de Mexico: agora nueuamente añadida y emendada por el mismo autor, con una tabla muy cumplida de los capitulos, y muchas figuras que en otras impressiones no lleva. Venden se en Caragoça en casa de Miguel de Çapila mercader de’ libros. Año de 1555.
[256] 1857, vol. ii. p. 317.
[257] Harrisse, in his Jean et Sébastien Cabot (Paris, 1882, p. 206), quotes from La grande insulaire of Thevet a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, showing that he was detained a prisoner at Poitiers by Francis I.; while in his Cosmographie universelle, folio 1021, he says it was “pour la prinse de quelques naviere d’Espaigne.” Allefonsce was a privateer, or “corsair,” and was so zealous in his work, that, to propitiate Spain, the King was obliged to put him in prison. He probably gave too much offence to the king’s enemies.
[258] Vol. iii. p. 240.
[259] It might appear that Allefonsce was dead at the time; his Cosmographie was finished in 1545, as the finishing touch was given by Paulin Secalart. The lines referred to are as follows:
“La mort aussi n’a point craint son effroy,
Ses gros canons, ses darts, son feu, sa fouldre,
Mais l’assaillant l’a mis en tel desroy,
Que rien de luy ne reste plus que poudre.”
[260] See also Harrisse, in Jean et Sébastien Cabot, p. 203, on Allefonsce.
[261] The Northmen in Maine, p. 131; and Lescarbot, Nouvelle France, p. 46. Bergeron, in his Voyages faits principalments en Asie, dans les XII., XIII., XIV., et XV. Siècles, a La Haye, 1735, part ii. p. 5, criticises the misprints of proper names in this volume.
[262] This work is preserved in the Manuscript Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, no. 676, under Secalart. It is a stout paper folio, 9 × 13 inches, written on both sides. This rude specimen of penmanship was originally designed for Francis I., like the book of John Rotz now in the British Museum. It contains 194 leaves; the titlepage is wanting. On what now forms the second leaf of the third page is found the following: “Jehan allafonsce—:—Paulin secalert,” with the motto: “Pouvre et Loil.”
It is signed “Nous Jehan allefonsce et Paulin Secalert.” Underneath is the date. “Paulin” might, perhaps, be read “Raulin.” The first line of every page is in red, the initials forming grotesque human faces. The work abounds in flourishing capitals, and the text is difficult to decipher. The maps are rude sketches, intercalated to illustrate the text, and washed with yellowish, reddish, and greenish tints. The islands are chiefly in gold, though some are red and green. At the end of the volume is a map of France with the royal arms. On a map of England is a rude representation of London. There are also four pages of plans and diagrams, relating chiefly to London and Bordeaux. The legends on the maps are written in a brown tint, much faded, though upon the whole the volume is in a good state of preservation. Cf. “L’hydrographie d’un découvreur du Canada,” in Margry’s Navigations Françaises.
[263] It will be remembered (Hakluyt, iii. 6) that Cabot’s Prima Vista was near “the Island of St. John.” On the map is the fabulous island of St. John out at sea, and the real St. John, now Prince Edward, is in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On this subject Hakluyt appears to have been confused. In his Principal Navigations (iii. 625) he speaks of “the isle of Iohn Luis or John Alverez in 41;” and in a marginal note says, “This is a very commodious Isle for us on our way to Virginia.” On page 627 he defines the position further, saying: “From Bermuda to the Isle of St. Iohn Luis or John Alverez 320 [leagues]. From the Isle of Iohn Luis or Alverez to Flores 320.” This appears to have been one of the flying islands. See Magazine of American History, viii. 510; The Northmen in Maine, p. 139. See also Harrisse’s Cabots, p. 275.
[264] Mr. Murphy, in his Voyage of Verrazzano, p. 38, mistranslated the text, reading ung as cinq, and making the latitude 45° instead of 41°. The original manuscript reads, “Le dict cap est par le quarente et ung degrez,” and overturns Mr. Murphy’s hastily formed theory. See also Verrazano: a Motion for a Stay of Judgment. New York, 1876, p. 10.
[265] In his narrative as given by Hakluyt (iii. 239): “I doubt not but Norumbega [River] entreth into the Riuer of Canada, and vnto the Sea of Saguenay.” Again, “from the entrance of Norumbega [at the Penobscot] vnto Florida are 300 leagues.”
[266] This may have been done by those Portuguese who disputed the title, and whose quarrels with the French were composed at Newfoundland by Roberval. Ante, p. 57; and Hakluyt, iii. 240.
[267] Voyages avantureux, Poitiers, 1559.
[268] “Premier livre de la description de tous les ports de mer de lunivers. Avec summaire mention des conditions differentes des peoples et addresse pour le rang de ventz propres a naviguer.” By Jehan Maillord, Mallert, or Mallard, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and quoted by Harrisse, Jean et Sébastien Cabot, pp. 223-227.
[269] Hakluyt, vol. iii.; see Vol. III. of the present work, pp. 171, 187.
[270] Here, indeed, it may prove of interest to give their respective descriptions of the same region. Vumenot writes: “La terre n’est pas fort haute, elle est bien labouree, et est garnie de ville et Chasteaux, ilz adorent le Soliel et la lune. D’icy tourne la coste au sud-sudoest et au sud, jusque un cap qui est haute terre, et ha une grand isle de terre basse, et trois ou quatre petits isles.”
This is a description of Cape Cod and the neighboring coasts, which, in the verse of Maillard, appear in the same way:—
“Ils ont chasteaux et villes quilz decorent
Et le Soliel et la lune ilz adorent
En ce pays leur terre est labouree
Non terroy hault mais assez temperee
Dicy la coste ainsy comme jai sceu
Au susseroest elle tourne aussy au su
Plus de cent lieux et jusque au cap va terre
Qui se congnoist en une haulte terre
Qui a vne isle en terre basse grande
Et troys ou quatre isleaux a sa demande
Et de ce cap a lisle se dit.”
Harrisse says that Maillard based his description upon the manuscript of Allefonsce, and not on the printed work, saying that the former was “begun in 1544 and finished in 1546;” whereas the manuscript itself shows that it was “finished the 24th day of November, 1545.” It is also said that Francis I., for whom Maillard wrote, died March 31, 1547, while the Voyages avantureux did not appear until 1559, which seems to have been the case; yet the verses agree with the printed work instead of the manuscript of Allefonsce, and bear no relation to the manuscript other than that borne by the book. We speak here, of course, only of that part of Maillard’s performance given in Jean et Sébastien Cabot. In several cases Maillard makes a point not in the book; as, for instance, where (line 131) he says of the Norumbega peltry,—
“De maint marchant bien cherement requise;”
but this statement is not found in the manuscript of Allefonsce itself. That Maillard wrote these verses describing our coast after the corresponding portion of Voyages avantureux had been composed, might seem to be indicated by the fact that the substance of a line omitted after line 28 is found in the prose version of 1559, as follows: “Tous le gens ceste terre ont queue,” which is an allusion to the old story told in the manuscript of Allefonsce, who says that towards the north, “in some of these regions are people with pig’s tails and faces,”—a statement which the printed work reduces so as to read, “All the people of this land have queue.” This was overlooked by the poet or transcriber.
The connection between Maillard’s work and the printed narrative is curious, for the two pieces show a common origin, while two different writers, independently of one another, could not have produced two versions so much alike; though it should be noted that at line 138 Maillard spoils the sense by writing “vne isle,” instead of “une grand ville,” as in the printed book,—unless, indeed, he intended to discredit the story of the “great city” of Norumbega, which Allefonsce in his manuscript simply styles “une ville.” There is no necessity for supposing that Maillard ever saw the manuscript of Allefonsce. He may have used the manuscript of the printed volume of 1559, if it was in existence in the time of Francis. It certainly was written March 7, 1557, when the printing was authorized. It is a curious fact that in 1578 one Thomas Mallard, or Maillard, published an edition of Allefonsce at Rouen: Les voyages avantvreux dv Capitaine Iean Alfonce, Sainctongeais: Contenant les Reigles & enseignmens necessaires a la bonne & seure Nauigation. Plus le moyen de se gouuerner, tart enuers les Barbares, qu’autres nations d’vne chacune contrée, les sortes de marchandises qui se trouuent abondamment à icelles: Ensemble, ce qu’on doit porter de petit prix pour trocquer avec iceux, afin d’en tirer grand profit. A Rouen, chez Thomas Mallard, libraire: pre le Palais deuant l’hostel de ville, 1578. Evidently Jehan Maillard, the poet, had some unexplained connection with the volume that appeared in 1559.
[271] Vol. iii. p. 237.
[272] “Les terres allant vers Hochelaga sont de beaucoup meilleures et plus chauldes que celles de Canada, et tient terre de Hochelaga au Figuier et au Perou, en laquelle abonde or et argent.”
[273] One thing must strike the student in going through these topics; namely, the indifference shown by the respective navigators and explorers to their predecessors. Cartier makes no reference to Verrazano, and Allefonsce pays no attention to Cartier. So far as the writings of Allefonsce go, it would hardly appear that any such person as Cartier ever existed. Of Roberval himself, the pilot of Saintonge makes but a single mention in passing, while Maillard speaks of Cartier only in a dedication.
[274] [There is a paper on the map literature of Canada, by H. Scaddin, in the Canadian Journal, new series, xv. 23. A large Carte de la Nouvelle France, pour servir à l’étude de l’ histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’en 1760, par Genest, was published a few years since.—Ed.]
[275] Ramé’s Documents inédits, p. 3.
[276] Kohl (Discovery of Maine, p. 350) speaks of it as open on the map of Ribero. Maps iv. and vii. of Kunstmann’s Atlas show the straits open. [Some of these maps are sketched in the Editorial Note following the preceding chapter.—Ed.]
[277] “I can write nothing else vnto you of any thing I can recouer of the writings of Captaine Iaques Cartier, my uncle diceased, although I haue made search in all places that I could possibly in this towne, sauing of a certaine booke made in maner of a sea chart, which was drawne by my said vncle, which is in the possession of Master Cremeur,—which booke is passing well marked and drawne for all the Riuer of Canada, whereof I am well assured, because I my self haue knowledge thereof as far as the Saults, where I haue beene: The height of which Saults is in 44 degrees. I found in the said chart beyond the place where the Riuer is diuided in twaine, in the midest of both the branches of said riuer, somewhat neerest that arm which runneth toward the northwest, these words following written in the hand of Iaques Cartier:—
“‘By the people of Canada and Hockeloga it was said, That here is the land of Saguenay, which is rich and wealthy in precious stones.’”—Hakluyt, iii. 236.
[278] See for these maps, ante, pp. 26, 39.
[279] Discovery of Maine, p. 296.
[280] [This map is sketched ante, p. 40.—Ed.]
[281] Historia, etc. (Madrid, 1852), ii. 148. [See post, p. 81.—Ed.]
[282] Ibid., p. 149.
[283] Kohl’s Discovery of Maine, p. 292. [See the map, ante, p. 38.—Ed.]
[284] The writer knows of but one copy of this map,—that in possession of Mr. J. Carson Brevoort. It is described in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, 1878, p. 195.
[285] The contents of this globe have not been published. Though Cartier is not recognized, we read, “Terra Francesca;” and on the northern border of Labrador, “TERRA PER BRITANOS INVENTA.” Another Spanish globe—say of 1540—gives no trace of Cartier. It seems to be a fact that Spaniards were sent to search the Gulf of St. Lawrence after Cartier’s voyages; while Le Blanc, Les voyages fameux, etc. (Paris, 1649, part iii. p. 63), referred to by Charlevoix, tells us that the St. Lawrence was visited by Velasco the Spaniard in 1506.
[286] In a sketch which the late M. d’Avezac made for the writer before the latter had personally examined the original manuscript, which bears the folio mark 184 instead of 187, “Laboureur” reads, as it should, “Norumbega.” We have sketches bearing the two numbers showing this difference, while also no. 184 does not show “Isla de Saint-Jean.”
[287] The Cosmographie says: “Passing about twenty leagues west-northwest along the coast, you will find an island, called St. Jean, in the centre of the district, and nearer to the Breton region than to Terra Nova. This entry to the Bretons is twelve leagues wide, and in 47° 30′ north. From St. Jean’s Island to Ascension [Assumption] Island, in the Canadian Sea, it is forty leagues across, northwest-by-west. St. Jean and Bryon and Bird Island are 47° north.” A little farther on he says: “Southeast of Cape Ratz [Race] there are two lost islands, which are called Isle St. Jean, D’Estevan,—lost because they consisted of sand.” He also mentions the Isle of St. Brandon, and “a large island called the Seven Cities, forming one large island, and there are many persons who have seen it as well as myself, and can testify; but I do not know how things look in the interior, for I did not land upon it. It is in 28° 30′ north latitude.”
[288] See on this globe, Verrazano the Explorer, p. 64; and the engraving of it, ante, p. 42.
[289] On the Nancy globe; see the Magazine of American History, vi. 183; and the sketch, ante, p. 81.
[290] Map in the British Museum, 25 × 15 inches. See post, p. 83.
[291] See sketch, post, p. 87.
[292] See post, p. 84.
[293] See a sketch of it, post, p. 85.
[294] The relation of the map to the Verrazano map, 1529, is shown in Verrazano the Explorer, p. 43, and on the composition map, p. 48. A fac-simile of Gastaldi’s map is given, post, p. 91.
[295] The atlas is about 12 × 18 inches, the maps, which are strongly Portuguese, being delicately drawn and washed with green, and elegantly colored. The title is Cosmographie universelle selon les navigateurs. Many of the names which we have examined appear to be very corrupt.
[296] A copy of the photograph was obtained in Venice by the writer.
[297] See Verrazano the Navigator, p. 55. [See a sketch and fac-simile of the map on pp. 94 and 373.—ED.]
[298] [See post, p. 92. These are reproductions of the maps of the 1561 and 1562 editions.—Ed.]
[299] [See post, p. 95; first appeared in 1570.—Ed.]
[300] A sketch of the North American portion of the map, in the possession of the writer, was made for him by M. Eugene Beauvois, who has suggested that the map might belong to the period of De Monts, as near the region of Nova Scotia we read “C. de Môt.” This name, however, appears on the map of the Dauphin and various other maps. The map is found in Premieres Œuvres de Jacques de Vaulx, pilote pour le Roy en la marine française de Grace l’an 1584, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, fond française, no. 9,175, folios 29-30.
[301] [See post, p. 96. This map originally appeared in 1572.—Ed.]
[302] [See post, p. 99.—Ed.]
[303] [See post, p. 100.—Ed.]
[304] On Labrador is the following significant legend: “This land was discouered by Iohn [and?] Sebastian Cabot for Kinge Henry ye 7. 1497.” This map shows Prince Edward Island in its proper place in the gulf, without a name, and “I. S. John” outside of Cape Breton in the sea, where it is so often found on the old maps.
[305] [See post, p. 377.—Ed.]
[306] Harrisse, Cabots, p. 173.
[307] Ibid., p. 232; and in his Bib. Amer. Vet., no. 149, he refers to Sacrobusto’s Sphera del mundo, translated from the Latin into Spanish by Hieronymus Chaves, and published at Seville in 1545, as showing a small map in a diagram, thought to be the work of Alonzo de Chaves.
[308] This is dated 1550, but is very much behind its date.
[309] Part ii. vol. i. p. 143, for the description.
[310] Ante, p. 40.
[311] Lelewel, pl. 46, from Apianus’ Cosmographia of that year.
[312] Ante, p. 41.
[313] Ante, p. 37.
[314] Raemdonck’s Les sphères de Mercator.
[315] Catalogue of Manuscripts, vol. i. p. 23.
[316] Cabots, pp. 77, 147, 201, 204; cf. Malte-Brun, Histoire de la géographie, i. 631.
[317] Kohl, Maps in Hakluyt, p. 32.
[318] Another of the Rotz maps (no. 104 in the Kohl Collection) is similar to the eastern part of the map here given as “Western Hemisphere;” but the passage to the west, south of Labrador (Greenland?), is not so distinctly closed. There is a strong resemblance to this map in a French manuscript map in the British Museum, marked Livre de la marine du Pilote Pastoret [perhaps Pasterot or Pralut], l’an 1587, which is also in the Kohl Collection, no. 110.
[319] Kohl, Discovery of Maine, pl. xviii.³; Harrisse, Cabots, p. 189.
[320] In the Huth Collection.
[321] This has “Stegen Comes” inscribed on North America, which is supposed to commemorate the Estevan Gomez explorations; cf. Baldelli, Storia del milione, vol. i. p. lxv; Zurla, Di Marco Polo, ii. 369; Desimoni in Giornale Ligustico, p. 57.
[322] A copy of this is in the Kohl Collection.
[323] Kohl, Description of Maine, p. 294.
[324] Harrisse’s Notes, etc., nos. 188, 189; Cabots, p. 189, and references there cited.
[325] A full account of this map will be found in Vol. III. chap. i. Since that chapter was written, Harrisse has stated (Cabots, p. 153) that the French Government paid M. de Hennin in 1844 four hundred francs for this map (cf. Essai sur la Bibliothèque du Roi, Paris, 1856, p. 285). It has also within a year been photographed full size, with the legends, and copies of the photographs have been placed in nine American libraries (cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xix. 387, and xx. 39 Charles Deane, in Science, vol. i.).
[326] See ante, p. 74 etc.
[327] Jomard owned it, and it is in his Catalogue, Paris, 1864, no. 121; it is now owned by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. See Harrisse’s Cabots, pp. 210, 216, for an account of Desceliers.
[328] Bulletin de l’Académie des Inscriptions, 30 Août, 1867.
[329] Discovery of Maine, p. 351, with a reproduction; he puts it “about 1548” in his copy of it in the State Department Collection.
[330] Cf. Murphy’s Verrazano, p. 42, where, for the region south of Cape Breton, it is claimed that the map-maker translated the Spanish names of Ribero.
[331] Harrisse’s Cabots, p. 197; Malte-Brun, Histoire de la géographie (1831), i. 630; British Museum Catalogue of Manuscript Maps (1844), i. 22; Additional Manuscripts, no. 5,413.
[332] Barbie du Bocage, in Magasin encyclopédique (1807), iv. 107; Major, Early Voyages to Australia, pp. xxvii, xxxv; Kohl, Discovery of Maine, p. 354, and Maps in Hakluyt, p. 38; Harrisse, Cabots, p. 219.
[333] Cabots, p. 245.
[334] Verrazano, p. 143.
[335] Catalogue of Manuscripts, no. 24,065.
[336] Cabots, p. 230.
[337] David Asseline’s Les antiquités de la ville de Dieppe, 1874, ii. 325; Harrisse, Cabots, p. 217; Desmarquet’s Mémoires chronologiques pour servir à l’histoire de Dieppe et à celle de la navigation Française, 1875, ii. 1.
[338] Cabots, p. 194.
[339] In the Jahresbericht des Vereins für Erdkunde in Dresden, 1870.
[340] Called “The Jomard Map.”
[341] Cabots, p. 238
[342] See chapter on “Cortes” in Vol. II.
[343] In Harvard College Library.
[344] Cabots, p. 242.
[345] Pages 425, 447.
[346] Cf. Harrisse, nos. 292, 293; Carter-Brown, vol. i. no. 195. This volume of Ramusio is said to have been prepared in 1553.
[347] It will be remembered that another map (1550) of this maker is supposed to preserve something of the lost map of Chaves.
[348] Catalogue of Manuscripts, no. 25,442; Harrisse, Cabots, pp. 189, 193.
[349] Les Papes géographes, p. 118.
[350] Cf. Manno and Promis, Notizie di Jacopo Gastaldi (1881), p. 19; Harrisse, Cabots, p. 237.
[351] Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, who has a copy, has furnished me a tracing of it. The late Henry C. Murphy had a copy without the date. A sketch of the western portion is given in Vol. III. p. 67. Cf. Catalogue of Maps in the King’s Library, British Museum, i. 24, and Kohl’s Maps in Hakluyt, p. 29. The annexed sketch follows the copy in the Kohl (Washington) Collection.
[352] Kohl gives it “Stadawna.”
[353] See chapter i.
[354] Discovery of Maine, p. 393.
[355] A copy belonging to Professor Jules Marcou has been used. All editions are in Harvard College Library. Lelewel reproduces the American map. Further accounts of Ortelius will be found in Vol. III. p. 34, and on a later page in the present volume in an editorial note on the Atlases and Charts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
[356] Leclerc (Bibliotheca Americana, no. 2,652) gives a map of Thevet’s “Le nouveau monde descouvert et illustre de nostre temps, Paris, 1581,” which Harrisse (Cabots, p. 252) calls another production.
[357] Vol. i. pl. vii.
[358] British Museum Manuscripts, Catalogue, i. 29; and (1844) vol. i. p. 31, no. 22,018.
[359] There is in the Kohl Collection (no. 107) a copy of a manuscript Portuguese map in the British Museum, which Kohl puts at about 1575. A legend on it says: “On the 20th November, 1580, a Portuguese, Fernando Simon, lent this map to John Dee in Mortlake, and a servant of Dee copied it for him.” It shows the coast from Cape Breton to Hudson’s Straits, giving the St. Lawrence gulf (with the Newfoundland group of islands), but not the river. Dee does not seem to have followed it.
[360] See Vol. III. p. 203.
[361] Given in Vol. III. p. 102.
[362] Given ante, p. 44.
[363] Given in Vol. III. pp. 41, 42.
[364] There are copies in the Library of Congress and in the Carter-Brown Collection; chapters 20 and 21 are on America. The Preface is dated 1587.
[365] Given in Vol. III. p. 213.
[366] Given in Vol. III. p. 216, and in this volume on a later page.
[367] The map is given in Vol. III. p. 101. It also appeared in later editions (1638, 1644, etc.) of Linschoten. I have used the Harvard College copy of Wolfe’s edition, and Mr. Deane’s copies of the Dutch and Latin editions.
Blundeville in his Exercises (p. 431) gives a description of Mercator’s globes and of that “lately set forth by M. Molinaxe; and [p. 515] of Sir Francis Drake his first voyage into the Indies.” He also describes various universal maps and cards of his day, noting their cartographical peculiarities, like those of Vopellio (p. 754), Gemma Frisius (p. 755), Mercator (p. 756), etc.
[368] See Vol. III. p. 100.
[369] See Vol. III. chap. iv.
[370] Cf. the map of New France published at this time at Cologne in the Beschreibung von America,—a translation of Acosta. See Vol. II. for the bibliography of Acosta.
[371] [Cf. chap. ii.—Ed.]
[372] [Cf. Professor Shaler on the different aims of the English and French in colonization, in the Introduction, pp. xxii, xxiii.—Ed.]
[373] [See chapter iv.—Ed.]
[374] The Port Royal of De Monts was on the site of Lower Granby, while that of Poutrincourt was on that of Annapolis.
[375] [Champlain’s explorations along the coast of Maine are given by himself in his 1613 edition, and are specially set forth in Mr. Slafter’s memoir in Voyages, vol. i., and by General John M. Brown in his “Coasting Voyages in the Gulf of Maine, 1604-1606,” in the Maine Historical Collections, vol. vii.,—a paper which was also issued separately. Champlain’s account of Norumbega is also translated in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., i. 321, 332.—Ed.]
[376] [De Costa, Coast of Maine (1869), p. 182, claims that in one of these expeditions Champlain discovered the Isle of Shoals, antedating John Smith’s discovery. See also Champlain’s Voyages, Prince Society’s ed., ii. 69, 70, and notes 142 and 144.—Ed.]
[377] [See Vol. III. chap. vi.—Ed.]
[378] [See chaps. i. and ii. of the present volume.—Ed.]
[379] [For the various theories regarding the origin of the name Quebec,—whether it is derived from a Norman title, as Hawkins maintained; or from an exclamation of the first beholders of the promontory, “Quel bec!” or from the Algonquin,—see Hawkins, Picture of Quebec; Brasseur de Bourbourg, Histoire du Canada; Ferland, Histoire du Canada; Garneau’s Canada, 4th ed., i. 57; Bell’s translation of Garneau’s Canada, i. 61; Warburton’s Conquest of Canada, i. 62; Shea’s edition of Charlevoix, i. 260.—Ed.]
[380] [Charlevoix gives a map of Lake Champlain, illustrating Champlain’s campaign of this year against the Iroquois. Cf. Brodhead’s New York, i. 18, and P. S. Palmer’s History of Lake Champlain (1866).—Ed.]
[381] [It was while crossing one of these portages, “suffering more from the mosquitoes than their burdens,” that Champlain is supposed to have lost his astrolabe; and his Journal shows that his subsequent records of latitude in the journey failed of the general accuracy which characterized his earlier entries. At least an astrolabe, with an inscription of its Paris make, 1603, was dug up on this route in August, 1867. Cf. O. H. Marshall, in Magazine of American History (March, 1879), iii. 179, and Alexander J. Russell’s On Champlain’s Astrolabe, Montreal, 1879; also Slafter’s edition of Champlain’s Voyages, iii. 64-66.—Ed.]
[382] [The cellar of the Château St. Louis, the structure originally built by Champlain, still remains. The subsequent history of the pile is traced in Parkman’s Old Régime, p. 419. Cf. Le Moine’s Picturesque Quebec (1882). Shea, in his Le Clercq, p. 115, has a note on Louis Hebert, the earliest settler of Quebec with a family, who died in 1627. An account is given of some bronze cannon, relics of Champlain’s time, in the Quebec Literary and Historical Society’s Transactions, ii. 198.—Ed.]
[383] [The Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, March 29, 1632, by which restorations were made to the French, will be found in Recueil de Traités de Paix, Leonard, Paris, 1692, vol. v. The contemporary quarto print of the treaty, printed at St. Germain, is of such rarity that Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, no. 794, prices a copy at five hundred francs. See Harrisse, no. 47, who refers for the causes of the long delay in making this restitution, to Le Clercq, Établissement de la Foy, i. 419; Faillon, Hist. de la Col. Française, i. 256. Compare also the notes in Shea’s Charlevoix, vol. ii. For the occupancy, see Harrisse, no. 48; also Mr. Slafter’s memoir in Champlain’s Voyages, i. 176, 177; and Sir William Alexander and American Colonization, Prince Society edition, pp. 66-72.
There are papers relating to the English claim to Canada urged at this time (1630-1632) among the Egerton manuscripts,—see British Museum Catalogue, no. 2,395, folios 20-26.—Ed.]
[384] Cf. Mass. Archives; Doc. Coll. in France, i. 591.
[385] Vide Champlain’s Voyages, Prince Society’s edition, i. 189-193.
[386] [There has been some controversy of late years over the site of the “sépulcre particulier” in which Champlain was buried. Cf. Le Moine, Quebec Past and Present, 1876, p. 41, and references; Découverte du Tombeau de Champlain, par MM. les Abbés Laverdière et Casgrain, Quebec, 1866; Le journal de Québec et le Tombeau de Champlain, par Stanilas Drapeau, Quebec, 1867; Delayant, Notice sur Champlain, Niort, 1867; John Gilmary Shea, in Historical Magazine, xi. 64, 100, and in his Charlevoix, ii. 283.—Ed.] For the latest view of the subject, see Documents Inédits Relatifs au Tombeau de Champlain, par l’Abbé H. R. Casgrain, L’Opinion Publique, Montreal, 4 Nov., 1875; also, note 116 in Mr. Slafter’s Memoir of Champlain, in vol. i. of the Prince Society edition of Champlain’s Voyages, pp. 185, 186.
[387] [The book is extremely rare. Field says a collector may pass a lifetime without seeing it. In 1870, when the Quebec edition of Champlain was issued, the editors got their text from a copy in the Bibliothèque Impériale at Paris, which they believed to be unique. There are, however, copies in Harvard College Library (lacking signature G) and in the Carter-Brown Library (Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 25). The Lenox Library has a copy without date, which seems to be from different type, and shows some typographical changes. Cf. Harrisse, nos. 10 and 11; Brunet, Supplément, p. 241; Sabin, vol. iii. no. 11,834; Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana (1878, no. 694) showed a copy priced at 1,500 francs.
There is a translation of this 1604 book in Purchas’s Pilgrimes, part iv. A synopsis, “Navigation des François en la Nouvelle France dite Canada,” is given in the preface of the Mercure François, 1609, by Victor Palma Cayet (Harrisse, no. 395), which is found separately, with the title Chronologie septenaire de l’Histoire de la Paix entre les Rois de France et d’Espagne, 1598-1604, and of various dates,—1605, 1607, 1609, 1612 (Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 32; Stevens, Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, no. 2,456).
A letter of Champlain to the King on the discovery of New France, and other documents, are included in L. Andiat’s Brouage et Champlain (1578-1667), Documents inédits, Paris, 1879. It is an “Extrait des Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis, t. vi. (1879); “seventy-five copies were printed.—Ed.]
[388] [The text is more ample than was subsequently retained in the 1632 edition, while what appears in that edition after page 211 is not found in this 1613 edition. Some leaves, separately paged, contain Quatriesme Voyage du Sr. de Champlain, fait en l’année 1613. There are copies in the Harvard College, Carter-Brown (vol. ii. no. 147), Lenox, Cornell University (Sparks Catalogue, no. 498), New York State, New York Historical Society, and Massachusetts Historical Society libraries. Rich, in 1832, priced a copy at £1 12s.; Dufossé of late years has held a copy, with the map in fac-simile, at 400 francs; cf. Harrisse, no. 27; Sabin, vol. iii. no. 11,835. Neither Brunet nor Harrisse recognize the edition of 1615 mentioned by Faribault.—Ed.]
[389] [This map is further considered in its relation to the cartography of the period in the Editorial Note on the “Maps of the XVIIth Century,” which follows chapter vii.—Ed.]
[390] [The 1619 title is as follows: Voyages et descouvertures faites en la Nouvelle France depuis l’année 1615; jusques à la fin de l’année 1618; ... où sont descrits les mœurs, coustumes, habits, façons de guerroyer, chasses, dances, festins, et enterrements de divers peuples sauvages, et de plusieurs choses remarquables qui luy sont arrivées au dit païs, avec une description de la beauté, fertilité, et temperature d’iceluy. Paris, 1619. A few copies of this date (1619) are known (Sunderland, no. 2,688; Leclerc, no. 2,696, priced at 1,500 francs); but most copies are dated 1620, with the engraved title sometimes retaining the 1619 date (Dufossé, no. 3,145, at 900 francs, and no. 8,235, at 600 francs; O’Callaghan, no. 571, at $55; Ellis and White, 1878, at £35; Brunet, Supplément, no. 242; Huth Catalogue, vol. i. p. 292; Sabin, vol. iii. nos. 11,836, 11,837). The text is mostly retained in the 1632 edition, though the voyage of 1618 and some other parts are omitted (Harrisse, nos. 32, 33, 40).
There are copies of the 1619 date in the Lenox and Massachusetts Historical Society libraries, and of the 1620 date in the Carter-Brown and Lenox libraries, and in the Library of Congress.
The same engraved title and the text belong to the edition of 1627, which has a new printed title, and the Epistle and Preface reset. Copies of this date are in Harvard College, Carter-Brown, and Lenox libraries, and one was sold in the Brinley sale (no. 75). See the Jesuit Relations printed by the Lenox Library, p. 4; Sabin, vol. iii. no. 11,838. Stevens’s Nuggets prices a copy at £4 4s.—Ed.]
[391] [The publisher’s name varies in different copies. The Boston Public Library copy (with the map in fac-simile) has “chez Pierre Le Mur dans le grand Salle du Palais.” The Library of Congress copy reads “Lovis Sevestre pres la porte St. Victor.” One of the Harvard College copies has “chez Clavde Collet;” the other is a Le Mur copy. Other copies are in the Boston Athenæum (lacking the map), the New York Historical Society, and the State Library at Albany. Two copies have been lately sold in America, one in the Brinley Catalogue (no. 76), and the other in the O’Callaghan Catalogue (no. 572, $130), both with the map, which was supplied in fac-simile in a second O’Callaghan copy (no. 573), now in the Boston Public Library. The Sunderland copy (no. 2,687) had the map, which is often wanting. Dufossé (no. 8,236) held a copy with the genuine map at 650 francs, and other copies (nos. 5,551 and 8,961) with the map in fac-simile, at 450 and 550 francs. Leclerc priced one (no. 695) with a fac-simile map at 750 francs, and (no. 2,697) with “l’avis au lecteur” lacking, at 1,000 francs. Quaritch advertised one with a fac-simile map at £36. Cf. Sabin, vol. iii. no. 11,839; Brunet, Supplément, p. 242.
Some of the copies known have a passage at the end of the first paragraph on page 27, which was held to be a reflection on Richelieu, in saying that statesmen or princes might not understand the sailing of a ship, and this led to the cancelling of sheets Dij and Diij (Stevens’s Nuggets, vol. i. no. 511; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 268). One of these copies is in the Lenox Library; and one with, and another without, the passage are in the Carter-Brown Library (vol. ii. nos. 382 and 383).
Harrisse (nos. 50, 51) says that Champlain was at the date of this publication in Canada, that the book was doubtless made up by a compiler, and that the record of 1631 was furnished from another source than Champlain. Whoever arranged it abridged, omitted, and extended with an author’s license. Mr. O. H. Marshall believes that the book and the map never passed under Champlain’s supervision (Mag. of Amer. Hist., i. 5, 6).
This issue of 1632 was reissued in 1640, with a new title, and of this date there are copies in the Lenox and Carter-Brown libraries. Sabin says that Mr. Lenox suggests that this 1640 edition probably consists of rejected copies of the 1632 edition, since the cancelled, and not the substituted, leaves are in it, and these bear the marks of having been cut through with a sharp instrument (Sabin, vol. iii. no. 11,840, who says that Mr. Lenox contributed most of his data on the Champlain bibliography). Leclerc in 1878 advertised a set of the four dates (1604, 1613, 1620, and 1632), bound uniformly, for 6,000 francs.—Ed.]
[392] [It bears the title, Voyages du Sieur de Champlain; ou, Journal ès Découvertes de la Nouvelle France, in two octavo volumes. The edition (two hundred and fifty copies) was mostly distributed among public libraries. The text, says Brunet, is not carefully followed, and the plates are omitted.—Ed.]
[393] [This “seconde édition” is explained by the fact that about 1865 the printing of a complete edition of Champlain’s works was begun in Quebec; but just as the volumes were ready for publication, they were totally destroyed by fire. The work was begun afresh. Dr. Shea, who gives me this information, has a portion of the proofs of this first edition, of which no entire copy is known to be preserved.—Ed.]
[394] [The original manuscript is described and priced in Leclerc’s Bibliotheca Americana (1878, no. 693) in these words:—
Champlain (Samuel). Brief discours des choses plus remarquables que Samuel Champlain de brouage a reconnues aux Indes Occidentales Au voiage qu’il en a faict en Icelles en Lannee mil vciiijxx xix. et en Lannee mil vjcj. comme ensuit. (1599-1601). In-4, mar. violet. 15,000 francs. Manuscrit original et autographe orné de 6z dessins en couleur.
Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française, i. 78, spoke of it as being then (1865) at Dieppe (in the cabinet of M. Féret, “ancien maire de Dieppe”) and unpublished; but in 1859 the Hakluyt Society had printed an English translation of it, as noted in the text, with fac-similes of the drawings (Field, no. 269). There were accounts of the manuscript published in the Hist. Magazine, vii. 269; and in the Transactions of the Lit. and Hist. Soc. of Quebec, in 1863. It is now in the Carter-Brown library.—Ed.]
[395] [It reproduced the drawings of the West-India manuscript, and also the plates of the early printed editions; but as lithographs of copper-plates they are not very successful. It is now worth about $25 in paper. Field, Indian Bibliography, p. 66; cf. Revue des Questions historiques, 1er Juillet, 1873.—Ed.]
[396] [Abstracts of Champlain’s Canadian voyages will be found in Harris’s Collection of Voyages, vol. i. etc., and there is a narrative in the Mercure François, xix. 803, which in Parkman’s opinion was “perhaps written by Champlain.”
One of the best accounts for the English reader of Champlain and his associates will be found in Parkman’s Pioneers of France in the New World. Summaries are given in Guerin’s Navigateurs Français, p. 249; Ferland’s Histoire du Canada, book ii.; Miles’s Canada, chaps. 5-10; Warburton’s Conquest of Canada, etc.—Ed.]
[397] [Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 76.—Ed.]
[398] [See the note on “The Jesuit Relations,” sub anno 1627.—Ed.]
[399] The Historiæ Canadensis of Creuxius contains a list of the members of this Company under the title, Nomina Centenum, qui primi Societatem Nouae Franciae conflauerunt. Cf. Massachusetts Archives: Documents collected in France, i. 527, and references in Harrisse, nos. 43, 54, 430, 432, 433, 434, 438, 441, 455, 476, 532, 533; and cf. Ferland, Cours d’Histoire du Canada, p. 259, Shea’s Charlevoix, ii. 39, and notes.
[400] The letters-patent to Roberval copied from the original parchment, dated Fontainbleau, Jan. 15, 1540, is in Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, i. 373.
[401] Cf. Hakluyt’s Westerne Planting, pp. 26, 101, 197, 198. A copy of his commission is in Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, i. 431.
[402] The patent granted to De Monts, with other documents confirming his claims, was printed at the time in a small volume, copies of which are in the library of Mr. Charles Deane and in the Carter-Brown Library (Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 33).
It may also be seen in Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France, and an English translation is in Williamson’s History of Maine, i. 651-654, and Harris’s Voyages (1705), i. 813; cf. Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouvelle France, nos. 14, 15, 27. In the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, i. (p. 435), is a copy of De Monts’s proposition to the King, Henry IV., dated Nov. 6, 1603, with the King’s remarks (p. 445), and the “Lettres Patentes expediées en faveur de M. de Monts,” signed by the King at Paris, Dec. 18, 1603. These letters-patent made him lieutenant-general of Acadia (40° to 46° N. lat.) for ten years; and by an ordinance (p. 451) all persons were prohibited to trade within his government; and (p. 453) the King orders all duties to be remitted on merchandise sent home by De Monts. Cf. Faillon, Colonie Française, au Canada, i.; and Guerin, Les Navigations françaises.
[403] [This island, now known as Douchet Island, is a few miles within the mouth of the St. Croix River, which empties into Passamaquoddy Bay. In the latter part of the last century, when the commissioners of Great Britain and the United States were endeavoring to define the St. Croix River, which by treaty had been fixed as the eastern bound of the new nation, this island played an important part. The maps were not conclusive respecting the historic St. Croix, some of them, like that of Bellin in Charlevoix’s History (1744), rather indicating the Magaguadavic River, on the eastern side of the bay; but the discovery in 1797 of the foundation-stones of De Monts’s houses on this island, with large trees growing above them, settled the question. The island bears evidence of having considerably wasted by the wash of the river, and its few acres are at present hardly large enough for the purpose it served in 1604. It is known that then the colonists resorted to the main shore for their planting. The island now has a cottage upon it, which bears aloft a small light, to aid river navigation, and is maintained by the United States Government, the deepest water being on the easterly side. The Editor examined the island in 1882, but could not find that any traces of De Monts’s colony now remained, though fragments of “French brick” were found there by William Willis twenty years ago. Cf. Hannay’s Acadia, p. 74; Parkman’s Pioneers of France, p. 227; Williamson’s Maine, i. 190; ii. 578; Holmes’s Annals, i. 149. In a survey of 1798 the island is called Bone Island; and it has sometimes been called, because of its position, Neutral Island. A plan of the buildings is given on the opposite page.—Ed.]
[404] [For this exploration, see ch. iii.—Ed.]
[405] [There is an essay on Pontgravé in the Mélanges of Benjamin Sulte, Ottawa, 1876, p. 31.—Ed.]
[406] [The question of early Dutch sojourns or settlements on the coast is examined in J. W. De Peyster’s The Dutch at the North Pole, and the Dutch in Maine, 1857, and his Proofs considered of the Early Settlement of Acadia by the Dutch, 1858; and traces of remains at Pemaquid have been assigned to the Dutch; but see Johnston in the Popham Memorial, and in History of Bristol and Bremen; Sewall’s Ancient Dominions of Maine. The early settlements of this region are also tracked in B. F. De Costa’s Coasts of Maine. Cf. New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1853, p. 213; 1877, p. 337.—Ed.]
[407] [According to Parkman, the elaborate notices of Madame de Guercheville in the French biographical dictionaries of Hoefer and Michaud are drawn from the Mémoires de l’Abbé de Choisy.—Ed.]
[408] According to a careful census taken in 1686, the whole population of Acadia was 915, including 30 soldiers; and there were in the whole colony 986 horned cattle, 759 sheep, and 608 swine. (Murdoch’s History of Nova Scotia, i. 166, 167.) In 1689 the census gave the whole population as 803. (Ibid., p. 177.) Commenting on the almost stationary condition of the colony for nearly a century, Murdoch justly remarks: “It is a subject of grave reflection, that after eighty-four years had elapsed from the founding of Port Royal in 1605, and notwithstanding the expense of money and all the exertions of De Monts, Poutrincourt, La Tour, Denis, and others, men highly qualified for the task of colonization, the results should be so trifling. Many of the settlements were now desolate and abandoned, and none of them prosperous. Nearly forty years before, D’Aulnay had besieged St. John with a flotilla and five hundred men, and the defenders had been probably numerous. The contests and discords of ambitious leaders contributed, doubtless, to this unfavorable state of things; but the incessant interferences and invasions which the English at Boston carried on, must be considered as the chief causes of retarding the progress of French settlement in Acadia.”
[409] [See Vol. III. chap. ix.—Ed.]
[410] The grant from Sir William Alexander, dated in 1630, was recorded at Boston in the Suffolk Registry of Deeds (liber iii. folio 276) in 1659. This was to secure an English registry, as the region, since Sedgwick’s expedition in 1654, had become subject to England, and seemed likely to continue so.
[411] [The contract, March 27, 1632, between Richelieu and De Razilly for the reoccupation of Port Royal is in Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France (i. 545); and (p. 584) his commission to take possession and drive away British subjects, with (p. 586) his acceptance.—Ed.]
[412] Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, pp. 292, 332.
[413] Winthrop, History of New England, i. 109.
[414] The agreement for these vessels, dated June 30, 1643, between La Tour and Edward Gibbons, is in the Suffolk Deeds, i. 7, 8 (printed by order of the Board of Aldermen in 1880); and a mortgage of La Tour’s fort or plantation to Gibbons, dated May 13, 1645, as security for the payment of two thousand and eighty-four pounds, with interest, is recorded on folio 10. Neither instrument was recorded until 1652.
[415] A copy of the agreement is in the Plymouth Colony Records, ix. 59, 60, and the Latin translation is in Hutchinson’s Collection of Original Papers, pp. 146, 147.
[416] The marriage contract between La Tour and Madame d’Aulnay, which is dated Feb. 24, 1653, was printed in the original French, for the first time, in the Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, iii. 236-241. An English translation is in Murdoch’s History of Nova Scotia, i. 120-123.
[417] [Among those whom the treaty of Breda released from military service at Quebec, was the colonel of a regiment, Jean Vincent, Baron de St. Castine, who now took to life among the Indians, and became the son-in-law of Madockawando, or Matakando, the chief sachem of the Eastern Indians. He afterward lived on the peninsula still bearing his name, near the head of Penobscot Bay, at Fort Pentagöet,—a defence which the French had built as early probably as 1626, on the site possibly of an earlier fort, which may date to the time of the Guercheville expedition in 1613. Some traces of Fort Pentagöet still remain, representing probably the magazine and well. The English surrendered it to the French in 1670.In 1674 a pirate ship from Boston captured the post and took De Chambly and others prisoners. (Frontenac, Quebec, Nov. 14, 1674, to the minister, in Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, ii. 287, 291.) A Dutch frigate captured the fort in 1676. Castine in later years made Pentagöet the base of many warlike movements, in league with his Indian friends, against the English, till his return to France in 1708, when he left the “younger Castine,” a half-breed, behind, who is also a character of frequent prominence in later days. Cf. Wheeler’s History of Castine; Williamson’s Maine, i. 471, etc. (with references); Maine Hist. Coll. iii. 124, vi. 110, and vii., by J. E. Godfrey, who also has a paper on the younger Castine in the Historical Magazine, 1873. Cf. Maine Hist. Coll., vol. viii.; Mag. Am. Hist. 1883, p. 365.—Ed.]
[418] [For the relations of this expedition to the general events of the harrowing war of that year, see chapter vii. of the present volume.—Ed.]
[419] [Kohl (Discovery of Maine, p. 234) thinks that the name Larcadia appeared first in Ruscelli’s map of 1561. The origin of the name Acadie usually given is a derivation from the Indian Aquoddiauke, the place of the pollock (Historical Magazine, i. 84), or a Gallicized rendering of the quoddy of our day, as preserved in Passamaquoddy and the like. Cf. Principal Dawson on the name, in the Canadian Antiquarian, October, 1876, and Maine Hist. Soc. Coll. i. 27. The word Acadie is said to be first used as the name of the country in the letters-patent of the Sieur de Monts.—Ed.]
[420] Histoire de la Nouvelle France, contenant les navigations, découvertes, et habitations faits par les Francois és Indes Occidentales & Nouvelle France souz l’avoeu & l’authorité de noz Rois Tres Chrétiens, et les diverses fortunes d’iceux en l’execution de ces choses, depuis cent ans jusques à hui. En quoy est comprise l’Histoire Morale, Naturelle & Geographique de la dite province. Avec les Tables & Figures a’icelle. Par Marc Lescarbot, Avocat en Parlement, Temoin oculaire d’vne partie des choses ici recitées. A Paris, chez Jean Milot, tenant sa boutique sur les degrez de la grand’ salle du Palais. 1609. 8vo. pp. 888.
[Lescarbot was in the country with De Monts, and again with Poutrincourt in 1606-7. Charlevoix calls his narrative “sincere, well-informed, sensible, and impartial.” The third book covers Cartier’s voyage; the fourth and fifth cover those of De Monts, Poutrincourt, Champlain, etc.; while the sixth is given to the natives. The first edition (1609) is very rare. Rich in 1832 priced it at £1 1s. Recent sales much exceed that sum: Bolton Corney, in 1871, £27; Leclerc, no. 749, 1,200 francs, and no. 2,836, 450 francs; Quaritch, £40; another London Catalogue, in 1878, £45. Cf. Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouvelle France, nos. 16 and 17; Sabin’s Dictionary, no. 40,169; Ternaux-Compans, Bibl. Amér. no. 321; Faribault, pp. 86-87. There are copies in the Carter-Brown (Catalogue, ii. 87) and Murphy collections.
This edition, as well as the later ones, usually has bound with it a collection of Lescarbot’s verses, Les Muses de la Nouvelle France, and among them a commemorative poem on a battle between Membertou, a chief of the neighborhood, and the “Sauvages Armor-chiquois.”
The later editions of the history were successively enlarged; that of 1618 much extended, and of a different arrangement. The edition of 1611 is priced by Dufossé, 580 francs. There are copies in the Library of Congress, and in the Murphy and Carter-Brown (Catalogue, ii. 117) collections; cf. Harrisse, no. 23.
The edition of 1612 was the one selected by Tross, of Paris, in 1866, to reprint. There are copies in the Astor and Harvard College Libraries; cf. Harrisse, no. 25; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 917; Brinley Catalogue, no. 103. It seems to be the same as the 1611 edition, with the errata corrected.
The edition of 1618 contains, additionally, the second voyage of Poutrincourt; and entering into his dispute with the Jesuits, Lescarbot takes sides against the latter. This edition is severally priced by Leclerc, no. 2,837, at 850 francs; by Dufossé, at 950 francs. Rich had priced it in 1832 at £1 10s. There are copies in the Library of Congress and in the Carter-Brown (Catalogue, ii. 201) Collection; cf. Harrisse, no. 31; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 915. Some authorities report copy or copies with 1617 for the date.
It is somewhat doubtful if more maps than the general one and another appeared in the original 1609 edition; Sabin and the Huth Catalogue give three. In the 1611 edition there is reference in the text to three maps; but another map (Port Royal) is often found in it, and the 1618 edition has usually the four maps. The Huth Catalogue says that no map belonged to the English edition; the map found in the Grenville copy, as in the Massachusetts Historical Society copy, belonging to the French original. Sabin, however, gives it a map. The general map is reproduced in Tross’s reprint, in Faillon’s Colonie Française au Canada, and in the Popham Memorial; and a part of it in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 49. The Catalogue of the Library of Parliament (Canadian), 1858, p. 1614, shows two maps of the St. Lawrence River and gulf, copied from originals by Lescarbot in the Paris archives.
Among the other productions of Lescarbot is the La Conversion des Sauvages qui ont été baptistes dans la Nouvelle France cette anne 1610, avec un recit du Voyage du Sieur de Poutrincourt, which Sabin calls “probably the rarest of Lescarbot’s books;” cf. Harrisse, no. 21. Another tract, published in Paris in 1612—Relation derniere de ce qui c’est passe au voyage du Sieur de Poutrincourt en la Nouvelle France depuis vingt mois en ça, supplementing his larger work—has been reprinted in the Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France, vol. xv. In 1618 he printed a tract—Le Bout de l’an, sur le repos de la France, par le Franc Gaulois—addressed to Louis XIII., urging him to the conquest of the savages of the west; Sunderland Catalogue, no. 4,933, £10, 10s. It is translated in Poor’s Gorges in the Popham Memorial, p. 140.
Another nearly contemporary account of the De Monts expedition is found in Cayet’s Chronologie Septenaire 1609 (Sabin’s Dictionary, vol. iii. no. 11,627) a precursor of the Mercure Française, which for a long while chronicled the yearly events. Cf. an English version from the Mercure in Magazine of American History, ii. 49.
Lescarbot’s account of the natives may be supplemented by that in Biard’s Relation. Hannay (chap. ii.) and the other historians of Acadia treat this subject, and Father Vetromile, S. J., at one time a missionary among the present remnants of the western tribes of Acadia, prepared an account of their history, which was printed in the Maine Hist. Coll., vol. vii.; and in 1866 he issued the Abnakis and their History. He died in 1881, and his manuscript Dictionary of the Abenaki Dialects is now in the archives of the Department of the Interior at Washington; Proceedings of the Numismatic Society of Philadelphia, 1881, p. 33; cf. also Maurault, Histoire des Abênaquis. Williamson, History of Maine, vol. i. ch. xvii., etc., enlarges on the tribal varieties of the Indians of the western part of Acadia, and (p. 469) on the Etechemins, or those east of the Penobscot; and later (p. 478), on the Micmacs or Souriquois, who were farther east. Williamson’s references are useful.
Shea, in his notes to Charlevoix, i. 276, says: “Champlain says the Kennebec Indians were Etechemins. Their language differed from the Micmac. The name Abenaki seems to have applied to all between the Sokokis and the St. John; the language of these tribes, the Abenakis or Kennebec Indians, the Indians on the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy, being almost the same.”—Ed.]
[421] Nova Francia; or the Description of that Part of New France which is one continent with Virginia. Described in the three late Voyages and Plantation made by Monsieur de Monts, Monsieur de Pont-Gravé, and Monsieur de Poutrincourt, into the countries called by the Frenchmen La Cadie, lying to the Southwest of Cape Breton. Together with an excellent severall Treatie of all the commodities of the said countries, and maners of the naturall inhabitants of the same. Translated out of French into English by P. E. London: Printed for Andrew Hebb, and are to be sold at the signe of the Bell in Paul’s Church-yard, [1609.] 4to. pp. 307.
This volume is a translation of books iv. and vi. of Lescarbot’s larger work; but it has been noted as a curious circumstance that the author’s name does not appear on the titlepage, and is nowhere mentioned in the volume. There are two copies in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society: one in the general library contains Lescarbot’s map, and has manuscript notes by the late Rev. Dr. Alexander Young; the other copy, in the Dowse Library, formerly belonged to Henri Ternaux-Compans. It is without the map, but contains the Preface and Table of Contents, which are not in the copy first mentioned. It is from the same type, but has a slightly different titlepage and imprint; the Dowse copy purporting to be published at London by George Bishop, and bearing the date 1609. It was a common practice of the printers of that time to sell copies of the same work with different titlepages, each containing the name of the bookseller who bought the printed sheets.
[This version was made at the instance of Hakluyt, and published with the express intention of showing, by contrast, the greater fitness of Virginia for colonization. Cf. Bibliotheca Grenvilliana; Huth Catalogue, iii. 839; Sabin, x. 40,175; Crowninshield Catalogue, no. 398; Griswold Catalogue, no. 436; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 916; Harrisse, no. 19. Rich priced it in 1832 at £2 2s.; a copy in the Bolton Corney sale, in 1871, brought £37. There are other copies in the libraries of Congress, New York Historical Society, Harvard College, and in the Carter-Brown Collection (Catalogue, ii. 102); cf. Churchill’s Voyages, 1745, vol. ii. Erondelle’s version is also given in Purchas, vol. iv. A German version, abridged from the 1609 original, appeared at Augsburg in 1613, called Gründliche Historey von Nova Francia. There is a copy in the Library of Congress, and in the Carter-Brown Collection (Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 154). Cf. Harrisse, no. 29; O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 1,374; Brinley Catalogue, no. 105; Sabin’s Dictionary, x. 40,177. Koehler, of Leipsic, priced this German edition in 1883 at 120 marks.—Ed.]
[422] [The visits of the Jesuits to Acadia and Penobscot in 1611 are recounted in Jouvency’s Historiæ Societatis Jesu pars quinta, Rome, 1710, drawn largely from the Relations.—Ed.]
[423] [There are, of course, illustrative materials in Lescarbot and Champlain, and on the English side in Purchas, Smith, and Gorges among the older writers; cf. George Folsom’s paper in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 2d series, vol. i. Champlain’s language has led some to suppose Argall had ten vessels with him besides his own; cf. Holmes, Annals; Parkman, Pioneers; De Costa, in Vol. III. chap. vi. of this History.—Ed.]
[424] Description Geographique et Historique des Costes de l’Amerique Septentrionale. Avec l’Histoire naturelle du Païs. Par Monsieur Denys, Gouverneur Lieutenant General pour le Roy, & proprietaire de toutes les Terres & Isles qui sont depuis le Cap du Campseaux jusque au Cap des Roziers. Tome I. A Paris, chez Loüis Billaine, au second pillier de la grand’ Salle du Palais, à la Palme & au grand Cesar. 1672. 16mo. pp. 267.
[Some copies have the imprint, “Chez Claude Barbin,” as in the Harvard College copy. There are other copies in the Library of Congress and in the Carter-Brown Collection (Catalogue, ii. 1,078). Sabin (vol. v. no. 19,615) says it should have a map; but Harrisse (nos. 136, 137) says he has found none in eight copies examined. Cf. Stevens’s Bibliotheca Historica (1870), no. 562; O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 767, both without the map; cf. Harrisse, no. 102. Charlevoix says of Denys, “he tells nothing but what he saw himself.” There is a copy of a Dutch version (1688) in Harvard College Library.—Ed.]
[425] [Mr. Smith, the writer of the present chapter, has given a succinct account of the relations of the rival claimants with the Massachusetts people in the Memorial History of Boston, vol. i. chap. vii., with references, p. 302. The general historians, from Denys and Charlevoix, all tell the story; cf. Historical Magazine, iii. 315; iv. 281, and various papers in the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, i. 599; ii. 1, 7, 9, 19, 25, 91. The Rival Chiefs, a novel, by Mrs. Cheney, is based on the events. See Rameau, Une Colonie féodale, p. xxxiii; Murdoch’s Nova Scotia, i. 120.—Ed.]
[426] Memorials of the English and French Commissaries concerning the Limits of Nova Scotia or Acadia. London: Printed in the Year 1755. 8vo. pp. 771.
[This volume is said to have been drawn up by Charles Townshend (Bancroft, original ed., iv. 100), and is fuller than the corresponding work previously issued in Paris under the title, Mémoires des Commissaires du Roi et de Ceux de sa Majesté Britannique sur les Possessions et les droits respectifs des deux Couronnes en Amerique. 4 vols. 4to. Paris, 1755. Another edition of this last appeared the next year in 8 vols. 12mo, and again in three thick but small volumes at Copenhagen in 1755 (Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. iii. no. 1074, etc.). The English edition above named contains the English case (both in English and French), signed W. Shirley and W. Mildmay, and dated at Paris, Sept. 21, 1750; and the French, signed by La Galissonière and De Silhouette, and dated the same day. Then follows the English memorial of Jan. 11, 1751, with the French reply (Oct. 4, 1751), and the English rejoinder (Jan. 23, 1753). In these papers the maps cited and examined are the English maps of Purchas, Berry, Morden, Thornton, Halley, Popple, and Salmon, the Dutch maps of De Laet and Visscher, and the French maps of Lescarbot, Champlain, Hennepin, De Lisle, Bellin and Danville, De Fer (1705) and Gendreville (1719). The rest of the volume is made of “Pièces Justificatives” brought forward by each side. There were maps accompanying these respective editions, setting forth the limits as claimed by the two sides, and marking by lines and shadings the extent of the successive patents of jurisdiction which follow down the region’s history. Jefferys and Le Rouge were the engravers on the opposing sides. John Green was the writer of the Explanation accompanying the Jefferys map. There was another edition in English of the case, printed at the Hague in 1756, under the title, All the Memorials of Great Britain and France since the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.
The contemporary literature of the controversy is extensive, and it all goes over the historical evidence in a way to throw much light, when separated from partisanship, on the history of Acadia. It may be said to have begun with a work mentioned by Obadiah Rich, A Geographical History of Nova Scotia, London, 1749 (Sabin, Dictionary of Books Relating to America, vol. xiii. no. 56,135), of which a French translation was published also in London (Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. iii. no. 1,064), and a German one the next year.
Jefferys printed in 1754, The Conduct of the French with regard to Nova Scotia, from its First Settlement to the Present Time; and this appeared in a French version in London (Conduite des François) in the same year, with notes said to be written by Butel-Dumont.
The next year, Dr. William Clarke, of Boston, also reviewed the historical claims from the discovery of Cabot, in his Observations ... with regard to the [French] Encroachments, Boston, 1755,—a tract also reprinted in London. There may be likewise noted Pidansat de Mairobert’s Discussion summaire sur les anciennes limites de l’Acadie, printed at Basel, 1755 (Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. iii. no. 1,035); Moreau’s Mémoire, Paris, 1756; and Jefferys’ Remarks on the French Memorials, London, 1756. The last has two maps, setting forth respectively the French and English ideas and claims of the various occupancies and settlements under grant and charter; the French map is reduced from the original of the commissioners, and it may also be found in the Atlas Ameriquain published at this time. At a later period, when the identity of De Monts’ St. Croix became an international question, the folio Correspondence relating to the Boundary between the British Possessions in North America and the United States of America, under the Treaty of 1783, was presented to Parliament July, 1840, and included an historical examination of the question, with maps and drafts from Lescarbot’s, Delisle’s, and Coronelli’s maps. Cf. in this connection Nathan Hale’s review of the history in the North American Review, vol. xxvi. In Shea’s edition of Charlevoix, i. 248, there is a note on the various limits assigned by early writers to Acadia.—Ed.
[427] Sir William Alexander and American Colonization. Including three Royal Charters; a Tract on Colonization; a Patent of the County of Canada and of Long Island; and the Roll of the Knights-Baronets of New Scotland. With Annotations and a Memoir. By the Rev. Edmund F. Slafter, A.M. Boston: Published by the Prince Society. 1873. 4to. pp. vii and 283.
[Mr. Slafter devotes a section of his monograph to the bibliography of his subject. Alexander’s tract, Encouragement to Colonies, which was printed in London in 1624 (some copies in 1625), and of which the unsold copies were reissued in 1630 as The Mapp and Description of New England, is printed entire by Slafter. The book is rare. Stevens, Nuggets, no. 59, prices it at £21; cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, nos. 739, 740. The map which accompanied both editions is given by Slafter, and in part in Vol. III. of the present work, and has been reproduced elsewhere, as Slafter (p. 124) explains. Hazard, Collections, i. 134, 206, prints some of the documentary evidence, and the British Museum Catalogue of Manuscripts shows that the Egerton Manuscripts, 2,395, fol. 20-26, also touch the subject. In further elucidation, see Thomas C. Banks, Statement of the Case of Alexander Earl of Stirling, London, 1832, and his Baronia Anglia Concentrata, 1844, and the various expositions of the claims to the earldom in the several works referred to by Slafter, p. 115; and also Rogers, Memorials of the Earls of Stirling and House of Alexander, i. chaps. iv. and v. Mr. Slafter subsequently enlarged his statement regarding the Copper Coinage of the Earl of Stirling, and issued it as a tract with this title in 1874. Mr. C. W. Tuttle reviewed Mr. Slafter’s labors in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 106.—Ed.]
[428] A Geographical View of the District of Maine, with Particular Reference to its Internal Resources, including the History of Acadia, Penobscot River and Bay; with Statistical Tables showing the Comparative Progress of Maine with each State in the Union, a List of the Towns, their Incorporation, Census, Polls, Valuation, Counties, and Distances from Boston. By Joseph Whipple. Bangor: Printed by Peter Edes. 1816. 8vo. pp. 102.
[429] An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, in two Volumes. Illustrated by a Map of the Province and Several Engravings. By Thomas C. Haliburton, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, and Member of the House of Assembly of Nova Scotia. Halifax: Printed and published by Joseph Howe. 1829. 8vo. pp. 340 and viii, 433 and iii.
[430] [Hannay, however, who followed Murdoch, freely acknowledges the great value of Winthrop, in that “without his aid it would have been impossible to give an accurate statement of the singular story of La Tour.”—Ed.]
[431] A History of Nova Scotia, or Acadie. By Beamish Murdoch, Esq., Q.C. Halifax, N. S.: James Barnes. 1865-1867. 3 vols. 8vo. pp. xv and 543, xiv and 624, xxiii and 613.
[Some later works deserve a word. Moreau’s L’Acadie Françoise covers the interval, 1598-1755, and draws upon the Paris archives.
Rameau’s Une Colonie féodale en Amérique: L’Acadie, 1604-1710, published at Paris in 1877, is called by Parkman (Boston Athenæum Bulletin, where his comments appear far too seldom) “a rather indifferent book, carelessly written; containing, however, some facts not elsewhere to be found about certain small settlements.” In the New York Nation, nos. 652, 666, is a review, with Rameau’s rejoinder.
James Hannay’s History of Acadia, St. John, N. B., 1879, is a well-compacted piece of work, somewhat unsatisfactory to the student, however, through the absence of authorities. In his preface he pays a tribute to the annals of Murdoch, and says he has attempted “to weave into a consistent narrative the facts which Murdoch had treated in a more fragmentary way.”—Ed.]
[432] Cours d’Histoire du Canada. Par J. B. A. Ferland, Prêtre, Professeur d’Histoire à l’Uni versité-Laval. Première Partie. 1534-1663. Québec: Augustin Coté. 1861. 8vo. pp. xi and 522.
[433] Histoire du Canada, depuis sa Découverte jusqu’à nos Jours. Par F.-X. Garneau. Seconde Édition, corrigée et augmentée. Québec: John Lovell. 1852. 3 vols. 8vo. pp. xxii and 377, 454, 410.
[434] History of Canada, from the Time of its Discovery till the Union Year (1840-1841). Translated from L’Histoire du Canada of F.-X. Garneau, Esq., and accompanied with illustrative notes, etc. By Andrew Bell. Montreal: John Lovell. 1860. 3 vols. 8vo. pp. xxii and 382, 404, 442.
[435] The First English Conquest of Canada: with Some Account of the Earliest Settlements in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. By Henry Kirke, M.A., B.C.L., Oxon. London: Bemrose & Sons. 1871. 8vo. pp. xi and 227.
[436] Pioneers of France in the New World. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1865. 8vo. pp. xxii and 420. [Mme. de Clermont-Tonnere has translated this and other of Mr. Parkman’s works, but with liberties prompted no doubt by disagreements in matters of religious faith. The Pioneers was the earliest, chronologically, in the series of France and England in North America,—a general title under which Mr. Parkman has already told a large part of the story of the French colonization in North America; but a later subject, the struggle of the Indians under Pontiac after the final English conquest, had before this engaged his pen. The characterization of later volumes of this series belongs to other chapters, in which will also be found further estimates of the other general historians here particularized. The Abbé Casgrain published at Quebec in 1872 an essay on Francis Parkman, pp. 89, with a lithographic portrait. Cf. a review by the Comte Circourt in the Revue des Questions Historiques, xix, 616; and references in Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature. The Editor would take this occasion to express his constant obligations to Mr. Parkman in the preparation of the present volume.—Ed.]
[437] Count Frontenac, and New France under Louis XIV. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1877. 8vo. pp. xvi and 463.
[438] Purchas, His Pilgrimage, London, 1614, p. 751.
[439] Named Ste. Claire, or St. Clare, after a Franciscan nun, but now spelled St. Clair.
[440] Ontario, or Skanadario, native name for beautiful lake.
[441] Purchas, His Pilgrimage, London, 1614, p. 747. [Cf. Professor Shaler’s Introduction to the present volume.—Ed.]
[442] [See the note on the Jesuit Relations, following the succeeding chapter, and L. H. Morgan on the Geographical Distribution of the Indians, in the North American Review, vol. cx. p. 33.—Ed.]
[443] See chapter ii.; also, a paper on the discovery of copper relics near Brockville, in the Canadian Journal, 1856, pp. 329, 334.
[444] Colonial State Papers.
[445] Chapter iii.
[446] [Cf. Parkman’s references on the fur-trade, given in his Old Régime in Canada, p. 309.—Ed.]
[447] Sagard, Histoire du Canada, Paris edition, 1865, pp. 589, 781; Champlain, Paris edition, 1634, p. 220.
[448] Parkman, Pioneers of France, pp. 377, 378.
[449] Sagard, Canada, Paris edition, 1865, p. 717.
[450] Champlain, edition of 1632.
[451] Hubbard’s New England. [See vol. iii. chap. ix.—Ed.]
[452] Fleet’s Journal, in Neill’s Founders of Maryland. Munsell, Albany, 1876. [See vol. iii. chap. xiii.—Ed.]
[453] See chapter iii.
[454] Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. xix.
[455] [This lake is shown in De Laet’s map of 1630, of which a fac-simile is given in chapter ix.—Ed.]
[456] Young’s “Voyage,” in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., ix. 115, 116.
[457] Le Jeune to Vimont, in the Relation of 1640, writes: “Some Frenchmen call them the ‘Nation of Stinkers,’ because the Algonquin word Ouinipeg signifies ‘stinking water.’ They thus call the water of the sea. Therefore these people call themselves ‘Ouinipegous,’ because they come from the shores of a sea of which we have no knowledge; and we must not call them the Nation of Stinkers, but the ‘Nation of the Sea.’”
In the Jesuit Relations of 1647-48 is the following: “On its shores [Green Bay] dwell a different people of an unknown language,—that is to say, a language neither Algonquin nor Huron. These people are called the Puants, not on account of any unpleasant odor that is peculiar to them, but because they say they came from the shores of a sea far distant toward the west, the waters of which being salt, they call themselves the ‘people of the stinking water.’”
[458] Relation of 1643. [See note on the Jesuit Relations.—Ed.]
[459] Outaouacs, or Ottawas, was a name applied to all the upper Indians who came to Montreal or Quebec to trade. The Relation of 1671 gives the origin of the name: “We have given the name of Outaouacs to all the savages of these countries, although of different nations, because the first who have appeared among the French have been Outaouacs.” Francis Assikinach, an Indian, published in 1858-60, various papers on the Odahwah legends and languages in the Canadian Journal.
[460] Groseilliers—sometimes written Grozelliers and Groselliers—was born in 1621, and in early life was a pilot. He married his second wife on August 24, 1653, and had a large family by her,—Jean Baptiste, born at Three Rivers, July 25, 1654; Marie Anne, August 7, 1657; Marguerite, April 15, 1659; Marie Antoinette, June 7, 1661.
The Sieur Radisson was the son of Sebastien and Madeleine Hayet Radisson. The St. Croix River of Minnesota is so called because as La Sueur says a Frenchman of that name was drowned in the stream. Before the year 1700 it is on the maps marked Madeleine, perhaps in compliment to Radisson’s mother.
[461] Relation of 1660: “Firent heureusement rencontre d’une belle rivière, grande, large, profonde, et comparable, disent ils, à nostre grande fleuve le Saint Laurent.”
[462] Duchesneau, Intendant of Canada, describes the Ottawas in these words: “The Outawas Indians, who are divided into several tribes, and are nearest to us, are those of the greatest use, because through them we obtain beaver; and although they do not hunt generally, and have but a small portion of peltry in their country, they go in search of it to the most distant places, and exchange it for our merchandise. They are the Themistamens [Temiscamings], Nepisseriens [Nipissings], Missisakis, Amicouës, Sauteurs [Ojibways], Kiskakons, and Thionontatorons [Petun Hurons].”—N. Y. Coll. Doc. ix. 160.
[463] Tailhan’s Perrot, p. 92.
[464] [See note on Jesuit Relations sub anno 1662-1663.—Ed.]
[465] [Given on a later page.—Ed.]
[466] [Given on a later page.—Ed.]
[467] [See note on the Jesuit Relations.—Ed.]
[468] Franquelin’s map calls the stream at the extremity of Lake Superior, which now forms a portion of the northern boundary of Minnesota, Groseilliers.
[469] [There is a portrait of Talon in the Hotel Dieu at Quebec. It is engraved in Shea’s Charlevoix, iii., and Le Clercq, ii. 61. His instructions are dated March 27, 1665. His eagerness was not altogether satisfactory to Colbert, who warns him, April 5, 1666, that the “King would never depopulate his kingdom to people Canada.” Talon in return (Mass. Archives: Docs. Coll. in France, ii. 189, 195), advocated the purchase of New Netherland, so as to confine the English to New England; but the English were about settling that question their own way.
A mémoire (1667) sur l’état présent du Canada, probably by Talon, is in Faribault’s Collection de Mémoires sur l’histoire ancienne du Canada, Quebec, 1840. Faillon (vol iii. part iii.) enlarges upon the zeal of Louis XIV. for the colony. The Bishop of Quebec meanwhile had his apprehensions. He warns the home government against allowing Protestants to come out. “Quebec is not very far from Boston,” he says, “and to multiply the Protestants is to invite revolution.” Massachusetts Archives: Documents Collected in France, ii. 233.—Ed.]
[470] This may be the Péré, or Perray, whose name is given on Franquelin’s map of 1688 to the Moose River of Hudson’s Bay. Bellin says that it was named after a Frenchman who discovered it. In 1677 the Sieur Péré was with La Salle at Fort Frontenac. Frontenac, in November, 1679, writes to the King that Governor Andros of New York “has retained there, and even well treated, a man named Péré, and others who have been alienated from Sieur de la Salle, with the design to employ and send them among the Outawas, to open a trade with them.” The Intendant, Duchesneau, writes more fully to Seignelay, “that the man named Péré, having resolved to range the woods, went to Orange to confer with the English, and to carry his beavers there, in order to obtain some wampum beads to return and trade with the Outawacs; that he was arrested by the Governor of that place, and sent to Major Andros, Governor-General, whose residence is at Manatte; that his plan was to propose to bring to him all the coureurs de bois with their peltries.” After this he seems to have been “a close prisoner at London for eighteen months” (N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 479). Governor Dongan, on Sept. 8, 1687, sends Mons. La Parre to Canada “with an answer to the French Governor’s angry letter.” Nicholas Perrot in the old documents is sometimes called Peré, and this has led to confusion.
[471] Father Allouez, the first Jesuit to visit Green Bay, writes: “We set out from Saut [Ste. Marie] the 3d of November [1669], according to my dates; two canoes of Ponteouatamis wishing to take me to their country, not that I might instruct them, they having no disposition to receive the faith, but to soften some young Frenchmen who were among them, for the purpose of trading, and who threatened and ill-treated them.”
[472] Bancroft, giving reins to the imagination, wrote in his early editions of “brilliantly clad officers from the veteran armies of France” being present (Hist. of the United States, iii. 154).
[473] The “Procès Verbal” of Talon, as given by Margry and Tailhan, mentions fourteen nations; among others: 1. Achipoés [Ojibways or Chippeways]; 2. Malamechs; 3. Noquets; 4. Banabeoueks [Ouinipegouek, or Winnebagoes?]; 5. Makomiteks; 6. Poulteattemis [Pottowattamies]; 7. Oumalominis [Menomonees]; 8. Sassassaouacottons [Osaukees or Sauks?]; 9. Illinois; 10. Mascouttins. The Hurons and Ottawas, at a later period, conferred with the French and assented to the treaty; and this would account for Talon’s assertion, as given in his report quoted in the text, that there were seventeen tribes.
[474] Margry, i. 367.
[475] Margry, i. 322. La Salle writes in August, 1682: “The brother Louis le Bohesme, Jesuit, who works for the Indians in the capacity of gunsmith at Sault Ste. Marie, advised him [a deserter] to hide in the house of the Fathers the goods which he stole from me.” (Margry, ii. 226.)
[476] [Cf. Courcelles au lac Ontario, in Margry’s Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l’Amérique septentrionale, part i. p. 169; and Relation du Voyage de M. de Courcelles au lac Ontario, in Brodhead’s New York Colonial Documents, vol. ix. p. 75.—Ed.]
[477] Letter to Frontenac.
[478] [Given on a later page.—Ed.]
[479] Shea, Charlevoix, iii. 177; Parkman, Discovery of the Great West, p. 154.
[480] Mount Joliet is about sixty feet in height. The summit is two hundred and twenty-five feet wide, and thirteen hundred long. It is forty miles southwest of Chicago, in the vicinity of the city of Joliet, Illinois.
[481] Joliet, in his letter written on the map prepared for Frontenac, speaks of passing the years 1673 and 1674 in explorations of the Mississippi valley. [See this letter in fac-simile on a later page.—Ed.]
At the conclusion of his note to Frontenac, he alludes to the disaster which happened a quarter of an hour before his arrival at the point from which, in September, 1672, he had departed, in these words: “I had avoided perils from savages, I had passed forty-two rapids, and was about to land, with full joy at the success of so long and difficult an enterprise, when, after these dangers, my canoe upset. I lost two men and my box (cassette) in sight of, at the door of, the first French settlements which I had left almost two years before.”
Marquette conveys the impression that Joliet returned with him to Green Bay in September, 1673; but when, in a few weeks, he went back to the Illinois country between Chicago and Lake Peoria, he found several Frenchmen trading with the Indians, and among others mentions La Taupine, or Pierre Moreau, who in 1671 was with Joliet at Sault Ste. Marie. Near one of the upper tributaries of the Illinois on Joliet’s map appears Mont Joliet. May Joliet not have traded in this vicinity during the winter of 1673-1674, and may not Taupine and others have been his associates?
[482] [Cf. narrative in chapter vii. A plan of this fort is given on a later page.—Ed.]
[483] Margry, i. 329.
[484] Ibid., i. 277.
[485] Du Lhut and Hennepin.
[486] Margry, i. 283.
[487] Ibid., i. 287.
[488] Ibid., i. 334.
[489] Margry, i. 333.
[490] Ibid., i. 337.
[491] N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 104.
[492] Margry, ii. 252.
[493] La Salle and Hennepin both write Du Luth.
[494] N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 795.
[495] Du Lhut’s letter to Seignelay, in Harrisse, speaks of the Izatys. The Issati or Isanti—Knife Indians—was the name of an eastern division of the Sioux that dwelt near Knife River, and perhaps made and traded stone knives.
[496] N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 132.
[497] Du Lhut’s letter, in Harrisse.
[498] Margry, ii. 252.
[499] Margry, ii. 251.
[500] Perhaps intended for Meshdeke Wakpa, River of the Foxes.
[501] Chapa Wakpa in the Sioux language is Beaver River.
[502] La Salle writes: “Michel Accault qui estoit le conducteur leur fit présenter le calumet.” Margry, ii. 255.
[503] La Salle, who probably received his information from the leader, Accault, gives a different version. [See the note on Hennepin on a later page.—Ed.]
[504] Harrisse makes the date of the letter 1685, at which time its writer was near Lake Superior; Shea, in its translation appended to his edition of Hennepin, retains the same date.
[505] He probably established the post near the Sioux at the portage of the St. Croix River, which upon Franquelin’s map of 1688 is called Fort St. Croix. The hostility of the Indians at the Bay may have led him to seek the point by way of Lake Superior.
[506] Louis XIV. confusedly writes on July 31, 1684: “It also appears to me that one of the principal causes of this war proceeds from the man named Du Lhut having two Iroquois killed who assassinated two Frenchmen on Lake Superior.”
[507] Tonty in Margry, i. 614.
[508] Margry, ii. 343.
[509] Bellin, in Remarques sur la Carte de l’Amérique Septentrionale, Paris, 1755, writes: “In the eastern part of Lake Nepigon there is a river by which one may ascend to the head of Hudson’s Bay. It is said this was discovered by a Canadian named Perray, who was the first to travel this route, and gave his name to the river.”
[510] Son of Groseilliers.
[511] Fort La Tourette. See Franquelin’s map of 1688 on a later page.
[512] Greyselon de la Tourette.
[513] De la Barre, Oct. 1, 1684; N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 243.
[514] N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 231.
[515] La Potherie.
[516] La Potherie, chap. xv. 165.
[517] Franquelin, in his map of 1688, as will be seen, marks the hill where the French wintered as a few miles above the Black River, probably montagne qui trempe l’eau. Major Long, in 1817, writes of “high bluff-lands at this point towering into precipices and peaks, completely insulated from the main bluffs by a broad flat prairie.”
[518] Franquelin’s map of 1688.
[519] Denonville, Nov. 12, 1685, N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 263.
[520] The history of this soleil has been given by Professor J. D. Butler, of Madison, in Wisconsin Historical Society’s Collections. In 1686 it was presented to the Jesuit mission at Depere, Wisconsin. In 1687 the mission-house was burned; in 1802 the soleil was ploughed up, and is now in the vault of the Bishop of the Church of Rome at Green Bay. See Shea’s History of Catholic Missions, p. 372.
[521] Nicholas Perrot married Marie Madeleine Raclot. His child Francois was born at Three Rivers, Aug. 8, 1672; Nicolas was born in 1674; Clemence in 1676; Michel, in 1677; Marie, in 1679; Marie Anne, on July 25, 1681; Claude, ——; Jean Baptiste in 1688; Jean, Aug. 15, 1690. In his old age he resided at the seigniory, Becancour, not far from Three Rivers, on the St. Lawrence. About the year 1718 he died.
[522] Tonty had been ordered to raise a party of Illinois and attack in the rear, while Denonville was charging in front; but he could not find enough men, and therefore joined Du Lhut, his cousin.
[523] [See chap. vii.—Ed.]
[524] Denonville, Aug. 25, 1687. N. Y. Col. Docs. ix.
[525] La Hontan writes: “I am to go along with M. Dulhut, a Lyons gentleman, and a person of great merit, who has done his King and his country very considerable service. M. de Tonti makes another of our company.” Joutel in his Journal mentions that Tonty reached his post in the Illinois country October 27, 1687.
[526] The post at Wisconsin River was called Fort St. Nicholas, suggested by Perrot’s baptismal name. In August, 1683, Engelran wrote to Governor de la Barre from Mackinaw: “M. de Boisguillot fulfils faithfully the duties of the position which has been assigned him during the absence of those who are under your command.” Le Sueur says St. Croix River was called from a Frenchman, and it is thought the River St. Pierre was named in compliment to Pierre Le Sueur.
[527] Sir Edmund Andros, the successor of Dongan as governor of New York, and subsequently governor also of New England.
[528] [See chap. iii.—Ed.]
[529] [See chap. vi.—Ed.]
[530] [Cf. also Benjamin Sulte’s papers, Mélanges, published at Ottawa, in 1876, and the Note on the Jesuit Relations, sub anno 1640 and 1642-1643.—Ed.]
[531] [See the Note on the Jesuit Relations, sub anno 1645-1646.—ED.]
[532] [For an account of these general sources, see the Note following chap. vii., and the statements regarding Margry’s labors on a subsequent page.—Ed.]
[533] [Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 165, Historical Magazine, ix. 205; and the Note on the Jesuit Relations.—Ed.]
[534] [See the Note on the Jesuit Relations.—Ed.]
[535] In Margry’s Découvertes, etc.
[536] In his Notes pour servir à l’Histoire, etc., de la Nouvelle France.
[537] The bibliography of Hennepin is examined in a later note.
[538] There have been papers on the ancient mining on Lake Superior, by Daniel Wilson, in The Canadian Journal, New Series, i. 125, and by A. D. Hager, in the Atlantic Monthly, xv. 308.
[539] The North American Missions of the Catholics, particularly those of the West among the Hurons, etc., have been followed by A. J. Thébaud in The Month, xxxiii. 480; xxxv. 352; xxxvi. 168, 524; xxxvii. 228; xl. 379; xli. 60; xlii. 379; xliii. 337; and they of course make an important part of Dr. Shea’s History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States. See the Note elsewhere in the present volume on “The Jesuit Relations.”
[540] Cf. “Early Notices of the Beaver in Europe and America,” by D. Wilson, in The Canadian Journal, 1859, p. 359; “French Commerce in the Mississippi Valley, 1620-1720,” in the American Presbyterian Review, iv. 620; v. 110.
[541] Cf. “Early French Forts in the Mississippi Valley,” in the United States Service Magazine, i. 356.
[542] Field, no. 1,081, who calls it the best of the books on Western history; Thomson’s Ohio Bibliography, no. 842.
[543] Mr. Perkins also published a paper on “French Discovery in the Mississippi Valley” in The Hesperian (Columbus, Ohio), iii. 295; cf. papers by R. Greenhow, in De Bow’s Review, vii. 319.
[544] Made mainly about 1856, by P. L. Morin.
[545] There is a memoir of Colonel Thorndike in Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, ii. 508.
[546] An excellent bibliographical summary of the sources of the history of these early Western explorations, by Mr. A. P. C. Griffin, appeared in the Magazine of American History, 1883, also separately. The account of the sources of La Salle’s discoveries given in Edouard Frère’s Manuel du Bibliographe Normand is scant. Mr. John Langton’s paper on “The Early Discoveries of the French in North America,” printed in The Canadian Journal, 1857, p. 393, enumerates some of the early maps. Dr. George E. Ellis’s “French Explorations in the West,” in the North American Review, cx. 260, is a review of Parkman; and J. H. Greene’s “Early French Travellers in the West,” in Ibid., xlviii. 63, is a review of Sparks’s Life of Marquette, which is one of the volumes of his American Biography.
[547] Margry, i. 81.
[548] La Salle, p. 450.
[549] Histoire de la Colonie Française, iii. 305.
[550] Notes, etc., no. 200.
[551] Catalogue, 1858, p. 1615.
[552] Histoire de la Colonie Française, vol. iii. p. 284.
[553] N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 66. Margry (i. 73) gives various papers indicating the views of Talon on western exploration.
[554] Vol. i. p. 112.
[555] He edited it for the Historical Society of Montreal in 1875. An English translation of part of it is given in Mr. O. H. Marshall’s First Visit of La Salle to the Senecas in 1669, which was privately printed in 1874.
[556] A heliotype of it is given in the note on “The Jesuit Relations,” following chapter iv., sub anno 1670, 1671. There is in the Kohl Collection (Department of State) what Kohl calls the “Jesuits’ map of Lac Supérieur;” but he gives it a somewhat later date, and says it is found in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. In the same Collection are maps of the Mississippi, dated 1670, and credited to “Thornton and Moll.”
[557] Parkman, La Salle, p. 452.
[558] Découvertes, etc., i. 376; cf. also p. 101.
[559] Cf. also Colonel Charles Whittlesey’s paper on “The Discovery of the Ohio River by La Salle, 1669-1670,” in no. 38, Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society’s Tracts. Dr. Shea thinks the legend “pour aller,” etc., was placed on the map by others.
[560] Découvertes, etc., ii. 285. The literature of this controversy is reviewed on a later page. Parkman thinks that La Salle crossed the Chicago portage and struck the upper waters of the Illinois, but did not descend that river, and suggests that the map called in a later sketch “The Basin of the Great Lakes” is indicative of this extent of La Salle’s exploration in the mere beginning of the Illinois River which it gives. Others reject the “Histoire” altogether, as Hurlbut does in his Chicago Antiquities, p. 250, not accepting Parkman’s view that La Salle was at Chicago in 1669 and 1670. Dr. Shea holds it was the St. Joseph’s River which La Salle entered.
[561] Shea (Mississippi Valley, p. lxxix) and Margry have done much to make known Joliet’s personal history. Margry has papers concerning him in the Journal général de l’instruction publique, and in the Revue Canadienne, December, 1871; January and March, 1872. Cf. Ferland, Notes sur les registres de Notre Dame de Québec, 2d ed., Quebec, 1863; Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Française; Parkman, La Salle, pp. 49, 66.
[562] There has been a controversy over the point of Marquette’s being at Chicago. Cf. Dr. Duffield’s oration at Mackinaw, Aug. 15, 1878; H. H. Hurlbut on Father Marquette at Mackinaw and Chicago,—a paper read before the Chicago Historical Society, Oct. 15, 1878; A. D. Hager’s Was Father Marquette ever in Chicago? which is replied to by Hurlbut in his Chicago Antiquities, p. 384; also see Historical Magazine, v. 99.
[563] Notes, etc., p. 322.
[564] In the N. Y. Col. Docs. (ix. 116), and in Margry, i. 257. See also Shea’s Mississippi Valley, p. xxxiii; Tailhan’s Perrot, p. 382.
[565] Vol. i. p. 259.
[566] This has appeared in the Mémoires du Congrès des Américanistes, 1879; and in the Revue de Géographie, February, 1880. The original manuscript of the map is priced in Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, no 2,808, at 1,500 francs. Gravier gave a colored fac-simile of it in connection with his essay, and the same fac-simile is also given in the Magazine of American History, 1883. This fac-simile is of a reduced size; but some copies were also reproduced of the size of the original.
[567] The Jesuit Relations call it the “Grande Rivière” and the Messi-sipi; Marquette calls it “Conception;” and in 1674 it was called after Colbert. See an essay on the varying application of names to the Western lakes and rivers in Hurlbut’s Chicago Antiquities.
[568] The Relation of 1666, and other of the early writers, record the reports from the Indians of a great salt-water lying west, where now we know the Pacific flows. A collation of some of these references has been given in Andrew McF. Davis’s elaborate paper on “The Journey of Moncacht-Apé,” in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, new series, ii. 335.
[569] Cf. Parkman, La Salle, p. 25.
[570] Parkman, La Salle, pp. 25, 450. A sketch of it is given herewith as “The Basin of the Great Lakes.”
[571] No. 214.
[572] Vol. i. pp. 259-270.
[573] This is printed in the Mission du Canada, i. 193, and translated in the Historical Magazine, v 237.
[574] Pages 231-257.
[575] He repeated this fac-simile later in his edition of the Relation of 1673-1679. The engraving of this map given in Douniol’s Mission du Canada has a small sketch of an Indian cabin on it which does not belong to it. Cf. Harrisse’s Notes sur la Nouvelle France, pp. 142, 610; Shea’s edition of Charlevoix’s New France, iii. 180; and Parkman’s La Salle, p. 451. There are other reproductions of this map in Blanchard’s History of the Northwest; Hurlbut’s Chicago Antiquities; and in the Annual Report of the United States Chief of Engineers, 1876, vol. iii. A sketch is given herewith. Kohl credits four maps, dated 1673, to Marquette, as given in the Collection in the State Department at Washington, of which use has also been made in the present essay.
[576] Again in 1861 in Douniol’s Mission du Canada, ii. 241, edited by Martin.
[577] See the note on the Jesuit Relations, sub annis 1673-1675.
[578] There are copies in Harvard College, Lenox, and Carter-Brown Libraries. Copies of Thevenot vary much in the making up. See O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 2,245; Stevens, Bibliotheca Historica, no. 2,068; Brinley Catalogue, no. 4,522; Sparks Catalogue, no. 2,592. Some copies have the date 1682; and the Sunderland Catalogue, no. 12,409, shows one with “Paris, I. Moette, 1689,” pasted over a 1682 imprint. A distinction must be kept in mind between this octavo Recueil de voyages, and Thevenot’s folio Relations des divers voyages curieux. The Sobolewski Catalogue (nos. 4,112-4,113) compares Brunet’s collation.
[579] Of Thevenot’s text a defective translation was published in London in 1698, as a supplement to an English version of Hennepin. Later and better renderings are in the Historical Magazine, August, 1861, and in part ii. p. 277, etc., of French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana, accompanied by a fac-simile of a map by Delisle showing the routes of the early explorers. This section of Thevenot was reprinted (125 copies) in fac-simile, with the map, in Paris in 1845, for Obadiah Rich. There is a copy of this reprint in the Sumner collection in Harvard College Library, and in the Carter-Brown and Lenox libraries, and the latter library has devoted no. iii. of its Contributions to a Catalogue (1879) to the “Voyages of Thevenot.” The MSS. de la Bibliothèque impériale, viii. 2d part, p. 11, note 1, shows a notice of the life of Thevenot. Harrisse, Notes, p. 140, compares the claims of several manuscripts of this narrative of Marquette.
[580] Notes, no. 202.
[581] La Salle, p. 452. From this Parkman copy the annexed sketch, to which the title, “Mississippi Valley, 1672-1673,” is given, has been taken. Another copy is given in the Catalogue of the Library of Parliament, 1858, p. 1615, no. 16.
[582] Sparks Catalogue, p. 175. Shea (Mississippi Valley, p. lxxv) thinks that the routes of going and returning were inserted by an editor. This Thevenot-Marquette map is rare. Dufossé has variously priced copies of the Recueil with the map at 150, 180, and 200 francs. Leclerc (no. 566) priced one at 325 francs.
[583] The contemporary account of Marquette’s death is given in the Relation of that year, and in the “Récit de la mort du P. Marquette,” as published in the Mission du Canada. Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 182, note; but Charlevoix’ account varies, and Parkman says it is a traditionary one, and that traces of the tradition were not long since current (La Salle, p. 72). Cf. “Romance and Reality of the Death of Marquette, and the Recent Discovery of his Remains,” by Shea, in the Catholic World, xxvi. 267, and “Father Marquette’s Bones” in the Canadian Antiquarian, January, 1878. In 1877 some human bones were found on the supposed site of the mission chapel at St. Ignace. Of Marquette’s successors in the Illinois mission, see Shea’s Catholic Missions, App., and Wisconsin Historical Society’s Collections, iii. 110.
[584] The claim was reinforced by Judge John Law in a paper on “The Jesuit Missionaries in the Northwest,” printed in the Wisconsin Historical Collections, vol. iii., with replies and rejoinders; Dr. Shea taking issue with him in a paper called “Justice to Marquette,” which originally appeared in the Catholic Telegraph, March 10, 1855. Parkman credits Shea also with a refutation in the New York Weekly Herald, April 21, 1855. The Jesuits alleged to have been on the affluents of the Mississippi thus early were Dequerre, Drocoux, and Pinet.
[585] Wisconsin Historical Collections, vii. 111.
[586] Printed in New York in 1879.
[587] 200e anniversaire de la découverte du Mississipi par Jolliet et le P. Marquette. Soirée littéraire et musicale à l’Université Laval, 17 juin, 1873. Québec, 1873. One of the latest studies on the subject is by the Père Brucher, Jacques Marquette et la découverte de la vallée du Mississipi, Lyons, 1880,—which had originally appeared in the Études réligieuses. Cf. also R. H. Clarke in the Catholic World, xvi. 688; Knickerbocker Magazine, xxxix. 1; etc.
[588] But the King, May 17, 1674, was warning Frontenac not to foster discoveries. Mass. Archives: Documents collected in France, ii. 283.
[589] Shea, in his Le Clercq, ii. 199, says: “La Salle has been exalted into a hero on the very slightest foundation of personal qualities or great deeds accomplished;” and in his Peñalosa, p. 22, he finds it not easy to conceive how intelligent writers have exalted a man of such utter incapacity.
[590] Cf. E. Jacker, in “La Salle and the Jesuits,” in American Catholic Quarterly, iii. 404.
[591] Margry (i. 271) gives various papers on La Salle’s first visit to Paris, when he got the seigniory of Fort Frontenac, together with La Salle’s “Proposition” and the subsequent “Arrest,” his “Lettres Patentes,” and “Lettres de Noblesse.”
[592] Margry (i. 301) gives Frontenac’s letter to Colbert, 1677, relating to La Salle and his undertakings.
[593] Margry (i. 329) gives La Salle’s petition for further discovery, and the royal permission (p. 337).
[594] Margry (i. 421) gives the papers of La Salle’s financial management from 1678 to 1683; and further (ii. 7) gives various papers relating to La Salle’s movements in 1679.
[595] The exact position of this extemporized ship-yard is in dispute. Parkman puts it at Cayuga Creek, on the east side of the river, and gives his reasons. La Salle, p. 132.
[596] Historical Magazine, viii. 367.
[597] Parkman, La Salle, p. 169. This first vessel of the lakes has been the subject of some study. Hennepin gives a view of her building in his Voyage curieux, 1711 edition, etc., p. 100. Mr. O. H. Marshall has published, as no. 1 of the publications of the Buffalo Historical Society, a tract of thirty-six pages, called The Building and Voyage of the “Griffin,” printed in 1879, giving in it a map of Niagara and its vicinity in 1688. Margry prints (i. 435) a “Relation des découvertes et des voyages du Sieur de la Salle, 1679-1681,” which he calls the Official Report of the transactions of this period made to the minister of the marine, and thinks it drawn up from La Salle’s letter by Bernou, and that Hennepin used it. Shea considers the question an open one, and that the Report may perhaps have been borrowed from Hennepin. A note on Hennepin and his contributions to the historical material of this period is on a later page.
[598] The principal portages by which passage was early made by canoes from the basin of the lakes to that of the Mississippi were five in number:—
1. By Green Bay, Lake Winnebago, and the Fox River to the Wisconsin, thence to the Mississippi,—the route of Joliet.
2. By the Chicago River, at the southwest of Lake Michigan, to the Illinois, thence to the Mississippi. This appears in the earliest maps of Joliet and Marquette, and is displayed in the great 1684 map of Franquelin, of this part of which Parkman gives a drawing in his La Salle, which with various later ones is repeated in Hurlbut’s Chicago Antiquities.
3. By the St. Joseph River, at the southeast corner of Lake Michigan, to the Kankakee, and so to the Illinois. This was La Salle’s route.
4. By the St. Joseph’s River to the Wabash (Ouabache); thence to the Ohio and Mississippi.
5. By the Miami River from the west end of Lake Erie to the Wabash; thence to the Ohio and Mississippi.
A paper by R. S. Robertson in the American Antiquarian, ii. 123, aims to show that this last portage was known to Allouez as early as 1680, and had perhaps been indicated by Sanson in his map of Canada as early as 1657. It would seem to have been little frequented, however, because of the danger from the Iroquois parties, but was reopened in 1716. Regarding La Salle’s connection with this portage, see a letter by Mr. Parkman quoted by Baldwin in his Early Maps of Ohio, p. 7, and letters of La Salle in Margry’s Découvertes, etc. Cf. H. S. Knapp’s History of the Maumee Valley from 1680, Toledo, 1872 (P. Thomson’s Bibliography of Ohio, no. 681). The southern shore of Lake Erie was the latest known of all the borders of the great lakes.
Margry in his fifth volume has two papers on the routes of these early explorers,—“Postes de la route des Lacs au Mississipi (1683-1695),” and “Postes dans les Pays depuis le Lac Champlain jusqu’au Mississipi (1683-1695).” The series of the Great Lakes show the following heights above tide-level at New York: Ontario, 247 feet; Erie, 573 feet; Huron and Michigan, 582 feet; Superior, 602 feet. The Mississippi at St. Paul is 80 feet above Superior.
[599] Parkman examines the evidence in favor of this site in a long note in his La Salle, p. 223.
[600] There is some dispute about the origin of this name. Le Clercq says it was so designated “on account of many vexations experienced there;” others say it was a reminiscence by Tonty of the part he had taken in the siege of Crèvecœur in the Netherlands. Cf. Shea’s Hennepin, p. 175.
[601] He now addressed to Frontenac, Nov. 9, 1680, a “Relation sur la nécessité de poursuivre le découverte du Mississipi,” which is given in Thomassy’s Géologie pratique de la Louisiane, Paris, 1860, App. B. p. 199. It is translated in the Historical Magazine, v. 196 (July, 1861). Margry (ii. 32) gives a letter of La Salle, in which he describes his operations and the obstacles he encountered in the Illinois country in founding Fort Crèvecœur, etc.; and (p. 115) another letter on the expedition (Aug. 22, 1680, to the autumn of 1681).
[602] Margry (ii. 164) gives a fragmentary letter of La Salle describing the country as far as the mouth of the Missouri; and (p. 196) another detached fragment, in La Salle’s hand, describing the rivers and peoples of the new region.
[603] Margry, ii. 181.
[604] The “Procès verbal de prise de possession de la Louisiane, 9 Avril, 1682,” is in Margry, ii. 186; in Gravier’s La Salle, App. p. 386; and in Boimare’s Texte explicatif pour accompagner la première planche historique relative à la Louisiane, Paris, 1868. The English of it is given by Sparks and in French’s Hist. Coll. of Louisiana, vol. i. and vol. ii.
[605] Zénobe Membré’s letter, “de la Rivière de Mississipi, le 3 Juin, 1682,” is given in Margry (ii. 206); and also (ii. 212) the letter of La Salle, dated at Fort Frontenac, Aug. 22, 1682, detailing his experiences.
[606] Géologie pratique de la Louisiane, p. 9. Cf. Harrisse, Notes, etc., no. 698. It is translated in French’s Hist. Coll. of Louisiana and Florida, 2d ser., ii. 17. Thomassy also printed in 1859 a tract of twenty-four pages, De la Salle et ses relations inédites de la découverte du Mississipi, avec carte.
[607] Parkman’s La Salle, p. 276.
[608] Membré’s narrative is translated in Shea’s Discovery of the Mississippi, p. 165. Cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, vol. iii. There is also a separate letter of Membré in Hist. Coll. of Louisiana, ii. 206, and other documents. Cf. the annotations in Shea’s Charlevoix and Le Clercq; Falconer’s Discovery of the Mississippi, London, 1844; and the account from the Mercure gallant, May, 1684, in Margry, ii. 355; who also (i. 573) gives Tonty’s “Relation écrite de Québec, le 14 Novembre, 1684,” which Margry thinks was addressed to the Abbé Renaudot; it covers La Salle’s undertakings from 1678 to 1683.
[609] Margry, i. 547. See the account of the La Salle celebration in Magazine of American History, February, 1882, p. 139. Margry (ii. 263) groups together various contemporary estimates of La Salle’s discovery, including the accusations of Duchesneau (p. 265), and the defence of La Salle (p. 277) by a friend, addressed to Seignelay, and La Salle’s own estimates of the advantages to grow from it, in a letter dated at “Missilimakanak, Octobre, 1682.”
[610] Margry (ii. 302) prints some of De la Barre’s accusations against La Salle, and shows the effects of them on the King (p. 309); and gives also La Salle’s letters to De la Barre (p. 312), one of them (p. 317) from the “portage de Checagou, 4 Juin, 1683.” De la Barre, addressing the King (p. 348), defends himself (Nov. 13, 1684) against the complaints of La Salle.
[611] Parkman has given an abstract (La Salle p. 458) of the pretended discoveries of Mathieu Sagean, who represents that he started at this time with some Frenchmen from the fort on the Illinois on an expedition in which he ascended the Missouri to the country of a King Hagaren, a descendant of Montezuma, who ruled over a luxurious people. The narrative is considered a fabrication. Mr. E. G. Squier found the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and bringing home a copy, it was printed by Dr. Shea, with the title, Extrait de la relation des aventures et voyage de Mathieu Sâgean. Nouvelle York: à la Presse Cramoisy de J. M. Shea. 1863, 32 pages. Cf. Field, Indian Bibliog., no. 1,347; Lenox, Jesuit Relations, p. 17; and Historical Magazine, x. 65.
There are some papers by J. P. Jones on the earliest notices of the Missouri River in the Kansas City Review, 1882.
[612] Margry (ii. 353) groups various opinions on La Salle’s discovery incident to his return to France in 1684.
[613] Notes, etc., nos. 209, 213-218. Harrisse also cites no. 229, a Carte du Grand Fleuve St. Laurens dressee et dessignee sur les memoires et observations que le Sr. Jolliet a tres exactement faites en barq et en canot en 46 voyages pendant plusieurs années. It purports to be by Franquelin, and is dated 1685. See Library of Parliament Catalogue, 1858, p. 1615, no. 17.
[614] Parkman, La Salle, p. 455; this is Harrisse’s no. 219; cf. his no. 223.
[615] Notes, etc. (1872), no. 222.
[616] La Salle, pp. 295, 455, where is a fac-simile of the part showing La Salle’s colony on the Illinois; and Géologie pratique de la Louisiane, p. 227.
[617] Harrisse, no. 223.
[618] Harrisse, no. 234; Parkman, p. 457.
[619] This also, according to Harrisse, is now missing; but the Catalogue (1858, p. 1616) of the Library of Parliament (Ottawa) shows a copy as sent by Duchesneau to Colbert, and it has been engraved in part for the first time in Neill’s History of Minnesota, 4th ed., 1882. Another copy is in the Kohl Collection (Department of State) at Washington. A copy of Neill’s engraving is given herewith.
[620] Notes, etc., nos. 240, 248, 259.
[621] Ibid., no. 231.
[622] Ibid., no. 232. There is a copy in the Library of Parliament at Ottawa (Catalogue, 1858, p. 1616). Harrisse (nos. 248, 259) assigns other maps to 1692 and 1699.
[623] La Salle, p. 457.
[624] These two maps are in the Poore Collection in the State Archives of Mass. Cf. Harrisse, nos. 359, 361, 362; and Parkman (La Salle, p. 142), on the different names given to Lake Michigan.
[625] Parkman, La Salle, p. 454; Library of Parliament Catalogue, p. 1615, no. 18. Harrisse (nos. 236, 237) gives other maps by Raffeix. The Kohl Collection (Department of State) gives a map of the Mississippi of the same probable date (1688), from an original in the National Library at Paris. See the Calendar of the Kohl Collection printed in the Harvard University Bulletin, 1883-84.
[626] Harrisse, Notes, etc., no. 237.
[627] Parkman, La Salle, p. 454.
[628] Notes, etc., p. xxv and no. 241.
[629] See the third page following.
[630] Notes, no. 202.
[631] Margry, iii. 17, etc.
[632] Margry (ii. 359) gives La Salle’s Memoir of his plans against the mines of New Biscay, together with letters (p. 377) of Seignelay, etc., pertaining to it, and the Grants of the King (p. 378), and La Salle’s Commission (p. 382).
[633] Margry (ii. 387) prints various papers indicative of the vexatious delays in the departure of the expedition and of La Salle’s difficulties (pp. 421, 454, etc.), together with his final letters before sailing (p. 469). Various letters of Beaujeu written at Rochelle are in Margry (ii. 397, 421, etc.).
[634] Margry (ii. 485) gives letters of Beaujeu and others concerning the voyage. A fragmentary Journal of the voyage by the Abbé Jean Cavelier is also given in Margry (ii. 501), besides another Journal (p. 510) by the Abbé d’Esmanville.
[635] Margry (ii. 499) gives an account of this capture.
[636] Margry (ii. 521) gives some letters which passed between La Salle and Beaujeu after they reached the Gulf.
[637] Margry (ii. 555) prints an account of the loss of the “Aimable.”
[638] Margry (ii. 564, etc.) prints some letters which passed between La Salle and Beaujeu just before the latter sailed for France, and Beaujeu’s letter to Seignelay on his return (p. 577).
[639] This map is still preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine, and a sketch of it is in the text. Thomassy (p. 208) cites it as “Carte de la Louisiane avec l’embouchure de la Rivière du Sr de la Salle (Mai, 1685), par Minet,” and giving a sketch, calls it the complement of Franquelin. Shea thinks it was drawn up from La Salle’s and Peñalosa’s notes. Cf. Shea’s Peñalosa, p. 21; Harrisse, Notes, etc., nos. 225, 227, 228, 256-258, 260, 261, 263, who says he could not find on it the date, Mai, 1685, given by Parkman and Thomassy; Gravier, La Salle; and Delisle, in Journal des Savans, xix. 211. Margry (ii. 591) prints some observations of Minet on La Salle’s effort to find the mouth of the Mississippi.
[640] Dr. Shea puts the settlement on Espirito Bay, where Bahia now is.
[641] See his Relation of this voyage in Falconer’s Discovery of the Mississippi, etc.
[642] This is Parkman’s statement; but Shea questions it. Margry (i. 59) gives various notices concerning le Père Allouez, who was born in 1613, and died in 1689.
[643] See Brodhead’s History of New York, ii. 478, and references, and the text of the preceding chapter.
[644] Margry, iii. 553.
[645] Harrisse (no. 261) mentions a sketch of the Mississippi and its affluents, the work of Tonty at this time, which is preserved in the French Archives.
[646] Margry, iii. 567.
[647] Margry, ii. 359; iii. 17; translations in French, Historical Collections of Louisiana, i. 25; ii. 1; and in Falconer’s Discovery of the Mississippi, London, 1844.
[648] He refers to evidences in Margry, ii. 348, 515; iii. 44, 48, 63. Cf. Shea’s Peñalosa and his Le Clercq, ii. 202. In this last work Shea annotates the narrative of La Salle’s Gulf of Mexico experiences, and makes some identifications of localities different from those of other writers. Cf. also Historical Magazine, xiv. 308 (December, 1868).
[649] There is an English translation in Falconer’s Discovery of the Mississippi, and in French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana, i. 52.
[650] Margry, i. 571.
[651] Joutel says it had a map; but later authorities have not discovered any. Cf. Harrisse, Notes, etc., no. 174; Leclerc, no. 1,027 (130 francs); Dufossé (70 and 100 francs); Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,522. It was reprinted as “Relation de la Louisiane” in Bernard’s Recueil des voyages au Nord, Amsterdam, 1720, 1724, and 1734, also appearing separately. An English translation appeared in London, in 1698, called An Account of Monsieur de la Salle’s last Expedition and Discoveries in North America, with Adventures of Sieur de Montauban appended. (Harrisse, no 178; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,542; Brinley, no. 4,524.) This version was reprinted in the N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii. 217-341.
[652] La Salle, p. 129.
[653] See vol. iii. pp. 89-534, and p. 648, for an account of the document.
[654] La Salle, 397; cf. Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 88-90.
[655] Joutel, according to Lebreton (Revue de Rouen, 1852, p. 236), had served since he was seventeen in the army.
[656] Harrisse, no. 750. The book is rare; there are copies in the Boston Public, Lenox, Carter-Brown (vol. iii. no. 117), and Cornell University (Sparks’s Catalogue, no. 1,387) libraries. Cf. Sabin, vol. ix. p. 351; Brinley, no. 4,497; Leclerc, no. 925 (100 francs); Stevens, Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, no. 1,036; Dufossé, nos. 1,999, 3,300, and 9,171 (55 and 50 francs); O’Callaghan, no. 1,276.
The book should have a map entitled Carte nouvelle de la Louisiane et de la Rivière de Mississipi ... dressée par le Sieur Joutel, 1713. A section of this map is given in the Magazine of American History, 1882, p. 185, and in A. P. C. Griffin’s Discovery of the Mississippi, p. 20.
In 1714 an English translation appeared in Paris, as A Journal of the last Voyage perform’d by Monsr. de la Sale to the Gulph of Mexico, to find out the Mouth of the Mississipi River; his unfortunate Death, and the Travels of his Companions for the Space of Eight Hundred Leagues across that Inland Country of America, now call’d Louisania, translated from the Edition just publish’d at Paris. It also had a folding map showing the course of the Mississippi, with a view of Niagara engraved in the corner. Cf. Harrisse, no. 751; Lenox, in Historical Magazine, ii. 25; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 808; Menzies, no. 1,110; Stevens, Historical Collections, vol. i. no. 1,462; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 55; Brinley, no. 4,498 (with date 1715). There are copies in the Boston Public, the Lenox, and Cornell University libraries. This 1714 translation was issued with a new title in 1719 (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 244; Field, no. 809), and was reprinted in French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana, part i. p. 85. A Spanish translation, Diario historico, was issued in New York in 1831. Dumont’s Mémoires historiques sur la Louisiane, Paris, 1753, with a map, was put forth by its author as a sort of continuation of the Journal published by Joutel in 1713.
Shea speaks of Hennepin’s Nouveau Voyage as “a made-up affair of no authority.” It is translated in French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana, part i. p. 214; in the Archæologia Americana; and of course in Shea’s Hennepin; cf. Western Magazine, i. 507.
[657] The Library of Parliament Catalogue, p. 1616, no. 30, gives a map, copied from the original in the French Archives, which shows the spot of La Salle’s assassination. La Salle’s route is traced on Delisle’s map, which is reproduced by Gravier.
[658] This portion of his Journal is translated in the Magazine of American History, ii. 753; and Parkman thinks it is marked by sense, intelligence, and candor.
[659] Translated into English in Shea’s Discovery of the Mississippi, p. 197, and in his edition of Le Clercq, where he compares it with Joutel. Parkman cannot resist the conclusion that Douay did not always write honestly, and told a different story at different times. La Salle, p. 409.
[660] Vol. iii. p. 601.
[661] La Salle, p. 436.
[662] Shea printed it from Parkman’s manuscript in 1858, and translated it, with notes, in his Early Voyages up and down the Mississippi. It is called Relation du voyage entrepris par feu M. Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle....Par son frère, M. Cavelier, l’un des compagnons de voyage. Shea says of it in his Charlevoix, iv. 63, that “it is enfeebled by his acknowledged concealment, if not misrepresentation; and his statements generally are attacked by Joutel.” Cf. Margry, ii. 501.
[663] Cf. Joutel, Charlevoix, Michelet, Henri Martin, and Margry in his Les Normands dans les vallées de l’Ohio et du Mississipi. Parkman modified his judgment between the publication of his Great West and his La Salle.
[664] Page 294.
[665] Page 208.
[666] Vol. iii. p. 610.
[667] Page 25. Cf. French, Historical Collections of Louisiana, 2d series, p. 293.
A few miscellaneous references may be preserved regarding La Salle and the Western discoveries:—
The paper by Levot in the Nouvelle biographie générale; one by Xavier Eyma, in the Revue contemporaine, 1863, called “Légende du Meschacébé;” Th. Le Breton’s “Un navigateur Rouennais au xviie siècle,” in the Revue de Rouen et de Normandie, 1852, p. 231; a section of Guerin’s Les navigateurs Français, 1846, p. 369; the Letters of Nobility given to La Salle, printed by Gravier in his Appendix, p. 360; where is also his Will (p. 385), dated Aug. 11, 1681, which can also be found in Margry, and translated in Magazine of American History, September, 1878 (ii. 551), and in Falconer’s Discovery of the Mississippi; a picture of his 1684 expedition, by Th. Gudin, in the Versailles Gallery; a paper on the discoveries of La Salle as affecting the French claim to a western extension of Louisiana, in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xiii. 223; paper by R. H. Clarke in the Catholic World, xx. 690, 833; “La Salle and the Mississippi,” in De Bow’s Review, xxii. 13. Gravier has furnished an introduction (69 pages) on “Les Normands sur le Mississipi, 1682-1727,” to his fac-simile edition (1872) of the Relation du voyage des dames Ursulines de Rouen à la Nouvelle Orléans (100 copies) of Madeleine Hachard, following the original printed at Rouen in 1728 (Maisonneuve, Livres de fond, 1883, p. 30).
[668] He seems to have begun to make his copies in 1842, led to it by the work he had done when employed by General Cass.
[669] “Découverte de l’acte de naissance de Robert Cavelier de la Salle,” in the Revue de Rouen, 1847, pp. 708-711, and others mentioned elsewhere.
[670] Preface to eleventh edition of Parkman’s La Salle.
[671] From a copperplate by Van der Gucht in the London (1698) edition of Hennepin’s New Discovery. The Margry picture has unfortunately deceived not a few. It has been reproduced in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, and in Shea’s edition of Le Clercq’s Établissement de la Foi; and Mr. Baldwin speaks of the determination which its features showed the man to possess!
[672] The curious reader interested in M. Margry’s career among manuscripts may read R. H. Major’s Preface (pp. xxiv-li) to his Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, London, 1868. Mr. Major has clearly got no high idea of M. Margry’s acumen or honesty from the claim which this Frenchman has put forth, that the instigation of Columbus’s views came from France. Cf. Major’s Select Letters of Columbus, p. xlvii.
[673] Margry is not able to refer to the depository of this document, as it is not known to have been seen since Faillon used it. The copy of it made for Sparks is in Harvard College Library. See a translation of part in Magazine of American History, ii. 238.
[674] This method of supplying Canadian mothers is the subject of some inquiry in Parkman’s Old Régime, p. 220.
[675] Papers on Hennepin and Du Lhut are in the Minnesota Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. i. Du Lhut’s “Mémoire sur la Découverte du pays des Nadouecioux dans le Canada,” is in Harrisse, no. 177, and a translation is in Shea’s Hennepin.
[676] Shea (Le Clercq, ii. 123) notes a valuable series of articles on Hennepin by H. A. Rafferman, in the Deutsche Pionier, Aug.-Oct., 1880.
[677] [See chapter iv.—Ed.]
[678] This was not the only missionary labor in New France during the period already noticed. In 1619 some Recollect Fathers of the province of Aquitaine in France, at the instance of a fishing company which had establishments on the Acadian coast, came over to minister to the French and labor among the Indians. Their field of labor included Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Gaspé; but of the results of their attempts to instil an idea of Christianity into the minds of the Micmacs, we can give no details. One of their number, Father Sebastian, perished in the woods in 1623, while on his way from his post at Miscou to the chief mission station on St. John’s River. Three surviving Fathers joined the Recollects at Quebec in 1624 by order of their provincial in France, and took part in their ministry till Kirk arrived.
[679] [It was printed in 1833, in the Memoirs of the American Academy. His strong box, captured at the same time, was for a while (1845-1855) in the keeping of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Proceedings, ii. 322; iii. 40). Pickering, who edited the dictionary when printed, submitted to the same Society (Proceedings, i. 476) some original papers concerning Rale, preserved in the Massachusetts Archives, and these were used by Convers Francis in his Life of Ralle in Sparks’s American Biography. Cf. also 2 Mass. Hist. Coll. viii. 2511 and Proceedings, iii. 324. An account of his monument is in the Historical Magazine, March, 1858, p. 84, and June, 1871, p. 399.—Ed.]
[680] The Abenaki missions on the St. Lawrence and in Maine were continued, however; and a remnant of the tribe still adhere to the Catholic faith at Indian Old Town, on the Penobscot, as they did in the days of Rale and of Orono, their chief, who led them to fight beside the Continentals in the Revolution. They are now known as the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies, but are dwindling away.
[681] [Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouvelle France, no. 62, says the book is hard reading, which explains the little use made of it by historians. Chevalier, in his introduction to the Paris reprint by Tross, in 1864-66, arraigns Charlevoix for his harsh judgment of Sagard. The original is now rare and costly. Tross, before securing a copy to print from, kept for years a standing offer of 1,200 francs. There are copies in the Harvard College and Carter-Brown (vol. ii. no. 437) libraries. Rich, in 1832, priced it at £1 16s.; Quaritch, in 1880, prices it at £63; and Le Clerc (no. 2,947), with the Huron music in fac-simile, gives 1,200 francs. Dufossé (Americana, 1876 and 1877-78) prices copies at 1,200 and 1,500 francs; cf. Crowninshield, no. 948, and Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 1,344.
Of the Grand Voyage of 1632, there are copies in Harvard College and Carter-Brown libraries, and in the Library of Congress. Other copies were in the Crowninshield (no. 949), Brinley (no. 143), and O’Callaghan (no. 2,046) sales. Harrisse (Notes, etc., no. 53) says that after the Solar sale, where it brought 320 francs, it became an object for collectors; and Dufossé, in 1877, priced it at 550 francs; Ellis & White, the same year, at £42; Quaritch, at £36; Rich, fifty years ago, said copies had brought £15. Cf. Field, no. 1,341. This book was also reprinted by Tross in 1865.—Ed.]
[682] [This translation, of which only 250 copies were printed, was made by Dr. Shea. He introduces it with “A Sketch of Father Christian Le Clercq,” which includes a bibliographical account of his works. The book supplements in a measure Sagard’s Histoire du Canada, since that had given the earlier labors as this portrays the later works of the Recollects, or at least more minutely than Sagard. The Recollects had been recalled to Canada to thwart the Jesuits, and Le Clercq reached Quebec in 1673, and was assigned in 1675 to the vicinity of the Bay of Gaspé as a missionary field; and it is of his labors in this region that we learn in his Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie, which was printed in Paris in 1691 (cf. Harrisse, Notes, 170; Field, Indian Bibliography, 902; Ternaux, 176; Faribault, 82; Lenox, in Historical Magazine, ii. 25; Dufossé, Americana, 1878, 75 and 100 francs; Sabin, vol. x. p. 159; Stevens, Bibliotheca Historica, 1870, no. 1,113; Brinley Catalogue, 102; Le Clercq, Bibl. Amer., 746, 140 francs; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,415; O’Callaghan, no. 1,360), and Le Clercq refers his readers to the present work for a continuation of the story, but it does not contain it, that portion being suppressed, as Dr. Shea thinks. The Jesuits are bitterly satirized by Le Clercq in the concluding part of the first volume, and in the second of the Établissement. Shea’s collation of the Nouvelle Relation does not correspond with the Harvard College copy, which has 28 instead of 26 preliminary leaves. See also Sabin’s Dictionary, vol. x. no. 39,649; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 903; Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouvelle France, no. 170; Boucher de la Richarderie, vi. 21; Faribault, p. 82.
The original edition of the Établissement had two varieties of title, one bearing the author’s name in full, and the other concealing it by initials. It is very rare with either title, but copies can be found in the Carter-Brown Library (see Catalogue, no. 1,413), and in the Sparks Collection at Cornell University (see Sparks Catalogue, no. 1,482). Dr. Shea notes other copies in Baron James Rothschild’s library at Paris, and in the Abbé H. Verreau’s collection at Montreal. Mr. Stewart tells me there are copies in the libraries of Laval University, of the Quebec Government, Of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, and of Parliament, at Ottawa. The Leno Library has a copy of what seems the same edition, with the title changed to Histoire des colonies françoises, Paris and Lyons, 1692. Mr. Lenox (Historical Magazine, January, 1858), following Sparks and others, claimed that the 1691 edition was suppressed; but Harrisse (Notes, etc. p. 159) disputes this in a long notice of the book, in which he cites Œuvres de Messire Antoine Arnould, Paris, 1780, xxxiv. 720, to the contrary. Le Clercq’s book should have a map, “Carte generalle de la Nouvelle France,” which is given in fac-simile in vol. ii. of this translation. It includes all North America, except the Arctic regions, but, singularly, omits Lake Champlain.
President Sparks wrote in his copy: “An extremely rare book.... It is peculiarly valuable as containing the first original account of the discoveries of La Salle by two [Recollect] missionaries who accompanied him. From this book, also, Hennepin drew the account of his pretended discovery of the Mississippi River.” See the bibliographical notice in Shea’s Discovery and Explorations of the Mississippi Valley, p. 78. Sparks, in his Life of La Salle, first pointed out how Hennepin had plagiarized from the journal of Father Membré, contained in Le Clercq. See further in Shea’s Mississippi Valley, p. 83 et seq., where Membré’s journal in Shea’s translation from Le Clercq was printed for the first time, and the note on Hennepin, following chap. viii. of the present volume. Harrisse, Notes, etc., p. 160, points out what we owe to this work for a knowledge of La Salle’s explorations. Cf. Parkman’s La Salle; Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 903, with a note touching the authorship; Brunet, Supplement, i. 810, noting copies sold,—Maisonneuve, 250 francs; Sóbolewski, 150 thalers; Tross (1873), 410 francs; Dufossé, 600 francs; Le Clercq, no. 2,833, 1,500 francs.
The bibliographers are agreed that others than Le Clercq were engaged in the Établissement, and that the part concerning Frontenac was clearly not by Le Clercq. Charlevoix says Frontenac himself assisted in it; and it is Shea’s opinion that extraneous matter was attached to Le Clercq’s account of the Recollect missions, to convert the book into an attack in large part on the Jesuits.—Ed.
[683] Champlain’s Voyages, Prince ed. iii. 104 et seq.
[684] Establishment of the Faith, i. 200, 346.
[685] [See a note on the bibliography of Hennepin, following chap. viii. of the present volume.—Ed.]
[686] [S. Lesage, in the Revue Canadienne, iv. 303 (1867), gives a good summary of the Recollect missions.—Ed.]
[687] [An annotated bibliography of the Relations follows this chapter.—Ed.]
[688] Harrisse, no. 122. The book has been priced by Leclerc at 500 francs, and by Quaritch at £16 16s. Field does not mention it in his Indian Bibliography.
[689] See chap. v.; and cf. Historical Magazine, ix. 205, and Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 165. Also later Sub 1655-56.
[690] Cf. Wilson on Mines in Canadian Journal, May, 1856.
[691] See Mgr. de St. Valier et L’Hôpital Général de Quebec. Quebec, 1882.
[692] This son, François Louis, entered the army, and was killed while in the service of King Louis, in Germany.
[693] A plan of this fort was sent by M. Denonville to France, on the 13th November, 1685. A copy may be seen in Faillon’s Histoire de la Colonie Française, iii. 467, entitled “Fort de Frontenac ou Katarakourg, construit par le Sieur de la Salle.” A sketch after Faillon is given on another page, in the editorial note on La Salle appended to chapter v.
[694] [Dr. Hawley says, in a note in his Early Chapters of Cayuga History, page 15, that this name is derived from onnonte, a mountain, and was given by the Hurons and Iroquois to Montmagny, governor of Canada, 1636-1648, as a translation of his name (mons magnus), and was applied to his successors, while the King of France was called Grand Onontio.—Ed.]
[695] [See narrative in chap. vi. Margry (i. 195) gives the “Voyage du Comte de Frontenac au lac Ontario, en 1673,” with letters appertaining. Cf. N. Y. Col. Doc., ix. 95.—Ed.]
[696] Abbé Salignac de Fénelon was a half brother of the author of Télémaque. Hildreth appears in doubt about him, and says: “Could this have been the Abbé and Saint Sulpitian priest of the same name, afterward so famous in the world of religion and letters? If so, his two years’ missionary residence in Canada seems to have been overlooked by his biographers. Yet he might have gathered there some hints for Telemachus.” See the “Note on the Jesuit Relations,” sub anno 1666-1667. Perrot’s character is drawn in Faillon (iii. 446) from the Sulpitian side.
[697] [Margry (i. 405) gives an account of the deliberations on the selling of liquor to the savages, which were held at Quebec Oct. 10, 1678.—Ed.]
[698] Auteuil’s house was situated about two leagues away from Quebec. Villeray went to the Isle of Orleans, and Tilly took up his quarters at the house of M. Juchereau, of St. Denis, near Quebec.
[699] [Duchesneau issued in 1681, at Quebec, a Memoir on the tribes from which peltries were derived. An English translation of this is in 2 Pennsylvania Archives, vi. 7.—Ed.]
[700] See chap. iv.
[701] [A Mémoire (Nov. 12, 1685) du Marquis de Denonville sur l’État du Canada, 12 Novembre, is in Brodhead, N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 280; and an English translation is in 2 Pennsylvania Archives, vi. 24. Various other documents of this period are referred to in the Notes Historiques of Harrisse’s Notes, etc.—Ed.]
[702] [Cf. chap. vi. For this campaign against the Senecas, see Shea’s Charlevoix, iii. 286 (and his authorities); Parkman’s Frontenac (references p. 156); Denonville’s Journal, translated in N. Y. Col. Docs., vol. ix.; St. Vallier, État Présent; Belmont, Histoire du Canada; La Hontan; Tonty; Perrot; La Potherie; and the statements of the Senecas, in N. Y. Col. Docs., vol. iii. Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of New York gives a plan of the Seneca fort; and O. H. Marshall identifies its site in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., vol. ii.—Ed.]
[703] [Margry (i. 37) gives a statement, made in 1712 by Vaudreuil and Bégon, collating the Relations from 1646 to 1687, to show the right of the French to the Iroquois country. Denonville’s Mémoire (1688), on the limits of the French claim, is translated in 2 Pennsylvania Archives, vi. 36. The Mémoire of the King, addressed to Denonville, explanatory of the claim, is translated in French’s Historical Collections, 2d series, i. 123. The Catalogue of the Canadian Parliament, 1858, p. 1617. no. 39, shows a large map of the French possessions, defining their boundaries by the English, copied from an original in the French archives. The claim was pressed of an extension to the Pacific. See Greenhow’s Oregon, p. 159.—Ed.]
[704] [There is in the Massachusetts Archives: Documents collected in France, iv. 7, a paper dated Versailles, 10 Mai, 1690, entitled “Projet d’une Expédition contre Manat et Baston,” which is accompanied by a map showing the coast from New York to the Merrimack, in its relation to Lakes Champlain and Ontario. The English towns are marked “bourg;” only “Baston” is put down by name. See Notes following chap. iv.—Ed.]
[705] [French armed vessels had also attacked Block Island, Historical Magazinevii. 324.—Ed.]
[706] The Editor is indebted to Francis Parkman, Esq., for the use of a fac-simile of the contemporary manuscript plan (preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris), of which the topographical part is shown, somewhat reduced, in the annexed fac-simile (Parkman’s Frontenac, p. 285). The rest of the sheet contains the following:—
“Plan de Québec, et de les environs, en la Nouvelle France, Assiegé par les Anglois, le 16 d’Octobre, 1690, jusqu’au 22 du dit mois qu’ils sen allerent, apprés avoir este bien battus, par Mr. Le Comte de Frontenac, gouverneur general du Pays.
“Les noms des habitans et des principaux Endroits de Quebec.
1. Maison Seigneurial de beauport.
2. pierre parent le Perre.
3. Jacque parent le fils.
4. aux R. P. Jesuistes.
5. pierre parent le fils.
6. la vefve de mathieu choset.
7. michel huppé.
8. Mr. de la Durantaye, Conseiller.
9. la vefve de paul chalifou.
10. Mr. de Vitray, Conceiller.
11. François retor.
12. Mr. denis.
13. Estienne lionnois.
14. Mr. Roussel.
15. Jean le normand.
16. Jean landron, ou est la briqueterie.
17. Joseph rancourt.
18. André coudray.
19. Jean le normand.
20. Mr. de St. Simeon.
21. le petit passage.
22. Le fort St. Louis, ou loge Mr. le comte de frontenac.
23. ntre dame, et le Seminaire.
24. hospice des R. P. Recolletz.
25. les R. P. Jesuistes.
26. les Ursulines.
27. l’hospital.
28. les filles de la Congregation.
29. Mr. de Villeray, premier Conseiller.
30. batterie de huict pieces.
31. Le Cul de Sac, ou les barques, et petits vaisseaux hivernent.
32. platte forme ou est une batterie de 3 p.
33. Place ou est le buste du Roy, pozé sur un pied d’estal, en 1686, par Mr. de Champigny,
Intendant.
34. Mr. de la Chesnays.
35. autre batterie de trois pieces.
36. autre batterie de trois pieces.
37. le Palais ou logent l’Intendant, le greffier du
Conseil Souverain, et ou sont aussy les
Prisons.
38. boulangerie a Mr. de la Chesnays.
39. la Maison blance a Mr. de la Chesnay.
40. moulin a Mr. de la Chesnays.
41. moulin au Roy.
42. moulins aux R. P. Jesuistes.
43. Maison a Mr. Talon, autrefois Intendant du
Pays.
44. Ntre. dame des anges.
45. Vincent poirié.
46. L’Esuesché, a Mr. de St. Vallier.
47. Jardin de Mr. de frontenac.
48. Moulin a Mr. du Pont, ou est une batterie
de trois pieces.
49. louis begin.
50. Jacque Sanson.
51. Pesche aux R. P. Jesuistes.
52. pierre Leyzeau.
53. Mathurin choüet, ou est un four a chaux.
54. batterie de trois pieces pour deffendre le passage
de la petitte Rre.
55. Canots, pour la decouverte pendant la nuit.
Par le sr de Villeneuve ingénieur du Roy.”
Harrisse, Notes, etc., no. 243, cites this plan, and, no. 244, refers to a map of a little different title by Villeneuve, preserved in the Dépôt des Fortifications des Colonies at Paris. Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, no. 2,652, notes another early manuscript copy of this plan (Harrisse’s no. 243) in a collection of maps of the 18th century, which he prices at 800 francs. He calls the plan “tres belle carte manuscrite et inédite,” not aware of the reduced engraving of it issued by Van der Aa, of which there is a copy in a collection of maps (no. 50) formed by Frederick North, and now in Harvard College Library.
[707] Chapter iv.
[708] [Benjamin Wadsworth, of Boston, was sent by Massachusetts Bay to Albany in 1694 as one of the commissioners to treat with the Five Nations, and his Journal is in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., i. 102-110.—Ed.]
[709] [These are particularly described in chap. ix. of the present volume.—Ed.]
[710] [See Note B, following this chapter.—Ed.]
[711] [Frontenac’s will is printed in the Magazine of American History, June, 1883, p. 465.—Ed.]
[712] Chapter viii.
[713] “M. Bacqueville de la Potherie a décrit le premier, d’une manière exacte, les établissemens des Français a Québec, à Montréal et aux Trois-Rivières: il a fait connaître surtout dans un grand détail, et en jetant, dans sa narration beaucoup d’intérêt, les mœurs, les usages, les maximes, la forme de gouvernement, la manière de faire la guerre et de contracter des alliances de la nation Iroquoise, si célèbre dans cette contrée de l’Amérique-Septentrionale. Ses observations se sont encore étendues à quelques autres peuplades, telle que la nation des Abénaquis, etc.”—Bib. des Voyages.
Charlevoix describes it as containing “undigested and ill-written material on a good portion of Canadian history.” Cf. Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 66; Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. iii. no. 319; Brinley Catalogue, no. 63; Sabin, Dictionary of Books relating to America, from its Discovery to the Present Time, vol. i. no. 2,692; Stevens, Historical Collections, vol. i. no. 1,313. It usually brings about $10; a later edition, Paris, 1753, four volumes, is worth a little less.
[714] [There were two editions in this year; one in three volumes quarto, and the other in six volumes of small size, with the plates folded. Cf. Sabin, Dictionary, vol. iii. p. 520; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 762, 763; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 282, who says that “an almost endless variety exists in the editions and changes of the parts in Charlevoix’s three volumes.” Heriot published an abridged translation of Charlevoix in 1804; but the English reader and the student of Canadian history owes a great deal to the version and annotations of Dr. Shea, which this scholar printed in New York, in six sumptuous volumes, in 1866-1872. (Cf. J. R. G. Hassard in Catholic World, xvii. 721.) Charlevoix’s list of authorities with characterizations is the starting-point of the bibliography of New France. See Note C, at the end of this chapter.—Ed.]
[715] [See the note on the Jesuit Relations, following chap. vi., sub anno 1659.—Ed.]
[716] [Cf. H. J. Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, p. 65.—Ed.]
[717] [Parkman, Frontenac, p. 181, gives the authorities on the massacre. La Hontan’s Voyages; N. Y. Coll. Doc., vols. iii., ix.; Colden’s Five Nations, p. 115; Smith’s New York, p. 57; Belmont, Histoire du Canada in Faribault’s Collection de Mémoires, 1840; De la Potherie, Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale. Shea says (Charlevoix, iv. 31), “There is little doubt as to the complicity of the New Yorkers in the Lachine massacre.”—Ed.]
[718] Shea’s Charlevoix, i. 94.
[719] An abridged edition was printed at Quebec in 1864. There is a bibliographical sketch of Garneau in the Abbé Casgrain’s Œuvres, vol. ii., first issued separately in 1866. Cf. Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, p. 135. Chauveau’s discourse at his grave is in the Revue Canadienne, 1867.
[720] Mr. Alfred Garneau, who has also written a readable paper entitled “Les Seigneurs de Frontenac,” which was originally published in the Revue Canadienne, 1867, vol. iv. p. 136. The English reader is unfortunate if he derives his knowledge of the elder Garneau’s historical work from the English translation by Bell, who in a spirit of prejudice has taken unwarrantable liberties with his original.
[721] Shea gives a portrait of Ferland (b. 1805, d. 1864) in his Charlevoix, and it is repeated with a memoir in the Historical Magazine, July, 1865; cf. Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, p. 121. His strictures on Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Histoire du Canada were published in Paris, in 1853. [Cf. chap. iv. of the present volume.—Ed.]
[722] Old Régime, p. 61. An account of his studies in Canadian history appeared at Montreal in 1879, in a memorial volume, M. Faillon, Prêtre de St. Sulpice, sa Vie et ses Œuvres. [See the note on the Jesuit Relations, following chap. vi., sub anno 1642; and Morgan’s Bibliotheca Canadensis, p. 118.—Ed.]
[723] The aims of partisanship always incite the detraction of rivals, and a story which is current illustrates the passions of rivalry, if it does not record the truth. Faillon’s book is said to have given offence to the members of the Seminary at Quebec, and to have restored some of the old recriminating fervor which so long characterized the relations of the ecclesiastics of Montreal and Quebec. The priests of the Seminary are even credited with an appeal to the Pope to prevent the continuance of its publication. Whether this be true or not, historical scholarship is accounted a gainer in the antidote which the Quebec ecclesiastics applied, when they commissioned the Abbé Laverdière, since deceased, to publish his edition of Champlain.
[724] In the Preface to his Old Régime, and repeated in his Frontenac, Mr. Parkman, in referring to his conclusions, said: “Some of the results here reached are of a character which I regret, since they cannot be agreeable to persons for whom I have a very cordial regard. The conclusions drawn from the facts may be matter of opinion; but it will be remembered that the facts themselves can be overthrown only by overthrowing the evidence on which they rest, or bringing forward counter evidence of equal or greater strength.” The chief questioner of Parkman’s views has been the Abbé Casgrain, whose position is best understood from his Une Paroisse Canadienne au XVIIe siècle, Quebec, 1880. See Poole’s Index, p. 973, for reviews of Parkman’s books.
[725] Mr. Parkman also made it the subject of an article in the Atlantic Monthly, xxxviii. 719.
[726] Sabin, vol. ii. no. 5,000.
[727] See Vol. III. p. 34.
[728] Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 516, 517.
[729] There are copies of the 1597 edition in the Carter-Brown and Harvard College libraries. They are worth from £3 to £4. Copies of the 1598 edition are in the Library of Congress, and in the Murphy, Barlow, and Carter-Brown Collections. It is usually priced at $8 or $10. This edition was reissued in 1603 with a new title, and the omissions of the leaf of “epigramma;” and copies of this date are in the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Library, and in the Carter-Brown Collection. A French edition, including the same maps, appeared at Douay in 1607, with the text abridged in parts and added to in others. There is a copy in the Carter-Brown (Catalogue, ii. 59) Collection. The maps were also reproduced, with four others not American, in the 1611 edition of Douay, of which the Library of Congress, Harvard College, and the Carter-Brown Collections have copies. The America, sive novus orbis of Metellus, published at Cologne in 1600, has twenty maps, which are reduced copies with little change from Wytfliet. (Rich, 1832, no. 90; Sabin, Dictionary, xii. 48,170). Harvard College Library has a copy of Metellus.
[730] Part of this famous map is given on p. 373. See Raemdonck’s Mercator, pp. 114-138, 249. The same map was reproduced on a different projection by Rumold Mercator in 1587, and by Corneille de Jode in 1589; and Guillaume Jannsonius imitated it in 1606, and this in turn was imitated by Kaerius. Girolamo Poro reproduced it at Venice on a reduced scale in 1596.
German and English writers have disputed over the claim for the invention of what is known as Mercator’s projection. The facts seem to be that Mercator conceived the principle, but did not accurately work out the formula for parallelizing the meridians and for spreading the parallels of latitude. Mead, on The Construction of Maps (1717), charged Mercator with having stolen the idea from Edward Wright, who was the first to publish an engraved map on this system in his Certaine Errors of Navigation, London, 1599. It seems, however, clear that Wright perfected the formula, and only claimed to have improved, not to have invented, the projection. Raemdonck (p. 120) gives full references.
[731] Dr. J. van Raemdonck published Gérard Mercator, sa Vie et ses Œuvres, in 1869; a paper in the nature of a supplement by him, “Relations commerciales entre Gérard Mercator et Christophe Plautin à Anvers,” was published in the Bull. de la Soc. géog. d’Anvers, iv. 327. There is a succinct account of Mercator by Eliab F. Hall published in the Bulletin (1878, no. 4) of the American Geographical Society. Raemdonck (p. 312) has shown that the old belief in the Latinization of Koopman, or Kaufmann, as the original name of Mercator, is an error,—his family name having been Cremer, which in Flemish signified the German Kaufmann and the Latin Mercator. Raemdonck also shows that Mercator was born in the Pays de Waas, March 5, 1512.
[732] Leclerc, Bibl. Amer., no. 2,911 (45 francs).
[733] Cf. I. C. Iselin, in Historisch-Geographisches Lexicon, Basel, 1726, 2d part.
[734] Sabin, vol. xii. no. 47,882. Lelewel, Géog. du Moyen Age, despaired of setting right the order of the various editions of Hondius-Mercator; but Raemdonck, Mercator, p. 260, thinks he has determined their sequence; and upon Raemdonck we have in part depended in this account. Raemdonck mentions the copies in European libraries. The 1607 edition was translated into French by Popellinière, the author of Les trois Mondes; and other French editions were issued in 1613, 1619, 1628, 1630, 1633, 1635. Cf. Quetelet, Histoire des Sciences, mathématique et physique chez les Belges, p. 116.
[735] Known in his vernacular as Pierre van den Bergh. He had married the sister of Jodocus Hondius.
[736] This had 153 plates, but none touching New France, except the map of the world. The same, with German text, appeared in 1609. About twenty editions appeared in various languages; but that of 1627-1628 showed 140 newly engraved maps, of which there were later Dutch (1630) and Latin (1634) editions. In 1651, this Atlas minor was increased to two volumes, with 211 maps, having 71 (including five new maps of South American regions) additional maps to the 140 of the 1627-1628 edition. Cf. Raemdonck, Mercator; Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. ii. no. 1,634; and Sabin, vol. xii. nos. 47,887 and 47,888.
[737] In 1633-39 it had the title, Atlas; ou, Représentation du Monde, in three volumes; Sabin, vol. xii. no. 47,884.
[738] The English editor was Wye Saltonstall. There are copies in Harvard College Library and in Mr. Deane’s, and the Carter-Brown Collection (Catalogue, ii. 430; cf. Sabin, Dictionary, vol. xii. no. 47,885). The second edition in some copies has Ralph Hall’s very rare map of Virginia.
[739] There is a fine copy in the Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society; cf. Sabin, vol. xii. no. 47,886.
[740] It is usually priced at from £7 to £10; cf. Sabin, vol. xii. no. 47,883. Raemdonck, Mercator, p. 268, says 313 maps, of which twenty are Mercator’s, and these last were latest used in the editions of 1640(?) and 1664.
[741] Lelewel, Epilogue, p. 222. Lelewel, a Pole, passed a long exile at Brussels, where he published, in 1852, his Géog. du Moyen Age. He died in Paris in 1862; and the people of Brussels commemorated him by an inscription on the house in which he lived.
[742] There is also a copy in Harvard College Library.
[743] Cf. Lelewel, Epilogue, p. 222. Covens and Mortier were the publishers of what is known as the Allard Atlases, published about the close of the century.
[744] A list of the royal geographers of France will often serve in fixing the dates of the many undated maps of this period. Such a list is given from 1560 in the Bulletin de la Soc. géog. d’Anvers, i. 477, and includes—
Nicolas Sanson, in office, 1647-1667.
P. Duval, 1664-1667.
Adrien Sanson, first son of Nicolas, 1667.
Guillaume Sanson, second son, 1667.
Jean B. d’Anville (b. 1697; d. 1782), 1718.
Guillaume Delisle (b. 1675; d. 1726), 1718.
Jean de Beaurain (b. 1696; d. 1771; publications,
1741-1756), 1721.
Le Rouge, 1722.
Philip Buache (publications, 1729-1760), d. 1773.
Roussel, 1730.
Hubert Jaillot, 1736.
Bernard Jaillot, 1736.
Robert de Vaugondy (b. 1688; d. 1766), 1760.
A Géographie universelle, avec Cartes, was published under Du Val’s name in Paris in 1682. Another French atlas, A. M. Mallet’s Description de l’Univers, Paris, 1683, in five volumes, contained 683 maps, of which 55 were American; and the century closed with what was still called Sanson’s Description de tout l’Univers en plusieurs Cartes, 1700, which had six maps on America.
[745] Copy in Boston Public Library (no. 2,311.68), 112 pp., quarto, without date. Cf. Uricoechea, Mapoteca Colombiana, no. 38; one of the Carter-Brown copies (Catalogue, ii. 828) is dated 1657 (as is the Harvard College copy), and the other, with twelve maps is dated 1662 (Catalogue, ii. no. 909). The entire atlas was called Cartes générales de toutes Parties du Monde, Paris, 1658 (Sunderland, vol. v. no. 11,069).
[746] Some copies are made up as covering the dates 1654 to 1669.
[747] Cf. Lelewel, Epilogue, p. 229. “The progress of geographical science long continued to be slow,” says Hallam in his Literature of Europe. “If we compare the map of the world in 1651, by Nicolas Sanson, esteemed on all sides the best geographer of his age, with one by his son in 1692, the variances will not appear perhaps so considerable as one might have expected.... The Sanson family did not take pains enough to improve what their father had executed, though they might have had material help from the astronomical observations which were now continually made in different parts of the world.” The Sanson plates continued to be used in Johannes Luyt’s Introductio ad Geographiam, 1692, and in the Atlas nouveau par le Sr. Sanson et H. Jaillot, published in Paris about the same year.
[748] A list of the American maps published in Holland is given on pp. 113-118 of Paullus’ Orbis terraqueus in Tabulis descriptus, published at Strasburg in 1673.
[749] Muller, Books on America, 1877, shows how copies of all these atlases are often extended by additional plates.
[750] Muller, Books on America, 1877, no. 89.
[751] Muller, Books on America, 1877, no. 701; Asher’s Essay, etc.; Sabin, Dictionary, vol. iv. no. 14,548.
[752] Cf. Muller, Books on America, 1877, nos. 957, etc., and Asher’s Essay.
[753] It is one of the rarest of these Zee-Atlases, and is worth £7 to £10; there is a copy in Harvard College Library.
[754] Muller, Books on America, 1877, no. 1,667, etc.
[755] There is a map of the world in this work which gives much the same delineation to America.
[756] Cf. the map on the title of the Beschryvinghe van Guiana, Amsterdam, 1605 (given in Muller’s Books on America, 1872). The map in Cespedes’ Regimiento de Navigacion, Madrid, 1606, is of interest as being one of the few early printed Spanish maps. This, like those in Medina, Gomara, and Herrera, is of a small scale. The map in so well-known a book as Herrera’s Descripcion de las Indias (1601, repeated in the 1622 edition) is very vaguely drawn for the northeastern part of America. The map in the Detectio freti Hudsoni, published at Amsterdam in 1613, showed as yet no signs of Champlain’s discoveries.
[757] It is reproduced as a whole in Tross’s edition of Lescarbot, Paris, 1866; in Faillon, Colonie Française en Canada, i. 85, and in the Popham Memorial.
[758] Harrisse, Notes, etc., nos. 306, 307.
[759] See chap. viii.
[760] Cf. Bibliographical Note in Vol. III. p. 47.
[761] See a bibliographical note in the present volume, chap. viii. Copies of the 1630 and 1633 editions are in Harvard College and the Boston Public Libraries, and in Mr. Deane’s collection.
[762] Notes, etc., no. 323. Harrisse also assigns to 1628 a map, “Novveau Monde,” by Nicolai du Dauphiné, which appeared in the French translation, 1628, of Medina’s L’Art de Naviguer. There is a mappemonde of Hondius bearing date 1630, and his America noviter delineata of 1631. Of about the same date is Den Groote Noord Zee ... beschreven door Jacob Aertz Colom, which appeared at Amsterdam, and shows the North American coast from Smith Sound to Florida. Muller, Books on America, 1877, no. 89, says it is “of the utmost rarity.”
[763] Harrisse, Notes, etc. nos. 270, 271.
[764] Harrisse, no. 327. Sanson had already published a map of North America in 1650 (Harrisse, no. 325). As contemporary maps, reference may be made to a map of Nicolosius (Harrisse, no. 268); and to one in Wright’s Certain Errors in Navigation. Harrisse (no. 336) refers to a later map of Sanson (1667), before his son published his revision in 1669.
[765] Similar delineations of these western lakes appear on various maps of about this time, including those credited to Valck and F. de Witt, and others marked “P. Schenk, ex.,” and “per Jacobum de Sandrart, Norimbergæ, B. Homann sculpsit.” Guillaume Sanson embodied the same representations in his Amérique septentrionale in 1669 (Harrisse, no. 338), and the next year (1670) they again appeared on the map attached to Blome’s Description of the World. Still later they are found in Jaillot’s Amérique septentrionale (1694); in the map in Campanius’ Nya Swerige (1702), and even so late as 1741 in Van der Aa’s Galerie agréable du Monde.
[766] There were various later editions,—1662, 1674, 1677 (with map dated 1663).
[767] Harrisse, Notes, etc., nos. 269, 272, 328; Uricoechea, Mapoteca Colombiana, no. 42, etc.
[768] See the Editorial Note on the Jesuit Relations.
[769] Harrisse (no. 197) refers to a manuscript map in the Paris Archives of 1665, showing the coast from Labrador to Mexico.
[770] Cf. Stevens’s Bibliotheca Geographica, no. 2,016.
[771] See chap. vi.
[772] Harrisse, nos. 336, 338, 344, 345, 347, 356, 363, 370; Stevens, Bibliotheca geographica, p. 236.
[773] Harrisse, no. 349.
[774] Harrisse, no. 350.
[775] Harrisse, no. 351.
[776] Harrisse, no. 354.
[777] Ibid., no. 367.
[778] Harrisse, nos. 371, 372.
[779] Harrisse, no. 374.
[780] I am inclined to consider this desire of finding a new and shorter passage to Cathay a flimsy excuse for premeditated descents upon the Spanish conquests, and shall give my reasons in the proper place.
[781] [See Vol. III., chaps. iv. and v.—Ed.]
[782] Wahlebocht, bay of the foreigners.
[783] [See Vol. III., chap. v.; also, later in the present chapter.—Ed.]
[784] [See this Vol., chap. ix.—Ed.]
[785] The schout-fiscal was a member of the Council, but had no vote. He attended the sessions of the Council to give his opinion upon any financial or judicial question; and, if required, acted as public prosecutor.
[786] [This was the origin of the New York Historical Society, which held its first organized meeting in January, 1805, and occupied its present building for the first time in 1857. (Historical Magazine, i. 23, 369; Public Libraries of the United States [1876], i. 924.) It was at this dedication that Dr. John W. Francis delivered his genial and anecdotal discourse on New York in the last Fifty Years.
Some good supplemental work has been done by the local historical societies, like the Long Island (Historical Magazine, viii. 187), Ulster County, and Buffalo societies.—Ed.]
[787] [Dr. O’Callaghan made the translations from the Dutch and French, and had the general superintendence. Brodhead prepared the Introduction, giving the history of the records. Brodhead made his first report on his work in 1845 (Senate Documents, no. 47, of 1845), after he had arranged and indexed his eighty volumes, also in an address before the New York Historical Society, 1844, printed in their Proceedings. This led to the arranging and binding of two hundred volumes of the domestic archives, which had been in disorder. The eighty volumes above named were divided thus:—
Sixteen, 1603-1678, obtained in Holland; forty-seven, 1614-1678, procured in England; seventeen, 1631-1763, secured in Paris. Brodhead’s New York, i. 759; Westminster Review, new series, iii. 607.
Asher, Essay, p. xlviii, says of Brodhead’s mission: “We must, however, regret that, tied down by his instructions, he took a somewhat narrow view of his search, and purposely omitted from his collection a vast store of documents bearing on the history of the West India Company.”
The documents as published were divided thus: Vol. i. Holland documents, 1603-1656. Vol. ii. Ibid., 1657-1678. Vol. iii. London documents, 1614-1692. Vol. iv. Ibid., 1693-1706. Vol. v. Ibid., 1707-1733. Vol. vi. Ibid., 1734-1755. Vol. vii. Ibid., 1756-1767. Vol. viii. Ibid., 1768-1782. Vol. ix. Paris documents, 1631-1744. Vol. x. Ibid., 1745-1774.
In the Introduction to vol. iii. Mr. Brodhead gives an account of the condition of the English State-Paper Office in 1843.—Ed.]
[788] [The discourse (1847) of C. F. Hoffman on “The Pioneers of New York,” institutes a comparison with the Pilgrims of Plymouth. Mr. Fernow’s paper in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., v. 214, discusses the claims of the Dutch to be considered as having educated people among them, and the various legislative acts indicating their tolerant spirit are enumerated in Historical Magazine, iii. 312.
See Dr. De Witt’s paper on the origin of the early settlers in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1847, p. 72. Various notices of the early families are scattered through O’Callaghan’s notes to his New Netherland, and embodied in the local histories; but genealogy has never been so favorite a study in New York as in New England.—Ed.]
[789] N. Y. Coll. MSS., xxxv. 162.
[790] Governor Ingoldsby to Lords of Trade, July 5, 1709: “I am well informed that when the Dutch took this place from us, several books of records of patents and other things were lost.”—N. Y. Coll. Doc’s, v. 83.
[791] [Calendar of Historical MSS. in the Secretary of State’s Office (Dutch), 1630-1664, Albany, 1865; and Ibid. (English), 1664-1776, Albany, 1866. On p. ix of the last is given a list of the papers and volumes formerly in the offices of the Secretary of State and Comptroller, now in the State Library. There was also printed at Albany, in 1864, a Calendar of the New York Colonial MSS. and Land Papers, 1643-1803, in the Secretary of State’s office.—Ed.]
[792] See Hakluyt, i. 218.
[793] Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, etc., iii. 155, London, 1600.
[794] Kunstmann, Monumenta Sæcularia, iii. 2; Entdeckungsgeschichte Americas, Munich, 1859, Atlas, tab. iv.
[795] Peter Martyr, seventh decade, tenth chapter.
[796] Oviedo, Relacion sumaria de la Historia Natural de las Indias, edition of 1526, x. 16. “While sailing westward, much land adjoining that which is called the Baccalaos [Newfoundland], and situate under the fortieth and forty-first degrees.”
[797] Mappa Mundi of Diego Ribero, 1529, given by Lelewel, Géographie du Moyen Age; two undated maps by unknown makers, about 1532-1540, in the Munich collection, Kunstmann’s Atlas, tab. vi., vii.; the globe Regiones orbis terrarum, quas Euphr. Ulpius descripsit anno MDXLII.; the map in the Isolario, by Benedetto Bordone, Vinegia, 1547; a map by Baptista Agnese, made in 1554, mentioned by Abbate D. Placido Zurla in Sulle Antiche Mappe Idro geografiche lavorate in Venezia; map of Vaz Dourado, the original of which, made in 1571, is in the archives at Lisbon, and a copy made in 1580 at Munich (Kunstmann, Atlas, tab. x.); map in the Cosmographie of Seb. Munster, Basel, 1574; and others.
[798] François de Belle Forest, Comingeois, La Cosmographie Universelle de tout le Monde, Paris, 1575, ii. 2195.
[799] [The bibliography of the Ptolemies is examined in another part of this work.—Ed.]
[800] Kunstmann, Atlas, tab. xii. [A section of Hood’s map is given in Dr. De Costa’s chapter in Vol. III.—Ed.] See also Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, 15.2
[801] Orbis Terrarum Typus de Integro multis in locis emendatus, auctore Petro Plancio, 1594, reproduced in Linschoten’s Histoire de la Navigation, 1638 and 1644. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 312; Quaritch (1879), no. 12,186. See also Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum, Cornelio Wytfliet auctore, Duaci (Douay), 1603, p. 99.
[802] Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, i. 94.
[803] Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, i. 51.
[804] [See on the first mention of Hudson River, Magazine of American History, July, 1882, p. 513. It had about twenty names in a century and a half. Ibid., iv. 404, June, 1880. De Costa, in Hudson’s Sailing Directions, elucidates the claims for the Spanish discovery.—Ed.]
[805] Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, i. 139.
[806] [Verrazano’s discoveries are followed in chapter i. of the present volume.—Ed.]
[807] Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, ii. 80.
[808] [It is often claimed that the map of Lok (see page 40 of Vol. III.) showing the Western Sea of Verrazano, and published in 1582, instigated Hudson to make search for it along the shore of New Netherland. Hudson’s voyage of 1609 is known as his third voyage. (Cf. a note to Mr Smith’s chapter in Vol. III. on “Explorations to the Northwest.”) The question of the impelling cause of this voyage is examined by Bancroft in his United States, vol. ii. chap. 15; by H. C. Murphy in his Henry Hudson in Holland, Hague, 1859; and by J. M. Read, in his Henry Hudson, his Friends, Relatives, and Early Life, Albany, 1866, which last work has an appendix of original sources.
The old narrative of Ivan Bardsen, which it is supposed was used by Hudson as a guide, is given in Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanæ, in Purchas’s Pilgrimes, in the appendix of Asher’s Hudson, and the English of it is given in De Costa’s Sailing Directions of Hudson (reviewed in the Historical Magazine, 1870, p. 204), which is accompanied by a dissertation on the discovery of Hudson River. Cf. also Major’s Introduction to the Zeni Voyages, published by the Hakluyt Society.
Moulton, in his New York, gives a running commentary on Hudson’s passage up the river. See also the conclusions of Gay in the Popular History of the United States, i. 355. We learn the most of this voyage from Purchas’s Pilgrimes (also N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1809, vol. i.), whose third volume contains the accounts by Hudson and his companions; and in the Pilgrimage there is a chapter on “Hudson’s Discoveries and Death,” which is mainly a summary of the documents in the Pilgrimes. This is reprinted by Asher in his Henry Hudson the Navigator (Hakluyt Society), where will also be found, page 45, what is known as Juet’s Journal, March-November, 1609 (also in Purchas, iii. 581; Munsell’s Annals of Albany, and in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., i. 317; also cf. ii. 367), with extracts from Lambrechtsen’s New Netherland, who used material not otherwise known, and from De Laet’s Nieuwe Wereld, and in the Appendix a bibliography of the voyage. De Laet used Hudson’s own journals (April 19, 1607-June 21, 1611), which are not now known and what De Laet gives of the third voyage is supposed to be Hudson’s own report. Asher, p. 167-172, claims that the matter given by Van der Donck and not found elsewhere was fabricated to support the Dutch claim. The controversial papers of Dawson and Whitehead, in the Historical Magazine, 1870, touch many of the points of Hudson’s explorations. Brodhead’s New York and O’Callaghan’s New Netherland give careful studies of this voyage. The latest developments, however, did not serve Biddle in his Cabot; nor Belknap in his American Biography; nor R. H. Cleveland in Sparks’s American Biography; nor Miller in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1810. The chief Dutch authority is Emanuel van Meteren, of whose work mention is made later in the text. (Cf. Asher’s Hudson, p. xxv; compare also a Collection of Voyages undertaken by the Dutch East India Company, London, 1703, p. 71.)—Ed.]
[809] See G. M. Asher’s Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland, Amsterdam, 1854-67. The Vryheden of the West India Company, 1630, a sort of primary charter to the colonists of New Netherland, is given in English by Dr. O’Callaghan (New Netherland, p. 112), and in Dutch in Wassenaer, Hist. Verhael, xviii. 194. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 367, shows an original copy.
[810] Ibid.; also manuscript in the possession of Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, Advice to establish a new South Company, by William Usselinx, 1636, and West-Indische Spieghel by Athanasius Inga, of Peru, 1624, probably a work of Usselinx’s. One copy is in Mr. Brevoort’s library, one in New York State Library, and a third in the Carter-Brown Collection. See the Catalogue of the latter collection, ii. no. 296.
[811] [See the following chapter.—Ed.]
[812] [This work is now rare; but copies are in the Congressional, Harvard College, Carter-Brown, Murphy, and Lenox libraries. See Asher’s Essay, pp. 83, 93.—Ed.]
[813] Born at Antwerp in 1582; died at Amsterdam, 1649.
[814] Johan de Hulter, one of the earliest settlers of Kingston, N. Y. His widow married Jeronimus Ebbingh, of Kingston.
[815] Nieuwe Wereld ofte Beschrijvinghe van West Indien, uijt veelerhande Schriften ende Aenteekeningen bij een versamelt door Joannes de Laet, Leyden, 1625,—“The New World, or Description of West Indies, from several MSS and notes collected by J. de Laet.” A second edition in Dutch appeared, with slightly changed title, in 1630; a third in Latin,—Novus Orbis, seu Descriptionis Indiæ Occidentalis Libri xviii.,—was published in 1633; and a fourth in French, entitled Histoire du Nouveau Monde, ou Description des Indes Occidentales, in 1640. The State Library at Albany, N. Y., has copies of all except the first, and all are noted in the O’Callaghan and Carter-Brown Catalogues. [A copy of the 1625 edition was priced by Muller in 1872 at ten florins. There is a copy in Charles Deane’s library. The 1630 edition, called “verbetert, vermeerdert, met eenige nieuwe Caerten verciert,” has fourteen maps, engraved chiefly by Hessel Gerritsz, and good copies are worth about six to eight guineas. The 1633 edition was priced by Rich in 1832 at one pound ten shillings, but a good copy of it will now bring about five guineas. The 1640 edition has appreciated in the same time from one pound four shillings (Rich, in 1832) to two guineas. Translations of such parts as pertain to New Netherland are in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., new series, i. 281, and ii. 373. Brodhead, in 1841, tried in vain in Holland to find De Laet’s papers. De Laet’s library was sold April 27, 1650. There is a catalogue of it noted in the Huth Catalogue, ii. 414.—Ed.]
[816] Historie ofte Jaerlijck Verhael van de Verrichtingen van de Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie sedert haer Begin tot 1636,—“History or Yearly Account of the Proceedings of the West India Company, from its beginning to 1636,” anno 1644. Copy in State Library, Albany. Trömel, no. 198. [For the history of the Dutch West India Company, see O’Callaghan’s New Netherland, vol. i. (its charter is given, p. 399); and a valuable contribution to the subject is also contained in Asher’s Essay, in the sketch of the Company in his Introduction, p. xiv and in the section on the Company’s history, p. 40, and on the writings of Usselinx, p. 73. He says the best history of its fortunes is in Netscher’s Les Hollandais au Brésil. There is also much of importance in T. C. de Jonge’s Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsch Zeewesen, 1833-48, six volumes. The flag of the West India Company is depicted in Valentine’s New York City Manual, 1863, in connection with an abstract of a paper on “The Flags which have waved over New York City,” by Dr. A. K. Gardner.—Ed.]
[817] [The letter of Rasieres, printed in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., ii. 339, gives us a notice of the country in 1627.—Ed.]
[818] De Origine Gentium Americanarum, Paris, 1643.
[819] Bancroft, History of the United States, ii. 281: “The voyage of De Vries was the cradling of a state. That Delaware exists as a separate commonwealth is due to the colony of De Vries.” Cf. Proceedings of the Inaugural Meeting of the Historical Society of Delaware, May 31, 1864; J. W. Beekman in the N.Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1847, p. 86; Delaware Papers, p. 335 of Calendar of Historical MSS. in the State Library (Dutch) at Albany, edited by Dr. O’Callaghan, 1865, and N. Y. Col. Docs. vol. xii., 1877.—Ed.
[820] Korte Historiael ende Journaels Aenteyckeninge van verscheyden Voyagien in de vier Teelen des Wereldts Ronde, door David Pietersen de Vries, Alkmaar, 1655,—“Short History and Notes of a Journal kept during Several Voyages by D. P. de Vries.”
[This extremely rare book was first used by Brodhead (i. 381, note). It should have a portrait by Cornelius Visscher, which has been reproduced in Amsterdam by photolithography. Mr. Lenox paid $300 for the copy noted in Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 1,615. There are also copies in the Carter-Brown (ii. 803) and Murphy collections, and one was sold in the Brinley sale, no. 2,717; cf. Asher, no. 336; Trömel, no. 279; Muller (1872), no. 1,109, and (1877) no. 3,414, 240 florins, not quite perfect; Huth, ii. 424; O’Callaghan, no. 778. Extracts from the book were translated in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., i. 243; and all the parts relating to America by H. C. Murphy, in Ibid., iii. 9; and this translation, with an Introduction, was privately reprinted by Mr. Lenox (250 copies), in 1853.]
[821] Title of the lowest grade of nobility in Holland.
[822] Hon. Jer. Johnson, in the preface to his translation of Van der Donck (N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1841), says “Van Rensselaer had arrived five years before Van der Donck.” This is an error. Kilian van Rensselaer, the first patroon, was never in America; and when by his death, 1646, the title to Rensselaerswyck devolved upon his infant son Johannes, the child’s paternal uncle, Johann Baptist van Rensselaer, undertook the personal management of the colony, but did not arrive in America as the first representative here of the family until 1651. O’Callaghan, in History of New Netherland, ii. 550, states that Van der Donck was not allowed to practise law in New Netherland, because “the directors could not see what advantage his pleadings before the courts would have, as there were already lawyers in New Netherland,” etc. This is also an error. See N. Y. Coll. MSS., xi. 86, where the application is refused “because they doubted whether there were any other lawyers who could act or plead against him.” Van der Donck was here from 1641 to 1655, when he died.
[823] Vertoogh van Nieu Nederland, whegens de Ghelegentheydt, Vruchtbaerheydt en Soberen Staet deszelfs, In’s Gravens Hage, 1650,—“Account of New Netherland, its situation, fertility, and the state thereof.”
[See O’Callaghan, ii. 90, 111; Brodhead, i. 506; Asher, no. 5; Brinley, ii. 2715; Huth, iii. 1031; Muller, 1877, p. 196, for 140 florins; Harrassowitz, cat. no. 61, book no. 87, for 125 marks; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 698. Brodhead found in Holland the copy now in the New York Historical Society’s library. Mr. H. C. Murphy translated it for 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii. 251, with an Introduction, and this, with Murphy’s translation of Breeden Raedt, was in 1854 privately reprinted, 125 copies, by Mr. Lenox, with a fac-simile of the map of the Hudson from the Zee-Atlas of Goos. See an extract from this map given on a later page.—Ed.]
[824] Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, i. 430.
[825] Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, i. 422.
[826] Beschrijvinge van Nieuw Nederlant, ghelijck het tegenwoordigh in staet is, etc., door Adrian van der Donck, beyder Rechten Doctoor, die tegenwoordigh noch in Nieuw Nederlant is, Amsterdam, 1655; second edition, 1656,—“Description of New Netherland as it now is, etc., by A. van der Donck, Doctor of Laws, who is still in New Netherland.”
[This work is perhaps the rarest and now the most costly of the early books on New York. Stevens (Historical Collection, nos. 200, 1,395) says, “Copies for the last forty years have usually sold for £12 to £21.” It is priced in Muller (1872 edition, nos. 1,079-81, 1877 edition, nos. 955, 956), 150 florins; in Leclerc (no. 866), 200 francs. Field (Indian Bibliography, no. 1,592) gives some reasons for supposing there was a third edition in 1656. (Cf. Asher, no. 7; Brinley, ii. 2,718; Carter-Brown, ii. 801, with supplement, no. 811; also no. 814; O’Callaghan, no. 2,315; Sabin, v. 482; Huth, v. 1514; Trömel, nos. 280, 281.) There is a view of New Amsterdam in the first edition which is not in the second. O’Callaghan, New Netherland, ii. 551, has a note on Van der Donck’s life and family. His book has been translated by General Jeremiah Johnson in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1841; see also second series, i. 125.—Ed.]
[827] Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in several of the American Colonies in 1679-1680, by Jasper Dankers and P. Sluyter, published from MSS. in his possession by Hon. Henry C. Murphy, in Collections of Long Island Historical Society, vol. i., 1867. See further on the Dankers and Sluyter Journal, the notes appended to Mr. John Austin Stevens’s chapter on “The English in New York,” in Vol. III.
[828] The hill below Albany, N. Y., on which the fort was built in 1618, is called by the Indians Tawalsontha, Tawassgunshee, Tawajonshe, “a heap of dead men’s bones.” Tas de jonchets would be the French for the same expression. Another place near Albany was called Semegonce, the place to sow; still another, Negogance, the place to trade; while semer and négoce (negocio) are the corresponding French words.
[829] Een kort Ontwerp van de Mahakvase Indianen, haer landt, tale, statuere, dracht, godes-dienst ende magistrature. Aldus beschreven ende nu kortelijck den 26 Augusti 1644 opgezonden uijt Nieuw Nederlant, Alkmaar, no date. It was published in Holland without his consent in 1651. Translated in Hazard’s State-Papers, i. 517 et seq., and by J. R. Brodhead in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., iii. 137. [Muller, Catalogue (1872), no. 1,089, says but one copy of this tract is known, which is among the Meulman pamphlets in the library of the university at Gand.—Ed.] For a biography of Megapolensis, see Manual of the Reformed Church in America, third edition, p. 378. Megapolensis says in one of his letters (Documents relating to the History of New York, xiii. 423), that in his youth he renounced popery; he could, therefore, hardly have been the son of a minister, as stated in the Manual.
[The general Indian Bibliography of T. W. Field must be held to indicate the sources of information regarding the condition of the natives at the time of the Dutch occupation. Bolton, in his West Chester County (1848), endeavors by a map to place the Indian tribes as they occupied the territory bordering the southern parts of the Hudson. Dunlap, New York, i. 20, gives a map showing the territory of the Five Nations. Dr. O’Callaghan translated in 1863 a paper in the State archives, entitled A Brief and True Narration of the Hostile Conduct of the Barbarous Natives towards the Dutch Nation, dated 1655, and gave the Indian treaty of 1645 in an appendix. Fifty copies only were printed (Field, no. 1,147). Judge Egbert Benson published in 1817, 1825, and in the N. Y. Hist. Coll., vol. vii., an essay on the Dutch and Indian names, of which a copy, with his manuscript additions, exists in Harvard College Library.
The most important of the works of the last century is Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Nations, originally printed at New York in 1727. The second and third editions were printed in London, and the English editors gave additions without distinguishing them. The best issue is the fourth, printed in New York in 1866, exactly following the 1727 one, and enriched with notes by John G. Shea, who gives also its bibliographical history. (Field, no. 341.) The first place among recent books on this confederacy must be assigned to Lewis H. Morgan’s League of the Iroquois. (Field, no. 1,091.) There is more or less illustrative of the early state of the Indians in Ketchum’s Buffalo (1864), for the Five Nations, as described in Field, no. 824; in Benton’s Herkimer County (1856), for the Upper Mohawk tribes. See also J. V. H. Clark’s Onondaga (1849), praised by Field, no. 323; A. W. Holden’s Queensbury (1874), for those of the northern parts; and in E. M. Ruttenber’s Indian Tribes of Hudson River (1872). Field, no. 1,334.—Ed.]
[830] [Published in English, with a biography of the writer, by Mr. J. Gilmary Shea in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., iii. 161, and separately, at Mr. Lenox’s expense, in 1862 as Novum Belgium, an Account of New Netherland in 1643-1644; and also in French, Description de Nieuw Netherland, et Notice sur René Goupil, etc.; cf. also Doc. Hist. of N. Y., iv. 15. Jogues was in New Netherland from August, 1642, to November, 1643. His Memoir is dated “Des 3 Riviéres en la nouvelle France, 3 Augusti, 1646,” and the original manuscript is preserved in the Hôtel Dieu at Quebec. Field’s Indian Bibliography, no. 781.
Mr. Shea speaks of this “as the only account by a foreigner of that time,” not then being aware of the letter written eighteen years earlier by the Rev. Jonas Michaelius, the first Reformed minister in New Netherland. This manuscript, dated Aug. 11, 1628, “from the island Manhattans,” was priced in Muller’s 1877 Catalogue, no. 2,121, at 375 florins. H. C. Murphy printed an English version of it privately at the Hague in 1858; also in O’Callaghan’s Doc. Hist. of N. Y., vol. ii. It had originally appeared in the Kerkhistorisch Archief, Amsterdam, 1858. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 339. Muller issued a fac-simile of it in 1876, accompanied by the Dutch transcript and Murphy’s version, giving it a preface, and printing only a hundred copies. Muller, Books on America, 1877, no. 2,122, and 1872, no. 1,053, where the original is said to be in the library of Dr. Bodel Nyenhuis at Leyden, who had bought it at the historian Koning’s sale in 1833. “Mr. Koning probably found it in the archives.” The letter is addressed to Adr. Smoutius, minister in Amsterdam. Historical Magazine, ii. 191.—Ed.]
[831] Beschrijvinghe van Virginia, Nieuw Nederlant, Nieuw Englant, etc., Amsterdam, 1651,—“Description of Virginia, New Netherland, New England,” etc. With a map and engravings.
[The book, being cheap at the time, was widely circulated, and most copies have disappeared, as is usual with such books. (Brodhead, i. 527.) Muller, 1877, nos. 312 and 2,265, prices it at 225 florins. (Cf. Asher, no. 6; Brinley, ii. 2,716; Trömel, no. 258; O’Callaghan, ii. 90, 111; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 721.).—Ed.]
[832] Verheerlickte Nederlant door d’ Herstelde Zee-Vaart; klaerlijck voorgestelt, ontdeckt en angewesen door manier van’tsamen-Sprekinge van een Boer, ofte Landt man, een Burger ofte Stee-man, een Schipper ofte Zeeman, etc., 1659,—“Netherland glorified by the Restoration of Commerce; clearly represented, discovered, and shown by Manner of a Dialogue, etc., 1659.”
[833] Mr. Asher, in his Bibliographical Essay, says that because the author alludes to Van der Donck as Verdonck, it is less probable that he had been in New Netherland. I do not see why a misspelling of a name should weaken an assertion made by Mr. Asher himself to the contrary,—if that can be called misspelling which is in reality an abbreviation in the old Dutch MS.
[834] Het waere Onderscheyt tusschen koude en warme Landen, aengewesen in de Nootsakelijckheden die daer vereyscht worden, etc., door O. K. In’s Graven Hage, 1659,—“The True Difference between Cold and Warm countries, demonstrated by the Requirements necessary,” etc. A German edition appeared at Leipzig in 1672, under the title “Otto Keyen’s kurtzen Entwurff von Neu Niederland und Guajana,” long considered an original work. A copy of this edition is in the State Library at Albany. Cf. Asher’s Essay, no. 12, and Carter-Brown, ii. 1,081.
[835] Kort Verhael van Nieuw Nederlants Gelegentheit, Deughden, Natuerlijcke Voorrechten en bijzondere bequaemheyt ter bevolkingh. Mitsgaders eenige Requesten, Vertooghen, etc., gepresenteert aen de E. E. Heeren Burgermeesters dezer Stede, 1662,—“Short Account of New Netherland’s Situation, Good Qualities, Natural Advantages, and Special Fitness for Populating, together with some Petitions, Representations, etc., submitted to the Noble, Worshipful Lord Mayors of this City, 1662.”
[The book is very scarce. “I have found only three copies in twenty years,” said Muller in 1872, “and sold my last at two hundred florins.” He also refers to the further development of the writer’s liberal and economical ideas in Vrije Politijke Stellingen, Amsterdam, 1665. Muller, Books on America, 1872, no. 1,111; Brodhead, New York, i. 699; Trömel, no. 312; Asher’s Essay, no. 13; Carter-Brown, ii. 926.—Ed.]
[836] These two parties were originally divided on theological questions; Gomar’s followers adhering to the religious doctrines of the Established Church and its principles of ecclesiastical polity, while Arminius (Harmansen), professor at Leyden, taught, among other doctrines then considered heretical, the supremacy of the civil authorities in clerical matters. Oldenbarnevelt, believing that the Prince of Orange intended to make himself King of Holland, although indifferent in religious matters, took the part of the Arminians, because he saw in them a powerful ally, and turned the theological controversy into a political question.
[837] O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, ii. 547.
[838] Bibliographical Essay, p. 16.
[839] O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, ii. 465.
[840] De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld; of Beschrijving van America en’t Zuyd Land, vervaetende d’ Oorsprong der Americaener en Zuidlanders, gedenkwaerdige togten derwaerts, etc., beschreeven door Arnoldus Montanus, Amsterdam, 1671,—“The New World, or Description of America and the South Land; containing the Origin of the Americans and South Landers, Remarkable Voyages thither,” etc. A German edition of 1673, Die Unbekante neue Welt, oder Beschreibung des Weltteils America und des Südlandes, etc., is ascribed by the translator to Dr. O. Dapper, who, however, only published it with other works of his collection. [See Asher’s Essay, nos. 14, 15, and the note to Mr. Stevens’s chapter in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[841] Edward Melton’s Zee en Land Reizen door verscheide Gewesten der Werelds. Edward Melton’s, Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc., Amsterdam, 1681, reprinted in 1702,—“Edward Melton’s Travels by Sea and Land through Different Parts of the World.” “Edward Melton, an English Nobleman’s Curious and Memorable Travels by Sea and Land,” etc. A part of this book was further reprinted in 1705 as Aenmerkenswaardige en Zeldzame West-Indische Zee en Land Reizen, door een Voornam Engelsche Heer, E. M., en andere,—“Remarkable and Strange West Indian Travels by Sea and Land by a Noble Englishman, E. M., and Others.” [Asher, Essay, p. xliv and nos. 16, 17, 18, points out the clumsy, unoriginal character of Melton’s tardy information. The O’Callaghan copy (no. 1,522) had the rare Lolonois portrait. See the note to Mr. Stevens’s chapter in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[842] Beschrijvinghe van Oost en West Indien. Beschrijvinge van eenige voorname Kusten in Oost en West Indien als Zuerinam, Nieuw Nederlant, etc., door verscheidene Leefhebbers gedaen, Leeuwarden, 1716,—“Description of East and West India.” “Description of some Notable Coasts in East and West India, as Surinam, New Netherland, etc., by Several Amateurs.” The description of New Netherland is a reprint of three chapters in Melton.
Algemeene Wereldt Beschrijving door A. P. De la Croix, Amsterdam, 1705. Algemeene Weereld Beschrijving nae de rechte verdeeling der Landschappen, Plaetsen, etc., in ’t Fransch beschreeven door den Heer A. Pher. De la Croix, Aerdryks Beschrijver des Konings van Frankryk,—“General Description of the World,” by A. P. De la Croix. “General Description of the World according to the Correct Division of Countries, places, etc.,” written in French by A. Pher. De la Croix, Geographer to the King of France.
[843] Born at Antwerp, 1535; as grandson of Willem Ortels, of Augsburg, and first cousin of the historian Abraham Ortelius, his taste for historical studies seems to have been inherited.
[844] Originally published in Latin at Amsterdam, 1597. Van Meteren translated the work into Flemish, and published it in 1599; then continued it in the same language up to 1612, in which shape it was republished after his death at Arnhem in 1614. French editions of the work appeared in 1618 and 1670, and a German one at Frankfort in 1669.
[845] A native of Huisdem, in Holland, at one time teacher in the Latin School at Haarlem. After having studied medicine and been admitted to practice, he employed his leisure hours in collecting material for a historical work, which he published under the title, Historisch Verhael al der ghedenckweerdichste Geschiedenissen, die hier en daer in Europa, etc., voorgevallen syn,—“Historical Account of all the most Remarkable Events in Europe, etc.” Part of it appeared under the name of his friend, Dr. Barend Lampe, of Amsterdam.
[This work, covering the years 1621-1632, was first brought to light by Brodhead (New York, i. 46), who has given an abstract of it in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., ii. 355. (Cf. Doc. Hist. N. Y., iii. 27.) It contains the earliest reports on New Netherland printed at Amsterdam. It is described in Muller, Books on America, 1872, no. 1,745, and was first noticed by Asher, Essay, no. 330; Carter-Brown, ii. 276.—Ed.]
[846] He says: “Alsoo de Staeten van de Vereenigde Nederlandsche Provintien door de 12 jaerighe Trefves, die nu (1621) een eijndt nam, in West Indien te trafiqueeren uijtgeslooten waeren, soo ist, dat sij bevindende door het jus gentium, dat de Zeevaert een ijeder vrij staet, gedestineert hebben een Companie op te rechten om op de Landen te negotieeren, die de Coningh van Spaengien besit,”—“As the States of the United Provinces have been excluded from trading to the West Indies by the truce of twelve years now expiring, upon finding that by the law of nations the navigation is open to everybody, they have resolved to organize a company for trade to the countries owned by the King of Spain.”
[847] Lieuwe van Aitzema, son of the Burgomaster of Dockum, born 1600, and himself in high official position, died 1669. Michaud, Bibliographie Universelle, says: “Ce qui donne une si haute importance à l’ouvrage d’A. c’est cette foule d’actes originaux, ...dont il a fait usage et qu’il a su tirer des archives et des dépôts les plus secrets [not always by quite proper means].” Wiquefort, in his Ambassadeur, criticises Aitzema sharply: “Elle [l’histoire d’A.] peut servir comme d’inventaire à ceux qui n’ont point d’accès aux archives d’État, mais ce que l’auteur a ajouté ne vaut pas la gazette. Il n’a point de style, son langage est barbare, et tout l’ouvrage n’est qu’un chaos.” However, he deserves our gratitude for throwing light upon the events of his time, and for giving us trustworthy and abundant information.
[848] Affairs of State and War in and concerning the United Netherlands, 1621-1669; The Re-instated Lion, 1650. The first edition of Saken, etc., appeared during the years 1657 to 1671; a second edition, containing the Herstelde Leeuw, 1669-1672. The work was continued by Lambert Sylvius or Van den Bosch up to 1697.
[849] Broad [wholesome] Advice to the United Netherland Provinces ... composed and given from divers ... documents by J. A. G. W. C. [Its authorship is assigned to Cornelis Melyn by Brodhead, New York, 1. 509, and by Henry C. Murphy, who translates it in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. iii. 237, and says it affords some facts not known from other sources. Extracts were reprinted in translation by F. W. Cowan at Amsterdam in 1850, and again in the Documentary History of New York, iv. 65. Brodhead censures this translation. Cf. Asher’s Essay, no. 334, who first gave it the prominence it deserves, and disbelieves in Melyn’s authorship, and goes into a long examination of the question. It is priced at from £20 to £40. Stevens’s Hist. Coll. i. 1,525; Sabin’s Dictionary, vii. 112; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 664; Brinley, no. 2,714.—Ed.]
[850] N. Y. Coll. Doc. i. 16, and N. Y. Coll. MSS.
[851] N. Y. Coll. MSS.
[852] He was born 1709, and died 1773. Cf. Asher’s Bibliographical Essay.
[853] Vaderlandsche Historie, ix. 227. “Resolved, that by carrying the war over to America the Spaniards be attacked there, where their weakest point was, but whence they drew most of their revenues. That a great part of America reaching thence to both poles was unknown (not undiscovered).”
[854] The full title of the twelfth part is: Zwölfte Schiffart, oder kurze Beschreibung der Newen Schiffart gegen Nord-osten über die Amerikanischen Inseln, von einem Englander, Henry Hudson, erfunden. Oppenheim, 1627.
[855] West und Ost-Indischer Lustgart, Eygentliche Erzaehlung wann vnd von wem die Newe Welt erfunden, besaegelt vnd eingenomen worden, vnd was sich Denckwuerdiges darbey zugetragen. Koeln, 1618.
Newe vnd warhaffte Relation von deme was sich in den West vnd Ost Indien vonder Zeit an zugetragen, dass sich die Navigationes der Holleandischen vnd Engländischen Companien daselbsthin angefangen abzuscheiden. Muenchen, 1619 (by Nicolai Elend).
[856] Philippi Cluverii Introductio in Universam Geographiam. Leyden, 1629. The edition of 1697 was published with notes by Hekel, Reiske, and Bunon.
[857] The same Johann Ludwig Gottfriedt published in 1655 Newe Welt vnd Amerikanische Historien. A later German geographer of America was Hans Just Winckelmann, whose Der Amerikanischen neuen Welt Beschreibung, Oldenburg, 1664, I have not seen. Nor have I seen any works of French contemporary writers, as Pierre Davity, Description générale de l’Amérique, 3me partie du monde, avec tous ses empires, royaumes, etc., Paris, 1643, 2d edition, 1660; M. C. Chaulmer, Le Nouveau Monde, ou l’Amérique chrétienne, Paris, 1659. [The last is in Harvard College Library; but without present interest.—Ed.]
[858] A Brief Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England, and of Sundry Accidents therein occurring, from the year 1607 to this present 1622.
[859] To Purchas: see 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. vol. i.
[860] N. Y. Coll. Doc. iii. 17.
[861] A Description of the Province of New Albion and a Direction for Adventurers with small Stock to get two for one and good Land freely; and for Gentlemen and all Servants, Laborers, and Artificers to live plentifully, etc. Printed in the year 1648 by Beauchamp Plantagenet, of Belvil in New-Albion. [Reprinted in Force’s Tracts, vol. ii. See documents in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Pub. Fund, ii. 213; and Professor G. B. Keen’s note on Plowden’s Grant in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[862] N. Y. Col. Doc. iii. 6 et seq.
[863] [Cf. on this alleged Argal incursion, Palfrey’s New England, i. 235, and George Folsom in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., i. 332. Brodhead, i. 140, 754, doubts it.—Ed.]
[864] See the patent in Hazard, State-Papers, i. 160. Doubts have been raised whether such a grant was ever made, or if made, whether it was ever acted upon by Sir Edmund; but the statement of Van der Donck in his Vertoogh van Nieuw Nederland should dispose of such doubts forever. When Sir Edmund came to New Netherland he was poor and in debt, without friends to help him; and seeing that the Dutch had a fort and soldiers, it was quite a matter of course that he returned to Virginia, saying he would not quarrel with the Dutch.—Ed.
[865] Vol. iv. part i.
[866] A Short Discovery of the Coast and Continent of America, from the Equinoctial Northward, by William Castle (Castell), Minister of the Gospel at Courtenhall, Northamptonshire, England, 1644; reprinted in Collection of Voyages and Travels, and compiled from the Library of the late Earl of Oxford, 1745. It states very oddly that, “Near the great North River the Dutch have built a castle ... for their more free trading with many of Florida, who usually come down the River Canada, and so by land to them,—a plain proof Canada is not far remote.” The mouth of Delaware Bay is according to Castle under 41° north latitude. [Extracts are printed in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., iii. 231. The book itself is in Harvard College Library; also in the O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 561.—Ed.]
[867] Journal of the Transactions and Occurrences in Massachusetts and other N. E. Colonies from 1630-44. Edited by Noah Webster, Hartford, 1790; and History of New England, from the Original MSS. and Notes of John Winthrop; with Notes by James Savage, Boston, 1825. [These two titles represent the same book, the later edition being much the superior. See Vol. III. O’Callaghan (New Netherland, i. 274) says, “The statements of the New England writers in general on matters occurring in New Netherland, must be received, for obvious reasons, with extreme caution;” and he disputes the usual assertion of the New England writers, that Roger Williams was instrumental in preserving the peace between the Dutch and the Indians on Long Island. (New Netherland, i. 276.) For the diplomacy that passed between the New Plymouth people and the Dutch in 1627, see 2 New York Historical Collections, i. 355; cf. Bradford’s New Plymouth, pp. 223, 233.—Ed.]
[868] Cosmographie in Four Books, containing the Chorographie and Historie of the whole World, London, 1657, by Peter Heylin, D.D., Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Rector of Hemmingford and Houghton, and Prebendary of Westminster, “in his younger days an excellent poet, in his elder a better historian” (Athenæ Oxonienses). From the preface to the latter it appears that the Cosmographie was an amplification or enlarged edition of a Microcosmus, published in 1622, by the same author, who during his lifetime wrote and published about forty works of a theological, educational, or political character. (Sabin, Dictionary, viii. 260; O’Callaghan Catalogue, 1086-87.) There were other editions of various dates, for which see Bohn’s Lowndes, p. 1059.
[869] Account of two Voyages to New England, London, 1675, reprinted in 3 Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., iii. John Josselyn was the son of Sir Thomas Josselyn and brother of Henry, one of the commissioners to organize the government of Maine under its first charter. Henry settled finally in Plymouth Colony. [See further on Josselyn and his books in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[870] Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in several of the American Colonies in 1679-1680. [Cf. notes to Mr. Stevens’s chapter in Vol. III. The Labadist P. Schluter was in New Netherland in 1682, and his journal was printed from the original manuscript by Mr. H. C. Murphy, for the Bradford Club, in 1867.—Ed.]
[871] [Cf. “Indian traditions of the first arrival of the Dutch in New Netherland,” in 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. i.—Ed.]
[872] John Thurloe, born 1616, died 1668, was the son of the Rev. Thomas Thurloe, Rector of Abbots Roding, Essex. Through the protection of Oliver St. John, solicitor-general under Charles I., he easily obtained appointments and promotions in the official circles. His collection of papers was published by Dr. Birch in 1742.
[873] Ferdinando Gorges, A briefe Narration of the original undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations in America, London, 1658; and America painted to the Life, London, 1658, 2d ed., 1659. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was the patentee of Maine. [See chap. ix. of Vol. III.—Ed.]
Samuel Clarke, A Geographical Description of all the Countries in the known World, London, 1657.
A Book of the Continuation of Foreign Passages; That is, the Peace between this Commonwealth and the Netherlands, 1654, London, 1656, printed by M. S. for Thomas Jenner.
Richard Blome, Isles and Territories belonging to his Majestie in America, 1673, and The present State of his Majesties Isles and Territories in America, 1687.
Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New York, formerly New Netherland, London, 1670. [See the notes to chap. x. of Vol. III.—Ed.]
[874] William Smith, Jr. was born in New York city in June, 1728; he graduated at Yale College in 1745; was appointed clerk of the Court of Chancery in 1748, and admitted to the Bar in 1750. Through the influence of his father, then attorney-general of the province, the revision of the provincial laws was intrusted to him and his law partner, William Livingston. In 1757 he published his History of New York. The breaking out of the Revolution found him a member of the council and a faithful adherent of the Crown. After some tribulation, he was allowed to proceed to New York city, whence he finally went to England, and thence to Canada, where he died as chief-justice in 1793. [Cf. the estimate of Smith in Mr. Stevens’s chapter in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[875] Kort Beschrijving van de Ontdekking ende de navolgende Geschiedenis der Nieuwen Nederlande door N. C. Lambrechtsen op Ritthem, Chevalier, etc., Groot Pensionarius van Zealand, Middelburg, 1818,—“A Short Description of the Discovery and Subsequent History of New Netherland, a Colony in America of the Republic of the United Netherlands.” [There is a translation in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll. i. 75. See Sabin, Dictionary, x. 38,745.—Ed.]
[876] History of the State of New York, including its Aboriginal and Colonial Annals, by John V. N. Yates, Secretary of State, and Jos. W. Moulton, New York, 1824. [This work is almost entirely Moulton’s. A second part was published in 1826, when the work was stopped for want of patronage. It covers 1609-1632. Field’s Indian Bibliography, nos. 1,104, 1,704.—Ed.] The Natural, Statistical, and Civil History of the State of New York, by James Macauley, 1829,—rather a chorography with copious topographical additions, a compilation of dry facts. The History of the State of New York, from the first Discovery to the Present Time, by F. S. Eastman, 1833, devotes only ten small octavo pages to the Dutch period. History of the New Netherlands, Province of New York, and State of New York, by Wm. Dunlap, 1839. [See Stevens’s chapter, in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[877] Dunlap, for instance, lets Schenectady be planted shortly after Fort Orange, in 1614, and considers the remnants of foundations found in Trinity Church-yard to indicate the location of the first Dutch fort on Manhattan Island, while they must have been the remnants of the city wall, running from the East River, along the present Wall Street, through Trinity Church-yard to the North River,—hence the name of Wall Street.
[878] Anniversary Discourse before New York Historical Society, 1828, in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vol. i.
[879] Dr. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan was born at Mallow, near Cork, Ireland, in 1797. After studying medicine in his native country and in Paris, he came to Canada in 1823, where he soon took an active part in politics on the patriots’ side. He was compelled to fly to the United States, and settled at Albany in 1837. Here he worked diligently in the field of American history, with results most gratifying to the student, until 1870, when he removed to New York, where he died in 1880.
[Dr. O’Callaghan’s New Netherland is divided thus: Book i., 1492-1621; ii., 1621-1638; iii., 1639-1647. He also printed a few copies of the Register of New Netherland, 1626-1674, giving the names of the pioneers. John G. Shea printed an account of O’Callaghan in the Magazine of American History, v. 77. The Catalogue of his library, sold in New York December, 1882, represents a collection rich in works in the fields of his special studies.—Ed.]
[880] [Cf. Mr. Stevens’s estimate of Brodhead in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[881] [One of the most interesting of such is The Anthology of New Netherland, by Henry C. Murphy, published (125 copies) by the Bradford Club in 1865, which includes, with enlargements, Mr. Murphy’s privately printed Jakob Steendam, a Memoir of the First Poet in New Netherland, The Hague, 1861. Steendam was the minister of the Protestant Church in New Amsterdam. Muller, Catalogue (1872), nos. 1,092 et seq.; (1877) nos. 3,063 et seq., notes several of Steendam’s publications. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. 862, 898.—Ed.]
[882] “Illa in terram suis lintribus, quas canoas vocant exuderunt,” says Peter Martyr.
[883] The Pompey Stone: a Paper read before the Oneida Historical Society, by Dr. H. A. Homes State Librarian, Albany, 1881.
[884] [It is no. 2,390 in the Catalogue.—Ed.]
[885] [Fac-similes of it are also given in Valentine’s Manual, 1858; in Pennsylvania Archives, second series, vol. v. Muller, Books on America, iii. 143, and Catalogue of 1877, no. 3,484, describe the only other copy known. It is a colored map, and extends from Panama to Labrador.—Ed.]
[886] [O’Callaghan, i. 433, gives a list of settlers in Rensselaerswyck, 1630-1646. (Cf. Munsell’s Albany, ii. 13, and the map of 1763 in Doc. Hist. N. Y., iii. 552, and Weise’s Troy, 1876.) In 1839 Mr. D. D. Barnard appended a sketch of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck to his discourse on the life of Stephen Van Rensselaer.
Much credit is due to Mr. Joel Munsell for his efforts to increase interest in the study of American affairs, and particularly for his labors upon the history of Albany and its neighborhood. He died in 1880. (Cf. Historical Magazine, x. 44; xv. 139, 270; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1880, p. 239.) He gives an account of his method and results in issuing historical monographs in small editions, in Historical Magazine, February, 1869, p. 139. His Annals of Albany appeared in ten volumes, from 1850 to 1859 (pp. 27-36 of vol. i. were never printed); his Collections on the History of Albany, four volumes, 1865-1871. See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1868, p. 104. He published in 1869 J. Pearson’s Early Records of Albany and the Colony of Rensselaerswyck, 1656-1675, translated from the Dutch, with notes; and Wm. Barnes’s Early History of Albany, 1609-1686, was privately printed by him in 1864, with a map of Albany, 1695. On the early Dutch history of this region, see also General Egbert L. Viele’s “Knickerbockers of New York two centuries ago,” in Harper’s Monthly, December, 1876; a paper on the Van Rensselaers in Scribner’s Monthly, vi. 651; and some landmarks noticed in B. J. Lossing’s Hudson River, p. 124, etc.—Ed.]
[887] [It is given in fac-simile in the Lenox edition (1862) of Jogues’s Novum Belgium, edited by Shea, who also gave it in his edition, 1865, of the tract, The Commodities of the Iland called Manati ore long Ile. Cf. Asher’s List, no. 3; Armstrong’s Essay on Fort Nassau, p. 7. Copies more or less faithful of De Laet’s map appeared in Janssonius and Hondius’s Atlas of 1638, and in the Novus Atlas of Johannes Janssonius, Amsterdam, 1658; again in 1695, with the imprint of Valk and Schenk; and earlier, in 1651, reduced and not closely copied, but with some new details, in the Beschrijvinghe van Virginia, etc.; and of this last a photo-lithographic fac-simile was made at Amsterdam a few years ago.—Ed.]
[888] [This map belongs to Robert Dudley’s Della Arcano del Mare, Firenze, 1647, i. 57, of which there was a second edition, corrected and enlarged, in 1661. The 1647 edition is very rare, and the only copy known to me in America is in Harvard College Library. The author of the note on the map in the Documents relative to the Colonial History of New York, vol. i., where a fac-simile of it is given, did not seem to be aware of its origin. The Rev. E. E. Hale, in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., October, 1873, describes some of the original drawings for Dudley’s maps preserved in the Royal Library at Munich, and says the engraver has omitted some of the names given in the drawing. (Memorial History of Boston, i. 59.) The map of New Netherland differs from other maps of its time, and is not noticed by Asher. Lucini says that he was at work for twelve years on the plates, in an obscure village of Tuscany. The work is usually priced at £20 or £25. Quaritch’s Catalogue, 321, no. 11,971. Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, 2,747 (150 francs.)—Ed.]
[889] [Cf. the notes to Dr. De Costa’s chapter, in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[890] [It is not easy to discriminate between these editions, as copies are often made up of various dates; but I have observed these dates: 1642, 1645, 1647, 1649, 1650, 1655, 1658, etc. The Dutch inscriptions on these earlier maps of New Netherland are quite different from those on the Latin later ones.—Ed.]
[891] [Sabin’s Dictionary, ii. 5,714; Baudet’s Leven en Werken van W. J. Blaeu, Utrecht, 1871, pp. 76, 114.—Ed.]
[892] [Cf. a dissertation on his work in Clément’s Bibliothèque curieuse, iv. 287.—Ed.]
[893] [From 1659 to 1672 it was issued with Spanish text, ten volumes, but not including the American parts; in 1662 to 1665, with Latin text, eleven volumes, the last devoted to America, usually with twenty-three maps; in 1663, in French, twelve volumes; in 1664 to 1665 in Dutch, but somewhat abridged. (Cf. Asher’s List, Muller’s Catalogue, Armstrong’s Fort Nassau, p. 7, on the map of 1645 particularly.) Muller says of this final edition: “The part treating of America may be regarded as the first atlas of what is now the United States, in the same sense as Wytfliet may be called the first special atlas of America in general.” He afterwards added a Theatrum Urbium. The younger Blaeu also issued, in 1648, an immense map of the world in two hemispheres, twenty-one sheets. (Hallam’s Literature of the Middle Ages, iv, 48; Muller’s Catalogue, 1877, no. 346).—Ed.]
[894] [It was based on Mercator’s plates, which were bought in 1604 by his father-in-law, Iodocus Hondius, an engraver, who was born in 1546; worked in London, where he learned the Wright-Mercator projection, and later published maps in Amsterdam, including the new edition of Mercator, adding new plates, and died in 1611. But subsequent editions (1617-1635), etc., of the atlas were known as Mercator’s and Hondius’s. Sabin’s Dictionary, ii. 5014.—Ed.]
[895] Quaritch’s Catalogue, 259, nos. 19 and 20.
[896] [The same Jansson map of New Netherland is reproduced in his Atlas Contractus of 1666. Some editions of Jansson’s Novus Atlas have the same text as Blaeu’s, with the maps, of course, different from Blaeu’s.—Ed.]
[897] [This map is given in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[898] See New York Colonial Documents, xii. 183.
[899] [List of the Maps and Charts of New Netherland, Amsterdam, 1855, and usually bound with his Bibliographical Essay.—Ed.]
[900] [Cf. notes to Mr. Stevens’s chapter, in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[901] Cf. Brodhead, New York, i. 621. Muller priced a copy at forty florins. Catalogue (1877), no. 2,271.
[902] [See Mr Stevens’s chapter in Vol. III. The New Netherland map (of which a section is given herewith) is reproduced in Mr. Asher’s List, with a tabulated list of names as they appear on this and the other early maps. Van der Aa issued a map called “Nouvelle Hollande,” giving the coast from the Penobscot to the Chesapeake.—Ed.]
[903] [A phototype of it is herewith given. Other fac-similes of this map are in O’Callaghan’ New Netherland, ii. 312; Banquet of the Saint Nicholas Society, in 1852; Valentine’s Manual, 1852, and his City of New York; 2 N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. i.; Munsell’s Albany; Gay’s Popular History of the United States, ii. 249; Dunlap’s New York, i. 84; and Pennsylvania Archives (second series), v. 233.
Modern eclectic maps, showing the Dutch claims and possessions, may be seen in Brodhead’s New York (according to the charters of 1614 and 1621); in Bancroft’s United States, ii. 297; in Ridpath’s United States (showing the various European colonies in 1655); and in Lamb’s New York, i. 218 (the same).—Ed.]
[904] Mr. Muller pays a warm tribute to Asher and his Essay in his Catalogue (1872), no. 1,052. “I always believed this book,” he says, “to be a striking example of what intuition and discernment, combined with great zeal, can do.” (Cf. Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., p. xxxvi.) Asher’s book may be supplemented by P. A. Tiele’s Bibliotheek van Nederlandsche pamfletten, 1858-1861, based on Muller’s collection, which gives 9,668 Dutch pamphlets published 1482-1702, adding to Asher’s enumeration many others relating to America; and again the Dutch-American student will find further help from J. K. van der Wulf’s Catalogus van de Tractaten in de bibliotheek van Isaac Meulman, Amsterdam, 1866-1868, three vols.,—a privately printed book in a collection now in the library of the University of Gand. (Muller’s Catalogue [1872], nos. 108, 114; [1877] nos. 3,202, 3,566.) These two works show 19,077 pamphlets published in the United Provinces from 1500 to 1713.
[905] It consists of Part I. (1872), books, nos. 1-2,339. Part II. (1875), supplement of books, nos. 2,340-3,534. Part III. a. (1874) portraits, nos. 1-1,280; b. (1874) autographs, nos. 1-1,508; c. (1874) plates, nos. 1-1,855; d. (1875) atlases and maps, nos. 1-2,288. Many of the larger notes in this catalogue were not repeated in the consolidated Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets, Atlases, Maps, Plates, and Autographs relating to North and South America, nos. 1-3,695, which Mr. Muller issued in 1877. In the preface of his 1872 Catalogue Mr. Muller speaks of his American collection, which formed the basis of Mr. Asher’s Essay; this collection he sold in 1858 to Brockhaus, and another was sold in 1866 to Henry Stevens,—all of which, as well as later acquisitions, formed the foundation of his Catalogue. “Since I began my present business,” says Mr. Muller in 1872, “now more than thirty years ago, my firm conviction has been that the antiquarian bookseller can largely serve science, bibliography, or literary history especially, without forgetting his own profit.... An antiquarian bookseller who is not himself a student, or at least desirous of furthering science by the aid of his connections, will hardly be as successful as he might be in another less scientific calling. Experience has amply shown me that this opinion, merely a loose impression when I first started in business, was correct.” Mr. Muller was born in Amsterdam, July 22, 1817, and was early apprenticed to his uncle, a bookseller of that town, and in 1843 he became a bookseller on his own account, and identified himself thereafter with bibliography. His pupil and friend, Otto Harrassowitz, printed a memoir of Muller in the German Börsenblatt, no. 48; and there is also a sketch with an engraved portrait in Trübner’s Literary Record, new series, vol. ii. (1881) no. 1. He died Jan. 6, 1881.
[906] Of his tract on the Stadthuys and the views of that building, see Mr. Stevens’s chapter in Vol. III.
[907] See the preceding chapter.
[908] In a letter of the 27th of April, of that year, Gustavus also commended the project to the Swedish Lutheran bishops, “the rather,” says Geijer, “that the Company was to labor for the conversion of the heathen.” Some popular verses of the day are cited by the same historian, attributing the solicitation of the clergy to invest their funds in the venture to motives not so pious.
[909] Portraits of Gustavus Adolphus and Axel Oxenstjerna, copied from originals in Sweden, are owned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[910] According to Campanius, the Swedish Government likewise obtained, through Johan Oxenstjerna, ambassador to King Charles I. of England, in 1634, the renunciation in their favor of all pretensions of the English to the territory afterward known as New Sweden, based on the right of first discovery,—a statement “confirmed by von Stiernman,” says Acrelius, “out of the official documents, the article of cession being preserved in the royal archives before the burning of the palace” of Stockholm in 1697. Sprinchorn recently searched the archives of Sweden for official testimony on the subject without avail, although he “met with the declaration of Campanius in more than one contemporaneous instrument.” The succeeding passage in Campanius, relating to the claims of the Hollanders, has been grossly mistranslated by Du Ponceau (misleading Reynolds, the translator of Acrelius), even to the mentioning of a treaty confirming the purchase of the Dutch title by the Swedes, regarding which nothing whatever appears in the original.
[911] See the preceding chapter.
[912] This letter is as follows:—
Whereas many kingdoms and countries prosper by means of navigation, and parts of the West Indies have gradually been occupied by the English, French, and Dutch, it seems to me that the Crown of Sweden ought not to forbear to make also its name known in foreign lands; and therefore I, the undersigned, desire to tender my services to the same, to undertake, on a small scale, what, by God’s grace, should in a short time result in something great.
In the first place, I have proposed to Mr. Peter Spiring to make a voyage to the Virginias, New Netherland, and other regions adjacent, certain places well known to me, with a very good climate, which might be named Nova Suedia.
For this expedition there would be required a ship of 60, 70, or 100 läster [120, 140, or 200 tons], armed with twelve guns, and sufficient ammunition.
For the cargo, 10,000 or 12,000 gulden would be needed, to be expended in hatchets, axes, kettles, blankets, and other merchandise.
A crew of twenty or twenty-five men would be wanted, with provisions for twelve months, which would cost about 3,400 gulden.
In case the Crown of Sweden would provide the ship with ammunition, with twelve soldiers, to garrison and hold the places, and likewise furnish a bark or yacht, for facilitating trade, the whole [additional] expense might come to about 1,600 gulden,—one half of which I myself will guarantee, Mr. Spiring assuming the other half, either on his own account or for the Crown, the same to be paid at once, in cash.
As to the time of sailing, the sooner we start the better; for, although trade does not begin till spring, by being on the spot in season, we can get on friendly terms with the savages, and induce them to collect as many furs as possible during the winter, and may hope to buy 4,500 or 6,000 beaver skins, thus acquiring a large capital from so small a commencement, and the ability to undertake more hereafter.
The Crown of Sweden might favor the beginners of this new enterprise with a charter, prohibiting all other persons from sailing from Sweden within the limits of Terra Nova and Florida for the space of twenty years, on pain of confiscation of ship and cargo. And as it often happens that French or Portuguese vessels are met with on the ocean, authority should likewise be granted to capture such ships, and bring them as lawful prizes to Sweden. Also, it should be conceded that all goods of the Company for the first ten years be free of duty both coming in and going out.
And, as the said land is suited for growing tobacco and various kinds of grain, it would be well to take along proper persons to cultivate these, who might at the same time be employed as garrison.
In addition, the advantages to be derived from the enterprise in course of time by the Crown of Sweden could be indicated orally by me, if I were called to Sweden to give a more detailed account of everything. However, that shall be as the gentlemen of the Government see fit.
This is designed briefly to serve your Excellency as a memorandum. I trust your Excellency will write an early answer from Sweden to my known friend [Blommaert?], whether the work will be undertaken, so that no time be lost, and others anticipate an enterprise which should bring so great profit to the Crown of Sweden.
Herewith wishing your Excellency bon voyage,
I remain
Your Excellency’s faithful servant,
Pieter Minuit.
Amsterdam, June 15, 1636.
[913] Compare documents printed by Sprinchorn with an examination of Mr. Lamberton by Governor Printz, at Fort Christina, July 10, 1643, in the Royal Archives at Stockholm. Acrelius, misinterpreting a statement in Lewis Evans’s Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America (Philadelphia, 1755), bounds New Sweden on the west by the Susquehanna River.
[914] A portrait of Queen Christina is owned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[915] Either this expedition or the preceding one under Minuit was accompanied by the Rev. Reorus Torkillus, a Swedish Lutheran clergyman, of Öster-Götland. Ten other companions of Minuit or Hollender are mentioned in a foot-note to the writer’s translation of Professor Odhner’s “Kolonien Nya Sveriges Grundläggning,” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iii. 402, among whom Anders Svenson Bonde, Anders Larsson Daalbo, Peter Gunnarson Rambo, and Sven Gunnarson are the best known in the subsequent history of the colony.
[916] It is only spoken of once in documents still preserved to us,—namely, in the Instructions to Governor Printz, Aug. 15, 1642. Bogardt himself is also referred to as “one Bagot,” in Beauchamp Plantagenet’s Description of New Albion.
[917] The names of forty-two persons who took part in this expedition are given in a note of the writer in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iii. 462, et seq.,—the most conspicuous of these being Lieutenant Måns Kling, a Swedish Lutheran clergyman called “Herr Christopher,” Gustaf Strahl (a young nobleman), Carl Janson (for many years Printz’s book-keeper), Olof Person Stille, and Peter Larsson Cock (afterward civil officers under the Dutch and English).
[918] The name given on Lindström’s map to the Cape Cornelius of Visscher’s and other Dutch maps, which apply the name of Hinlopen to the “false cape,” twelve miles farther south, at the mouth of Rehoboth Bay. It corresponds with the present Cape Henlopen.
[919] Twenty-three of these are mentioned in a foot-note to the writer’s translation of Odhner’s work before referred to, Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iii. 409; the most prominent of whom are Sergeant Gregorius van Dyck, Elias Gyllengren, Jacob Svenson, and Jöran Kyn Snöhvit.
[920] That at the Schuylkill, or a stronghold which superseded it, is mentioned in a report of the Dutch Commissary Hudde as situated “on a very convenient island at the edge of the Kil,” identified by Dr. George Smith as Province or State Island, at the mouth of the Schuylkill, which river, says Hudde, “can be controlled by it.”
[921] [See Professor Keen’s paper on New Albion in Vol. III.—Ed.]
[922] It may be proper to note that the Governor himself does not seem at first to have been satisfied with the sincerity of the aborigines, and, in keeping with his former profession of arms, even appeals in his report of 1644 to the authorities in Sweden for a couple of hundred soldiers to drive the savages from the Delaware, arguing also that the Dutch and English would be more likely to respect rights acquired from the natives not merely by purchase, but also by the sword.
[923] This vessel alone is named in Printz’s reports of 1644 and 1647. In a communication, however, of Queen Christina to the Admiralty, of the 12th of August, 1645, and in her Majesty’s letter to Captain Berendt Hermanson, of the 8th of the preceding May, preserved in the registry of the Admiralty in the naval archives of Sweden, the “Kalmar Nyckel” is mentioned, with the “Fama,” as having made “the voyage to Virginia” under the commander named. On her return this ship met with detention in Holland similar to that incurred by the “Fama,” but finally arrived in Sweden with 53,100 pounds of tobacco. So large a cargo certainly was not raised in New Sweden (which place, probably, was not visited by the vessel), and may have been purchased in the English Virginia. For a comment on such practices see an extract from a letter from Directors of the Dutch West India Company in Holland to Director-General Stuyvesant, dated Jan. 27, 1649, a translation of which is printed in Documents relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, xii. 47, 48.
[924] Only five male emigrants who came out on this expedition, beside Papegåja, were living in the colony March 1, 1648; namely, a barber-surgeon, a gunner, two common soldiers, and a young lad.
[925] Printed at Stockholm in 1696, under the title of Lutheri Catechismus, Öfwersatt på American-Virginiske Språket, followed by a Vocabularium Barbaro-Virgineorum, reproduced by the author’s grandson in his Kort Beskrifning om Nya Sverige. A copy of it is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Concerning it, see particularly Acrelius’s Beskrifning, p. 423. [Cf. Brinley Catalogue, nos. 5,698-99; Sabin’s Dictionary, x. 42,726; O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 1,427; Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii. no. 1,498; and Muller, Books on America (1872). no. 1,562, where errors of Brunet and Leclerc are pointed out.—Ed.]
[926] Campanius, to be sure, mentions “Korsholm” as a distinct fort, but he does so in terms which show that he is citing Lindström, who speaks of it as on territory granted to Sven Schute, embracing “Passajungh, Kinsessingh, Mockorhuttingh, and the land on both sides of the Schylekijl to the river” Delaware, and makes no reference to a “Fort Skörkil.” The statements with regard to the latter were probably drawn from the manuscripts of his grandfather. It did not occur to him, I suppose, that the places might be identical. “Gripsholm” is the name incorrectly given for “Korsholm” by N. J. Visscher and later Dutch cartographers.
[927] At “Chinsessingh” (the Indian name of the land west of the Schuylkill), says Campanius,—“the New Fort,” so called, which “was no fort, but a good log-house, built of strong hickory, two stories high, and affording sufficient protection against the Indians.” If the interpretation usually given to the dates of Hudde’s report already cited be correct, both Wasa and Mölndal were occupied by Printz before November, 1645. The latter post was at a “place called by the Indians Kakarikonck” or “Karakung,” near where the present road from Philadelphia to Darby crosses Cobb’s Creek.
[928] The expression used in Oxenstjerna’s reply to Printz’s Report referred to in the next sentence. Printzdorp, on the west side of the river Delaware, south of Upland, was doubtless granted to Printz in accordance with this petition.
[929] The only one residing in New Sweden March 1, 1648, was the Reverend Lars Carlson Lock. Sprinchorn also mentions another Swedish Lutheran clergyman, “Israel Fluviander,—Printz’s sister’s son,” who probably died or returned home in the spring.
[930] Corresponding, of course, to July 27, O. S. The materials of this narrative being almost entirely derived from Swedish sources, the dates have not been altered from the Julian calendar, which was still used in Sweden. The news referred to in the text was brought by Augustine Herman, who had dealings with Governor Printz upon the Delaware, and for some account of whom see the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, iv. 100 et seq.
[931] Something over two hundred tons.
[932] A certified copy of Amundson’s patent, with the Regis Regnique Cancellariæ Sigillum of the period attached to it, is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In view of conflicting interests of the West India Company, adverse claims of other colonists, and the opposition of an Indian proprietor of Passajung, Rising declined to sanction the occupation of these tracts without further orders from Sweden.
[933] So Governor Rising. According to a Dutchman who took part in the expedition, the “force consisted of three hundred and seventeen soldiers, besides a company of sailors.”
[934] Anders Bengtson is the only one whose name has been preserved to us.
[935] The dread expressed in letters from the Directors of the Dutch West India Company to Director-General Stuyvesant, dated Oct. 16 and 30, 1663 (Doc. Col. Hist. N. Y., xii. 445-46), lest an expedition, which had sailed from Sweden under Admiral Hendrick Gerritsen Zeehelm, was designed to subvert their dominion over the South River, is not justified, says Sprinchorn, by evidence of the existence of any plan to recover the colony, at that time, by force of arms.
[936] Manifest und Vertragbrieff, der Australischen Companey im Königreich Schweden auffgerichtet. Im Jahr MDCXXIV. 4to, 12 unnumbered pp. The only copy known to the writer is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The document itself is reproduced in the Auszführlicher Bericht über den Manifest. A fac-simile of the title is given herewith.
[937] Fullmagt för Wellam Usselinx at inrätta et Gen. Handels Comp. til Asien, Afr., Amer. och Terra Magell. Dat. Stockh. d. 21 Dec. 1624. Cited by Acrelius. It has been translated into English in Doc. Col. Hist. N. Y., vol. xii. pp. 1 and 2.
Sw. Rikes Gen. Handels Compagnies Contract, dirigerat til Asiam, Africam och Magellaniam, samt desz Conditiones, etc. Stockh. år 1625. Cited by Acrelius.—Der Reiche Schweden Genera. Compagnies Handlungs Contract, Dirigiret naher Asiam, Africam, Americam, vnd Magellanicam. Samt dessen Conditionen vnnd Wilköhren. Mit Kön. May. zu Schweden, vnsers Aller-gnedigsten Königs vnd Herrn gnediger Bewilligung, auch hierauff ertheilten Privilegien, in öffentlichen Druck publiciret. Stockholm, 1625. 4to, title, and 7 unnumbered pages. A copy is in the Carter-Brown Library. Translated into English in Doc. Col. Hist. N. Y., xii. 2 et seq.
Uthförligh Förklaring öfwer Handels Contractet angåendes thet Södre Compagniet uthi Konungarijket i Swerighe. Stält igenom Wilhelm Usselinx, Och nu aff thet Nederländske Språket uthsatt på Swenska, aff Erico Schrodero. Tryckt i Stockholm, aff Ignatio Meurer, Åhr 1626, 4to. —Auszführlicher Bericht über den Manifest; oder Vertrag-Brieff der Australischen oder Süder Compagney im Königreich Schweden. Durch Wilhelm Usselinx. Ausz dem Niederländischen in die Hochdeutsche Sprache übergesetzt. Stockholm, Gedruckt durch Christoffer Reusner. Anno MDCXXVI. 4to. The German version contains Usselinx’s interesting “voorrede” to the Netherlanders, dated at Stockholm, Oct. 17, 1625, in the original Dutch (not given in the Swedish edition), reprinted in the Dutch Octroy ofte Privilegie, and reproduced in the corrected Auszführlicher Bericht of the Argonautica Gustaviana. Cf. Muller’s Books on America (1872), no. 1,143, for a comparison of the Swedish edition and the Dutch Octroy ofte Privilegie. The only copies of these books known to the writer are in the Library of Congress.
Octroy eller Privilegier, som then Stormägtigste Högborne Furste och Herre, Herr Gustaf Adolph, Sweriges, Göthes och Wendes Konung, etc. Det Swenska nysz uprättade Södra Compagniet nädigst hafwer bebrefwat. Dat. Stockholm d. 14 Junii, 1626. Cited by Acrelius.—Octroy und Privilegium so der Allerdurchläuchtigste Groszmächtigste Fürst und Herr, Herr Gustavus Adolphus, der Schweden, Gothen und Wenden König, Grosz-Fürst in Finnland. Hertzog zu Ehesten und Carelen, Herr zu Ingermanland, etc. Der im Königreich Schweden jüngsthin auffgerichteten Süder-Compagnie allergnädigst gegeben und verliehen. Stockholm, gedruckt bey Ignatio Meurern. Im Jahr 1626. Reprinted in Johannes Marquardus’s Tractatus Politico-Juridicus de Jure Mercatorum et Commerciorum Singulari, vol. ii. pp. 545-52, Frankfort, 1662. An English translation is given in Doc. Col. Hist. N. Y., xii. 7 et seq.
Octroy ofte Privilegie soo by den alderdoorluchtigsten Grootmachtigen Vorst ende Heer Heer Gustaeff Adolph, der Sweden Gothen ende Wenden Koningh, Grootvorst in Finland, Hertogh tot Ehesten ende Carelen, Heer tot Ingermanland, etc., aen de nieuw opgerichte Zuyder Compagnie in’t Koningrijck Sweden onlangs genadigst gegeben ende verleend is, Mitsgaders een naerder Bericht over’t selve Octroy ende Verdragh-brief door Willem Usselincx. In’s Gravenhage, By Aert Meuris, Boeckverkooper in de Papestraat in den Bybel, anno 1627. 4to. Besides the Octroy it comprises a Dutch version of Usselinx’s Uthförligh Förklaring. Cf. Asher’s Essay, no. 41 and pp. 82, 83.
Kurtzer Extract der vornemsten Haupt-Puncten, so biszher weitläufftig und gründlich erwiesen, und nochmals, jedermänniglich, unwiedersprechlich für Augen gestellet sollen werden. In Sachen der neuen Süder-Compagnie. Gedruckt zu Heylbrunn bey Christoph Krausen, Anno 1633. Mens. Aprili. Reprinted in Marquard’s Tractatus, vol. ii. 541-42.
Instruction oder Anleitung: Welcher Gestalt die Einzeichnung zu der neuen Süder-Compagnie, durch Schweden und nunmehr auch Teutschland zubefördern, und an die Hand zunehmen; derselben auch mit ehestem ein Anfang zumachen. Gedruckt zu Heylbrunn bey Christoph Krausen. 1633. Mense Aprili. Reprinted in Marquard’s Tractatus, vol. ii. pp. 542-45.
Ampliatio oder Erweiterung des Privilegii so der Allerdurchläuchtigste Groszmächtigste Fürst und Herr, Herr Gustavus Adolphus, der Schweden, Gothen und Wenden König; Grosz-Fürst in Finnland, Hertzog zu Ehesten und Carelen, Herr zu Ingermannland, etc. Der neuen Australischen oder Süder-Compagnie durch Schweden und nunmehr auch Teutschland, allergnädigst ertheilet und verliehen. Gedruckt zu Heylbrunn, bey Christoph Krausen. Im Jahr 1633. Mense Aprili. Reprinted in Marquard’s Tractatus, vol. ii. pp. 552-55.
Argonautica Gustaviana, das ist: Nothwendige Nach-Richt von der Neuen Seefahrt und Kauffhandlung, so von dem Weilandt Allerdurchleuchtigsten Groszmächtigsten und Siegreichesten Fürsten unnd Herrn, Herrn Gustavo Adolpho Magno; ... durch anrichtung einer General Handel-Compagnie ... vor wenig Jahren zu stifften angefangen: anjetzo aber der Teutschen Evangelischen Nation ... zu unermesslichem Nutz und Frommen ... mitgetheilet worden.... Gedruckt zu Franckfurt am Mayn, bey Caspar Rödteln, im Jahr Christi 1633. Mense Junio. Folio. It comprises: a Patent oder öffentlich Auszschreiben wegen dieses Vorhabens, signed by Axel Oxenstjerna, June 26, 1633 (3 pp.); an Extract etlicher vornehmen Haubtpuncten (2 pp.); the Octroy und Privilegium of Gustavus Adolphus (8 pp.); the Ampliatio (4 pp.); Formular desz Manifest, reproducing with slight variations the Manifest, and Usselinx’s Auszführlicher Bericht, in Niderländischen Sprach gestellet, vor diesem bereit in eyl in Teutsch übergesetzt, anitzo aber nach dem Niderländischen mit allem fleisz übersehen, an vielen Orten nach Notturfft verbessert und mit Summarischen Marginalien bezeichnet (56 pp.); and, finally, Usselinx’s appeal to the Germans, entitled Mercurius Germaniæ, with the Instruction, and some Nothwendige Beylagen (51 pp.). It has been reprinted in Marquard’s Tractatus, vol. ii. pp. 373-540. Cf. Muller’s Books on America (1872), no. 1,136; (1877) no. 179; and a note in the preceding chapter.
Ampliation oder Erweiterung von dem Octroij und Privilegio, der newen Süyder-Handels Compagnia, durch Last und Befehl von die Deputirten der löblichen Confæderirten Herren Ständen, der vier Ober-Cräysen zu Franckfurth, anzustellen verordnet, den 12 December, Anno 1634. Gedruckt zu Hamburg, durch Heinrich Werner, im Jahr Christi 1635. A copy is bound with that of the Argonautica Gustaviana in the Harvard College Library.
[938] Printed in the Year 1648. For the full title and some particulars concerning this book see paper on “New Albion,” in Vol. III.
[939] Breeden-Raedt aende Vereenichde Nederlandsche Provintien, Gelreland, Holland, Zeeland, Wtrecht, Vriesland, Over-Yssel, Groeningen, Gemaeckt ende Gestalt uyt diverse ware en waerachtige memorien. Door I. A. G. W. C. Tot Antwerpen, ghedruct by Francoys van Duynen, Boeckverkooper by de Beurs in Erasmus, 1649. Translated into English by Henry C. Murphy in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll.,[P3: missing. inserted] second series, vol. iii. part i. pp. 237 at seq. (New York, 1857). See preceding chapter.
[940] Vertoogh van Nieu Nederland, Weghens de Gheleghentheydt, Vruchtbaerheydt, en Soberen Staet deszelfs. In’s Graven-Hage. Ghedruckt by Michiel Stael, Bouckverkooper woonende op’t Buyten Hof, tegen-over de Gevange-Poort, 1650, 4to, 49 pp. A translation of it, with explanatory notes (one of which relates to the date of the arrival of the Swedes on the Delaware, citing Hawley’s letter to Windebanke, and correcting Arfwedson’s misapprehension of Biörck), by Henry C. Murphy, is given in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vol. ii. pp. 251 et seq. (New York, 1849); and one of an authenticated copy of the original document appears in Doc. Col. Hist. N. Y., vol. i. pp. 271 et seq. Authors also frequently cite the Beschryvinghe van Virginia, Nieuw Nederlandt, etc. (’t Amsterdam, by Joost Hartgers, 1651, 4to), a compilation from the Vertoogh and other publications. See preceding chapter.
[941] Beschrijvinghe van Nieuvv-Nederlant ... Beschreven door Adriaen van der Donck.... ’t Amsteldam.... 1655, 4to. The same: Den tweeden Druck. Met een pertinent Kaertje van’t zelve Landt verciert en van veel druckfouten gesuyvert. ’t Aemsteldam.... 1656. 4to. A translation of the second edition, by the Hon. Jeremiah Johnson, is given in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vol. i. pp. 125 et seq. (New York, 1841). See preceding chapter.
[942] Upsala, 1654 and 1662, 8vo. Frankfort and Leipsic, 1676, 4to.
[943] In his Korte historiael ende journaels aenteyckeninge van verscheyden voyagiens in de vier deelen des Wereldts-Ronde, ... t’ Hoorn.... 1655 (4to, 192 pp.). A translation of the voyages to America, by Henry C. Murphy, appears in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vol. iii. pt. i. pp. 1 et seq. The version in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vol. i. pp. 243 et seq., by Dr. G. Troost, from the Du Simitière MSS. in the Philadelphia Library, does not include the visit of De Vries to Printz, an imperfect account of which is given by the translator, which has been not less imperfectly followed by several later writers. See preceding chapter.
[944] Saken van Staat en Oorlogh, in, ende omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, 1621-1669. The Hague, 1657-1671, 15 vols., 4to; 1669-1672, 7 vols., folio.
[945] Antwoordt van de Hog. Mo. Heeren Staten Generael deser vereenighde Nederlanden, Gegeven den 15 Augusti 1664, op twee distincte memorien, ende pretensien van de Heer Appelboom, Resident van den Konich van Sweden, De eene overgelevert aen haer Ho. Mo. voorsz. Tot Uytrecht, By Pieter Dercksz. Anno 1664. 4to.
[946] Kort Beskrifning om Provincien Nya Swerige uti America, som nu förtjden af the Engelske kallas Pensylvania. Af lärde och trowärdige Mäns skrifter och berättelser ihopaletad och sammanstrefwen, samt med åthskillige Figure utzirad af Thomas Campanius Holm. Stockholm, Tryckt uti Kongl. Boktr. hos Sal. Wankijfs Änkia med egen bekostnad, af J. H. Werner. Åhr MDCCII. 4to, xx + 192 pp. An ornamental titlepage bears the legend: Novæ Sveciæ seu Pensylvaniæ in America Descriptio. The work is dedicated to King Charles XII. of Sweden, and is divided into four books, the first of these treating of America in general, the second of New Sweden, and the third of the Indians in New Sweden, and the fourth consisting of a vocabulary and collection of phrases and some discourses in the dialect of the same savages, with Addenda concerning the Minquas and their language, and certain rare and remarkable things in America. It is embellished with numerous illustrations besides those mentioned in the text; among them being maps of America and of Virginia, New England, New Holland, and New Sweden, and one of New Sweden taken from Nicholas Visscher, the two latter being given in this chapter, and pictures of an Indian fort and Indian canoes. An extract from a translation of it is given in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. ii. pp. 343 et seq. (New York, 1814). An annotated translation of the whole work, by Peter S. Du Ponceau, LL.D., reproducing Lindström’s and Visscher’s maps of New Sweden, and the representations of Trinity Fort, the siege of Christina Fort, and the Indian fort, above referred to, was published in Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. iii. pt. i. pp. 1 et seq. (Philadelphia, 1834). The work is rare. Copies are to be found in the Philadelphia Library, in the libraries of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Harvard College and Congress, and in the Carter-Brown collection. It is priced in recent catalogues as high as £15 or £16. Cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,043-44; Sabin’s Dictionary, iii. 10,202; Muller (1872), no. 1,138; (1875), no. 2,845; (1877), no. 570; 80 Dutch florins; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 233; Menzies Catalogue, no. 327; O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 467. Few copies have all the illustrations. Muller errs in making the author the son, instead of the grandson, of the Rev. Johan Campanius Holm.
[947] One of the most noteworthy of these is the assertion that the Swedes settled on the Delaware as early as 1631. This is reiterated by Cronholm and Sprengel, and in Smith’s New Jersey, Proud’s Pennsylvania, Holmes’s Annals, etc., and even in a note in loco of Du Ponceau himself.
[948] Dissertatio Gradualis de Svionum in America Colonia, quam, ex consensu Ampl. Senatus Philosoph. in Inclita Academia Upsaliensi, Præside viro amplissimo M. Petro Elvio, Mathem. Prof. Reg. et Ord., publice ventilandam subjicit Johannes Dan. Swedberg, Dalekarlus, in Audit. Gustav. Maj. ad diem xxiii. Junii Anni MDCCIX. Upsaliæ, ex officina Werneriana. Small 8vo, vi + 32 pp. A copy is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,099; Muller’s Books on America (1872), no. 1,141; (1877), no. 3,137. A copy has been recently priced at 50 marks.
[949] Bishop Svedberg’s interest in the posterity of the old colonists of New Sweden is well evinced in his America Illuminata (Skara, 1732, small 8vo, 163 pp. + Indices), copies of which are in the libraries of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and of Harvard College. Cf. Brinley Catalogue, ii. 3,100; Muller’s Books on America (1872), no. 1,140. Well-bound copies have been recently priced at £10. See also Vita Jesperi Swedberg, Episcopi Scarensis, an academical dissertation by Carolus Johannes Knos, vestrogothus (Upsala, 1787), a copy of which is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, as well as a portrait of the bishop, signed “H. C. Fehlingk delin. Joh. Chr. Böcklin Aug. Vind. sc. Lipsiæ.”
[950] Brieven geschreven ende gewisselt tusschen der Herr Johan de Witt, Raedt-Pensionaris, etc., ende de Gevolmachtigden van den Staedt der Vereenigde Nederlanden, so in Vranckryck, Engelandt, Sweden, Danemarcken, Poolen, etc., 1652-1659. The Hague, 1723-1725, 6 vols., 4to.
[951] ﬣוֹﬣיּ ﬤשׁﬦ Dissertatio Gradualis, de Plantatione Ecclesiæ Svecanæ in America, quam, suffragrante Ampl. Senatu Philosoph. in Regio Upsal. Athenæo, Præside Viro Amplissimo atque Celeberrimo Mag. Andrea Brörwall, Eth. et Polit. Prof. Reg. et Ord., in Audit. Gust. Maj. d. 14 Jun. An. MDCCXXXI., examinandam modeste sistit Tobias E. Biörck, Americano-Dalekarlus. Upsaliæ, Literis Wernerianis. 4to, viii + 34 pp. Embellished with an original folding copperplate map, engraved by Jonas Silfverling, Upsala, 1731, entitled Delineatio Pennsilvaniæ et Cæesareæ Nov. Occident seu West N. Iersey in America, indicating many of the settlements of the descendants of the old colonists of New Sweden. A copy is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Cf. Historical Magazine, art. iii., April, 1873, by J. R. Bartlett; Muller’s Books on America (1872), no. 1,137, where it is claimed that it is the first work on New Sweden written by a native, and published in Sweden. A copy has been recently priced at 50 marks.
[952] Author of Kort Berettelse om then Swenska Kyrkios närwarande Tilstånd i America, samt oförgripeliga tankar om thesz widare förkofring.... Tryckt i Norkiöping, Anno 1725 (4to, 24 pp.). The book contains no new information about the early history of the Swedish colony on the Delaware. A copy of it is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[953] Publication passed August 11, 1742. A copy is in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[954] Ifrån år 1523 in til närvarande tid. Uppå Hans Kongl. Maj: ts nådigesta befallning gjord. Forsta del, Stockholm, 1747; andra del, ibid., 1750; tredje del, ibid., 1753; fjerde del, ibid., 1760; femte del, ibid., 1766; sjette del, ibid., 1775. In the same author’s Matrickel öfwer Sweriges Rikes Ridderskap och Adel, 1754, p. 350, occurs a notice of Johan Printz, stating that after his return from New Sweden he was made a General, and in 1658 Governor of Jönköping. It is added: “He was born in the parsonage of Bottneryd, and died in 1663, without sons, the family thus ending with him in the male line.” As to these points compare, however, Prof. Dr. Ernst Heinrich Kneschke’s Neues allgemeines Deutsches Adels-Lexicon, vii. pp. 253-54 (Leipsic, 1867), art. “Printz, Printz v. Buchan,” which speaks of Governor Printz as belonging to a Lutheran branch of an old Austrian noble family that emigrated to Holstein soon after the Reformation, and finally settled in East Prussia. According to this authority he had a son Johann Friedrich, who became a Major-General in the army of the Electorate of Brandenburg, and was ennobled in 1661 under the name of Printz von Buchan, whose descendants still live in Germany. In mitigation of the blame attached by Stiernman to Printz for the surrender of Chemnitz, see Puffendorf in loco.
[955] Ex Archivo Palmskiöldiano nunc primum in lucem edita. Præeside Olavo Celsio. Upsaliæ, MDCCL. (Academical dissertations.)
[956] Stockholm, 1753-1761, 3 vols., 8vo. In German, Göttingen, 1754-64; and in English, Warrington and London, 1770-1771, 2d ed. 1772. Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, ix. 382. Kalm’s Tankar med Guds Wälsegnande Nåd och Wederbörandes Tilstånd om Nyttan som kunnat tilfalla wårt kjära Fädernesland af des Nybygge i America ferdom Nya Swerige kalladt (Aboæ, 1754, 4to) gives a short account of the fertility and the chief natural products of the territory on the Delaware, nearly the same as the fuller one in the author’s Resa.
[957] London, 1757. See Mr. Stevens’s chapter in Vol. III.
[958] Beskrifning om de Swenska Församlingars Forna och Närwarande Tilstånd, uti det så kallade Nya Swerige, sedan Nya Nederland, men nu för tiden Pensylvanien, samt nästliggande Orter wid Alfwen De la Ware, Wäst-Yersey och New-Castle County uti Norra America; Utgifwen af Israel Acrelius, För detta Probst öfwer de Swenska Församlingar i America och Kyrkoherde uti Christina, men nu Probst och Kyrkoherde uti Fellingsbro. Stockholm, Tryckt hos Harberg et Hesselberg, 1759. 4to, xx+ 534 pp. The work is dedicated to Queen Louisa Ulrica of Sweden. A translation of portions of the book, by the Rev. Nicholas Collin, D.D., is given in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vol. i. pp. 401 et seq. A translation of the whole of it, by the Rev. William M. Reynolds, D.D., with numerous additional notes, was published in Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. xi. (Philadelphia, 1874). The latter is accompanied by a portrait of the author, engraved from a copy in oils by Christian Schuessele (in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania) from a picture sent to this country by Acrelius, now the property of Trinity Church, Wilmington, Del.; as well as by a map of New Sweden, engraved from a copy (belonging to the same Historical Society) of the original of Engineer Lindström, still preserved in Sweden. There are copies in the libraries of Harvard College and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and in the Carter-Brown collection. (Cf. Sabin’s Dictionary, i. 133; Brinley Catalogue, ii. 3,030; Muller’s Books on America [1872], no. 1,134; also Catalogue of Paintings, etc., belonging to the Hist. Soc. of Penn., no. 59. Priced recently at £7 7s.) Acrelius died in 1800.
[959] In Svenska patriotiska Sällskapets Handlingar, Stockholm, 1770.
[960] London, 1772.
[961] The later edition of James Savage, under the title History of New England (Boston, 1825-1826), contains also the continuation of the Journal, with additional matter on the Swedes. See preceding chapter, and Vol. III.
[962] Very carefully reprinted in Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, vols. ix. and x. (Boston, 1859.)
[963] Hamburg, 1799. The author’s treatment of the subject in his histories of New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the same work, vols. iii. and vi. (Hamburg, 1796 and 1803), is not so full. Ebeling’s library, now in Harvard College Library, shows several of the rarest of the early books on New Sweden.
[964] In Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vols. v. and vi. (Boston, 1815). Reprinted in 1848. For an estimate of Hubbard see Vol. III.
[965] De Colonia Nova Svecia in Americam Borealem Deducta Historiola. Quam, venia ampl. Fac. Phil. Upsal., Præside Mag. Erico Gust. Geijer, Historiar. Prof Reg. et Ord.... P. P. Auctor Carolus David Arfwedson, Vestrogothus. In Audit. Gust. die xix. Nov. MDCCCXXV. H. A. M S. Upsaliæ. Excudebant Regiæ Academiæ Typographi. 4to, iv + 34 pp. Copies are in the libraries of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and of Harvard College. Cf. Muller’s Books on America (1872), no. 1,135; Brinley, ii. 3,031.
[966] A translation of this, by the late Hon. George P. Marsh, is given in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., second series, vol. i. pp. 443 et seq.
[967] A translation of it is inserted in Du Ponceau’s translation of Campanius, already mentioned, p. 109 et seq.
[968] In History of the State of New York, part ii., New York, 1826.
[969] Sketches of the Primitive Settlements on the River Delaware. A Discourse delivered before the Society for the Commemoration of the Landing of William Penn, on the 24th of October, 1827. By James N. Barker. Published by request of the Society. Philadelphia, 1827. 8vo, 62 pp. Extracts from it are given in Samuel Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, vol. i. p. 179 et seq. (Philadelphia, 1828.)
[970] Philadelphia, 1829 and 1830.
[971] Philadelphia, 1835, 12mo, 180 pp.; 2d ed. 1858, 12mo, 179 pp., omitting the charter of the Swedish churches.
[972] Örebro, 1832-1836.
[973] Vol. ii., Boston, 1837.
[974] Baltimore, 1837. Cf. Mr. Brantley’s chapter in Vol. III.
[975] Vol. i. p. 9. Dover, 1838.
[976] Page 428 et seq. New York, 1841.
[977] Paris, 8vo, 29 pp. A Swedish translation of it, bearing the title of Underrättelse om den Fordna Svenska Kolonien i Norra Amerika kallad Nya Sverige, “med Anmärkningar och Tillägg af Öfversättaren,” was printed at Stockholm in 1844 (8vo, title + 41 pp.). The author’s treatment of his theme so closely resembles Bancroft’s, that we infer that he followed the American historian without acknowledgment.
[978] Wilmington, 1846, 8vo, xii + 312 pp. Among its illustrations are a reproduction of the representation of the siege of Fort Christina in Du Ponceau’s Campanius, and an original “Map of the Original Settlements on the Delaware by the Dutch and Swedes.”
[979] New York, 1846-1848. It reproduces Van der Donck’s map of New Netherland. See the preceding chapter.
[980] Stockholm, 1848.
[981] Philadelphia, 1850.
[982] Albany, 1850. See the preceding chapter.
[983] Albany, 1851.
[984] Reappearing among “The Jogues Papers,” translated by John Gilmary Shea, in New York Historical Society Collections, second series, iii. 215, et seq. See the preceding chapter.
[985] Newark, N. J., 1853.
[986] On the date of the building of Fort Nassau, see O’Callaghan’s New Netherland, i. 100. On maps, see note on Lindström’s Map.
[987] Boston, 1853.
[988] Albany, 1853.
[989] New York, 1853-1871. See the preceding chapter; and Mr. Stevens’s, in Vol. III.
[990] Stockholm, 1855-1856.
[991] Albany, 1856-1858.
[992] Hartford, 1857-1858.
[993] Published at Amsterdam. A translation of the letters referred to, by the Hon. Henry C. Murphy, appears in the Historical Magazine, ii. 257 et seq. (New York, 1858).
[994] In Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. vii., Philadelphia, 1860. The frontispiece consists of an engraving of a mural tablet in St. Paul’s Church, Chester, Pa., in memory of Ann Keen, daughter of Jöran Kyn, of Upland, and her husband James Sandelands, one of the provincial councillors of Pennsylvania appointed by Deputy-Governor William Markham in 1681,—the oldest tombstone extant on the Delaware.
[995] Philadelphia, 1862.
[996] Stockholm, 1865. The matter referred to in the text has been translated by the writer of this essay for the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vol. vii.
[997] A Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland, and to the Dutch West India Company and to its possessions in Brazil, Angola, etc., as also on the Maps, Charts, etc., of New Netherland, with fac-similes of the map of New Netherland by N. J. Visscher and of the three existing views of New Amsterdam. Compiled from the Dutch public and private libraries, and from the collection of Mr. Frederik Muller in Amsterdam, G. M. Asher, LL.D., Privat-Docent of Roman law in the University of Heidelberg. Amsterdam, Frederik Muller, 1854-1867. See the preceding chapter.
[998] With regard to Usselinx, Asher refers to Berg van Dussen Muilkerk’s work on New Netherland, written in 1851, Captain P. N. Netscher’s Les Hollandais au Brésil (La Haye, 1853), and the histories of Dutch political economy by Professor O. van Rees and Professor E. Laspeyres. The last of these books, entitled Geschichte der volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Niederländer, is also cited by Professor Odhner.
[999] Philadelphia, 1870.
[1000] Stockholm, 1857-1872.
[1001] Pages 42 et seq. Boston, 1874.
[1002] Printz’s letter is not in reply to this of Winthrop (as Mr. Kidder supposes), but to another (dated April 22, 1644) mentioned by Sprinchorn. It is written in Latin, a language necessarily used by the Swedish Governor in such correspondence, though he felt his incompetence for the task, saying in his report of the same month that “for the last twenty-seven years he had handled muskets and pistols oftener than Cicero and Tacitus.” He therefore desired his superiors to send him a Latin secretary, and, repeating his request in his Report of 1647, hopes that that person might render aid in administering justice and solving intricate problems of law, which occasionally arose, besides relieving him from the embarrassment of appearing in court in certain cases as both plaintiff and judge.
[1003] Harrisburg, 1876; 2d ed., 1880.
[1004] Stockholm, 1876. A few copies of the article were printed separately (8vo, 39 pp.) A translation of it, with notes, containing lists of colonists who emigrated to New Sweden in the first four Swedish expeditions, and other information, by the writer of this essay, is given in the Pennsylvania Magazine, vol. iii. p. 269 et seq., p. 395 et seq., and p. 462 et seq. (Philadelphia, 1879.) For further information concerning Peter Spiring (ennobled in 1636, under the name of Silfvercron till Norsholm), particularly mentioned by Odhner, see the latter’s Sveriges deltagande i Westfaliska fredskongressen, p. 46; and for additional references to Samuel Blommaert, also spoken of by the author, see Doc. Col. Hist. N.Y., vols. i. and xii.
[1005] Albany, 1877.
[1006] Harrisburg, 1877. The frontispiece consists of a portrait of Queen Christina of Sweden, from the same original as that which appears on the writer’s map of New Sweden, accompanying this chapter. It reproduces Van der Donck’s map of New Netherland.
[1007] Harrisburg, 1878.
[1008] Also printed separately, the titlepage describing it as Akademisk Afhandling, som med vederbörligt tillstånd för erhållande af Filosofisk Doktorsgrad vid Lunds Universitet till offentlig granskning framställes af Carl K. S. Sprinchorn, Filosofie Licentiat, Sk. (Stockholm, 1878, P. A. Norstedt & Söner, Kongl. Boktryckare. 8vo, 102 pp.) A translation of it has been made, by the writer of this essay, for publication by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[1009] Philadelphia, 1878, et seq. ann.
[1010] Philadelphia, 1880.
[1011] Published by the Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington, 1881. (8vo, 27 pp.) The paper was read before that Society Dec. 10, 1874, and should be supplemented and corrected in some particulars from the essays afterward written by Professor Odhner and Doctor Sprinchorn. Concerning Minuit, see also a paper by Friedrich Kapp, entitled “Peter Minnewit aus Wesel,” in Von Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift, xv. 225 et seq., and the preceding chapter.
[1012] Pages 55-78. Stockholm, 1882. The author, who is librarian of the Royal Library at Stockholm, gives a brief list of books referring to New Sweden, embracing, besides others spoken of in the text, Svenska Familj-Journalen, 1870 (reprinted by the writer, C. G. Starbäck, in Historiska Bilder, Stockholm, 1871), and Förr och Nu, 1871.
[1013] Philadelphia, 1882. The original of the second document mentioned is in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[1014] Most of these are cited by Odhner and Sprinchorn, with indication of the places where they are now deposited.
[1015] Referred to in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vol. v. pp. 468-69.
[1016] For very kind aid the writer is especially indebted to Professor C. T. Odhner, of Lund.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious errors were corrected.
—The transcriber of this project created the book cover image using the title page of the original book. The image is placed in the public domain.