Today in 1534, Jacques
Cartier, a Breton navigator sailing for King Francis of France, began exploring
the coast of Newfoundland, the Canadian Maritimes, and the Gulf of St.
Lawrence. Two ships carrying sixty
men under his command left St. Malo on the 20th of April, and after
twenty days of prosperous sailing weather, they sighed Cape Bonavista. From there, it still being rather
wintery conditions, they moved southeast where they took refuge in a harbor
that they named St. Katherine.
For roughly three months, Cartier
and his men explored the area seen in the map opposite, but in the first week
of August, with the winds and tides making sailing difficult, they decided to
head for home, resolving to come back the following year and continue their
explorations. After celebrating
the feast of the Assumption on August 15, they set sail and arrived back in the
port of St. Malo on the 5th of September.
Like many before and after
him, Cartier was looking for a westward passage to the fabled riches of the
East Indies. Like many before and
after him, he thought he had done so, or at least found one of the islands
wherein great riches awaited. He spent
the winter in France getting more ships and men together, and sailed again the
following May, when he moved up what he was certain was a northwest
passage. It was instead the St.
Lawrence River, but after wintering over in the ice-bound St. Charles River, he
persuaded the local chief to go back to France with him to tell King Francis
personally of the fabulously wealthy Kingdom of Saguenay somewhere to the
north.
Due to the increasing strife
between France and Spain, which came to a head in 1536, and the loss of
influential friends at court, it would be five years before Cartier sailed
again for the New World. This time,
his orders included the disparate duties of looking for that fabulously wealthy
country and, at the same time, assisting in the permanent settlement of the
lands along the St. Lawrence River.
The project was under the command of the new Viceroy of the lands in
Canada, Jean-Francois de La Rocque, Sieur de Roberval, with Cartier as
Captain-General.
Finding settlers was not an
easy task. As usual, giving one’s descendents the entrée to exclusive “First
Settlers” organizations does not seem to have greatly influenced anyone to be
one of those First Settlers. The
king finally had to issue instructions for Roberval and Cartier to search the
prisons of Paris and other major cities of France, and fill their crews with
those convicts under sentence of death, excluding those guilty of high treason,
counterfeiting, and heresy.
While Roberval stayed behind
to get the last of his supplies, Cartier with five ships and provisions
sufficient for two years sailed from France on 23 May 1541, arriving, after a
stormy voyage, late in June. Here
he waited six weeks for Roberval’s arrival before finally losing patience and moving
up the St. Lawrence River without him. On the 23rd of August the
ships arrived at the site of modern Cap-Rouge, Quebec. Cartier and his advance
team of about 400 settlers left the five ships on which they had spent the last
three months and built a fortified settlement, which he called
Charlesbourg-Royal. That done,
Cartier went exploring again.
What happened during that
winter is a matter for conjecture. In spite of the ample provisions and the
fortifications, the settlement did not flourish. The winter was extremely long and bitter. Relations with their Iroquoian
neighbors were strained, especially when they learned that the chief who had
accompanied Cartier to France in 1536 had died there. [Actually, of the ten
natives who had gone to France with the promise that they would return to their
homes within the year, only one little girl had survived.] To mitigate the hostility
he knew would be aimed at the Frenchmen, Cartier said that the others had
become great lords in France, and did not wish to return. It didn’t work. The natives remained hostile. Roberval remained absent.
Under the circumstances,
Cartier could not explore the lands on the Ottawa River where he thought the
Kingdom of Saguenay lay, nor was his other job of establishing a permanent
settlement looking successful. Discouraged,
he determined to return to France in the spring. Gathering the colony into his remaining ships, he set sail and
actually met Roberval’s supply ships as they moved up the Newfoundland
coast. Instead of turning back,
however, he set his face for home and arrived there in October. Roberval
continued to Charlesbourg-Royal, where his 200 colonists cleared land, refurbished
the abandoned buildings, and endured his iron rule, but his efforts were too
little, too late. He was recalled
to France the following year, and the first attempted European settlement in North
America was abandoned.
Artwork:
Map of Cartier’s First
Voyage and Explorations, from Wikipedia.
The Reception of Jacques
Cartier at Hochelaga, from
William Henry
Atherton, Under the French regime,
1535-1760 (1914), p. 8.
(Future Montreal)
Cartier’s Ships in the St. Lawrence River, from Gilbert Parker and
Claude G. Bryan, Old Quebec: The Fortress
of New France (1908) p. 13.
