Old Quebec, the city of Champlain. Emily Poynton Weaver
away, leaving Champlain and twenty-eight men to make good during the winter their bold invasion of the wilderness. They stood on the defensive; but the neighboring Indians proved friendly, and no human enemy came near their “habitation.” Yet the foundations of New France (as it seems of every colony) were laid in woe and anguish. The winter had hardly begun in earnest when the horrible scurvy appeared amongst them, and before spring twenty of the company lay cold and silent beneath the snow. Of the remaining eight, four had been at death’s door, but Champlain himself was still full of health and life and courage.
Once, when on an excursion up the St. Charles, he had chanced upon a tumble-down stone chimney, a few rusted cannon-balls, and some other relics which convinced him that he stood upon the spot where Jacques Cartier had wintered seventy-three years before. A less resolute man might have found the discovery disheartening; but Champlain had no thought of retreat.
Often during that melancholy winter he questioned the Algonquins, who had camped beside the little fort, as to what lay in the unknown regions beyond; and, listening to their talk of rivers, lakes and boundless forests, he grew more and more eager to plunge into the wilderness. But always the Indians added tragic stories of a foe infesting the woodland paths and lying ambushed beside the streams; and so Champlain, moved partly perhaps by chivalrous pity for their terror, and trusting in the superior military skill and excellent weapons of his own people, promised to take the field during the coming spring against the ubiquitous and blood-thirsty Iroquois.
Some writers regard this promise as the grand mistake of Champlain’s policy. Possibly, however, the struggle was inevitable. At any rate, the first anniversary of the founding of Quebec had hardly passed, when was inaugurated the fearful blood-feud between the French and the Iroquois that for the greater part of a century brought out the best and the worst of New France—courage, steadfastness, unselfish heroism on the one hand, and, on the other, dare-devil recklessness and pitiless brutality.
Blamable or unblamable, Champlain and two of his followers, clad in “helmet, breastplate, and greaves,” and carrying ponderous arquebuses, joined a host of painted warriors, and caused for once a horrible panic in the ranks of the Iroquois. What brave could stand against an adversary who had the thunder and lightning at his command? But the Iroquois were no cowards. Their panic passed with the novelty of the French mode of fighting; but their thirst for vengeance long outlived him who had awakened it, and again and again it threatened the very existence of New France.
Clearly, however, it was not the fault of Champlain that the colony remained so perilously feeble. He was as truly the servant as the governor of his settlement, and for nearly thirty years his voyages and journeys and battles, his struggles with mercenary traders and heedless officials, had little intermission. He was, moreover, a homeless man; for, though he married in 1610, his wife was a child of twelve, and he did not bring her out to his ruinous “habitation” for ten long years.
Immediately after his return with her, he began to build on the edge of the cliff, where now stands the Chateau Frontenac, a fort which, altered or rebuilt by his successors, was afterwards known as the Chateau St. Louis. Beneath the planks of Dufferin Terrace its cellars still remain. The main building was destroyed by fire in 1834; but a wing added by General Haldimand in 1784 was only demolished in 1891 to make way for the luxurious Chateau Frontenac hotel. This often shelters ten times the number of people which made up the population of New France when Champlain began the building of his “chateau.”
At that date six white children represented young Canada, and Madame de Champlain had scarcely any companions of her own sex save her three serving-women. She had no lack of occupation, however, for she devoted much of her time to teaching the Indians.
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