down from that early voyage. The tides carry to a broad river on the north side. It is St. John's Day. They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking vainly for more minerals. Westward is another river, known to-day as the Ste. Croix, the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. Dochet Island at its mouth seems to offer what to a soldier is an ideal site. A fort here could command either Fundy Bay or the upland country, which Indians say leads back to the St. Lawrence. Thinking more of fort than farms, De Monts plants his colony on Ste. Croix River, on an island composed mainly of sand and rock.
While workmen labor to erect a fort on the north side, the pilot is sent back to Nova Scotia to prospect for minerals. As the vessel coasts near St. Mary's Bay, a black object is seen moving weakly along the shore. Sailors and pilot gaze in amazement. A hat on the end of a pole is waved weakly from the beach. The men can scarcely believe their senses. It must be the priest, though sixteen days have passed since he disappeared. For two weeks Aubry had wandered, living on berries and roots, before he found his way back to the sea.
PORT ROYAL OR ANNAPOLIS BASIN, 1609 (From Lescarbot's map)
Here, then, at last, is founded the first colony in Canada, a little palisaded fort of seventy-nine men straining longing eyes at the sails of the vessel gliding out to sea; for Pontgravé has taken one vessel up the St. Lawrence to trade, and Poutrincourt has gone back to France with the other for supplies. A worse beginning could hardly have been made. The island was little better than a sand heap. No hills shut out the cold winds that swept down the river bed from the north, and the tide carried in ice jam from the south. As the snow began to fall, padding the stately forests with a silence as of death, whitening the gaunt spruce trees somber as funereal mourners, the colonists felt the icy loneliness of winter in a forest chill their hearts. Cooped up on the island by the ice, they did little hunting. Idleness gives time for repinings. Scurvy came, and before spring half the colonists had peopled the little cemetery outside the palisades. De Monts has had enough of Ste. Croix. When Pontgravé comes out with forty more men in June, De Monts prepares to move. Champlain had the preceding autumn sailed south seeking a better site; and now with De Monts he sails south again far as Cape Cod, looking for a place to plant the capital of New France. It is amusing to speculate that Canada might have included as far south as Boston, if they had found a harbor to their liking; but they saw nothing to compare with Annapolis Basin, narrow of entrance, landlocked, placid as a lake, with shores wooded like a park; and back they cruised to Ste. Croix in August, to move the colony across to Nova Scotia, to Annapolis Basin of Acadia. While Champlain and Pontgravé volunteer to winter in the wilderness, De Monts goes home to look after his monopoly in France.
What had De Monts to show for his two years' labor? His company had spent what would be $20,000 in modern money, and all returns from fur trade had been swallowed up prolonging the colony. While Champlain hunted moose in the woods round Port Royal and Pontgravé bartered furs during the winter of 1605–1606, De Monts and Poutrincourt and the gay lawyer Marc Lescarbot fight for the life of the monopoly in Paris and point out to the clamorous merchants that the building of a French empire in the New World is of more importance than paltry profits. De Monts remains in France to stem the tide rising against him, while Poutrincourt and Lescarbot sail on the Jonas with more colonists and supplies for Port Royal.
Noon, July 27, 1606, the ship slips into the Basin of Annapolis. To Lescarbot, the poet lawyer, the scene is a fairyland—the silver flood of the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness. As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The Jonas runs up the French ensign. Then a canoe shoots out from the brushwood, paddled by the old chief Membertou. He signals back to the watchers behind the gates. Musketry shots ring out welcome. The ship's cannon answer, setting the waters churning. Trumpets blare. The gates fly wide and out marches the garrison—two lone Frenchmen. The rest, despairing of a ship that summer, have cruised along to Cape Breton to obtain supplies from French fishermen, whence, presently, come Pontgravé and Champlain, overjoyed to find the ship from France. Poutrincourt has a hogshead of wine rolled to the courtyard and all hands fitly celebrate.
BUILDINGS ON STE. CROIX ISLAND, 1613 (From Champlain's diagram)
When Pontgravé carries the furs to France, Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer poet, proves the life of the fort for this, the third winter of the colonists in Acadia. Poutrincourt and his son attend to trade. Champlain, as usual, commands; and dull care is chased away by a thousand pranks of the Paris advocate. First, he sets the whole fort a-gardening, and Baron Poutrincourt forgets his noblesse long enough to wield the hoe. Then Champlain must dam up the brook for a trout pond. The weather is almost mild as summer until January. The woods ring to many a merry picnic, fishing excursion, or moose hunt; and when snow comes, the gay Lescarbot along with Champlain institutes a New World order of nobility—the Order of Good Times. Each day one of the number must cater to the messroom table of the fort. This means keen hunting, keen rivalry for one to outdo another in the giving of sumptuous feasts. And all is done with the pomp and ceremony of a court banquet. When the chapel bell rings out noon hour and workers file to the long table, there stands the Master of the Revels, napkin on shoulder, chain of honor round his neck, truncheon in his hand. The gavel strikes, and there enter the Brotherhood, each bearing a steaming dish in his hand—moose hump, beaver tail, bears' paws, wild fowl smelling luscious as food smells only to out-of-doors men. Old Chief Membertou dines with the whites. Crouching round the wall behind the benches are the squaws and the children, to whom are flung many a tasty bit.
At night time, round the hearth fire, when the roaring logs set the shadows dancing on the rough-timbered floor, the truncheon and chain of command are pompously transferred to the new Grand Master. It is all child's play, but it keeps the blood of grown men coursing hopefully.
Or else Lescarbot perpetrates a newspaper—a handwritten sheet giving the doings of the day—perhaps in doggerel verse of his own composing. At other times trumpets and drums and pipes keep time to a dance. As all the warring clergymen, both Huguenot and Catholic, have died of scurvy, Lescarbot acts as priest on Sundays, and winds up the day with cheerful excursions up the river, or supper spread on the green. The lawyer's good spirits proved contagious. The French songs that rang through the woods of Acadia, keeping time to the chopper's labors, were the best antidote to scurvy; but the wildwood happiness was too good to last. While L'Escarbot was writing his history of the new colonies a bolt fell from the blue. Instead of De Monts' vessel there came in spring a fishing smack with word that the grant of Acadia had been rescinded. No more money would be advanced. Poutrincourt and his son, Biencourt, resolved to come back without the support of a company; but for the present all took sad leave of the little settlement—Poutrincourt, Champlain, L'Escarbot—and sailed with the Cape Breton fishing fleet for France, where they landed in October, 1607.
Cartier, Roberval, La Roche, De Monts—all had failed to establish France in Canada; and as for England, Sir Humphrey's colonists lay bleaching skeletons at the bottom of the sea.
CHAPTER III
FROM 1607 TO 1635