Old Times in the Colonies. Charles Carleton Coffin
Читать онлайн книгу.
fair way to control the whole Western World.
While Richard Hakluyt was thus endeavoring to awaken an interest among his friends, there was a gentleman in France, Pierre de Guast, who saw that it was time for France to be getting a foothold in America. Henry IV. bestowed the title of Sieur de Monts upon De Guast, and gave him the territory now comprised in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, to which was given the name of Acadia. He gave to De Monts, Baron Pontrincourt, and Samuel Champlain, as he had once given to De la Roche, the sole privilege of trading with the Indians. They were to build up the empire of New France in the New World.
It was a strange company that sailed from Havre de Grace, April 7th, 1604. There were De Monts, Pontrincourt, Pontgrave, Champlain, several Jesuit priests and Huguenot ministers, and a crowd of thieves and vagabonds which De Monts had taken from the prisons. The Jesuits and Huguenots were almost at swords’ points; and when they could not convince one another by argument, fell to with their fists, while the thieves blackened each other’s eyes in their frequent quarrels. They sailed into the Bay of Fundy, laid out a town on the sandy island of St. Croix, built a great house for the noblemen, and smaller houses for the others; and then the vessels returned to France, leaving De Monts, Champlain, and seventy men.
What a dreary winter it was! The snows whirled around the houses, and the nights were so cold that the wine which De Moots had brought from France was frozen in the casks. Disease thinned their ranks. Before spring one-half died.
In the spring a vessel came from France with forty men, whom De Monts had hired. He saw that the soil of the island was poor, and sailed in search of a better place — visiting the Kennebec, Saco, and Piscataqua rivers and the Isles of Shoals, discovering the Merrimac River, which he named for himself, La Riviere de Guast. He called Cape Aun Cape St. Louis, and Cape Cod Cape Blanco. He landed at Nausett; and while the sailors were obtaining fresh water an Indian darted from behind a tree and seized a kettle.
A crowd of Indians were upon them, letting fly their arrows; but Champlain fired a gun, which so frightened them that they fled.
De Monts returned to his settlement, sailed eastward, and selected a beautiful site on the eastern shore of the Bay of Fundy, and laid out a town which he named Port Royal, putting up a spacious house, containing a great hall with a wide-mouthed
fireplace, a row of smaller buildings, and a church. So France obtained her first foothold in the Western World.
Gold! gold! The ships of Spain were bringing it by the cart-load from Mexico and South America. For more than a century rich cargoes had been gathered in by the rapacious gold-hunters of Castile, Aragon, and Andalusia. The people of England began to have the gold hunger, and fondly imagined that gold could be found almost anywhere in America. Poets pictured the attractions of the ‘Sew World in glowing language. In one of the plays, Captain Seagull narrated to a fellow named Spendthrift wonderful accounts of the country beyond the sea:
Spendthrift. “Is there such treasure there as I have heard?”
Seagull. “I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us. For as much copper as I can carry, I’ll have thrice weight in gold. Why, man, all their pots and pans are of purest gold; all their prisoners are fettered in gold; and as for rubies and diamonds, they go forth and gather them by the sea-shore to hang on their children’s coats and stick in their children’s caps.”
Spendthrift. “Is it a pleasant country?”
Seagull. “As ever the sun shone on: temperate, and full of all sorts of excellent viands. Wild-boar is as common there as bacon is here, and venison as mutton. You may be an alderman there, and not a laborer; an officer, and not a slave.”
Night after night crowds flocked to the theatres to see the play, and have their imaginations fired by the exhibition of pieces of gold supposed to have been brought from America.
Queen Elizabeth was dead, and James was on the throne, and the merchants of London and Plymouth petitioned him for a grant of land in America: he complied with their request, and gave the London merchants the country between Long Island and Cape Fear; and to the Plymouth merchants the country between Long Island and Nova Scotia.
The Plymouth men sent out Captain Weymouth to explore the coast. He reached Cape Cod on May 13th, 1605, then sailed north and landed on the island of Monhegan. He entered a harbor on the coast of Maine on Pentecost Sunday, and named it Pentecost. He landed the next day, and the sailors dug up a patch of ground and sowed some garden-seeds — the first sown by the hands of Englishmen in the Western World.
Captain Weymouth sailed up the Kennebec River, entered Booth Bay, and landed at Pemmaquid. The Indians flocked around his ship in their bark canoes. He enticed them on board, treacherously seized five, and sailed away to England.
What an excitement there was in the old town of Plymouth when the ship Archangel, with five Indians on board, dropped anchor in the harbor! All the town came to see Squanto and his red-skinned fellow-savages. Sir Fernando Gorges, the governor, became greatly interested in them. Wherever they went great crowds flocked to see them, which set everybody to talking and thinking about America.
Sieur de Monts, the while, was spending his money freely in buying provisions and supplies for his colony on the Bay of Fundy, treating the Indians kindly, feasting their old chief, Membertu, at his own table, and tossing strips of bear-meat to the dusky warriors who squatted on the floor of the great hall. The savages grunted their satisfaction, and looked up with longing eyes for more; it was better than tramping through the forest all day in pursuit of game — they would always be friends of the French.
A vessel sailed into the harbor, bringing a letter for Sieur de Monts: “Your enemies have persuaded the king to deprive you of the sole privilege of trading with the Indians,” was the message.
Everything was abandoned — houses, furniture, all — and with a sad heart Sieur de Monts sailed away; so the second attempt of France to get a foothold in Canada ended in failure.
The vessel which carried the disappointed Frenchmen back to France almost came in contact, in mid-ocean, with three ships from London, which were bearing to Virginia the men who were to make the first permanent English settlement in America at Jamestown.
In April, 1607, Captain Newport, Bartholomew Gosnold, Captain John Smith, and a party of colonists sailed into the peaceful waters of Chesapeake Bay, dropping anchor off a point of land where everything around was so pleasant: after tossing so many weeks on ship-board, they named it Point Comfort. The vessels sailed up a noble river, which Captain Newport named the James, in honor of the king. He made a settlement on an island, to which he gave the name of Jamestown.
The expedition had been fitted out by the London Company of merchants. The colonists consisted of four carpenters, a few laborers, and forty-eight “gentlemen,” sons of noblemen, who had wasted their fortunes, and who expected to find gold lying in heaps. They had vague ideas of a life of exciting adventure in the wilderness. How different the reality! They found no gold; the sun blazed in the heavens like a fiery ball, and they wilted beneath the heat; fever set in; death began to pick them off; provisions failed; and had not Captain Smith obtained corn from the Indians, all would have perished. Instead of gold and adventures, sickness, death, and disappointment!
While this was transpiring in Virginia, William Brewster, William Bradford, and the farmers of Scrooby and Austerfield, in obedience to their convictions of duty and obligation, were fleeing from England to Holland — the country which the sturdy, patient, plodding Dutchmen had banked in from the sea, pumped dry with their windmills, and converted it into farms and gardens— the only country on the face of the earth where they would be wholly free to think for themselves.
‘What land is this, that seems to be
A mingling of the land and sea?
This land of sluices, dikes, and dunes?
This water-net that tessellates
The landscape? this unending maze
Of gardens, through whose latticed gates
The imprisoned pinks and tulips gaze;
Where in