Samuel de Champlain. Francine Legaré
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people present.
It was Samuel de Champlain's initial meeting with Canada's First Peoples. These were the same people the previous explorers had erroneously called “Indians,” simply because they thought they had arrived in India via the western route! Upon meeting them, Champlain immediately showed an ethnologist's concern, and tried to understand their way of life, radically different from that of so-called civilized societies! In his journal, he described them as people “well proportioned in body” and smeared with paint that made their skin olive-coloured. Half-clad in animal skins, in cold weather, they kept warm beneath huge skins of moose, seal, or deer. They had their own beliefs, notably their version of the beginning of the world.
“See how they imagine Creation,” Champlain later explained to Pont-Gravé. “To their mind, after God created all things on earth, he took arrows and drove them into the ground. Later women and men came out. Afterwards, they multiplied.”
“I'd like very much to drive in one of those arrows if it gave birth to a pretty girl!” Pont-Gravé replied, pretending to shoot an imaginary arrow into the distance.
At the gathering in Tadoussac the noisy festivities suddenly gave way to silence as the Montagnais returning from Europe delivered their homecoming speeches. They spoke of France's kindness to them, the King's intention to populate the land, and his collaboration in defeating the eternal enemies, the Iroquois. Excellent news!
Once they'd warmed up, the young interpreters also described the living conditions, cities, houses, castles… That country was full of so many incredible things! How could they convey the idea of a horse-drawn carriage to an audience who travelled on foot or by canoe and had never seen a horse? One of the boys thought for a moment, hesitated, and ended up blurting out that people over there travelled in a sort of cabin pulled by moose.
All this met with a great deal of noisy sympathy.
“No nation in the world seems to us better than yours!” cried the Sagamo to the two sailors.
Moose and bear meat was put on to cook. Tobacco, called petun, went around. After the meal, there was dancing.
Other families arrived the next day. No less than a thousand men, women, and children gathered. People began to sing and the dancing began again. As dictated by ritual, the women undressed completely, wearing only a few necklaces. Spectators from the old world were in for a shock. Among the dancers, many proudly displayed the heads of Iroquois cut off during a confrontation two days earlier.
Then, more solemnly, partnerships were concluded between France and the nations present: Algonquin, Montagnais, and Maliseet. The King's men were given official permission to establish a colony. In return, they would combat the Iroquois.
“Did you hear the Gougou last night, Champlain?” exclaimed Pont-Gravé, smiling at his companion.
“What are we to make of all that?” replied Samuel, pensive.
“Come now!” the captain cried. “You're not going to really believe that fools' twaddle?”
Fools? Who was to say? Perhaps that irrepressible nature had in fact given rise to Gougou, the terrible monster the “Savages” had described to him. This horrifying creature took on the appearance of a woman so enormous she stood higher than a ship's masts. She emitted terrifying hissing noises and ate humans – first placing them in a huge pouch. In general, all believed in Gougou and feared her.
In Paris, they spoke of it as superstition for simple-minded people. But then, surrounded by so much strangeness, Champlain was no longer so sure that the Gougou was an invention.
The Montagnais described to the French a saltwater sea to the north which, six years later, proved to be the bay to which English navigator Henry Hudson would give his name. Especially interested in this body of water that he thought was a third ocean surrounding Canada, Champlain hoped to reach there by travelling up the Saguenay River in a canoe with a few Montagnais, whom he bombarded with questions. After about sixty kilometres, Champlain and Pont-Gravé decided to turn back. They could continue farther another time.
During the next few days, they navigated along the St. Lawrence in a small boat with a sail that had been transported on the deck of the Bonne Renomméle. They reached the Lachine rapids after passing Île aux Lièvres, Île aux Coudres, Île d'Orléans, and Montmorency Falls as well as the future sites of Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal.
Throughout the voyage, the navigator was on the lookout and observed the appearance of the coasts, forests, and meadows. The cartographer prepared relief maps. Certain areas were deemed “unpleasant” lands because nothing, it seemed, would ever grow, besides rocks and fir trees. In addition “these were veritable deserts uninhabitable by animals and birds.”
Elsewhere, what he saw was more appealing and let him picture ways of developing these splendid, untouched areas in the near future.
We came to drop anchor in Quebec, a strait in the aforementioned river of Canada, which is three hundred paces wide… The country is smooth and lovely, containing good land full of trees such as oaks, cypresses, birches, pines and aspens and other wild fruit trees and vines, which, in my opnion, if cultivated, would be as good as our own.
The snows began on the 6th of October. On the 3rd of December we saw sheets of ice floating by that had come from some frozen river. The bitter cold was more extreme than in France and lasted much longer. I think that comes from the north and northwest winds blowing over high mountains still covered in snow, which we had from three to four feet high, until the end of April.
“Whom does it concern this time?” Champlain asked, overcome.
“Marcel… It's big Marcel who'll remain here… like all the others!”
“Is it really blackleg? Is that definite?”
“What else can it be?… None of us will escape…”
The first attempt at settlement, on Île Ste. Croix, was a disaster. Champlain drew the buildings of this site, where “all being sand, everything burned there almost as soon as the sun shone on it.” From The Voyages of the Sieur de Champlain of Saintonge, Captain in Ordinary for the King in the Navy.
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