The White and the Gold (20 page)

When the war began the Company of Merchant Adventurers raised the sum of sixty thousand pounds to equip an expedition against the French in Canada. Three ships set out early in 1628 under the command of Captain David Kirke, a son of Gervase. Word had reached England that the armada promised Champlain by the Company of One Hundred Associates was ready to start. Kirke made his first objective the interception and capture of the fleet.

Kirke and his two brothers, Lewis and Thomas, started for Canadian waters, carrying letters of marque from King Charles. They found Admiral Roquemont and his armada in Gaspé Bay, where he had been compelled to take refuge by heavy storms sweeping over the gulf. It was clear to the English captains at once that the French admiral had been taken by surprise. All his ships were deep in the water with the weight of the cargoes they carried. The new guns were lashed in the holds of the bigger ships and the few that were ready for use were of small caliber. Even the decks of the four warships were black with the passengers they were bringing out—men, women and children, soldiers and mechanics and Jesuit priests. To see English sails on the horizon was the last thing the admiral had expected.

De Roquemont looked about him with a desperate anxiety. The Company of One Hundred Associates had lived up to their promises. The bay was dotted with sails, for in addition to the four convoy ships he had twenty transports in his charge. Everything that the colony at Quebec needed had been loaded into the holds with a lavishness in contrast to the penurious methods of the now defunct trading companies. Could he let this wealth of supplies, which meant life to the struggling colony, fall into the hands of these buccaneering ships which had suddenly emerged out of the blue horizon?

De Roquemont was a good sailor and a brave man. He decided not to give up without a struggle, and the order to prepare for defense
was hastily flown from his masthead. The struggle, however, was a brief one. The three English ships came in under a spread of canvas but otherwise stripped for action, the shrouds filled with musketeers, the muzzles of heavy cannon protruding from the portholes. David Kirke brought his ship alongside that of the admiral and raked the hull of the French flagship with a broadside. Throwing out their grappling irons, a boarding party of the English came over, their cutlasses in their teeth. With the most valorous of intentions, the French found themselves unable to put up any effective resistance. To spare the lives of his helpless passengers, De Roquemont had to strike his colors. The other French vessels, seeing the uselessness of further resistance, surrendered also.

Kirke burned some of the transports and took the rest, heavily loaded with the spoils of victory, into Newfoundland harbors. From here he sailed back to England, taking the most prominent of his prisoners with him.

England hailed the victors with delight. France seethed with indignation and dismay. Stuffed effigies of the three Kirke brothers were burned on the Place de la Grève.

A despairing Champlain paced the ramparts of the citadel on the heights after receiving this bitter news. He had learned of the capture and destruction of Roquemont’s ships from Indian scouts. The French colony, he was convinced, was now doomed. There was nothing to prevent the English from seizing Quebec and expelling all the French settlers. Old and bent and unhappy, he kept an eye on the eastern reaches of the river, expecting to see at any moment the sails of the English ships coming triumphantly to his undoing.

Champlain was fully aware of the weakness of his position. Never an engineer, he had proven himself a poor builder. The houses he had raised among the walnut trees had been flimsy and had fallen into dilapidation and disrepair in the course of a few years. His great pride, the stone citadel, was now going the same way. The walls showed signs of decay and insecurity; the masonry had developed dangerous fissures; two of the corner towers had collapsed, filling the moat with rubble over which an attacking force could scramble to victory with the ease of Joshua and his men charging into Jericho. The mouths of his few cannon protruding above the battlements
looked little more dangerous than broomsticks poking out from the white walls of a boy’s snow castle.

Expecting attack, Champlain had moved the people of Quebec into the fort. The food supplies were inadequate for a siege and so he had found it necessary to reduce the daily ration to a small supply of peas and “turkey corn,” as the Indian maize was called. The people grumbled and in their hearts perhaps hoped that the English would come soon to free them from such privations.

But the English did not come. Winter settled in. With the freezing of the streams and the falling of the snow, the sufferings of the little garrison became pitiful indeed. The cellars of the now fatherless but always thrifty Héberts yielded considerable in the way of grain and vegetables, but the total supply could not fill so many hungry mouths. When spring came at last there was no joy over the violets in flower and the chervil which was ready for cutting. The daily ration by this time had been cut to seven ounces of pounded peas per person. The settlers were gaunt; the children were thin and spiritless in their patched and ragged clothes.

Throughout the winter the unhappy colony had been cut off from the outside world. The Kirkes held control of the waters about Newfoundland and the gulf. Champlain did not know, therefore, that the defeat had precipitated a serious situation in France. The Company of One Hundred Associates hovered on the brink of bankruptcy.

Returns made to the government in 1671, after the final dissolution of the concern, showed that it had been bankrupt almost from the first. The cost of the great fleet had almost exhausted the amount raised. All subsequent reorganizations did no more than fend off the ultimate failure. After the first days of incredulous rage when the effigies of the three Kirkes smoked on Execution Square, there had been talk of equipping more ships for the relief of Canada, but the preparations had proceeded with great slowness. Champlain, in the dark about all this, still expected relief in the spring.

The settlers do not seem to have shared his optimism. The men of the colony, no longer content to exist on starvation rations and anxious as well to ease matters for their families, began to scatter into the woods. Some joined bands of roving Indians, some took to boats and vanished down the river in the direction of the fishing banks. Their wives and children remained in the fort, begging piteously for the food which the unhappy commander could not supply. When the English finally came, Champlain had no more than sixteen men with him in addition to the priests on the St. Charles.

Two ships came into sight from behind the Isle of Orleans, flying the English flag. David Kirke had returned from England with four ships, the
Abigail
of three hundred tons and the others of two hundred tons each, the
William
, the
George
, and the
Gervase
. The first two named had been left at Tadoussac, and it was the
George
and the
Gervase
which had been sent to attack the citadel. As it happened, this was not going to prove a difficult task. At the moment there was no man in the fort save the stooped and sad-eyed commander, all of his sixteen men being in the woods in a desperate search for food. Champlain, standing despondently on the battlements, watched an English officer climb up the narrow path under a white flag. The moment he had foreseen with so much dread had arrived.

The sails of the ships had been seen from the woods on the high declivity, however, and now the men of the garrison were hurrying back. As they straggled in they were ordered to go at once to their posts. When the English officer reached the summit, he found the fort well manned. Soldiers with muskets on their shoulders paced the crumbling ramparts, and the sound of sharp military orders reached his ears. It must have been apparent to him, however, that all this was no more than a brave pretense; that in reality destitution perched on the sagging walls and the sharpness of the voices held an edge of despair.

Realizing that to offer defense would be futile, Champlain nevertheless held out for terms. He insisted that the commander of the attacking force must first show his commission from the English King, that no effort be made to come ashore until all terms had been agreed to, and that one of the two ships be used to convey his people back to their own country, including all the priests and two Indians; and above everything he demanded that fair and courteous treatment be accorded to all.

The commander of the English agreed to these terms. And so on August, 9, 1629, Champlain formally surrendered Quebec to the invaders. It is worth noting that the company of English officers and men who came ashore and raised their flag over the citadel found no food in the place save one tub filled with potatoes and roots.

What thoughts filled the mind of Samuel de Champlain, watching the fluttering of the fleur-de-lis as it was hauled down from the flagpole on the battlements? Was he remembering the struggles of the long years, the disappointments, the triumphs? Did he think of the
meeting at Fontainebleau when he and the Sieur de Monts had pledged their lives to the cause, come what might? Did he pause to recall his many explorations which had accumulated knowledge of the vast extent of this wooded empire, this wonderful domain which France was now yielding to her hereditary foe? Perhaps he was too old and tired, too beaten down by the seeming finality of the blow, to experience the poignancy of such regrets. Perhaps he said to himself no more than “This, then, is the end of it all” as he turned and hobbled down the uneven stone steps to the cobbled courtyard of the citadel, where his word had been law for so many years.

It was known to Champlain that Kirke’s ships had been guided up the St. Lawrence by Frenchmen, and he encountered two of these renegades when he reached Tadoussac as a prisoner on his way to England.

The English commander had left a garrison at Quebec under Lewis Kirke and was taking all his important prisoners of war with him. Champlain, the most unhappy and weary of men, was allowed to go ashore when they reached the mouth of the Saguenay, and it was here that the two men were pointed out to him as having belonged to the party of four who acted as guides to the enemy. The governor’s indignation caused him to approach the guilty pair, who hung back with a shamed air and seemed anxious to get away. To his astonishment and sorrow, he recognized one of the brown and unkempt fellows as Etienne Brulé!

Champlain’s ire mounted to such a height that he proceeded to berate the pair at great length. A full version of what he said is contained in the
Relations
. It unquestionably has been rephrased, for it is a well-rounded and somewhat stilted harangue and not in the heated terms in which Champlain probably expressed himself. The picture of the scene that is given, however, can be accepted as an accurate one. It is recorded that Brulé, holding his head down and shuffling in the extremity of his embarrassment, made no defense save to say that he knew the French garrison had no hope of resisting successfully and so it had not seemed to him wrong to act with the English.

The former servant of the governor, whose exploits in the field of exploration had been so creditable and, in fact, astounding, but who
now would be remembered chiefly for this act of treachery, slunk away and was never seen again by men of his own race. Word of his doings reached their ears, however, and it is possible to tell briefly of his last days.

When he guided the English ships up the estuary to the foot of the rock, his period of achievements and, yes, glory came to an end. From that stage on he failed to add anything to his record. Apparently the urge to set out on new quests had left him. No longer was he filled with a desire to plant his moccasined feet on new trails or to dip his paddle in strange waters. He went back to the Huron country and spent the balance of his days there, a slothful and degraded existence. Perhaps he became bitter of temper and quarreled with the tribesmen in whose midst he lived. He had settled down in the village of Toanché on Penetanguishene Bay, a spot of great natural beauty. One day the Indians turned on him and by force of numbers (he was a man of considerable personal strength and could not have been worsted in single combat) succeeded in beating him to death. Having killed him, they decided they might as well benefit in the usual way. They cut up his body and boiled it in the kettles, and then they gathered in a wide circle and proceeded to consume all that was left of this ungovernable young Frenchman (he was only forty-one when he came to his end) who, in spite of everything, deserves to be remembered for the greatness of his exploits.

Sometime afterward Father Brébeuf recorded in one of his letters that he had visited Penetanguishene Bay where the tragedy occurred and that an intuitive flash of his own death had come to him. “I saw the spot where poor Etienne Brulé was barbarously and brutally murdered,” he wrote, “which made me think that perhaps someday they might treat me in the same manner, and to desire at least that it might be while we were earnestly seeking the glory of the Lord.”

On April 24, a month after the second fleet left England to complete the conquest of Canada, peace had been declared between England and France. When word came back from Canada of the success of the Kirkes, the French Government made an immediate demand that Quebec be restored and that restitution be made for all the losses the French had sustained. King Charles agreed to this.

The Kirkes found on their arrival that their King had appointed a commision made up of a panel of legal baronets to take possession of everything they had brought back, with the intention of turning it over to the French Government. A warrant had been issued to seal the warehouses of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, the purpose being to seize and deliver to the French all the beaver skins and other pelts which were stored there.

The victors protested vigorously. They pointed out that they had sailed under a royal commission and that the purpose of the expedition had been discussed and approved. Their claims, in spite of this, were coldly received and as coldly brushed aside. No attention was paid to the fact that the men who backed the expedition had spent sixty thousand pounds in equipping the ships and that they now stood to lose every penny of it. Even the statement of Kirke that only thirteen hundred of the seven thousand skins he had brought back with him had been taken from the French, the rest being the result of his own trading with the Indians, was disregarded. When he went to the length of taking forcible possession of the warehouses and refusing to yield them to the Crown, the sheriffs of London received orders from the King, or from the ministers acting in his name, to use force in regaining possession. This was done.