The White and the Gold (51 page)

A different picture of Perrot emerges from a memoir dealing with
an early stage of the career of the great La Salle. The latter had established himself at Fort Frontenac and was on bad terms with the Jesuits, being convinced that they aimed at monopolizing the fur trade. When a salad was served to him at his table containing a mixture of hemlock and verdigris which made him very sick, La Salle was disposed at first to suspect the Jesuits of a scheme to get rid of him. It developed later that one of his own followers was to blame. This man, whose name is given as Nicolas Perrot but who was generally called
Jolycoeur
, confessed his guilt and the episode seems to have ended there. It has been assumed that the man
Jolycoeur
was none other than the interpreter and voyageur, but the story is out of keeping with everything else known about him. No stigma seems to have attached to him later because of it. Four years before the death of La Salle, Perrot was appointed commandant of the whole Northwest. This post was of such importance by that time that it would not have been conferred on one who had been guilty of such a low form of crime.

As commandant he seems to have been eminently successful. He retained the good will of the Indians and kept them true to their French alliance. In the year 1693, wandering far afield, he discovered the lead mines on the Mississippi.

After taking up land near Becancourt, Perrot married a girl named Madeleine Raclot, who presented him with nine children. He began to accumulate property, having so much family responsibility, but like Job in the Land of Uz, who had excelled him by bringing ten children into the world and whose wealth was swallowed up in the attacks of the Sabeans and by the great wind which came up out of the wilderness, the last years of the voyageur’s life were filled with misfortune. Twice stray parties of Indians looted his personal stores, and in the year 1687 a fire destroyed the Jesuit mission at De Père, wiping out a large supply of furs which Perrot had deposited there. Finally, in 1697, a bolt from the blue descended upon all Frenchmen who were engaged in the Northwest trade. Without any earlier notification of such intent the King abolished all trading privileges in that territory. Perrot was the hardest hit of them all. In his official capacity he had been giving expensive gifts to the Indians to hold them in line.

Perrot protested to Versailles. There was no response. The King, having made up his mind, paid no attention to the clamor of indignation which rose. There may have been reasons for this sudden
change of policy, but there can be no doubt that great injustice was visited on many of the men in the government employ. Perrot spent his declining years in poverty.

Although his exploits in the field entitle him to a permanent place in Canadian annals, Nicolas Perrot is chiefly remembered for a quite remarkable manuscript he prepared during the final years, when he had little to do and nothing to expect. These memoirs, which were not printed until 1864, presented a detailed and accurate picture of the Northwest at the period when he acted as commandant and gave much important information with reference to the Indians of the lakes and plains.

I
T WILL be recalled that the arrival of Radisson and Groseilliers in the early summer of 1660 with a large cargo of furs had temporarily saved the credit of the colony. They had passed the Long Sault on the way home a few days following the slaughter of Dollard and his brave handful. The pair were in high favor for a time. Elaborate plans were made for another voyage into the wilds, and the talk flew about the offices in the citadel and radiated out into all the commercial shops and the religious institutions and the houses of the town that the objective of the new venture would be Hudson’s Bay. The two
coureurs de bois
were certain they could lead the way there.

But before the time to leave came they were hearing rumors which discomfited them not a little. Another party was being organized to make an overland dash for the bay. It was to be headed by two prominent Jesuits, Fathers Gabriel Dreuillettes and Claude Dablon, and the route they proposed to take was that of the Saguenay River.

The next development was equally disconcerting. The Sieur d’Avagour was governor at this time, and it was known that he had a willingness to improve his own fortunes; a weakness shared by a number of the governors of New France. He came to them in great secrecy with a proposal. He would give them official permits for their next excursion if they would give him half of the profits. The answer he received was that they would be glad to have the governor’s company if he desired to share in the proceeds. This, at
least, is the story that Radisson tells; there were no doubt denials later from the official camp. There is such a nice fitness about the answer of the voyageurs that it is easier to believe the Radisson version than the denials which came from the other side.

Whatever the truth may be, the resourceful pair did not delay. Convinced they had nothing to gain by further parleys and feeling the pinch of time, they stole away in the night as they had done before. They left Three Rivers with a cheery message from the guards in the lookout tower, where no doubt there was much grinning and winking in the dark. When a member of the party named Larivière became separated from the rest and was found later in a state of semi-starvation, the governor displayed his pique by clapping him in prison. Whereupon the good people of Three Rivers, who knew enough of the story to have decided sympathies and who seem, moreover, to have been an independent lot, broke open the jail and released him.

The expedition was a great success. The party struck for the hunting grounds north of Lake Superior, where Radisson was prompted by the beauty and richness of this stretch of primeval land to write in his diary: “It grieves me to see that the world could not discover such enticing country to live in.… The Europeans fight for a rock in the sea against one another or for a sterile land.… It is true, I confess, that access here is difficult, but nothing is to be gained without labor and pains.”

The party returned from this idyllic land in 1663 with a wonderful store of furs and a secret. Some intimation of the secret leaked out at once; it had to do with a new land route to Hudson’s Bay. As the Jesuit party had failed in their venture up the Saguenay, there was much interest in what Radisson and Groseilliers might know.

The governor acted promptly and with a degree of severity which showed that his resentment still ran deep. He ordered them arrested and had the cargo impounded. The upshot was that they were fined almost up to the full value of the fur they had brought back with them. Some of the money was to be employed in building a new fort at Three Rivers, this being intended perhaps as a measure to rob them of the sympathies of their fellow citizens. As a sop to the pair, it was stipulated they could put their respective coats of arms on the gate of the new fort. A second slice was to go at once into the treasury, and a special fine of fourteen thousand pounds was imposed. From the figures available, it seems that the value of the
furs ran very high—some place it at sixty thousand pounds—and out of this the woodsmen were left no more than four thousand, from which the expenses of the expedition had to be met.

Radisson and Groseilliers were not men to sit down under such treatment. Radisson had been nicknamed
Dodcon
, which meant Little Devil, when he was prisoner of the Mohawks, and both he and his partner had shown highhandedness and temper in their dealings. Groseilliers departed at once for France in a state of high dudgeon to appeal their case before the King’s ministers. It is said that he spent half of the capital remaining in the partnership in his efforts to get the Quebec decision reversed. The ministers gave him the cold shoulder and refused to do anything about a decision which had brought into the treasury such a comfortable sum. It is clear they gave no thought to the future, to the possibility that these men, the most spectacularly successful traders the colony had produced, might be capable of bringing continuous revenue into the royal coffers if allowed official co-operation. The stand they took was a grievous error and was to cost France a huge price in war and bloodshed as well as financial losses so enormous that by comparison the amount of the fines seems of no more consequence than the scratch of a bookkeeper’s pen.

Groseilliers returned to New France and rejoined his partner there. They were now almost devoid of funds, and their position seemed so hopeless that they reached a momentous decision; with considerable reluctance, it is believed. They decided to see if they could secure backing in the colonies of New England. With this in mind they went to Acadia by way of Nicolas Denys’ fort at St. Peter and then by Canso. At Port Royal they met a New England sea captain named Zachariah Gillam, who encouraged them in their purpose to do their trading in future from England’s colonial ports. Their reluctance still nagged at them because this meant going to Hudson’s Bay by sea and abandoning the land route which they had learned from the Indians of the West, the direct and easy way through a very long lake now called Winnipeg and then straight to the bay by a river which would be given the name of Nelson. Zachariah Gillam offered to take them in his ship, and together they got as far as the straits which Sir Martin Frobisher, the great Elizabethan navigator, had found in 1577. The straits led straight into the West and perhaps would open up for them the way to the Northwest Passage. Gillam, according to Radisson’s account, began to complain that his ship
was not fitted out for winter sailing and to say they should turn back. Radisson, who does not seem to have been afraid of anything, wrote in his picturesque reports that Gillam was frightened by “the mountains of sugar candy,” by which he meant the icebergs. At any rate, turn back they did, arriving in due course in Boston.

A deal was made in the latter city by which two ships were supplied for another effort to reach Hudson’s Bay by sea. One of the ships was wrecked and the crews lost heart. They did not reach the bay, and on their return the New England backers of the venture entered suit against the French Canadians.

At this low point in their fortunes—they were now almost destitute—they met an extraordinary man named Sir George Carteret. He had been born and raised on the island of Jersey and during the English civil war had fought with the greatest zeal and vigor on the royalist side, with so much zeal, in fact, that he went on fighting after the King’s banner went down finally. From his headquarters on the island of Jersey he waged a privateering war on English shipping and was proclaimed a pirate by the victorious parliamentary party. His activities were maintained until the restoration of the Stuarts put Charles II on the throne. It was to be expected that among those rewarded by the new King was the hard-fighting buccaneer. Carteret was made a baronet and given various posts of importance. He was granted “a certain island and adjacent islets in perpetual inheritance to be called New Jersey,” and he was one of the lords proprietors to whom the King assigned the colonization of the Carolinas.

Pepys calls him “the most passionate man in the world,” and Clarendon has described him as “the most generous man in kindness and the most dexterous man of business ever known.” There seems to have been a basis for both descriptions. One thing is certain: in one way and another Sir George Carteret became one of the wealthiest men in the world.

He was in the American colonies on business concerned with his New Jersey grants when he met Radisson and Groseilliers. His keen mind jumped at once to the great possibilities of the northern trade. He saw the French Canadians undoubtedly as men of his own kidney and was certain they could be employed to great advantage. He persuaded them to go to England with him.

They arrived in England after many adventures, including their capture by the Dutch, with whom England was at war, and a period of detention in Spain. It was in 1665 when they arrived, when London was in the throes of the Great Plague. The most acute stage of that terrible visitation had been reached, when people were dying at the rate of six or seven thousand a month, when the red cross was marked on most of the houses and at nights the carts rumbled through the streets and the summons was intoned, “Bring out your dead!” Those who could afford to leave the city had already done so. King Charles was at Oxford, and Carteret repaired to that city, taking his two new friends from the French colonies with him.

Radisson acted as spokesman, and the King listened to him with the closest attention. There can be no doubt that this young adventurer had a way with him. He probably deserved to be called
Dodcon
and certainly he had a tongue with which to spin glowing pictures. He seems, sensibly enough, to have dwelt on the great profits to be made out of the fur trade in the northern waters, but through the recital ran a golden thread, the speculation that out of the bay running ever westward on its way to the East would be found the Northwest Passage.