The French in the Heart of AmericaFinley, John H. (John Huston)
History
The French in the Heart of America
Finley, John H. (John Huston)
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); French -- North America; Mississippi River Valley -- History
He had also made one expedition to the St. Lawrence, reaching the deserted
Hochelaga, seeing the Lachine Rapids, and getting vague reports of the
unknown West. He must have been back in Paris in time to see the eleven
survivors of La Roche's unsuccessful expedition of 1590, who, having lived
twelve years and more on Sable Island, were rescued and brought before
King Henry IV, "standing like river gods" in their long beards and clad in
shaggy skins. During the next three years this indefatigable, resourceful
pioneer assisted in founding Acadia and exploring the Atlantic coast
southward. Boys and girls in America are familiar with the story of the
dispersion of the Acadians, a century and more later, as preserved in our
literature by the poet Longfellow. But doubtless not one in a hundred
thousand has ever read the earlier chapters of that Aeneid.
The best and the meanest of France were of the company that set out from
Dieppe to be its colonists: men of highest condition and character, and
vagabonds, Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, soldiers and artisans.
There were theological discussions which led to blows before the colonists
were far at sea. Fiske, the historian, says the "ship's atmosphere grew as
musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles as that of a room at the
Sorbonne." There was the incident of the wandering of Nicolas Aubry, "more
skilled in the devious windings of the [Latin Quarter] than in the
intricacies of the Acadian Forest," where he was lost for sixteen days and
subsisted on berries and wild fruits; there was the ravage of the
relentless maladie de terre, scurvy, for which Cartier's specific could
not be found though the woods were scoured; there were the explorations of
beaches and harbors and islands and rivers, including the future
Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, and the accurate mapping of all that coast
now so familiar; there were the arrivals of the ship _Jonas_ once with
temporal supplies and again, as the _Mayflower of the Jesuits_, with
spiritual teachers; there was the "Order of Good Times," which flourished
with as good cheer and as good food at Port Royal in the solitude of the
continent as the gourmands at the Rue aux Ours had in Paris and that, too,
at a cheaper rate; [Footnote: "Though the epicures of Paris often tell us
we have no Rue aux Ours over there, as a rule we made as good cheer as we
could have in this same Rue aux Ours and at less cost." Lescarbot,
"Champlain Society Publication," 7:342.] there was later the news of the
death of Henry IV heard from a fisherman of Newfoundland; and there was,
above all else except the "indomitable tenacity" of Champlain, the
unquenchable enthusiasm, lively fancy, and good sense of Lescarbot, the
verse-making advocate from Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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