Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

Quest for the Northwest Passage

Fishermen seasonally attending to their dry ﬁ shery on the eastern

Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland represented the extent of the

English presence in North America for more than three-quarters of a

century after Caboto’s disappointing voyages. But with England’s rise as

a great sea power, heralded by Sir Francis Drake’s voyage around the

world from 1577 to 1581, came a renewed interest in northern discov-

ery. The year before Drake embarked upon his epic global journey,

Martin Frobisher undertook his ﬁ rst of three voyages in search of a

northwest passage to Asia through the uncharted Arctic waters of

Canada. For the next 330 years, the quest for a northwest passage

would capture the imagination and daunt the spirit of numerous British

oceanic explorers (Francis 1986).

In July 1576, after a fairly routine crossing of the north Atlantic,

Frobisher and his crew sailed past Greenland into a wide stretch of

water that appeared to divide two continents. He named this waterway

Frobisher Strait in the belief that, like the Strait of Magellan at the

southern tip of South America, it would lead to the Paciﬁ c Ocean. As

he explored this “strait” for nearly a month, he presumed that he was

passing through the gap between the northern coastlines of America

and Asia. Unbeknownst to Frobisher, he had not discovered a strait but

rather a long, wide bay at the southeastern end of Bafﬁ n Island that

would one day bear his name. Before he had a chance to realize his

mistake, Frobisher encountered Inuit people who apparently had

already been trading furs for metal goods with European vessels of the

Newfoundland-Labrador ﬁ shing and whaling ﬂ eets. In the midst of

trade relations, misunderstandings ensued and ﬁ ghting broke out

between the Inuit and Frobisher’s crew. Having incurred the wrath of

the local Natives and mindful that it was late August, Frobisher decided

it would be prudent to return to England whereupon he could report

triumphantly that not only had he discovered the passage to Asia but

the mysterious black rock that he had brought back contained evidence

of gold.

The excitement generated by these discoveries persuaded Queen

Elizabeth I to provide three ships and a crew of 120 for a second voyage

in 1577. Frobisher returned to Bafﬁ n Island in July and August, more

concerned with mining than exploration. He loaded nearly 200 tons of

rock onto his ships before renewed hostilities with the Inuit and the

fear of advancing ice prompted his return to England. The four Inuit

captives whom Frobisher brought along did not survive more than two

months. Furthermore, tests conducted on the new ores led to the hasty

conclusion that they contained a quantity of gold and silver sizable

enough to warrant a third voyage.

The 15 ships that left England on May 31, 1578, represented the

most ambitious overseas speculation of the age and indeed the largest

expedition ever sent to the Canadian Arctic. Frobisher was instructed

to establish a colony of 100 men to serve as a base for a gold-mining

operation. After straying off course into a waterway that Frobisher

dubbed “Mistaken Strait” (later known as Hudson Strait) and dogged

by ice and stormy weather, the expedition ﬁ nally reached the site of his

earlier excavations on Bafﬁ n Island at the end of July. Too late to estab-

lish a colony, Frobisher concentrated on setting up an efﬁ cient mining

operation, which produced over 1,200 tons of ore by the end of August

when it became necessary to depart. Back in England, smelters spent

the next ﬁ ve years in a futile attempt to extract gold or silver from the

ore. In keeping with the adage that “all that glitters is not gold,”

Frobisher, like Cartier before him, had actually brought back iron

pyrite, aptly known as “fool’s gold.”

Despite the failure of Frobisher’s gold-mining venture, the search

for a northwest passage to Asia continued. In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gil-

bert, an early champion of the idea of a northwest passage, attempted

to establish a colony in the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland to

serve as a base from which the search for the passage could be

launched. After formally taking possession of Newfoundland for Eng-

land, he perished at sea and the colonizing mission was abandoned. In

1585 English navigator John Davis continued the quest by sailing to

the waters west of Greenland, crossing the strait that would bear his

name, and eventually reaching Cumberland Sound, north of Frobisher

Bay on Bafﬁ n Island. Sailing into Cumberland Sound for about 150

miles, Davis was forced to turn back by stormy weather. Convinced

that he had located the passage to Asia, he returned to Bafﬁ n Island in

1586. In fog and poor weather, he strayed off course and ended up

along the coast of Labrador. On a third attempt, in 1587, Davis sailed

up the western coast of Greenland through Davis Strait and into Bafﬁ n

Bay, reaching farther north than had any other previous navigator. He

crossed westward to Bafﬁ n Island before proceeding south to explore

Cumberland Sound, but never ascertained whether it was a closed

inlet or an open sea.

War with Spain distracted English interest in the northwest passage

until 1610 when Henry Hudson sailed into Frobisher’s “Mistaken

Strait,” which was subsequently renamed Hudson Strait. In early

August he came upon a huge body of water that he felt certain would

ACCIDENTAL REDISCOVERY

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

lead to Asia. Following its southerly course, he reached the bottom of

what came to be known as Hudson Bay and James Bay, where his ship

became trapped by ice. During the winter, scurvy made its appearance

and supplies ran low. When the ice thawed in the spring, Hudson

wanted to continue his exploration, but his men, ravaged by scurvy and

a shortage of supplies, did not share his enthusiasm. Mutiny ensued

and Hudson, his son, and a few loyal crew members were cast adrift in

an open boat, never to be seen again. One of the mutineers, Robert

Bylot, who guided Hudson’s ship back to England, was pardoned and

returned with Thomas Button to search for Hudson in 1612–13. After

exploring the western shore of Hudson Bay and ﬁ nding no prospect of

a passage, Bylot accompanied William Bafﬁ n in a renewed search for a

northerly route in 1615. On their second voyage in 1616, Bylot and

Bafﬁ n surpassed Davis’s northern penetration when they reached the

top of Bafﬁ n Bay and sailed into the entrance of Lancaster Sound, which

they did not realize was the eventual gateway to the northwest passage.

On the threshold of conquering the elusive passage, England’s interest

in far northern discovery was waning, with the result that the records

of the Bylot and Bafﬁ n discoveries slipped into obscurity and more than

two centuries would pass before their feat would be duplicated.

Similarly, enthusiasm for ﬁ nding a northwest passage via Hudson

Bay diminished considerably when Danish naval captain Jens Munk

lost 61 out of 64 of his men during a horrifying winter at the mouth of

the Churchill River in 1619–20. A ﬁ nal effort was made in 1631, when

rival expeditions led by Luke Foxe and Thomas James set sail from

England two days apart to explore the western shore of Hudson Bay.

Foxe followed a northerly course that led him out of Hudson Bay and

into the channel and basin that bear his name, while James proceeded

in a southerly direction to explore the bay that is named after him. Both

explorers concluded that a western sea route out of Hudson Bay did not

exist and that the climate and terrain of the surrounding area rendered

colonization inconceivable. Thus, exploration of the Hudson Bay area

ceased for the next four decades, while the lure of the northwest pas-

sage faded for the next two centuries.

Indeed, the European rediscovery of North America was a multina-

tional affair motivated by the pursuit of commercial goals, notably a

western sea route to Asia. The failure to achieve this goal or at least to

ﬁ nd the kinds of resources that were valued in western Europe

prompted the Scandinavian countries, Portugal, Spain, France, and

England to despair over the developmental prospects of the vast, mys-

terious, and seemingly inhospitable continent by the end of the 16th

century. With Portugal and Spain fading fast as imperial powers and

preferring to exploit the subtropical regions to the south, the entrepre-

neurs and missionaries of the two emerging rivals for European

supremacy, France and England, would give the northern American

frontier a second look in the 17th and 18th centuries and comprehend

the potential resources that could be exploited—and the souls that

could be converted to Christianity.

ACCIDENTAL REDISCOVERY

The Colonization

of New France (1608–1663)

he development of the northern American frontier in the 17th and

18th centuries was a product of intense imperial rivalry between

two emerging European powers. The rivalry between Protestant, demo-

cratic Britain and Catholic, feudal France occasionally erupted into

international warfare that often spread to the far corners of their expan-

sive empires. Even when the nations were ostensibly at peace, the feroc-

ity of their economic, political, and religious competition inevitably

inﬂ uenced the destiny of the Canadian frontier, which until the mid-

18th century stood at the outer margins of imperial expansion. France

took the initiative in exploiting the resource potential of the northern

American frontier, as its fur traders and missionaries reached Hudson

Bay in the north, the Gulf of Mexico in the south, and the foothills of

the Rocky Mountains in the west. But the perils of ruling over such a

far-ﬂ ung empire while containing domestic political unrest would prove

to be overwhelming in the face of a British adversary, which, standing

on the threshold of industrial power, ultimately placed greater value on

the long-term developmental prospects of North America.

Yet the inspiration for the colonization of the northern half of North

America spoke neither French nor English; indeed, it spoke no human

language. A small fur-bearing animal, the beaver, revived French inter-

est in the region discovered and explored by Cartier almost a half-

century earlier. The quest for new sources of fur lured traders deeper

into the continental interior, sustained friendly and hostile contact with

the Native people, initiated permanent settlement along the shores of

the St. Lawrence River, and prompted the French government to regu-

late trade through monopolies granted to private companies. Paradoxi-

cally, the fur trade would prove to be both a blessing and a curse to

French colonization, for the industry that gave rise to New France was

also chieﬂ y responsible for its slow development, particularly during its

ﬁ rst half-century of existence (Innis 1999).

In Search of a Commercial Outpost

While France was plagued by the anarchy of religious and civil warfare,

the French presence in North America in the half-century after Cartier’s

voyages continued to be maintained by the growing number of ﬁ shing

ﬂ eets that sailed every spring to the Grand Banks off the coast of

Newfoundland, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and to the Bay of Fundy.

As they waited on shore for their ﬁ sh to dry, crew members routinely

came into contact with the local Native population, with whom they

casually traded knives, axes, pots, and other ironware and trinkets in

exchange for furs. The increasing demand of the western European and

Mediterranean markets for cod and the ﬁ erce international competition

in North Atlantic American ﬁ sheries necessitated the establishment of

permanent shore bases. At these ﬁ shing bases, men were left over the

winter to guard the more favored sites and the drying racks in addition

to making preparations for the following season. Initially, French ﬁ sh-

ermen maintained good trade relations with the Native people out of

sheer necessity. However, these trade relations took on added economic

signiﬁ cance as the beaver felt hat became fashionable in late 16th-cen-

tury Europe.

Since the supply of European beaver was by this time extremely lim-

ited, the excellent quality beaver pelts that the ﬁ shing ﬂ eets brought

back to France commanded a high price. With the huge proﬁ ts to be

made in the fur trade, French ships came in larger numbers and soon

pushed farther up the St. Lawrence River, seeking out the Native trad-

ers before other competitors reached them. By the end of the 16th

century, a thriving trade in beaver pelts had developed at Tadoussac,

located at the mouth of the Saguenay River where it ﬂ ows into the

lower St. Lawrence. So intense and potentially ruinous was the compe-

tition for beaver fur in the Gulf of St. Lawrence region that enterprising

merchants appealed to the Crown to grant them trading monopolies. A

royal charter of monopoly granting exclusive rights of trade and control

over a designated region was considered necessary to stabilize prices at

a proﬁ table level in an industry burdened by uncertain supplies and

markets as well as risky and costly transatlantic voyages. For his part,

King Henry IV was quite willing to grant such a privilege in exchange

for a commitment to establish and develop colonies that would reassert

the French claim to sovereignty overseas without signiﬁ cant cost to the

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

royal treasury. This merger of private enterprise and public support

would be the hallmark of French imperialism in North America, and

colonial destinies would inevitably be shaped by the shifting balance of

commitment within this fragile partnership (Eccles 1969).

The early efforts of French monopoly holders to establish colonies as

year-round trading bases in the St. Lawrence and Maritime regions

around the turn of the 17th century proved to be no more successful

than Cartier’s earlier voyages. In 1598 the Marquis de La Roche depos-

ited 40 to 50 convict settlers on Sable Island, 90 miles off the southern

coast of Nova Scotia, but after ﬁ ve years only a dozen survivors returned

to France. Pierre Chauvin de Tonnetuit failed in his attempt to estab-

lish a permanent trading post at Tadoussac as only ﬁ ve of 16 settlers

survived the severe winter of 1600–01. Having obtained the monopoly

over the fur trade of the St. Lawrence Valley, Vice Admiral Aymar de

Chastes commissioned François Gravé Du Pont along with Samuel de

Champlain to explore the region’s commercial and settlement potential

in 1603. Journeying up the St. Lawrence as far as Lachine, west of pres-

ent-day Montreal, they learned much about the inland areas farther

north and west as a result of their contact with the Algonquians, whose

trading network extended well into the lower Great Lakes. Impressed

with the potential of the region and the possibility that the St. Lawrence

River and the Great Lakes could be a water route across the continent

to the Paciﬁ c Ocean, Gravé and Champlain returned to France only to

ﬁ nd that de Chastes had died and that the monopoly was transferred to

Pierre de Gua, sieur de Monts.

De Monts did not share Champlain’s enthusiasm for the St. Law-

rence Valley, which he felt was too distant and inclement for settlement

and too competitive with traders who refused to respect the royal

monopoly. Preferring the more accessible and southerly Atlantic

shores, de Monts enlisted Champlain and Gravé to accompany him on

an expedition that sailed into the Bay of Fundy in 1604 and wintered

on a small island near the mouth of the St. Croix River, now on the

border between New Brunswick and Maine. Not only was the island’s

sandy soil unsuitable for agriculture but a shortage of water and timber

added to the misery of a bitterly cold winter. Nearly half of the expedi-

tion’s 79 men died of scurvy before spring, while the remainder suf-

fered from near-starvation. In 1605 the struggling colony was moved

across the Bay of Fundy to Port Royal on the west coast of Nova Scotia,

which was then known to the French as Acadia. Situated in the fertile

Annapolis Valley, Port Royal became the ﬁ rst European agricultural

settlement on Canadian soil. Life in the colony was enhanced by the

burlesque pageantry and feasting of the Ordre du bons temps (Order of

Good Cheer), the ﬁ rst social club in Canada, along with the ﬁ rst Cana-

dian theatrical production, Théâtre de Neptune, presented by Marc

Lescarbot in 1606. Nevertheless, de Monts remained dissatisﬁ ed with

this colonial venture. The quest for furs and mineral resources in the

region was insufﬁ ciently proﬁ table, and the search for a westward pas-

sage through the continent proved futile. When he received word that

the king had cancelled his monopoly, de Monts abandoned the colony

in 1607 just as the English were establishing their ﬁ rst permanent set-

tlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia.

De Monts succeeded in persuading the king to extend his fur-trading

monopoly for one more year to allow him a ﬁ nal opportunity to recoup

at least part of his investment. Realizing the limitations of Acadia, in

1607 he relinquished Port Royal to his chief associate, Jean de Bien-

court de Poutrincourt, who had no immediate plans to continue the

colony. Port Royal was deserted and Acadia remained undeveloped

except for a few ﬁ shing stations until de Poutrincourt returned three

years later with a group of settlers, including two Jesuit priests who

hoped to start a mission to convert the Micmac. The revived colony

struggled along until 1613 when it was destroyed by a Virginia-based

expedition led by Samuel Argall, who claimed that English sovereignty

extended that far up the Atlantic coast. About 20 French fur traders and

ﬁ sherman stayed on at Port Royal, but after a few years the base fell into

disuse.

Meanwhile, de Monts decided to follow Champlain’s advice by

focusing his attention on the St. Lawrence region. In 1608 Champlain

and Gravé, under the auspices of de Monts’s company, led an expedi-

tion up the St. Lawrence River to establish a commercial colony in the

region the French called Canada. In an attempt to forestall the summer

traders at Tadoussac, Champlain set up his trading post 130 miles far-

ther upstream where the river narrows suddenly before widening out

once more. This site, which Champlain called Quebec (Kebec is the

Algonquian word for “where the river narrows”), would prove to be

one of the best natural military strongholds in North America. Not only

did the river narrow sufﬁ ciently at this point to allow cannons to dis-

pute the passage of enemy ships, but the cliffs of Cape Diamond tower-

ing above the shoreline offered a natural citadel to guard the great water

highway into the interior. Indeed, whoever controlled Quebec would

control access into the interior of the continent. But as past experience

had shown, strategic location was not enough to sustain a colony. The

seeds of French colonialism had been planted before but had persistently

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

failed to take root. What would enable Quebec to achieve the distinc-

tion of being the ﬁ rst permanent settlement in Canada was the vision-

ary leadership of its founder (Trudel 1973).

As autumn approached, Gravé left Quebec with a shipload of furs,

leaving Champlain and 27 men ill-prepared to confront the severe win-

ter. By the following spring only eight of them had survived, with two-

thirds of the deceased falling victim to scurvy and one-third to

dysentery. But unlike the earlier winterers at Quebec and Port Royal,

the stout-hearted Champlain was not discouraged. When Gravé

returned in the spring with supplies and reinforcements, Champlain

renewed his determination to fulﬁ ll his “desire . . . of making new dis-

coveries in New France for the welfare, advantage, and glory of the

French name, as well as of bringing these poor [Native] peoples to the

knowledge of God” (Biggar 1925, II:241).

The Early French Fur Trade and Native Relations

As the founder of New France, Champlain embodied the spirit of 17th-

century French imperialism. He was inspired by a sense of patriotism

that desired to promote the greatness of France and by a religious zeal

to spread the Catholic faith to the “pagan” world. He was also moti-

vated by a passion for adventure, with a special fascination for the

discovery of new lands and the search for the unknown. For all his

devotion to religion and his skills as a navigator and geographer,

Champlain realized that he was ﬁ rst and foremost an agent of a busi-

ness enterprise. Above all, Champlain was keenly aware that the com-

mercial investors on which he depended for his colonial success were

more interested in proﬁ ts and dividends than in empire-building and

the promotion of new settlements.

To keep his colonial dream alive, Champlain had to devote much of

his energy to defending and promoting the monopoly principle that

was so vital to determining the fur trade’s margin of proﬁ t in the face

of opposition or disinterest in France. After the cancellation of de

Monts’s monopoly in 1609, Champlain successfully negotiated with

various noble sponsors who not only inﬂ uenced the king to renew the

monopoly but also recruited ﬁ nancial supporters. Champlain made

frequent trips back to France to plead for more aid and settlers for his

struggling colony of scarcely 20 men. In 1617, for example, he appealed

to the French Chamber of Commerce to undertake a major coloniza-

tion program that would bring 400 families and 300 soldiers to settle in

Quebec. The Chamber of Commerce expressed interest in his request

but thought it more appropriate for the Crown to undertake. With the

threat of religious conﬂ ict with the Huguenots looming, the French

king felt that he could spare neither ﬁ scal nor human resources to

transform a distant trading post into a thriving colony.

Champlain did succeed in persuading retired Parisian pharmacist

Louis Hébert to bring his family to Quebec in 1617 to become the ﬁ rst

permanent settlers dedicated to the cultivation of the land. Hébert’s

wife, Marie Rollet, is believed to be the ﬁ rst European woman to till the

Canadian soil. But the successive fur-trade monopolists who effectively

controlled the destiny of Canada had no interest in encouraging others

to follow the lead of the Héberts. Bringing out settlers was expensive

and would lead to the clearing of the forest in which the beaver lived

and the fur trade thrived. More settlers would also render the monop-

oly more difﬁ cult to enforce since they would inevitably prefer the

quicker proﬁ ts to be realized in the fur trade to the arduous work of

clearing and cultivating the land. This inherent conﬂ ict between the fur

trade and settlement would persistently undermine Quebec’s evolution

from outpost to colony.

When he was not traveling back to France to court potential monop-

olists and investors, Champlain was preoccupied with inland explora-

tion in search of furs and a western route through the continent.

Initially, his main concern was to forestall the competition of the sum-

mer traders at Tadoussac by sending men upriver to meet the Algon-

quian and Huron middlemen coming down with their furs, thereby

ensuring that they went no further east than Quebec. Since the time of

Cartier’s expeditions, the Algon quians, notably the nomadic hunting

Montagnais and Algonquin, had moved from the north to drive the

Iroquois south of the St. Lawrence into the present-day states of New

York and Pennsylvania. The Montagnais maintained their base of

operation in the vicinity of Quebec, while the Algonquins occupied the

Ottawa River region and the Huron were stationed to the south in pres-

ent-day southern Ontario. To establish good trade relations with these

northern and western tribes, Champlain agreed to join them in raids

against their long-standing Iroquois enemies in 1609. The expedition

gave him the opportunity to follow the Richelieu River ﬂ owing south

from the St. Lawrence (just below present-day Montreal) to the lake

that now bears his name. In the ensuing encounter, a few shots from

French muskets quickly scattered the Iroquois war party, which had

never previously seen guns. However, this apparently easy victory had

the unexpected effect of mobilizing a powerful and relentless foe: the

Iroquois would imperil French colonization throughout the century

(Eccles 1969, 1990).

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE