Samuel de Champlain - Feature Stories

From The Champlain Portal

On April 7, 1604, fur merchant Pierre du Gua de Monts departed from Le Havre, France for the east coast of the New World. King Henri IV had granted him a trade monopoly with the aboriginals in the region. In exchange, he had to look for minerals, map safe harbours, colonize sixty settlers and convert the native population to Christianity by aiding the work of Catholic missionaries.

With Governor de Monts was an able mapmaker, Samuel de Champlain, who eventually played a far more prominent role than his leader. Champlain's duty was to make a faithful report of “all I saw and discussed” and present it to the King.

Sieur de Monts

Port-Royal, founded 400 years ago, is the first permanent European settlement in North America.

The expedition arrived off the coast of Nova Scotia in mid-May. They put into La Have and St Mary’s bays, and mapped the shore of the Bay of Fundy. Champlain marveled at the bay’s tides, the highest in the world. On June 24 they arrived at the mouth of the Saint John River, where Champlain was the first European to illustrate the “reversing falls.” Further down the coast they sailed into Passamaquoddy Bay, where de Monts decided to build a settlement on an island he called Sainte-Croix. (Today, the St. Croix River marks the boundary between New Brunswick and Maine.) The site had a decent harbour and could be easily defended in the event of attack, and the company was facing the onset of winter and thus had to make their decision quickly.

Habitation at Ste-Croix

The men started building winter quarters, while Champlain explored down the coast of Maine for a few weeks. By late September the weather had turned bad. The first snows fell on October 6th and the snow was still in high drifts late into April. “The cold was severe,” Champlain wrote in his journal, “and more extreme than in France.”

Despite Champlain's design of the habitation, the colonists faced brutal difficulties. They could not hunt fresh game because of the ice floes in the river, and had to live on salt meat. They failed to cut enough firewood, and all their provisions froze. Their diet was poor and many developed scurvy from a lack of vitamin C from fresh vegetables and fruit. That in turn led to exhaustion, illness and eventually death. Almost half of the colonists did not survive that first winter. Of 79 men, 35 died and 20 more fell seriously ill. In the spring of 1605, a flood almost drowned the island.

Champlain and de Monts decided to sail down the Atlantic coast to look for other potential sites for settlement. They reached as far as Cape Cod, mapping the coast and several suitable harbours. They found several aboriginal settlements of “active people,” who grew corn, beans, pumpkins and squash. After their men fought with the natives on July 23, they returned to St-Croix on August 8.

During their absence, de Monts' agent Pont Gravé had arrived from France with additional men and provisions for the colony. They decided to move across the Bay of Fundy to the Annapolis Basin. The buildings at St. Croix, with the exception of the store-house, were taken down and put on ships.

Port Royal Habitation

On August 18, Champlain and Pont Gravé selected a place for the new settlement on the north side of the basin, directly opposite Goat Island, near the present village of Lower Granville. The site was well protected from Fundy fogs and northwest gales by a high range of hills. There, Champlain wrote, “We began to clear the ground, which was full of trees, and to erect the houses as quickly as possible. Everybody was busy at work.” A “habitation” was completed in short order. It was built in the form of a quadrangle with an open court in the centre, as at St. Croix.

De Monts deemed Port Royal a fairly good spot. The French had learned from their errors of the previous year. The new location was close to a forest that could be used for building supplies and firewood. There were meadows where they planted wheat and vegetables, marshes where they shot game birds, and small river where they built a mill. Champlain himself dug a trout pond, and built a summer house “in order that I might enjoy the fresh air."

Order of Good Cheer

De Monts decided to return to France. Those who stayed behind tried to be self-reliant. That winter, Champlain organized the Order of Good Cheer, a kind of social and gastronomic club to raise the spirits of the men over the long winter months. But scurvy struck again, this time killing 12 men of 45.

In the late Spring of 1607, with no sign of a provision ship, Pont Gravé and Champlain decided to abandon Port-Royal. On July 17 the ships sailed off, leaving two men behind to care for the fort, with a reward of 100 silver coins. Near Sable Island, they luckily spotted the supply ship, Jonas, led by the new governor, Jean de Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt, the writer Marc Lescarbot and farmer/apothecary Louis Hébert. Together they all returned to Port-Royal to prepare for winter.

While Champlain worked on his maps, Poutrincourt set out on an exploration down the coast, reaching the site of Gloucester, Massachusetts, visiting, where he saw crops of grapes, beans and squash. The native Algonkians were not friendly. On October 15, they attacked the expedition at at Port Fortuné, killing four French sailors. When Poutrincourt returned to Port Royal, Champlain concluded that settling the southern coast was an impossible and dangerous task.

Lescarbot's Theatre of Neptune

That autumn, Lescarbot wrote "The Theatre of Neptune in New France," the First European play performed in Canada. The French extablished good relations with the local Mi'kmaq people, and Membertou, their chief. The Mi'kmaq received the Frenchmen with warmth and generosity, believing hospitality was a matter of honour. Everything seemed to be in order until the expedition received news that the French Crown had revoked de Monts' trading monopoly.

Champlain was to move north and west to found the first successful permanent French colony in Canada at Quebec in 1608. But that did not mean that France was abandoning Acadia. The land was simply too strategically and financially important to give up. The French government wanted to retain a presence in the region in order to keep alive its claims to the fur trade and fishery of the area. And Membertou, Chief of the the Mi'kmaq, was able to keep the buildings in good condition until Poutrincourt returned in 1610 to reestablish the colony.

SOURCE: History of Canada Online