James Ritchie - Pictures of Canadian Life - A Record of Actual Experiences

It was no common faith that led the French monks to seek to make Canada theirs. Their sufferings from cold, from starvation, from the savages, from want of all the comforts of life, seem to have been as much as mortal men could bear. But they made many converts. On one occasion, when the French Chaumont had delivered an address, his Indian auditors declared that if he had spoken all day they should not have had enough of it. ‘The Dutch,’ said they, ‘have neither brains nor tongues; they never tell us about paradise or hell. On the contrary, they lead us into bad ways.’ Nothing could daunt the Jesuits – not the loss of all they had, nor protracted suffering, nor cruel death. ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,’ said one of them; ‘and if we die by the fires of the Iroquois, we shall have won eternal life by snatching souls from the fires of hell.’

Let us listen to Chaumont again, as he stands before his savage hearers – he and his companions having first, with clasped hands, sung the ‘Veni Creator’: ‘It is not trade that brings us here. Do you think that your beaver-skins can pay us for all our toil and dangers? Keep them, if you like; or, if any fall into our hands, we shall use them only for your service. We seek not the things that perish. It is for the faith that we have left our homes, to live in your hovels of bark and eat food which the beasts of our country would scarcely touch. We are the messengers whom God has sent to tell you that His Son became a man for the love of you; that this man, the Son of God, is the Prince and Master of men; that He has prepared in heaven eternal joys for those who obey Him, and kindled the fires of hell for those who will not receive His Word. If you reject it, whoever you are – Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, or Oneida – know that Jesus Christ, who inspires my heart and my voice, will one day plunge you into hell. Be not the authors of your own destruction. Accept the truth; listen to the voice of the Omnipotent!’

Wonderful miracles sustained and renewed this ardent faith. In the autumn of 1657, there was a truce with the Iroquois, under cover of which three or four of them came to the Montreal settlement. Nicholas Godé and Jean Pière were on the roof of their house, laying thatch, when one of his visitors aimed his arquebuse at Saint Pière, and brought him to the ground like a wild turkey from a tree. The assassins, having cut off his head and carried it home to their village, were amazed to hear it speak to them in good Iroquois, scold them for their perfidy, and threaten them with the vengeance of heaven; and we are told they continued to hear its voice of admonition even after scalping it and throwing away the skull.

During a great part of this period, the French population was less than three thousand. How was it they were not destroyed? Mr. Parkman tells us for two reasons. In the first place, the settlements were grouped around three fortified posts – Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal – which, in time of danger, gave an asylum to the fugitive inhabitants; and secondly, their assailants were distracted by other wars. It was their aim to balance the rival settlements of the Hudson and the St. Lawrence. It was well for Canada when France lost hold of her. In 1666, Louis the Great handed her over, bound hand and foot, to a company of merchants – the Company of the West, as it was called. As, according to the edict, the chief object in view was the glory of God, the Company was required to supply its possessions with a sufficient number of priests, and diligently exclude all teachers of false doctrine. It was empowered to build forts and war-ships, cast cannon, wage war, make peace, establish courts, appoint judges, and otherwise to act as sovereign within its own dominions. A monopoly of trade was granted it for forty years, and Canada was the chief sufferer; but at any rate the peopling of Canada was due to the king. Colbert did the work and the king paid for it. Protestants were objected to. Girls, to be wives to the emigrants, were sent out from Dieppe and Rochelle. In time, girls of indifferent virtue, under the care of duennas, emigrated to meet the growing demand for wives. ‘I am told,’ writes La Houtan, ‘that the plumpest were taken first, because it was thought, being less active, they were more likely to keep at home, and that they could resist the winter cold still better.’ Further, such was the paternal care of the king for Canada, that he attempted to found a colonial noblesse, and offered bounties for children. The noblesse were a doubtful boon: industrious peasants were much more to be desired. Leading lazy lives, many of the gentilhommes soon drifted into the direst poverty. The Canadians had one advantage – their morals were well looked after by the priests, who kindly took charge of their education as well. Compared with the New England man, the habitant had very much the advantage. He was a skilful woodsman, able to steer his canoe, a soldier and a hunter. Nevertheless, when Wolfe’s army had scaled the heights of Abraham, and won Canada for the British, it was the beginning of a new life.

‘England,’ writes Mr. Parkman, ‘imposed by the sword on reluctant Canada the boon of rational and ordered liberty. A happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by the British arms.’ But it was not till the American Revolution had broken out, and the royalists left the States to found in Canada a strong colony attached to the British Crown, that Canada may be really said to have been a part and parcel of the Empire, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It was necessary to move many of the French Canadians elsewhere; and those who remained, still for long looked with an unfriendly eye on England and her rule.

One Wednesday at the end of April, last year, St. Pancras Railway Station was the scene of a display not often matched even in these demonstrative days. Mr. J. J. Jones, of the Samaritan Mission, had arranged to take out a party of five hundred emigrants to Canada – the first party of the season. The event seemed to create no little excitement in philanthropic circles. The Lord Mayor had promised to be there, but he was detained in the City, possibly in defence of the ancient Corporation of which he has become the champion; but he sent a cordial letter, as did many other distinguished people, to express sympathy and goodwill.

In the absence of the Lord Mayor, the Earl of Shaftesbury, after the emigrants had been got together in a waiting-room, presided at a farewell meeting, which ought to have sent the emigrants in the best of spirits to the new homes they expect to find on the other side of the Atlantic. They would, said his lordship, still be under the reign of our Queen. They would confer a great blessing on the country whither they were going, and they would show what they could do as good citizens in subduing and replenishing the earth, and in spreading over the world the Anglo-Saxon race. He hoped that the young men present would come back to England for wives, and ended with his best wishes for all in the way of a safe voyage and temporal and spiritual good.

The Earl of Carnarvon, who next spoke, had this advantage over the noble chairman, in that he had made a trip to Canada himself. The emigrants, he said, would encounter difficulties. They were not going to a paradise, but they would find that they had a better chance of getting a living in the New World; especially if they avoided bad company and the crowded towns, and got into the country, and underwent a certain preparatory training. As to Canada, it was a country in which a man would succeed who had health and strength and industry, and a good head and a good heart, and the fear of God to teach him that honesty was the best policy.