Modern historians have pretty well shot down the idea
that Frenchman were the first white men to set foot in America,
and that one of them led the way for Christopher Columbus.
But it could have happened.
According to the discredited story, a French navigator
from Dieppe named Cousin was sailing off the coast of Africa in
1488, four years before Columbus' voyage, and was forced
westward by winds and tides until he reached an unknown shore.
On board the ship was a mutinous seaman named Pinzon who, after
the voyage, was thrown out of the French Navy. Pinzon went
to Spain, met Columbus, told him of the New World, and sailed
with him in 1492.
There
is not much evidence to make historians think the story is true,
but who knows? There are a handful of proven instances of
ships being blown far to the west and unto strange shores.
There is, however, good evidence that the first Europeans to
establish a permanent settlement in North America were
Frenchmen. They were the ancestral Acadians and they came
to the New World as fishermen.
Norman, Breton, and Basque fishermen almost assuredly
began fishing Newfoundland's Grand Banks as early as 1497, the
year John Cabot explored the area. These Grand Banks are
shallow places in the North Atlantic where plant and animal
plankton thrive and feed huge schools of codfish. Cabot
swore that cod were so plentiful that schools of the fish
sometimes blocked the way of his ships. He said there was
no need for a hook, line, or bait. All a fisherman had to
do was to drop a basket over the side of his ship, and pull it
up, filled to the brim with fish.
That
was only a mild exaggeration. The Grand Banks were, indeed,
among the best fishing grounds then known, and Frenchmen were
among the first to exploit them. Reliable records show
that Jean Denys of Honfleur fished the Grand Banks as early as
1504. Other records show that Thomas Aubert of Dieppe was
there two years later. In 1507, a Norman fisherman
returned to Rouen with an extra cargo of seven
sauvages, probable Beothunk
Indians.
We know of an early Breton fishing voyage by the
ship La Jacquette of
Dahouet because of a shipboard brawl. The master,
Guillaume Dobel, alleged that the ship was carrying too much
sail. He called the skipper, a man named Picart, an idiot,
and the quartermaster, named Garrouche, a
veall, the meaning of which is not
precisely clear. But it must have been a serious insult.
Garrouche roared up to the quarterdeck to start a fight but
instead collected a punch in the jaw from Dobel, who then drew a
knife and chased Garrouche overboard. The crew tried to
rescue Garrouche, but he drowned. Dobel made the best
retribution he could to the widow. He married her.
The
early fishermen who visited the Grand Banks made two trips each
year. The first was in late January or early February and,
braving winter winds in the North Atlantic, they returned to
France as soon as their holds were full. They sailed again
in April or May and went home in September.
At first,
these fishermen cleaned the cod aboard ship and stored them
between thick layers of salt. But it was not long before
they found that cod could be sun dried on land, and that cured
cod tasted better and was easier to store. The fishermen
began to go ashore each summer, to build makeshift villages for
themselves and drying stands for their fish. By 1539, the
French, Portuguese, and English had set up such outposts on the
shores of Newfoundland, the Acadian peninsula, Cape Breton
Island, and the St. Lawrence River.
Salt
fish became big business and they were sold wholesale in France
by the thousands. In 1515, Michel Le Bail of Breton sold
more than 17,000 codfish to local merchants in Rouen. By
1529, the Normans were shipping Newfoundland codfish to England.
On just one day in 1542, no fewer than 60 ships sailed from
Rouen alone for the Grand Banks. In 1576, there were 250
French vessels there, and 200 from other nations.
But,
except for the temporary villages, the French made no attempt at
settlement. For one thing, they were being kept busy with
wars on the European continent.
Jacques Cartier, lured by
Indian tales of gold and the hope of finding a Northwest Passage
to the riches of the Orient, made voyages to the Canadian wilds
in 1534 and 1535. He attempted a short-lived settlement,
but a bitter winter and equally bitter Indians ended it quickly.
Jean Francois de la Roque, Sieur de Robeval, tried to revive
that colony but met with even less success. Then France
became involved in another war and the king and his courtiers
forgot about North America for a while.
But
the fishermen didn't forget. They kept coming.
By
the middle 1500s, the fishermen, still drying their cod ashore,
had begun trading with the Indians for a rich harvest of furs.
The furs found a ready market in France, and official interest
in the New World picked up in direct relation to the value of
the fur and fish trade. In 1588, realizing an opportunity
for profit, the French monarchy began to grant fur-trading
monopolies to groups of merchants. As the trade developed,
the idea then struck the crown that these fur traders could also
establish settlements that would better establish French
territorial claims in North America.
With that in mind,
King Henry IV gave Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Monts, a Protestant
merchant of some wealth, a 10 year monopoly on trade "on sea and
land in La Cadie, Canada and other parts of New France between
40° and 46°." His domain ran roughly from Philadelphia to
Newfoundland. His grant required that he establish a
settlement in North America. He set up a private company
that included merchants from several ports in France and began
to gather supplies for the settlement.
On April 7, 1604,
De Monts set off from France with Samuel Champlain and Jean de
Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt, who was a Catholic and one of
the substantial investors in de Monts' settlement. There
were 80 to 120 men with them, depending upon which estimate one
believes. There were enough men to fill two ships.
One ship was commanded by Francois Grave du Pont, the other by
de Monts himself.
It
took two months to cross the Atlantic; then de Monts explored
the coast looking for a place to put his settlement. He
decided finally to establish his colony on minuscule Saint Croix
Island, in Passamaquoddy Bay, an arm of the Bay of Fundy near
the mouth of the river that today divides New Brunswick from
Maine. He selected the island because if offered some
protection from marauders. Apparently, that was its only
redeeming value.
De Monts left Champlain and 78 other men
on the island, then sailed back to France. He promised to
return in the Spring with new supplies.
Historian Francis
Parkman described the first settlement. "The rock fenced
islet was covered with cedars," Parkman wrote, "and when the
tide was out the shoals were dark with the swash of sea
weed....(Here), in their leisure moments, the Frenchmen, we are
told, amused themselves with detaching the limpets from the
stones, as a savory addition to their fare. But there was
little leisure at St. Croix. Soldiers, sailors, and
artisans betook themselves to their task. Before the
winter closed in, the northern end of the island was covered
with buildings, surrounding a square, where a solitary tree had
been left standing. On the right was a spacious home, well
built, and surmounted by one of those enormous roofs
characteristic of the time. This was the lodging of De
Monts. Behind it, and near the water, was a long, covered
gallery, for labor or amusement in foul weather. Champlain
and the Sieur d'Orville...built a house for themselves nearly
opposite that of De Monts; and the remainder of the square was
occupied by storehouses, a magazine, workshops, lodgings for
gentlemen and artisans, and a barracks for the...soldiers, the
whole enclosed with a palisade. Adjacent there was an
attempt at a garden...but nothing would grow in the sandy soil.
There was a cemetery too, and a small, rustic chapel on a
projecting point of rock."
In the summertime, the island
was very pretty and cozy. In winter, it was something
entirely different. Vegetables would not grow in the sandy
soil, even in summer, so the colonists had to plant their garden
and sow their wheat on the mainland. The spring on the
island went dry, so fresh water had to be brought across from
the mainland as well. So also with firewood.
The
first snow fell on October 6. By December 3, ice floes
began to cut off the Frenchmen from the mainland garden,
woodlots, and water. A bitter wind blew constantly from
the northeast, making it impossible to keep warm. Food
froze hard, then rotted. Scurvy began to take its toll.
Thirty five of the 79 men who originally settled on the
island were dead by the time De Monts finally returned the
following June. He decided to move the colony across the
Bay of Fundy to a place he named Port Royal. It would
become one of the first permanent settlements in North America.
All of the buildings of Saint Croix Island were taken down
and hauled, plank by plank, across the Bay of Fundy. The
same materials were used to build a habitation at a place later
named Lower Grenville. This time, the habitation, built in
the form of a hollow square, was better suited to the colonists'
needs. It fronted the Annapolis Basin and its back was
protected from winter winds by a range of 500-foot hills.
The first Acadians had settled in to stay.
As historian
J. A. Doyle put it, "For the first time there was to be seen in
America a colony of Europeans, not a mere band of adventurers or
explorers, but a settled community subsisting by their own
labor." Among those settlers was the first black man known
to have come to New France. His name was Mathieu de Costa
or d'Acosta. He had been to Acadia
in a Portuguese ship and had learned the Micmac language.
A Rouen merchant kidnapped him in Portugal or in the East Indies
and sold or lent him to De Monts as an interpreter.
Of
the colonists, Marc Lescarbot, described their new home like
this: "This port is envisioned with mountains on the North
side; towards the South be small hills, which (with said
mountains) do pour out a thousand brooks, which make the place
pleasanter than any other place in the world; there are very
fair falls of water, fit to make mills of all sorts. At
the East is a river between the said mountains and hills, in the
which ships may sail fifteen leagues and more, and in all this
distance is nothing of (sic) both sides the river but fair
meadows."
Champlain created a little garden near the Port
Royal habitation, complete with a gazebo where he could go to
relax. He recorded in his journal, "We often went there to
pass time; and it seemed to please the little birds of the
neighborhood; for they assembled there in great numbers and made
such a pleasant warbling and twittering, of which I have never
heard the like."
Despite the idyllic setting, De Monts'
company barely turned a profit in the first year. Sale of
the furs that were gathered just covered expenses.
Nonetheless, by the Spring of 1607, it looked like the little
settlement would last. Naomi Griffiths reports, "There is
a tradition that one of the colonists who had arrived the year
before, Louis Hebert, had brought his wife with him, and that
she gave birth that Spring to a daughter, who would thus be the
first Acadian born. In any case, so strong a sense of
optimism pervaded the settlers then that cultivation began
before the ships arrived."
Unfortunately, the ships
brought news of trouble at home. Merchants who did not get
a piece of the North American trade began to grumble to King
Henry. Militant Catholics complained that it was even
worse that the monopoly was given to a Protestant. Their
griping was so incessant that in 1607, the king revoked De Monts'
monopoly. When that happened, De Monts' partners pulled
out of the trading company, leaving him with no way to continue
to support the colony. So, after asking the local Indians
to guard the Acadian settlement, everyone returned to France.
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