River City (3 page)
Masts creaked, sails flogged as the wind shifted, waves gently lapped at the prow. Overhead, geese by the tens of thousands flew in V-formations from one horizon to the next, wave upon wave across the sky, their bellies lit bright orange by the setting sun, their manic honking incessant.
South with Verrazano, Cartier had already proven his mettle, and this was his second exploration with his own command to the north latitudes, to most minds an act of foolhardiness. Both stubborn and astute, he believed that the challenges that faced him here and beyond this island would be greatly superseded by the riches they sheltered.
The trick would be to survive.
Jacques Cartier readily followed his instincts, but he was no fool. A year earlier, he had sailed the coast of an impressive island on a broad, magnificent sea bound by imposing coastlines and an abundance of birdlife and fish. Combining his wits and experience with stories gleaned from Indians, he’d deduced that the current indicated a great river flowing to the sea. Winter stood guard against him, and with the season the wild, frigid winds of the north Atlantic. Having returned to France without exploring what lay ahead, he had spoken of his belief with sufficient zeal—and produced two Indians to corroborate his opinions—that his second voyage was financed and its scale increased. His calculation proved shrewd, for on this next journey he sailed into the inland waterway, which he declined to name. (An anomaly of which his crew took notice. Cartier named an insignificant bay for St. Lawrence, anchoring there on that saint’s day, but the mightiest river known to him, the only river upon which he’d sailed a vessel intended for the sea, went unnamed. Most of his men, but not all those aboard, remained puzzled by this.) After a brief sojourn at the native village of Stadacona, he left two ships there and approached, more than a hundred nautical miles south, the place the Iroquois called Hochelaga. In the shank of the evening, with a distant silhouette of the mountain behind which the sun had set, the
Émérillon
dropped anchor to weigh the adventures of morning.
Ducks descended from the sky like a darkening rain and fell upon the broad bays and out from the river’s shore.
Cartier stood upon the deck while his men struck sail. In the distance, elevated on a squat mountain, he observed tiny specks. Fires within the Iroquois fortifications. Evidence of habitation in this vast domain bewildered and excited him, and he listened to the robust silence of a continent awakening to his presence.
“Jacques.” Only the king’s man presumed to speak to him without proper formality.
“Gastineau,” acknowledged the captain. Neither did he return the appropriate recognition, failing to use the king’s man’s Christian name or to address him as
monsieur.
If the courtier considered him a boor for being a mariner, he would allow the opinion to stand, and behave, whenever he felt the need, boorishly.
The two men stood side by side in the vast twilight while seamen worked aloft and along the deck. They were not the sole inhabitants of their planet, but in this realm it was easy to imagine that they persevered among the scant few.
“Come sunrise, Jacques, what are your expectations? What do you hope to find here? In this … Hochelaga. The way you speak the name … the reverence in your voice. This place is important to you.”
Cartier considered a response. How could he explain the magic in the word? Or dare reveal that Indian stories describing the Land of the Saguenay, its access beyond this river island, had seduced him? He had paused in Stadacona only a few days—compelled by the weather, but more importantly by a sense of destiny, a compulsion to prove the island and speak to the Indians there, hear from their lips tales of the marvels over which their island stood guard.
From the outset, Gastineau had been skeptical of the voyage, reticent to accept the potential of a land beyond the sea. Sailors were impudent liars by nature, clever with a tall tale or an outlandish claim of riches calculated to inspire a king’s investment. The most resilient among them if confronted by a disappointment, Cartier was also the most persistent, both as an explorer and as a spokesman for his cause. Not a trustworthy combination in Gastineau’s mind, an opinion shaken in recent days as a land of astounding scale had arisen before his eyes. The broad hills, the majestic waterway—in all of Europe no river of similar breadth existed. He had already participated in perplexing adventures and conceded that Cartier had never overstated his impressions gleaned from previous voyages. If anything, he should be judged deficient at invoking the continent’s majesty and wonders. Upon reflection, Gastineau had come to believe that he now knew why—for no speech could summon this
dominion to life. What words could recreate its wild enchantment, pay homage to its particular glory?
Such wonders. Seals by the hundreds of thousands barked at their passage. Whales cavorted in a river far inland from the sea. Seabirds by the millions, their cries louder than the roar of armies. Fish in such thick abundance, at times they reversed a ship’s progress.
The shape of the world was being forever transformed.
And what of those they called
sauvages?
Severe in their smoky tepees, asquat in animal skins, gazing coldly upon him, they stank. Such a foul odour that his eyes watered and he veered towards faint. He had no standing in their midst—he could not announce the king’s name to assure his passage—yet he had been obliged to sit among them, mindful of protocol. On this side of the sea, his very life, he had come to understand, had to be entrusted to the care and acumen of Cartier.
“Last summer,” spoke the captain of the
Émérillon,
and he possessed a slow manner of speech, each word carefully considered, which indicated to Gastineau that he had either to be plotting something or maintaining a rigorous mental diary of his lies, “at the approach of autumn, I stood on an island out to sea. I felt the flow of water between my fingers, observed its ripple despite the tide. This confirmed stories told by Indians of a great river. Now we have sailed its upper portion. My friend, the river will continue for miles without end, through what riches? Ask yourself, how vast a land must exist to provide for such a river? The tributaries, the lakes? Together, all the lakes and streams of Europe are no more than puddles and creeks compared to this river! No man has seen its end, the Indians say. So, we are not passing through a narrow barrier to the Orient, the one Verrazano envisioned. He was searching for what he saw in his mind, failing to comprehend what his eyes could plainly see. What lies beyond us is what the Iroquois say: a land without measure. A land, as you may advise our king, rich in diamonds, abundant in gold.”
The king’s man nodded and continued to watch down the river for the occasional infinitesimal flicker of fire. With the fall of darkness, he could feel the continent rising in his mind, as though to mirror the immensity of the starry space above them, equally as mysterious and unknown. He felt that he
now understood why the captain had named his ship after Merlin, a sorcerer. Yet he was a practical man, and checked himself before he was fully undermined by the poetry of this boundless space. “My dear Jacques, my mind has been opened to the girth of the land, yes. But God has not entrusted my eyes with evidence of treasure.”
“All that the natives have told me has been proven true. Why not this?”
The king’s man no longer challenged Cartier’s logic with any special vigour. During the voyage, he had lost every argument he had pressed and the exercise now lacked merit. If Cartier was leading him, and their king, to gold and diamonds, he no longer wished to be dissuaded of the possibility. Indeed, with the proper inflections, an adroit word, he could recast himself as the true proponent of the enterprise.
Gastineau had guessed Cartier’s motive in not naming the river. The mariner had to be hoping that a clever cartographer, or the king himself, would name the river after him.
Fleuve Jacques-Cartier.
The king’s man would have none of that. He had gazed upon the map the captain was creating and noticed a small bay that now bore the name St. Lawrence. As soon as they were back in France, he would speak to the cartographers, and, through whatever means necessary, impress upon them that St. Lawrence was the name intended and best suited for this river without end. He wished the mariner no ill, but what extant mortal deserved a river of such immensity named in his honour? Certainly not a ship’s captain. If he personally accomplished nothing else on this voyage, Gastineau would sink that ambition to the bottom of the sea.
The travellers gazed upriver into the darkness there.
Unbeknownst to either man, at the smoky village beyond their vision, an Iroquois hunter had arrived on the shore by canoe. He told of a strange canoe the size of a hill seen afloat on the water days earlier, heading upstream. News of similar sightings had previously reached the ears of these men and women. White-skinned men, bearded men, men without women, sea creatures whose wretched seal-stink and sordid wolf-breath had been much discussed among the coastal tribes, men who lived in canoes as tall as trees and travelled from a world beyond the waters, beyond this land in another land, or so they claimed,
had found the path down the great river inland from the sea, into the depths of their forests by giant canoe.
This, then, would be their time to meet.
These were Mohawks, one of the six nations of the Iroquois people. They kept watch that night, and awaited morning and the days ahead, their vigil a lengthy one …
… in the year 1535.
S
URGING EAST ALONG STE. CATHERINE STREET, A MOB SWELLED.
Thousands spilled from the Forum, where a game between
les Canadiens
and the Detroit Red Wings had been curtailed, initially by tomatoes thrown at Clarence Campbell, the National Hockey League’s president. Then stink bombs erupted on the ice. The stench and smoke ignited panic among a portion of the spectators while seeding rage in others. The most angry swarmed Montreal’s focal artery, smashing windows, looting shops and vandalizing buses. Hordes exercised their collective muscle by rocking police cruisers until they managed to roll a few upside down, then the mob burned the cars and cheered the flames.
A former prosecutor at Nuremberg, Campbell had brought down a stunningly stiff verdict. Maurice “Rocket” Richard had been suspended for the remainder of the season for swinging his stick three times across an opponent’s back. He’d also punched an official. The judgment effectively denied Richard the scoring title. More shocking, his suspension included the playoffs. Montrealers feared the edict would cost their team the championship they were favoured to win. Fans were livid. Once the stink bombs were tossed their rage knew no remorse. Rioters toppled phone booths, stomped on mailboxes and slashed tires. Hundreds cheered each petty misdemeanour as they followed the mischief-makers on foot.
Although it possessed no organizational apparatus, and slogans had yet to catch on, the burgeoning crowd seemed to know that it would find more interesting, more critical targets ahead.
A pair of cops patrolling the beat near the Forum were not the first to intervene—others had evicted the crowd from the building and bullied a few individuals outside—but, unaware of what had transpired, they were ill prepared for the impending rampage. Beer-bellied, with a florid complexion, the senior of the two put up a hand to block a group of forty raucous men and youths. He demanded that they get off the street and use the sidewalk. “That’s what it’s there for!” he castigated them, as one might a rascally pack of kids. The men hooted, then charged, and the officer felt both his knees snap before he was trampled underfoot.
His partner, youthful, more limber and less belligerent, escaped the crush by vaulting over the hood of a parked car and dashing across the sidewalk into a doorway, emerging to help his dazed and bloodied mentor back to his feet after the howling band had pressed on. The older man seemed to be under the impression that he still had a function to pursue, raising a hand to block the progress of the next throng, a gang of about six hundred men, reaching also for his missing pistol—confiscated by a rioter and now indiscriminately being fired in the air.
The junior officer guided his confused colleague away.
The first calculated intervention by authorities outside the building resulted in similar dismay. Fifteen officers ran down a side street and cut the mob off as it moved along Ste. Catherine, expecting that the presence of the uniform and the sight of fifteen truncheons would sober the drunks and bring order to the lives of the reckless. The gang failed to be impressed. Having ransacked a corner grocer, depositing the owner and his wife outside the premises while emptying his backroom, they demonstrated their commitment to the furor by hurling full and half-full beer bottles at the cops, and the blue line of fifteen men buckled and ran.
Their flight charged the atmosphere with conviction. To the men running rampant on the street, they now owned the city.
Bad news for Captain Armand Touton of the Night Patrol. After the sun went down, the city’s security rested upon his shoulders, but he had made a reasoned deduction. His detectives were not equipped for this type of operation and could offer no useful support beyond logistics and expertise. He did
not find merit in hand-to-hand combat against the rioters.
“We have a choice,” he maintained to the officer in charge of the patrolmen. Many of his constables had reported in when an appeal went out over the radio. Others had trundled off to bed as soon as news of the riot was broadcast—so great their need for sleep that they disconnected their phones. Still others headed for the nearest neighbourhood tavern in order to miss the call from a station commander to return to work.
“Is that right?” Captain Réal LeClerc, in charge of police operations, asked him. “What choice would that be?”
“We can let the rioters break store windows, or we can let them break the noses of our men. I say we let the mob smash glass.”