The White and the Gold (68 page)

The Indians were caught between these two forces, particularly the Iroquois, who were the only red race capable of playing an important role in the struggle. The Five Nations distrusted the English but they hated the French. They sided with the Anglo-Saxons and helped them to ultimate victory. Nothing could halt the British, consolidating their gains as they moved forward, taking over and settling the land and building towns before moving the boundaries farther westward, shoving the red men back slowly but inexorably. The imperial dreams of the French, demonstrated in the exploits of La Salle and the Le Moynes and in the persistence of the Jesuit missionaries, make the Canadian story warm and exciting and as colorful as a book of folklore; but dreams dissolve in impact with sounder conceptions. Courage and élan cannot prevail against equal courage backed by logical purpose.

The clash would have come sooner if a curious undercurrent of policy had not held back the colonial governors in New England during the thirty years of the second Stuart period. Charles II had secret commitments with the French which kept the two nations at peace. James II was spending his few troubled years on the throne when Denonville came out to inaugurate a vigorous policy and found Colonel Dongan watching him warily from his post in the fast-growing town of New York. James soon got himself so embroiled with his subjects that his only hope of clinging to power lay in the support of Louis XIV. He kept sending secret instructions to Dongan to maintain the peace. A few more years would see Willian of Orange at Westminster and James living in bitter sanctuary in France. When William involved England in his continental alliance against the Sun King, the dry tinder in America would catch fire instantly. It would continue to blaze furiously for the better part of a century thereafter.

Denonville was a good soldier with thirty years of honorable service to his credit. He was a devout and conscientious man, a believer in blind obedience to the King. Less adroit than the resourceful Dongan, however, and facing a situation which demanded knowledge and facility rather than sterling rigidity, he proceeded to make disastrous errors of judgment.

At first the two governors played a careful game, exchanging letters which ranged in tone from cordiality to bitterness. Dongan, being heir to an Irish earldom, was a gentleman but he does not seem to have been a scholar. On one occasion, in a mood of rare amiability, he wrote to Denonville, “Beleive me it is much joy to have soe good a neighbour of soe excellent temper.” In another official epistle he displayed a facetious turn and answered a charge of his gubernatorial opponent that the English traders were converting the Indians into demons by supplying them with liquor by declaring that “our rum doth as little hurt as your brandy and in the opinion of christians is much more wholesome.”

While thus engaging his rival in a harmless interplay of verbal fencing, and while Barillon, the French Ambassador in London was whispering in the ear of King James that Dongan must be restrained, Denonville was making secret and ambitious plans. He realized that this was the time for the French to make themselves felt. The La Barre fiasco had alienated the western Indians. Although none of them had yet withdrawn from the alliance, they no longer placed any faith in French powers or promises. Denonville wanted to cement the tribes about the Great Lakes to the French cause by building a chain of new forts, stretching from Frontenac to Michilimackinac and ultimately to the mouth of the Mississippi. The most important location was at the waterways connecting Lake Erie with Lake Huron, because the English traders could be blocked off effectually there from the Eldorado of the northern lakes and the great West.

To carry out these broad plans, Denonville needed more soldiers and more money. Louis the Ever Patient (where Canada was concerned) groaned at the need because he was already deeply involved in the continental wars which would continue as long as he lived. He obliged, however, by sending out eight hundred more trained soldiers as well as cash and supplies running close to two hundred thousand livres.

This brought Denonville to the moment of decision. He instructed Du Lhut to establish a fort in the Detroit area and to occupy it with a garrison made up of
coureurs de bois
. Did it matter that the adventurers who took the woods against the orders of the Martinet of
Marly had been fined, imprisoned, sent to the galleys, even hanged, for their disobedience? They were needed now and so they were taken back into official favor. Du Lhut obeyed the instructions by constructing a small but strong fortress at the entrance to Lake Huron. The next step had to do with the far North, where the English were monopolizing the fur trade on Hudson’s Bay. The two nations were at peace, but Denonville was convinced that the precarious position of King James kept him securely under the thumb of the French King. He decided to risk sending a force of French-Canadian militia to the bay to take the English unawares and seize all their forts and posts. The chief enterprise was to be the leading of an army into the Iroquois country to exterminate the Senecas.

Before he could put all of his bold plans into execution, however, the governor committed an error of judgment He proceeded to make a mistake of such gravity that it has remained a blot on his memory and is generally accepted as the prime cause of a catastrophe which involved French Canada soon thereafter.

The French King had intimated during the La Barre incumbency that one way to tame the Iroquois was to capture as many of them as possible and send them to France to work as galley slaves. Louis XIV has left sayings on the pages of history which do not lend luster to his name or redound in any way to his credit as a monarch or a man; but nothing he ever said or did compares for cruelty and stupidity of conception with this particular idea. La Barre was neither astute nor discriminating but he had seen the folly of the King’s suggestion. At any rate, he had done nothing about it.

The galley, propelled by great banks of oars or “sweeps,” had ceased by this time to be a ship of war, but France still kept a few of them in the Mediterranean as a means of punishment for criminals. The
galiot
was a tall vessel with sails as well as banks of thirty-two oars on each side. The slaves were the most unfortunate and the most pitied of men. In earlier ages they had been chained to their benches and kept there until they died. At this stage there was some slight mitigation of their lot. The galleys would go out on cruises and the slaves would pull on the oars, three or more to each, under the lash of supervisors. The supervisors had their own beds built over part of the bench they controlled, and those who sat immediately under were in luck because they escaped the indiscriminating flail of the lash. To be “under the bench,” the poor criminals toadied to their supervisors in every possible way. Between cruises the slaves
would be kept in prisons, so closely packed into dark cells that they would have to sit knee to knee on damp masonry. They had the word “gal” branded on their backs, but it was generally hard to distinguish the letters because of the scars left by the whips of the galley masters.

To condemn Indians to such a fate was particularly cruel. They were accustomed to a life in the open air, and their lungs soon collapsed in the fetid atmosphere of the galleys. Having as well a racial tendency to melancholia, the most powerful of them would pine away and die in such surroundings.

Frontenac, who understood the Indians, would have brushed such instructions aside with no ceremony at all. Denonville, the earnest and obedient servant of the King, decided it was his duty to carry out the orders which had come to him.

His choice of victims was as faulty as his judgment in taking action at all. If the unfortunate braves he sent to the galleys had been prisoners of war there might have been a bare excuse, for there were only differences of degree in the barbarity with which such prisoners were treated. Instead he sent the new intendant Champigny (Meules, the playing-card moneyman, had been recalled by this time) to the north shore of Lake Ontario, where there were two villages of expatriate Iroquois engaged in hunting and fishing. By various wiles these harmless people were coaxed into the waiting maw and, when the catch had been sifted out, fifty-one able-bodied men were left in the net. Until such time as they could be placed on ships and sent off to the
galiots
of Marseilles, the puzzled and frightened natives were tied to stakes and kept in this trussed-up position for many days. Some of them died of exposure.

The unfortunate prisoners were being held in this way at Fort Frontenac when Baron la Hontan arrived to take part in the final phase of Denonville’s plans, the expedition against the Senecas. He reported that it was a favorite occupation of the Christian Indians, allies of the French, to burn the fingers of the men strapped to their stakes with the bowls of their tobacco pipes.

Some of the prisoners were freed later, but a large number were sent to France. It had been in Denonville’s highly unimaginative mind that what he was doing would serve as a lesson and a warning to the Five Nations. When he discovered that his action had created an entirely different reaction, stirring the Iroquois tribes to a furious desire for revenge, he wrote to the colonial minister, begging that the prisoners be sent back.

Many of the prisoners had died in their cruel captivity, but even if it had been possible to send them all back, sound and well, the damage could not be undone. The Iroquois never forgave this exhibition of treachery. With them it was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; and for every one of the harmless fishermen thus sent to a lingering death, many Canadian men and women would die in torment at the stake.

Denonville, earnest though he was by nature and honorable according to his lights, was still not above resorting to subterfuge in the matter of the projected attack on the British at Hudson’s Bay. As the two countries were at peace, he could not proceed against them openly and so he left it to the
Compagnie du Nord
to assume the responsibility. Seeing a chance at last to undo the grievous errors which had driven Radisson and Groseilliers to London and so had led to the English occupation, the enterprising merchants who composed the French company were only too ready to take advantage of the governor’s compliance.

What followed has an importance out of proportion to the significance of the event itself, for this was the introduction to the pages of Canada’s history of one of her truly great sons, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville. He was third in the family in point of years but already he was recognized as outstanding among the many tall, brave sons of that equally brave father, Charles le Moyne. Born in 1661, Pierre was now twenty-five years of age and had spent his life on the wilderness trails and in the maritime service of France. It is unfortunate that so little is known about this remarkable man who was soon to demonstrate his ability to command successfully both on land and sea. To present him as he was in the flesh, to make him come alive by anecdote and story, would be a grateful task for any narrator of those stirring events. This much can be repeated: that his brief career was filled with such amazing exploits that the luster of his name would have shone with the bravest figures of French history had they not been enacted in the obscurity of an overlooked colonial backwater.

It had been decided that the command of the expedition should be in the hands of the Chevalier de Troyes of Montreal, which lent something of official sanction to the effort. The Chevalier de Troyes
was a good soldier but he dropped into the background when from the ranks there emerged the figure of the daring and inspired Iberville.

In all honesty it is impossible to describe this beloved paladin of New France. Over the years stories have grown up about him and bits of description have accumulated which have served as a portrait of the man; but it must be asserted that most of this, if not actually all, has no basis in fact. It has been assumed that he was strongly built, which seems a reasonable conclusion, and also that he wore his hair long as his father had done before him; and this also seems within the range of probabilities because the close cropping of hair had not become general then and a woodsman venturing out into the wilds in a wig would be an absurdity. Perhaps, then, the gallant Iberville had ringlets falling to his shoulders. This is a pleasant assumption; but whether his hair glistened like ripe corn in the sun or inclined instead to the dark coloring more general among men of his race is open territory for personal preferences.

With Iberville were two of his brothers, Jacques de Ste. Hélène, his senior by two years, and Paul de Maricourt, who was two years younger. Ste. Hélène was destined to an early death in the service of his country, and so it is impossible to make any comparisons among these elder brothers. Maricourt seems to have been quite different from the vivid and outstanding Iberville. He was already a rare woodsman, although he had not yet acquired his nickname among the Indians of Little-Bird-Always-in-Motion. One assumes from this picturesque term that Maricourt lacked the stature of his better-known brothers and that he possessed perhaps a delicacy of physique which would set him apart from them.

The expedition left early in the spring of 1686. It had been decided, most wisely, to take the overland route to the bay, that pet project of the unlucky and unstable Radisson. The party proceeded up the Ottawa River, passed Lake Temiscaming and Lake Abitibi, and then proceeded north on the Abitibi River to strike at the nearest of the English posts, Fort Hayes, which lay about equidistant between the two other posts covering the southern portion of James Bay, Fort Rupert on the east and Fort Albany on the west. If they had sailed from Quebec, the arrival of their ship in the northern reaches of the bay would have been detected quickly and all element of surprise would have been lost. As it was, they emerged from the desolation of this unknown muskeg country like the men of Israel
under Joshua surprising the city of Ai from the impassable hills or, to cast on into the future, Wolfe debouching on the Plains of Abraham.