The French in the Heart of America by John Finley
page 22 of 380 (05%)
page 22 of 380 (05%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
which Lescarbot, as Neptune, impersonated in the pageant of welcome, and
the English ships received back those who had not been gathered into the cemetery on land; and the first agricultural colony in the northern wilds lapsed for a time at least into a fur traders' station or a place of call for fishermen. It was only by locating these points on Champlain's map of Port Royal that I was able to find in 1911 the site of the ancient fort, garden, fish- pond, and cemetery. The men unloading a schooner a few rods away seemed not to know of Lescarbot or Poutrincourt or even Champlain, but that was perhaps because they were not accustomed to my tongue. The unquiet Champlain left Acadia in the summer of 1607, the charter having been withdrawn by the king. In the winter of 1607-8 he walked the streets of Paris as in a dream, we are told, longing for the northern wilderness, where he had left his heart four years before. In the spring of 1608 the white whales are floundering around his lonely ship in the river of his dreams. At the foot of the gray rock of Quebec he makes the beginning of a fort, whence he plans to go forth to trace the rivers to their sources, discover, perchance, a northern route to the Indies, and make a path for the priests to the countless savages "in bondage of Satan." Parkman speaks of him as the "Aeneas of a destined people," and he is generally called the "father of Canada." But I think of him rather as a Prometheus who, after his years of bravest defiance of elements and Indians, is to have his heart plucked out day by day, chained to that same gray rock--only that death instead of Herculean succor came. There is space for only the briefest recital of the exploits and endurances of the stout heart and hardy frame of the man of whom any people of any time might well be proud. The founding of Quebec, the |
|