After college, I discovered Francis Parkman, the historian. Actually I had heard of him before, but found the first volume of his ambitious account of the struggle between England and France for possession of the North America. It was called Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), and it fired my desire to see old Quebec. Parkman is a wonderful writer and I have injected his descriptions of the St. Lawrence into my pictures of my husband’s and my 25th Wedding Anniversary Trip to Quebec and Maine. This blog may not be about Art precisely, but Parkman’s histories are definitely Literature.

“Here a small stream, the St. Charles, enters the St. Lawrence, and in the angle betwixt them rises the promontory, on two sides a natural fortress. Between the cliffs and the river lay a strand covered with walnuts and other trees. From this strand, by a rough passage…, one might climb the heights to the broken plateau above, now burdened with its ponderous load of churches, convents, dwellings, ramparts and batteries. Thence, by a gradual ascent, the rock sloped upward to its highest summit, Cape Diamond, looking down on the St. Lawrence from a height of three hundred and fifty feet. Here the citadel now stands; then the fierce sun fell on the bald, baking rock, with is crisped mosses and parched lichens. Two centuries and a half have quickened the solitude with swarming life, covered the deep bosom of the river with barge and steamer and gliding sail, and reared cities and villages on the site of forests; but nothing can destroy the surpassing grandeur of the scene.”

City Gate and Fortifications (Grande Allee)

From Pioneers of France:”

“On the strand between the water and the cliffs Champlain’s axemen fell to their work….In a few weeks a pile of wooden buildings rose on the brink of the St. Lawrence, on or near the site of the market-place of the Lower Town of Quebec. The pencil of Champlain, always regardless of proportion and perspective, has preserved its likeness. A strong wooden wall, surmounted by a gallery loopholded for musketry, enclosed three buildings, contained quarters for himself and his men, together with a courtyard, from one side of which rose a tall dove-cot, like a belfry. A moat surrounded the whole, and two or three small cannon were planted on salient platforms towards the river. There was a large storehouse near at hand, and a part of the adjacent ground was laid out as a garden….

“A roving band of Montagnais had built their huts near the buildings, and were busying themselves with their autumn eel-fishery, on which they greatly relied to sustain their miserable lives through the winter. Their slimy harvest being gathered, and duly smoked and dried, they gave it for safe-keeping to Champlain, and set out to hunt beavers. It was deep in the winter before they came back, reclaimed their eels, built their birch cabins again, and disposed themselves for a life of ease, until famine or their enemies should put an end to their enjoyments. These were by no means without alloy. While, gorged with food, they lay dozing on piles of branches in their smoky huts, where, through the crevices of the thin birch-bark, streamed in a cold capable at times of congealing mercury, their slumbers were beset with nightmare visions of Iroquois forays, scalpings, butcherings, and burnings (pretty much the standard fare of Eastern Indian warfare). As dreams were their oracles, the camp was wild with fright. They sent out no scouts and placed no guard; but, with each repetition of these nocturnal terrors, they came flocking in a body to beg admission within the fort. The women and children were allowed to enter the yard and remain during the night, while anxious fathers and jealous husbands shivered in the darkness without.

“On one occasion a group of wretched beings was seen on the farther bank of the St. Lawrence, like wild animals driven by famine to the borders of the settler’s clearing. The river was full of drifting ice, and there was no crossing without the risk of life. The Indians, in their desperation, made the attempt; and midway their canoes were ground to atoms among the tossing masses. Agile as wild-cats, they all leaped upon a huge raft of ice, the squaws carrying their children on their shoulders, a feat at which Champlain marvelled when he saw their starved and emaciated condition. Here they began a wail of despair; when happily the pressure of other masses thrust the sheet of ice agains the northern shore. They landed and soon made their appearance at the fort, worn to skeletons and horrible to look upon. The French gave them food, which they devoured with a frenzied avidity, and unappeased, fell upon a dead dog left on the snow by Champlain for two months as a bait for foxes. They broke this carron into fragments, and thawed and devoured it, to the disgust of the spectators, who tried vainly to prevent them.

“This was but a severe access of the periodical famine which, during winter, was a normal condition of the Algonquin tribes of Acadia and the Lower St. Lawrence, who, unlike the cognate tribes of New England, never tilled the soil, or made any reasonable provision against the time of need.”

It was these Algonquin tribes, his neighbors, whose part Champlain took for his own and fought their battles against the Iroquois, I must say, very effectively but without the cruelties his friends wanted to visit upon their enemies.

“One would gladly know how the founders of Quebec spent the long hurs of their first winter; but on this point the only man among them, perhaps, who could write, has not thought it necessary to enlarge….At the middle of May, only eight men of the twenty-eight were alive, and of these half were suffering from disease.”