LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 019 313 877 9 HoUiiiger pH &5 SIEUR DE MONTS PUBLICATIONS IX The Sieur de Monts National Monument A .V Co m me mora ting Acadia and Early French Inflnences of Race and Settlement in the United States ISSUED BY THE WILD GARDENS OF ACADIA BAR HARBOR, MAINE Collected sei S D. of D. NOV 30 1917 SIEUR DE MQNTS PUBLICATIONS IX The Sieur de Monts National Monument As Commemorating Acadia and Early French Influences of Race and Settlement in the United States George B. Dorr The Sieur de Monts National Monument combines in a remarkable way three separate aspects: It is an ex- traordinary Nature Monument, as such are termed abroad, fitted to exhibit and preserve its regional life in the widest range a single area can, and to set forth its region's geologic history; it is a great Recreation Area, a park in the true popular sense, capable in the highest degree of drawing city-wearied men and sending them away refreshed and stimulated; and it is a Historic Monument of singularly impressive character whose ancient granite heights, sculptured in bold relief by ice and sea, commemorate as they look out across the stormy wilderness of the North Atlantic the men who sailed across that wilderness in early days from ports of west- ern France to settle on the Acadian shores or fish in the Acadian seas. The first commissions that resulted in permanent settle- ment on the American continent to the north- of Florida were issued by Henry of Navarre, Henry IV of France, in December, 1603, to Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts and Governor of Pons, a Huguenot of noble family who had served the King faithfully through the recent wars and stood high in his esteem. De Monts, then not over thirty years of age and in his prime, was a native of Saintonge, a district facing on the Bay of Biscay between La Vendee and Bordeaux, 3 which was the home of Champlain also who accompanied him to the Acadian shores. Born of one of the most ancient families of France, that had served the Crown for centuries iwith credit and distinction, all accounts agree in praise of him as a brave and gallant gentleman. Chami)lain who later wrote the history of the enterprise speaks of him ever in terms of warm regard, and states that the King had "great confidence in him for his fidelity, as he ever showed, even to his death — ," while the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier de Charlevoix, writing over a century later, described him, though a Huguenot, as "a most honorable man of upright views and zealous for the State, who had every quality necessary for success in the enterprise committed to his charge." Court in- trigues and powerful trading influences seeking to control the valuable fur-trade rights which had been granted him and his associates to meet the expense of new colonial establishments on a yet savage coast, forested to the water's edge, wrested at length his charter from him, to be restored again, then lost again, till the assassination of Henry IV, by a fanatic, on the 14th of May, 1610, in- volved in a common ruin de Monts and the best interests of France. The Jesuits took up in turn the work de Monts had left, establishing a colony in 1613 at Mount Desert, the first land touched on by Champlain within the limits of the United States, when, in September, 1604, he sailed out from its future boundary at the mouth of the St. Croix, where de Monts was establishing his first colony, to explore the neighboring coast. For a century after, till the peace of Utrecht, France continued to hold the land it called Acadia, a name which included until then the magnifi- cently harbored coast of eastern Maine as well as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Had France, moved by the spirit of Henry IV and de Monts, made some present sacrifice to consolidate what their and other early enterprise had won instead of plung- 4 tf ing again upon the death of Henry into factional politics and religious strife, she probably and not Anglo-Saxon nations would have controlled the larger destinies and develoi3ment of this continent. It was a time of new beginnings when mighty rivers of future history were gathering their first waters and es- tablishing their yet doubtful course. France, through the enterprise and adventurous spirit of the early mariners and nobles on her western coasts, fronting the Atlantic, won the first advantage in the occupation of the new continent discovered on its opposite shores ; she lost her opportunity through the triumph of reactionary j)oli- tics and selfish privilege which culminated in the French E evolution's fearful travail after thwarting for genera- tions the best energies of the nation and destroying largely or sending into exile her best blood. The French Dominion Francis Parkman The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us ; an untamed continent ; vast wastes of forest verdure ; mountains silent in primeval sleep ; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France con- quered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath^ of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway,* and stood serene be- fore the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, 6 Leirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here with their Lnntless l,ardihoocl, pnt to shame the boldest sons "^Itt'a u.en,orable but half-forgotten chapter in tl,e book of hnman life that can be rightly read only by widely scattered lights. ^Y. F. Ganong striking description of the landing of de Mf''""^ Ckamplain to lay the first foundations of ^<=-fp^^ from address delivered at the Ter-Centennud Celebra- tiou held at tit. Croix Island on June 25th, 1904, m ,rhich France, England and the United States tvere all ofjicially represented. Three centnries ago today all the northern part of America was one vast wilderness and all >ts mighty fweep of forest and plain a solitude, save only where the mtle groups of Indian lodges clung to the shores of its '"i^'lie'ear 1604 over a century had already elapsed since Columbus had found the New World, ancl since C ot ii^d explored its -''''-f "^ ^^^ ^"jj/t^er and marked it for the empire of the Anglo-Saxon. Over '^ Quarters of a century had passed since Verrazano ad explored the same coast for France; and nearly as loit s nee earlier had carried the fieur-de-^'s up the l"t Tawrence laying the foundation for the French do- nintr 11 America! Both nations had thus . acquired Xi to this continent, but neither had obtained any too old ^ipon it. Both, indeed, had attempted settle- ment Wie English ill Newfoundland and Virginia, and fte French al Quebec and Tadonssac; but both had fa led Upon the whole continent only the Spaniard had deeded! for he had planted a small - «™en in Florida and others around the Gulf of Mexico, where, and everywhere to the northward, there was only wilderness. Such was the state of North America, when, on a fair midsummer day, just three centuries ago, a tiny vessel came sailing along the lonely Fundy coast from the east- ward and turned her prow to the river on whose historic banks we are now standing. She was a tiny craft that thus appeared out of the unknown, for she was no larger than the fishing sloops we know so well in our Quoddy waters today. She carried about a dozen men, of whom two bore the unmistakable stamp of leadership. One was a prominent gentleman of France, lofty in spirit, devoted in purpose, trusted of his King, the com- mander of the company, Sieur de Monts. The other was one of the great men whom France has given to the world, a remarkable combination of dreamer and man of swift and wise action. The intentness of his gaze as one new feature after another unfolds itself along the coast, and his constant use of compass and pencil, shows him to be the geographer and chronicler of the expedition. He was the first cartographer and historian of Acadia, Samuel de Champlain. But the little vessel is coming nearer; she reaches our beautiful Passamaquoddy islands ; she winds her cautious and curious way among them; she crosses the spacious bay ; she enters our noble river ; she sails up the hill-bordered valley; she reaches the island where today we placed our memorial, then unbroken forest; her sails are furled ; the leaders step ashore and, with the air of men who have ended a weary search, declare that it is good and that here they will plant the capital of the New World. Whence came this little vessel! What carried she that we should here assemble three centuries later, to cele- brate her coming? She was the herald of the permanent occupation of the northern part of America by Europeans. From the 8 day the keel of her small boat grated on the beach of St. Croix Island, this continent has never been without a popnlation of those races which have made the history of the principal part of America, — the French and the English. We celebrate today not only an event of great human interest, but one of the momentous circumstances of history, the actual first step of North America from barbarism over the threshold of civilization, and the first stage in the expansion of two of the most virile races of Europe into the wonderful New World. Note by Editor. — De Monfs had left his well- equipped and furnished larger vessel in- safe moorings at St. Mary's Bag, upoti the Nova Scotia coast — opposite Mount Desert Island, at the eastern entrance to the Bay of Fundy — irhile he and Champlain searched out, in the little barque of a few tons described, a site upon the unknown shore beyond for their first colony. Acadia at the End of the Seventeenth Century Francis Parkman Amid domestic strife, the war of France with Eng- land and the Iroquois went on. Each division of the war was distinct from the rest, and each had a character of its own. As the contest for the West was wholly with New York and her Iroquois allies, so the contest for Acadia was wholly with the "Bostonnais," or people of New England. Acadia, as the French at this time understood the name, included Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the greater part of Maine. The river Kennebec, which they looked on as the true dividing line between their posses- sions and New England, they regarded with the most watchful jealousy. Its headwaters approached those of the Canadian river Chaudiere, the mouth of which is near Quebec ; and by ascending the former stream and 9 crossing- to tlie headwaters of the latter through an intricacy of forests, hills, ponds and marshes, it was possible for a small band of hardy men to reach the Canadian capital — as was done long after by the fol- lowers of Benedict Arnold. Hence, it was thought a matter of the last importance to control the river. Since the wars of D'Aunay and La Tour, this wilder- ness had been a scene of unceasing strife; for the Eng- lish drew their eastern boundary at the St. Croix, and the claims of the rival nationalities overlapped each other. Along the lonely coasts one might have sailed for days and seen no human form. At Canseau, at the east- ern end of Nova Scotia, there was a fishing-station and a fort; Chibuctou, now Halifax, was a solitude; at La Heve there were a few fishermen; and thence, as you doubled the rocks of Cape Sable, the ancient haunt of La Tour, you would have seen four French settlers and an unlimited number of seals and sea-fowl. Eanging the shore by St. Mary's Bay and entering the Strait of Annapolis Basin, you would have found the fort and settlement of Port Eoyal, the chief place of all Acadia. It stood at the head of the basin, where de Monts had planted his settlement eighty or one hundred years be- fore. At the head of the Bay of Fundy were two other settlements, Beaubassin — the Beautiful Basin — and Les Mines — the Place of Mines, comparatively stable and populous. At the mouth of the St. John were the aban- doned ruins of La Tour's old fort; while at some dis- tance up the river stood the small wooden fort of Jem- sec, with a few intervening clearings. Still sailing west- ward, passing Mount Desert — another scene of ancient settlement — and entering Penobscot Bay, you would have found the Baron de Saint-Castin, with his Indian house- hold, at Pentegoet, where the town of Castine now stands. All Acadia was comprised in these various stations, more or less permanent, together with one or two small posts 10 on the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the hnts of an errant population of fishermen and fur-traders. Rude as it then was, Acadia had charms — and has them still — in its wilderness of woods and its wilderness of waves; the rocky ramparts that guard its coasts; its deep, still baj-s and foaming headlands; the towering cliffs of Grand Menan; the innumerable islands that clus- ter about Penobscot Bay; and the romantic highlands of Mount Desert, down whose gorges the sea-fog rolls like an invading host while the spires of firs and spruces pierce the surging vapors like lances in the smoke of battle. Leaving Pentegoet and sailing westward all day along a solitude of woods, one might reach the English outpost of Pemaquid, and thence, still sailing on, might anchor at evening off Casco Bay, and see in the glowing west the distant peaks of the White Mountains. Inland, Acadia was all forest, as vast tracts of it are primeval forest still. Here roamed the Abenakis with their kindred tribes, a race wild as their haunts. Their villages were on the waters of the Androscoggin, the Saco, the KennebeC', the Penobscot, the St, Croix, and the St. John; here in spring they planted their corn, beans, and pumpkins, and then, leaving them to grow, went down to the sea in their birch-canoes. They re- turned towards the end of summer, gathered their har- vest, and went again to the sea, where they lived in abundance on ducks, geese, and other water-fowl. During the winter, most of the women, children, and old men remained in the villages; while the hunters ranged the forest in chase of moose, deer, caribou, beavers, and bears. Their summer stay at the seashore was perhaps the most pleasant, and certainly the most picturesque, part of their lives. Bivouacked by one of the innumerable coves and inlets that indent these coasts, they passed their days in that alternation of indolence and action which is a second nature to the Indian. Here in wet 11 weather, while the torpid water was dimpled with rain- drops and the upturned canoes lay idle on the pebbles, the listless warrior smoked his pipe under his roof of bark; or launched his slender craft at the dawn of the July day, when shores and islands were painted in shadow against the rosy east, and forests, dusky and cool, lay waiting for the sunrise. The women gathered raspberries or whortleberries in the open places of the woods, or clams and oysters in the sands and shallows, adding their shells to the shell-heaps that have accumu- lated for ages along these shores. The men fished, speared porpoises, or shot seals. A priest was often in the camp watching over his flock, and saying mass every day in his chapel of bark. There was no lack of altar candles, made by mixing tallow with the wax of the bayberry, which abounded among the rocky hills and was gathered in profusion by the squaws and children. Some of the French were as lawless as their Indian friends. Nothing is more strange than the incongruous mixture of the forms of feudalism with the independence of the Acadian woods. The only -settled agricultural population was at Port Royal, Beaubassin, and the Basin of Minas. The rest were fishermen, fur-traders, or rovers of the forest. Repeated orders came from the court to open a communication with Quebec, and even to establish a line of military posts through the inter- vening wilderness ; but the distance and the natural diffi- culties of the country proved insurmountable obstacles. If communication with Quebec was difficult, that with Boston was easy; and thus Acadia became largely de- pendent on its New England neighbors, who, says an Acadian officer, "are mostly fugitives from England, guilty of the death of their late King, and accused of conspiracy against their present sovereign; others of them are pirates ; and they are all united in a sort of inde- pendent republic." Their relations with the Acadians were of a mixed sort. They continually encroached on 12 Acadian fishing-groimds, and we hear at one time of a hundred of their vessels thus engaged. They often landed and traded with the Indians along the^ coast. Meneval, the governor, complained bitterly of their arro- gance. Sometimes, it is said, they pretended to be for- eign pirates, and plundered vessels and settlements, while the aggrieved parties could get no redress at Bos- ton. They also carried on a regular trade at Port Eoyal and Les Mines or Grand Pre, where many of the in- habitants regarded them with a degree of favor which gave great umbrage to the military authorities, who, nevertheless, are themselves accused of seeking their own profit by dealings with the heretics. The settlers caught from the "Bostonnais" what their governor stigmatizes as English and parliamentary ideas, the chief effect of which was to make them restive under his rule. The Church, moreover, was less successful in ex- cluding heresy from Acadia than from Canada. A num- ber of Huguenots established themselves at Port Royal, and formed sympathetic relations with the Boston^ Puri- tans. The bishop at Quebec was much alarmed. ''This is dangerous," he writes; "I pray your Majesty to put an end to these disorders." ''Men know little of the consequences of their actions. It was the Stuart policy of religious intolerance at home and of allowing colonies as safety valves for dissent winch laid the sure foundation of the future United States." —Camhridge Modern History. After the Peace of Utrecht Francis Parkman "Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was strengthening with slow hut steadfast growth. By name, local position and character, one community stands forth as the conspicuous representative of this antagonism- Liberty and Absolutism, New England and New France. 13 After the Peace of Utreclit, in 1713, the contest between France and England in America divided itself into three parts, — the Acadian contest ; the contest for north- ern New England ; the contest for the West. Nothing is more striking- than the contrast in the conduct and methods of the rival claimants to this wild but magnifi- cent domain. Each was strong in its own qualities, and utterly wanting- in the (jualities that marked his opponent. On maps of British America in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, one sees the eastern shore, from Maine to Georgia, garnished with ten or twelve colored l)atches, defined, more or less distinctly, by dividing-lines which in some cases are prolonged westward till they touch the Mississippi, or even cross it and stretch on in- definitely. These patches are the British provinces, and the westward prolongation of their boundary lines rep- resents their several claims to vast interior tracts, founded on ancient grants but not made good by occupa- tion, or vindicated by any exertion of power. These English communities took little thought of the region beyond the AUeghanies. Each lived a life of its own, shut within its own limits, not dreaming- of a future collective greatness to which the possession of the West would be a necessary condition. No conscious community of aims and interests held them together, nor was there any authority capable of uniting their forces and turning them to a common object. Each province remained in jealous isolation, busied with its own work, growing in strength, in the capacity of self-rule and tlie spirit of in- dependence, and stubbornly resisting all exercise of authority from without. If the English-speaking pojui- lation flowed westward, it was in obedience to natural laws, for the King did not aid the movement, the royal governors had no authority to do so, and the colonial as- semblies were too much engrossed with innnediate local interests. The power of these colonies was that of a 14 rising flood slowly invading by the unconscious force of growing volume. In the French colonies all was ditferent. Here the representatives of the Crown were men bred in an atmos- phere of broad ambition and far-reaching enterprise. Achievement was demanded of them. They recognized the greatness of the prize, studied the strong and weak points of their rivals, and with a cautious forecast and a daring energy set themselves to the task of defeating them. If the Englisli colonies were comparatively strong in numbers their numbers could not be brought into action ; while if the French forces were small, they were vigor- ously commanded, and always ready at a word. It was union confronting division, energy confronting apathy, military centralization o]^posed to industrial democracy; and, for a time, the advantage was all on one side. The demands of the French were sufficiently compre- hensive. They regretted their enforced concessions at the Treaty of Utrecht, and, in spite of that compact, main- tained that, with a few local exceptions along the Atlantic Shore, the whole North American continent, except Mexico, was theirs of right ; while their opponents seemed neither to understand the situation, nor to recognize the greatness of the stakes at issue. ''The Articles in the Treatij of Utrecht which dealt ivith cessions mcide by France to Great Britain in the New World are justly regarded as the real beginnings of the expansion of the British Colonial Empire in America — hence, also, of the United States and its democracij. It was a notable event accordingly in the view-point of World History when, by the Treaty's terms, Acadia— save Cape Breton Island— was assigned to England." — Cambridge Modern History. 15 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 019 313 877 9 HolUiiger pH S3