Since his first trip to Canada, Samuel de Champlain had a pretty good idea that if the French were going to plant an enduring settlement, it would be along the St. Lawrence River.

Since the first Frenchmen sailed down its shores, it was apparent that here laid the grand entry into a new world. As Jacques Cartier had written to King François I, “the richness of the great river, which flows through and waters the midst of these lands of yours, is without comparison the largest river that is known to have ever been seen.”1 Most Indigenous groups of the area had long characterized it in similar terms—designating it simply as the “Great River” or “Big Waterway”.2

The river served essential economic purposes as a highway for people and resources, but it also molded the identities of its inhabitants. The St. Lawrence functioned as a fertile ground, vivifying and life-giving. Other times, when winter rolled in, it served as an intermediary chaotic structure, as it froze and cut off those who lived on its shores from contact with the ocean.

There were several practical reasons to favour the St. Lawrence for establishing a colony. The most economically obvious was the proximity to the already well-oiled and functioning fur trade—with Tadoussac, on the north shore of the estuary of the St. Lawrence, being the final stop on major routes.3

Another factor for the French was the aim of beating their European rivals to the punch. The English and Dutch were not slowing down their territorial claims down the northeastern coasts of the continent. Also, if the long sought-after sea route to Asia was still waiting to be found, if would only be discovered through continued exploration into the interior, from established bases inland.

So in 1608, Champlain returned to this grand gateway to Canada, and established a settlement which would persist for the next four hundred years.

Arrival

Sailing up the great river, the explorer assessed his surroundings. At the Île d’Orléans, about five kilometres east of present-day downtown Quebec City, he remarked, “all this coast, both on the north and south sides, from Tadoussac to the island of Orleans, is hilly country, and very poor, with nothing but pine, spruce and birch, and very ugly rock.”4

Continuing on, “from the island of Orleans to Quebec is one league, and I arrived there on July the third. On arrival I looked for a place suitable for our settlement, but I could not find any more suitable or better situated than the point of Quebec, so called by the natives, which was covered with nut-trees.”5

Champlain quickly put his men to work in this area, constructing what he began referring to as the Abitation de Québecq. For many years, the initial structures would function as little more than a fortified post along the fur trading route.

Three buildings were constructed on the banks of the river, all connected by a second-floor gallery, with a moat and drawbridge, and palisade around the exterior. It was a little less friendly to the outside world than the arrangement in Acadia, which invited in their Indigenous upper-class neighbors over to eat and drink. As one historian remarked, “here at Quebec in 1608 was a reproduction in miniature of a European fortress.”6

Unfortunately, the first few Canadian winters brought much suffering for the ordinary workmen who built Quebec. Out of the original 28 men who arrived in September 1608, no more than eight remained by May 1609.7 Scurvy, the familiar, terrible disease, struck again. That same winter was devastating for the Indigenous people of the area as well.

On one occasion, Champlain recalled a group of them appearing out of the trees, risking death crossing an icy river to reach the French settlement, “so thin and emaciated that they looked like skeletons”. The French gave them provisions of bread and beans, and in their hunger these poor souls also resorted to eating half-cooked fox and dog carcasses which the French used to attract game outside of the habitation.8

Vivid examples like these exposed the early French colonists to the immediacy of danger in Canada. Beauty and awe was often correlated with cold and death. And sometimes the clothing that you used in Canada to extend yourself into this majestic, scary world simply wasn’t enough to survive.

Along the St. Lawrence, the French confronted a land filled with potential and quantity. And as we’ve seen, their attempts to colonization were slow to develop compared to other European efforts in the Americas. They had to carefully implement systems of order if they hoped to have success.

To bring stability to new settlements along the St. Lawrence, the colony would be filled with localized, miniature markers and signs of its mother country. A heightened adherence to social norms and customs would also be required. Time would tell if this approach could plant the seeds of a new society.

Trouble in Paradise

Some of the first colonists in Quebec quickly decided that they were not terribly interested in seeing through a plan measured by centuries. Instead, they decided to try and make a quick buck. And just as quickly as Quebec was founded, some of Champlain’s own men turned on him.

A small group had conspired to cash in on a deal struck with Basque fur traders based down the river at the Tadoussac trading post. The mutineers agreed to take out Champlain and deliver control of the Quebec habitation to these traders for a cash reward.

Luckily, one of the would-be conspirators of the plot came forward and confessed before the plan could be carried out. Champlain granted a pardon to the man who confessed, and had the rest of the group arrested.

Champlain administered a sentence of death upon the ringleader, a locksmith named Jean Duval; and his three accomplices. Duval had been in Champlain’s crew since their stay at Port-Royal in Acadia. Duval was nearly killed by an arrow through his chest during one of Champlain’s explorations in the Cape Cod area years prior. Marc Lescarbot, the first-hand historian of New France, later remarked of Duval’s fate, “better would it have been for him to die [back then]”.9

Champlain recalls the events of this attempted mutiny very matter-of-factly, and does not waver in instilling order. He succinctly explains his reasoning behind the verdict:

We decided that it would be sufficient to put to death Duval as the first mover in the conspiracy, and also to serve as an example to those who remained, to behave properly in future in doing their duty, and in order that the Spaniards and Basques who were numerous in the region might not rejoice over the affair… Duval was hanged and strangled at Quebec, and his head placed on the end of a pike and set up in the highest spot in our fort, and the other three were sent back to France.10

Canada seemed to have an effect of pushing people to their limits, and making them do things that could be extraordinarily brave and daring, as well as reckless and foolish.

But Champlain was finding a middle ground in this new world, somewhere between an unabashed and open embrace of the environment, which came naturally as an explorer, and a cool ability to instill discipline and order in a chaotic space, which he learned as a soldier. New France needed more of the latter.

The stakes were getting higher. Champlain had been lucky and used his skills well so far, but who know how many more chances he would get. It was clear that in Quebec, there would initially be much less of the merry atmosphere surrounding the Order of Good Cheer in Acadia.

In these early years, in addition to occasionally mutinous locksmiths like Duval, the habitation relied heavily on various tradesmen, such as plank sawyers, carpenters, masons, stonecutters, sailors, surgeons, gardeners, farmers, and lumberjacks.11

Champlain: Soldier & Diplomat

As the small settlement of Quebec slowly grew, Champlain went to work to fulfill the promise made back in France to aid their new Indigenous allies in war. Along with only a few other Frenchmen, Champlain accompanied hundreds of Huron (Wendat), Montagnais, and Algonquin warriors, into enemy territory against their Iroquois (Mohawk) rivals.

After finding success using Indigenous birchbark canoes, it was Champlain’s turn to return the favour and engage in technological exchange. He came armed with an early form of musket called an arquebus. When compared to skilled archers, the typical arquebusier in France was a clunky soldier—very slow to reload, and not terribly accurate or effective at long range.12 But, the weapon and man who fired it could be effective in battle against those who were unacquainted with the technology.

In 1609, Champlain became perhaps the first European to join a battle between two North American Indigenous armies.13

David Hackett Fischer paints a picture of the psychological impact of Champlain’s technological clothing as the battle began:

Champlain’s burnished steel cuirass and helmet glittered in the golden light of the morning sun. The Mohawk stopped in amazement and studied this astonishing figure who had suddenly appeared before them, as if he had risen out of the ground… There was a mighty crash and cloud of white smoke. Two Mohawk chiefs fell dead, and another warrior was mortally wounded—three men brought down by one shot. Champlain’s Indian allies raised a great shout, so loud that “one could not have heard the thunder”.14

The outcome of this particular battle scored a key strategic victory. But far more importantly, Champlain’s foreign technology also uprooted war as the Indigenous knew it. Fischer notes that it was a “pivotal event in the history of Indian warfare… [they had] fought in close formation. In the face of a new reality, the Indians learned quickly, and changed to what would later be called a “skulking way of war.”15

Champlain had also fired the first shot in a series conflicts between the French and the Iroquois, which would last into the next century.

At the time, it seemed like everything was coming together for Champlain. His experience as a soldier gave a coolness and proficiency to establish himself as a competent leader, administering justice and leading in battle.

He avoided the mistakes of his predecessors and established strong alliances with the Indigenous of the area. And his philosophy based on toleration and cultural exchange was bearing fruit. Best of all, he was free again to continue what he loved most—exploring the beauty of God’s creation.

And then, he received the terrible news: the king was dead.

King Henri IV had survived several attempts on his life. Not everyone in France had been as enthusiastic as Champlain in accepting the convert king’s ideals of toleration. And some were still terribly bitter about conclusion to the long and destructive Wars of Religion.

In 1610, as the king’s carriage rolled to a stop amidst heavy Paris traffic, François Ravaillac, a Catholic schoolmaster described by one historian as a “religious fanatic and academic lunatic”16, suddenly climbed into the royal coach and plunged a knife into King Henri’s chest.

In an instant, not only had Champlain lost his king, but someone he genuinely looked up to and respected dearly. It was their shared vision that set Champlain’s course to explore and settle in Canada. And now the entire endeavour was at risk of falling apart.

The heir to the throne, Louis XIII, was only a few months away from celebrating his ninth birthday when his father was killed. The king’s widow, the Italian Marie de’ Medici, was made Queen Regent, until her son came of age.

For the next several years, Champlain would have to periodically make the journey between worlds to return to Paris and ensure that the various schemers at court did not influence the young king or his mother to threaten his vision for New France and Canada.

Fortunately, Champlain developed a knack for navigating in a complex world of politics and court dynamics. In 1613, his negotiations and insistence eventually led to the establishment of the Compagnie du Canada. The entire St. Lawrence was to become the “exclusive reserve”17 of this new organization.

But much to Champlain’s consternation, for the major players in the new company, growing New France with settlers was a secondary concern to maintaining and exploiting their monopoly over the fur trade. The company committed to establishing only six families in the colony over eleven years. As a result, it was not until 1619 that Quebec began to evolve from a simple post by the river and a storehouse for the company, into a full-fledged village.18

To secure continued funding, Champlain established relations with influential groups in the Church, and also, pious and wealthy members of the French aristocracy. With many potential benefactors, there were often struggles for power when dealing with these groups.

The Society of Jesus, the order commonly known as the Jesuits, were often at the centre of many of these disputes. The Jesuits were expelled by King Henri back in 1594, following an assassination attempt on the king by a Jesuit pupil. There was lingering animosity and feelings of disloyalty due to the order’s support of the Catholic League, who opposed the king and his army during the Wars of Religion.19

Throughout the 1600s, the Jesuits established themselves at the forefront of international missionary work throughout Asia and the Americas. And by 1603, the Jesuits were fully reinstated to operate in France, just in time to lend a hand with King Henri’s ideas of expansion and colonization. Henri also made a shrewd political choice by reversing course and promoting the Jesuits, drawing away some of these men who had been the King of Spain’s strongest missionaries.

But it would be Acadia rather than Quebec where evangelization would first take place. At Port-Royal, we see the beginnings of missionary work, in which attempts were made to re-make the church in the new world.

Societies of Jesus

In 1610, Jean de Poutrincourt, lieutenant of Pierre Dugua de Mons, returned to Acadia with a smattering of colonists and renewed funding. Poutrincourt didn’t like the Jesuits very much, finding them untrustworthy due to their Spanish and Popish sympathies. He refused to take any with him despite King Henri’s wishes. Instead, he chose his own priest, Father Fléché.

The French found their settlement at Port-Royal had been well taken care of. In their absence, the fearsome and respected M’ikmaq chief Membertou and his people had maintained the buildings and crops, and were glad to see their French companions again.

Poutrincourt had his priest quickly get to work. Fléché presided over the baptism of Membertou and 20 members of his family, as they became the first of their people to be baptized on their native soil. Between 1610 and 1611, over a hundred Indigenous baptisms were carried out in the area.20

Poutrincourt made sure to popularize these successes back in Paris, to show that that the Jesuits weren’t needed in New France.

But the Jesuits were not easily deterred. They went straight to the Queen Regent and reminded her of the promise her late husband had made, and were soon granted permission to journey tp Acadia.21

Upon arriving at Port-Royal, it quickly became clear to the Jesuit Fathers Pierre Biard and Énemond Massé, that the methods employed by Father Fléché had produced less than stellar converts. The Jesuits reported their initial findings:

[The Indigenous near Port-Royal] accepted baptism as a sort of sacred pledge of friendship and alliance with the French. As regards Christ, the Church, the Faith and the Symbol, the commandments of God, prayer and the Sacraments, they knew almost nothing; nor did they know the sign of the cross or the very name of Christian. So, even now, whenever we ask any one, “Are you a Christian?” every one of them answers that he does not understand what we are asking him. But when we change the form of our question and ask, “Are you baptized?” he assents and declares himself to be already almost a Norman, for they call the French in general Normans.22

The Jesuits urged a different approach. Consisting of careful and sound instruction, and delay of adult baptisms until an understanding of the faith was sufficient. The Jesuits had additonal thoughts of how to better run the colony too. The newly arrived fathers frequently butted heads with the leaders of Port-Royal, including Poutrincourt’s son, Biencourt.23

Port-Royal was becoming a microcosm of the old world, but in all the wrong ways. Ideas of toleration and coexistence had been replaced with same dynamics that all-too-often plagued the royal court in the Louvre. The largely empty shores of eastern North America became another opportunity for bickering between Catholics and Protestants, and clergy and noblemen.

The Acadian story was far from over, but already multiple times the region showed the difficulties of trying to establish “home” in a new place. The often-popular view of colonial enterprises as being a top-down, all-encompassing display of power or exploitation over native inhabitants of far-away lands was often much more complicated.

Throughout New France, it was a continual negotiation for competing groups to establish a microcosm of the world they had known. The explorers, colonists, missionaries, and labourers all had roles to play in the quest to win souls for Christ, expand the influence and power of France, and bring Canada into being.

By 1615, the first missionaries arrived in Quebec. Again they were not Jesuits, but four Récollet priests, part of a reformed branch of the Franciscan order, recruited by Champlain.24

Champlain was determined to not follow the approach of the English or Dutch in settling away from the Indigenous groups of which they came into contact. He wanted to maintain a steady flow of cultural exchange. The Récollet fathers were brought to support both the French settlers as well as their Indigenous counterparts.

Champlain set his men at to work at Quebec, to clear land and build lodging for the fathers, and construct a chapel to celebrate mass.25

Champlain was then accompanied by sixteen Frenchmen—including one of the Récollets, Father Joseph, and some interpreters—on an expedition to Huronia. This was territory of the Huron Confederacy, between lakes Simcoe, Ontario, and Huron. Geographer Conrad Heidenreich explains some of the significance of the area from the French’s perspective:

[The Hurons were] a group of semi-sedentary, agricultural Indians, belonging to the larger family of Iroquoian-speaking peoples. With a population estimated at 21,000, in a territory some 340 square miles, Huronia was perhaps the most densely settled area of aboriginal Canada… the Huron and Algonquin groups controlled the access to the lands north of the Great Lakes, and, in particular, the resources of the Canadian Shield. Realizing this, the French were obliged to commit themselves to the Huron-Algonquian alliance.26

Champlain was fascinated and thrilled to be welcomed into Huron villages with hundreds of dwellings, as he made note of their wooden palisade defences, sometimes up to thirty-five feet high, and the well-tended farmland with large amounts of corn.

The land and people were fertile and agreeable, but maybe too much so for Champlain, as he recalled one sleepless night in a Huron village, “having gone outside the lodge to escape the fleas, which were very numerous and a great pest to us, a shameless girl came boldly up to me, offering to keep me company, which I declined with thanks, sending her away with gentle remonstrances.”27

As part of the negotiations back in Paris to fund his colonial expeditions, Champlain had become married to Hélène Boullé, the daughter of Nicolas Boullé, an influential and powerful secretary in the king’s household.

As married man, Champlain’s focus was not on removing clothing of his own but on bringing the technological and religious clothing of Europe to exchange with the Indigenous.

This was another one of the many ways that Champlain stood out among his peers.

Next, we’ll track Champlain’s travels deeper into the interior, and discover that superior technology was no guarantee of success in war. And see how the first families of New France brought life to the slowly growing settlement of Quebec.

Samuel de Champlain’s first trip to Canada is told in great detail in his first major book, Des Sauvages.

The title is deceptive for a modern reader. The word sauvage does not map onto the present day understanding of “savage”. As historian David Hackett Fischer explains:

In old French and early English, “sauvage” or “savage” was sometimes written salvage, a clue to its original meaning. It derived from the Latin silva, for a forest or woodland. In the seventeenth century, “sauvage” preserved this meaning, and was used to describe wild things that lived in the forest. When Champlain used the term “sauvages”, he meant forest-dwellers… he did not mean an inferior race of people. There was nothing racist in his thinking, nothing invidious about the intellectual capacity of the people it described.1

Similarly, the Algonquin peoples, who met the French as they entered the St. Lawrence Valley, referred to their new European visitors as mistigoches, meaning, “men who travel in wooden vessels” or those who “work in wood”.2

It was simply common to name someone based on how they interacted with their environment. Strangers identified groups based on the clothing each peoples “wore”—AKA the technology and customs they used to extend themselves into the world.

Champlain detailed his initial impressions of these forest-dwelling peoples he encountered, which included Algonquin groups and a people he referred to as the montagnais or “mountain people”—today they’re known as the Innu.

His introduction to Indigenous life came at Tadoussac, a major fur-trading port along the St. Lawrence. The village’s inhabitants were in the midst of a large celebration following a recent victory against their Iroquois enemies.

Champlain took in the exciting atmosphere, which included around 100 freshly cut off scalps put on display, drums and singing, and the hustle and bustle of warriors and their families eating and dancing. He sketches out his thoughts as he gets to know them better:

I think that if any one would show them how to live, and teach them to till the ground, and other matters, they would learn very well; for I assure you that plenty of them have good judgment, and answer very properly any question put to them. They have one evil quality in them, which is, that they are given to revenge, and are great liars, a people in whom it is not well to put confidence, except for good reason, and standing on your guard. They promise much and perform little. They are for the most part a people that has no law… they believe there is a God, who has made all things… I think they would speedily be brought to be good Christians, if their country were colonised, which most of them would like.3

Champlain thrived on the periphery of his own culture, but here he could clearly see the contrasts between this new world and his own. And although he generalizes and makes bigoted, sweeping statements to modern sensibilities, he sincerely believed that the betterment of man was a noble goal, and extended to all.

Following the destructive Wars of Religion in France, liberal-minded readers of Des Sauvages certainly would’ve also found it preferable to avoid war with these strange and intriguing peoples from the edge of the world. And the next step then, welcoming them into the universal brotherhood of man, could of course only be accomplished through the Christian faith.

Wearing New Clothing

Champlain certainly brought the assumptions of his world with him to Canada, and relied on the Frenchmen who had dealt with the Indigenous of the area to get much of his initial information, and to survive.

But in other ways, Champlain quickly adapted to his new environment. He realized that different clothing would be required if the French were to finally put down roots in Canada. This included the use of new technology.

The most obvious example of this is that Champlain may have been the first European to use a birchbark canoe.4 Letting go of French ways of navigating the world, he embraced Indigenous know-how, recognizing the superior speed and maneuverability of the canoe for navigating rivers; the highways and thoroughfares of Canada at the time.

The canoe was particularly useful for crossing the Lachine Rapids, just outside of the future site of Montreal, which had given Jacques Cartier much trouble. As one historian put it, “in a day’s observation of the largest obstacle to inland exploration, Champlain had solved the problem. With the help of the Natives and the use of their technology, the interior of Canada could become accessible.”5

Champlain’s approach allowed a further expansion of Canada as Europe knew it. The mist over the continent was beginning to clear. He soon heard tales of lakes the size of the sea itself, and rumours about what lay beyond them: lands and waters so vast that his guides knew of no men who had seen their end.6

In just a few short weeks exploring with his Indigenous guides, Champlain was already managing to form a fairly accurate picture of a significant portion of North America, from Hudson Bay to the Hudson River, and from the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes.7 Unfortunately, just as he was getting the hang of his canoe, the sponsor and leader of the expedition, Aymar de Clermont de Chaste, Vice-Admiral of France, died.

But luckily for Champlain, he didn’t need to give up hope. King Henri soon approved a new proposal for exploration, trade, and settlement in Canada. This one would be led by none other than Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, nobleman of Champlain’s home region of Saintonge.

Both Champlain and de Mons made presentations for the king in support of a new venture. de Mons had been to Canada just a few years prior to support the fur trade, and was part of an attempt to build a settlement near Tadoussac. de Mons wanted to stay out of the St. Lawrence, preferring the region known as ‘La Cadie’ or Acadia.

de Mons and King Henri liked Acadia partly for political reasons. England was also making significant efforts to explore and settle the northern latitudes of the Americas at this time. Champlain had done the initial important work of exploring the interior of the continent before the English, now he and de Mons could cut them off near the coasts and claim the area for the French—if they moved quick enough.

In exchange for taking on the expenses of the expedition, the king granted de Mons a monopoly on the fur trade in Canada. Champlain accompanied him with no official title. He was simply a “volunteer” and received no pay.8 For both men, this was really a passion project. de Mons would end up losing most of his fortune as a result of his efforts to build a lasting new society in Canada.9

Port-Royal

For the first new settlement site in Acadia, de Mons chose a small island, just over the present-day Canadian U.S. border in the state of Maine. On this Saint Croix Island, the first try at settling in Acadia looked suspiciously familiar to France’s previous attempts elsewhere. Supplies quickly ran low, winter came, and about half of the 60 men died from scurvy.

Those few words do little justice to the hopes and dreams that were dashed, the suffering endured, and cold and frightening deaths from strange diseases. Just how many times these types of stories unfolded is illustrative of how dangerous and indifferent Canada could be without the proper “clothing”.

But, an important symbolic milestone in the story of Canada was reached on Saint Croix. The first wheat to be harvested in North America was sown, and the harvest was promising.10 Champlain and de Mons did not expect overnight success—but they were slowly proving it was possible to “raise up” the earth to support their dreams of what Canada could be—they just needed to dial in their methods.

Undeterred, de Mons shifted his efforts to a site on present-day Nova Scotia, and in 1605 he dubbed its grand and welcoming harbour, ‘Port-Royal’ (today’s Annapolis Royal). There a new habitation was built.

The English were not far behind—Jamestown, in the future colony of Virgina, was established just two years later in 1607.

From a solid base, Champlain could continue his work of exploration and mapmaking, which he did from 1605-1607. de Mons returned to France in 1606 to deal with problems financing the venture, as Jean de Poutrincourt, his lieutenant, arrived to take over operations of the colony.

Poutrincourt was joined by some 50 men and boys, who got to work preparing fields and planting crops, and built dwellings, workshops, storage areas, and communal spaces. No women were present in Acadia from 1604-1607. Three men served as the founding clergy of Acadia: two Catholic priests and a Protestant minister.

The colonists were committed to emulating King Henri’s spirit of mediation and tolerance. Also towards this aim, Poutrincourt and Champlain worked together to build and maintain a positive relationship between the colonists and the Indigenous peoples around Port-Royal. The leaders of the colony were determined not to repeat the mistakes of Jacques Cartier or others, in which relations broke down, or never had any hope of being productive.

David Hackett Fischer said that it was because of an ability to move between the European and Indigenous worlds that Champlain, the level-headed soldier and diplomat, was increasingly taking the reins of control, “a new leader emerged in New France. His way of working with the Indians made the difference.”11

Old Habits in the New World

At Port-Royal, Champlain’s approach meant that the French in charge of the colony were in some ways closer with the leaders of the various Indigenous groups around them, than their fellow countrymen of lower social rank.

To survive in Canada, adaptation was crucial, but so was instilling a clearly defined social hierarchy—based on the customs of the old country. Here we can see the beginnings of French Canada in some ways becoming “more French than France”. As some practices served purposes in Canada long after they were discontinued back home.

Nearby Indigenous leaders, for the most part, were treated like friendly neighbours. The upper class French gentlemen of Port-Royal were comfortable exploring with them, and welcomed them into their homes to feast, drink, and smoke together in the evenings.

These courtesies were not always extended to other Frenchmen, “even in a small ship or a close-built colony, a great distance separated the gentlemen from other men… They were quicker to recognize the humanity of the Indians than that of their own servants and laborers—an attitude that Champlain shared.”12

From the French point of view, the Indigenous peoples who “lived without laws” benefited in some ways from their lack of knowledge. In the same way that Adam and Eve were content in their ignorance, the French describe many of the Indigenous groups the encountered as having cheery and noble disposition, suited to prospering in their environment—but, from the French point of view—lacking in the knowledge of higher principles which allowed European civilization to develop.

Of course now with the French as their stewards, they would be given the tools to reconcile their innate skills with new wisdom. And what would follow would not be a fall, but becoming self-aware Christians, and full participants in the society that was coming into being.

At Port-Royal, we also gain access to a bit of outside commentary beyond Champlain’s, giving further insight into the French perspective on the relations with the Indigenous. One of the colonists, Marc Lescarbot, published a book about his experiences entitled Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. Lescarbot was Parisian jurist, well versed in the humanities, and a true believer Champlain’s mission. Both he and Champlain speak with great respect of a M’ikmaq chief, who the French called Membertou.

Champlain describes some of their relations with Membertou, saying, “we had found him a good Indian all the time we were there, although he had the reputation of being the worst and most treacherous man of his tribe [in war].”13

Lescarbot likewise paints a picture of an intelligent, fearsome, and generous leader:

He has been a very great and cruel warrior in his youth and during his life… This Membertou told us at our first coming thither that he wished to make a present to the King of his copper mine, since he saw that we held metals in high regard, and since Sagamores [chiefs] must be honourable and liberal one toward the other. For being himself a Sagamos, he considers himself the equal of the King and of all his lieutenants, and often said to M. de Poutrincourt that he was his great friend, brother, companion, and equal… if Membertou had had more he would have offered it freely.14

There was a true meeting of worlds among men like Membertou and Champlain. Hardened by war, loyal to their people, and quick to make allies, they were different superficially in just about every way, but were quite similar where it mattered.

Dinner and a Show

Lescarbot described the everyday work of instilling order, through labouring in the soil of the new world:

I can say with truth that I have never done so much bodily work through the pleasure which I took in digging and tilling my gardens, fencing them in against the gluttony of the swine, making terraces, preparing straight alleys, building store-houses, sowing wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans, peas, garden plants, and watering them, so great a desire had I to know the soil by personal experience.15

Lescarbot adapted well to the simplicity of colonial life. And he was afforded time to be a little creative. He decided to bring some of the familiar liveliness and entertainment from home with him. At Port-Royal, he wrote the first European play performed in North America, Théâtre de Neptune.

The story retells the founding of the colony. It features the Greek god Neptune, who welcomes Lieutenant Poutrincourt to his new home of Port-Royal. He is surrounded by choir of Indigenous leaders, who praise the King of France, and proclaim their allegiance to him. A chorus celebrates the new colony, as trumpets sound and cannons are fired.

One writer notes the symbolic significance of Lescarbot theatrically commemorating the founding of the colony:

The elaborate, ritualized entry of the monarch into a city remains a semantic touchstone of Lescarbot’s celebration of a new social order… Such ceremonies were complex cultural productions, meant to transfuse the quotidian event with an allegorizing, transcendent significance… Thousands of miles away, and with a tenuous hold on the land, at best, Lescarbot mimed these forms of legitimizing rule.16

Champlain also made an effort to build camaraderie, and bring mirth to the often drab, tedious, and difficult work of daily life at Port-Royal. Champlain founded a dining and social club among the leadership of the colony called L’Ordre de Bon Temps, often translated as the Order of Good Cheer / the Good Time.

Champlain describes the benefits of the club in combatting the ills of the winter months:

Everybody found [the Order] beneficial to his health, and more profitable than all sorts of medicine we might have used. This Order consisted of a chain which we used to place with certain little ceremonies about the neck of one of our people, commissioning him for that day to go hunting. The next day it was conferred upon another, and so on in order. All vied with each other to see who could do the best, and bring back the finest game. We did not come off badly, nor did he Indians who were with us.17

After going through failure after failure, Champlain was finding success for the French in Canada, and having a good time doing it.

Trouble Back Home

Unfortunately, the newfound spirit of camaraderie and unity at Port-Royal did not extend back home in France. de Mons had been attempting to deal with various factions vying for control and influence at court, who were not pleased with the king granting him a monopoly over the fur trade in Canada.

King Henri had been pressured to remove the monopoly under pressure from a group of powerful and influential merchants and traders in Brittany, Normandy, and the Parisian hatters whose role in shaping fashion on the continent was put in jeopardy. Along with these businessmen, there was another powerful man who played a role, Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully.

In 1598, Sully was named senior councillor to the king and Superintendent of Finance. He was a chief opponent of colonization efforts, writing in his memoir’s years later, “Sieur de Mons’s sea voyage to go and make settlements in Canada, utterly against my advice... great wealth will never be drawn from sites below 40 degrees.18 Here he actually meant above 40 degrees—referring to latitude. And that the natural resources of the northern Americas were essentially wasted effort compared to what could be found further south.

Sully was also a Huguenot. Which on occasion lent him to be favourable to Protestant Holland. And Dutch merchants just so happened to be among those quite upset about the disruption to the fur trade caused by de Mons. These merchants had engaged in privateering efforts against the French in retaliation:

Those responsible for the severe losses suffered by the partners were the merchants of Amsterdam, who wanted to trade with the Aboriginals. In July or August 1606, their ship had ambushed two of the four ships in Dugua de Mons ‘s fleet in the St. Lawrence Valley. The French had not been able to turn back the heavily armed Dutch vessel, and their furs were pillaged by the Amsterdam merchants.19

One historian characterized the relations of Sully and his allies towards Holland, saying, “[they] let themselves be circumvented by the Dutch, who showered them with sumptuous gifts.20

By 1607, enough pressure was put on the king by Sully and others that King Henri revoked de Mons’ monopoly. With funding cut off, the settlers at Port-Royal were ordered to leave and return to France in September 1607.

Once again, just as things seemed to finally coming together, the French colonists had to close up shop and leave Canada.

After being forced to abandon Acadia, Champlain and de Mons returned to France. Following months of negotiation and uncertainty about the future of establishing anything lasting in Canada, King Henri reinstated de Mons’ monopoly, but only for one year.

Knowing that time was limited, de Mons now agreed that if they were to attract additional funders, they would finally need to return to Champlain’s original choice of settlement: the St. Lawrence Valley. In 1608, it was in this promising corridor to the interior that he would establish the habitation of Quebec.

There the pattern would continue of the first Canadiens consisting of two general types: firstly, the priests, gentlemen, and explorers; those men with humanist visions of the future wanting to extend their faith and make their mark on the far reaches of the earth. And secondly, the more practical men; tradesmen and labourers seeking a vocation to support their family, who viewed New France as an escape to a new life of adventure and opportunity.

Next, we’ll see how Champlain managed these sometimes conflicting groups, while forging new alliances with the Indigenous through diplomacy and war.

When we last left off after Jacques Cartier’s travels, we saw that approaching the year 1600, European exploration into Canada had largely been a failure. The great river named the St. Lawrence by Cartier held promise, but this gateway to the northern world so far failed to produce the spoils won by the Spanish and Portuguese in Mexico, Peru, or Brazil. And as the 17th century approached, the adventurers who helped map the unknown of Canada were already fading from memory.

In England, those writing about the bustling cod fisheries around Newfoundland often confused John Cabot with his son Sebastian, who accompanied his father across the Atlantic and continued to make voyages following his death. In France, Jacques Cartier soon faded from public view; unable to find treasure or establish a colony across the sea. By 1557, both Cabot and Cartier passed away.

None of these first men who explored Canada were regarded as great heroes in their own lifetimes—and they certainly were not viewed as the founders of any new nation of which to speak of.

European exploration pursued knowledge and pushed the limits of the world, which came with great rewards and great costs. In Canada, this also revealed vulnerability. The new lands appeared unconstrained by size or distance, with endless frontier. Enduring a Canadian winter required a great many things outside of oneself.

This encounter with the unknown is present in one of the oldest stories we have. In Genesis, through the eating of forbidden fruit, a pursuit of knowledge streches the limits of the world but also leads to the first humans needing to clothe themselves, and having to hide in a new, vulnerable state.

In Canada, deadly diseases, a hostile climate, and strange peoples meant a higher level of order, discipline, vision, and technology would be needed ‘to clothe oneself’. And the man who would first figure how to ‘best dress’ for this new land, was Samuel de Champlain.

A Boy from Brouage

An explorer, adventurer, soldier, sailor, cartographer, ethnographer, naturalist, colonist, and artist, Champlain also wrote more about his exploits than any other explorer of his era. He led the establishment of the some of the first permanent European settlements in Canada since the Norse, set a course for relations between the French and Indigenous peoples, and became a founding father of Canada.

For all the material produced by Champlain about himself, it remains difficult to get a concrete sense of the man. As historian David Hackett Fischer put it in his sweeping biography Champlain’s Dream, “rarely has an author written so much and revealed so little about himself.”1

There is a mist cast over many aspects of his life. Many biographic details are foggy. But what we do know, tells us that Champlain was destined to be the leader of a liminal place like Canada. From the beginning, he had the makings of a man between worlds.

Champlain was raised in a culture with ancient roots in seafaring, adventure, trade, and openness to the world. His father was a successful sailor, and although not members of the nobility, the family enjoyed a place of wealthy prominence in their community.

The name Samuel gives us a clue that he was likely raised Protestant—as it was a name preferred among French Huguenots at the time.2 The region he grew up in was also heavily Huguenot. It’s likely that Champlain was baptized and raised Protestant and later converted to Catholicism. Around the time of his birth, between 1570 and 1580, 7-10% of France was Protestant.

Champlain grew up in the town of Brouage, situated on the Gulf of Saintonge, along the coast of western France. The site of the town was an organized and important economic centre since antiquity, dating back to the former occupants of the region, the Romans.3 With a long history of trade and commerce in connection with the sea, it is not surprising that in the 1540s, fishermen from the area were among the first few in Europe to make regular trips back and forth to the newly discovered Newfoundland cod fisheries.4

Champlain’s home was a mix of economic and cultural dynamism. The area produced fluid identities, and opportunities to move up the social ranks. Foreigners came and went, bringing their languages and customs along with them, as sailors ventured out and returned with new treasures and tales of far away lands. They developed their own dialect as well—referred to today still by its speakers as the langue xaintongeaise, or la parlanjhe: the speech.5

On one occasion, Champlain characterized neighbouring Brittany in the north of France (where Jacques Cartier was from) as a foreign country.6 There was a sense in Saintonge that a man could shape his own destiny and future, and stand apart from the larger culture.

And Champlain was not the only man from the region who would play a key role in Canada. Pierre Dugua, sieur de Monts, also from Saintonge, would later emerge as an important figure in New France. One historian even went as far to say, “without him one could assume there would have never been a Champlain.”7

Historian David Hackett Fischer attributed the pair’s colonial success due to their unique Saintonge heritage, highlighting their liminal qualities, “the medieval geography of their region, the diversity of their world, and the modern values of their culture helped them to work with others, and gave them strength as mediators among many groups.”8

^{A Young Soldier}

Around Champlain’s birth, religious tensions in France erupted into a terribly violent and destructive civil war between Catholics and Protestants. These are generally known as the French Wars of Religion, which lasted from 1562-1598.

The strategically important and heavily fortified coastal Protestant centre, La Rochelle, was around 50 kilometres away from Champlain’s hometown of Brouage. Fighting was fierce, and the town was besieged and changed hands throughout the wars. Champlain grew up as no stranger to violence, spending his formative years in close proximity to assassinations, instability, mob massacres, and warring factions fighting for control of the crown and church.

Eventually, Champlain found himself directly involved in the conflict as well. Like most young men of his time, Champlain was enlisted into the fighting as he came of age. He fought in the army of the one and only Protestant King of France, Henri IV.

Against King Henri and his forces were the Catholic League—composed of French Catholic nobility (led by Henri, Duke of Guise) which found an allies in the Papal States (led by Pope Sixtus V), and of course the usual Hapsburg rivals of France, the Spanish (led by Philip II).

As early as 1595, Champlain is listed in army records as a fourier, a type of quartermaster, in charge of ensuring the proper housing or quartering of soldiers during campaigns. His duties also included creating maps for used for troop movements, and also creating maps for use by the royal household. By his early 20s, Champlain had proven his skills on the battlefield—and brains off of it—to quickly rise through the ranks and make powerful friends.

Champlain emerged from the Wars of Religion as an experienced and hardened soldier who had the discipline, leadership qualities, and the experience to lead men into danger. In other words, he was acquiring the clothing that would help him survive and thrive in Canada.

But gaining these skills came at a cost. Champlain’s country had nearly torn itself apart, and to save it required great sacrifice, foresight, and mediation from King Henri IV. For Champlain, his king embodied the spirit of Christian leadership and toleration he hoped to emulate.

Throughout the wars, Henri had converted to Catholicism a total of three times, and reverted back to his Protestant beliefs twice. As you can probably guess, some of these weren’t entirely his choice or borne out of a genuine change of heart and soul. Sometimes it was literally keep his head and other times to strengthen his claim to the throne. But in 1593, the king swore a final oath to the Church and would remain a Catholic until his death.

Following his king, we have records that Champlain become Catholic by 1598, and probably by 1595.9 For both Champlain and Henri, these conversions did not primarily arise from changing theological positions. Their faith was more pragmatic and productive. As one historian put it, “they disliked doctrinal disputes, despised religious bigotry, and hated religious persecution.”10

Given what they had witnessed over the course of their lives, peaceful toleration of difference was preferable to a rigid enforcement of rules. And in the aftermath of the wars, much of France followed along similar lines of thought:

Among the majority who lived between 1598 and 1610, and among the political elites that led them, there was a “tepid” orthodoxy. In order to rebuild the kingdom, people sought to heal the wounds; they avoided the intransigent proselytism that might lead to violent confrontations, thorny questions, or extremism. They even avoided discussing their faith in public. This is why Champlain, in his writings, never said anything about his private life.11

Along with his conversion to Catholicism, King Henri enacted the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The edict granted a large degree of religious liberty to Protestants in France, and set a course for religious tolerance without precedent, in a Europe which had seen decades of brutal war and persecution among Christians.

Early Explorations

The end of war allowed Champlain to look beyond France’s borders. As part of the treaty which ended the wars, Spanish troops stationed in France were permitted to evacuate back home. Champlain took advantage of this to travel to Spain aboard a Spanish troop transport, captained by his uncle. Fortunately enough, the same ship eventually made its way to the West Indies, to replenish the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico with goods and supplies.

Champlain was able to spend two and a half years in the New World, learning good and bad lessons from the Spanish. Upon his return, he published a manuscript titled Brief discours, which told of his adventures and experiences.

Champlain laments the mistreatment of the Africans enslaved by the Spanish, as well as Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. He also takes great pleasure in meticulously cataloguing the unusual and exciting flora and fauna of this world, then unknown to the French.

By age 30, Champlain had realized a major goal by making it to the New World. Upon his return, King Henri granted him a pension for his work reporting on the colonial goings on of his Spanish rivals. Champlain was also employed by the king as one of his many geographers. Working in the basement of the Louvre, Champlain developed the skills which would eventually make him a master cartographer, as he helped his king to quite literally map the world, naming and navigating the unknown. Champlain was one of many talented young men who Henri patronized—making the royal court a buzzing hive of intellectual and cultural activity.

Around the same time, Champlain inherited an estate from his recently deceased uncle. He now had little worry about money or property, and could have settled in for a comfortable life, with ample opportunity to dedicate his time to exploring the social circles of Paris as an accomplished and established young man. But Champlain and his king not only shared common religious beliefs—the two had a common vision of the role France should play in the world, which would require venturing far beyond Paris.

They had a true love and desire for knowledge, and in the spirit of the Renaissance and the age of scientific inquiry which followed, this passion was centred on the natural world.

Exploration, discovery, and map-making were all ways to partake in the beauty of God’s creation. Champlain may have even dared to dream that with the right knowledge—the right clothing we could say—one could bring about a future without war between the princes of Christendom.

Champlain wanted to be involved in the pan-European exploration of the world, which extended across the arts and sciences. All in a quick few decades, French thinkers like René Descartes and Michel de Montaigne were shaping an intellectual foundation for the nation through philosophy and essay writing. Shakespeare’s plays were being performed in England for the first time, Miguel de Cervantes was writing the first modern novel in Spain, and Galileo Galilei in Italy and Johannes Kepler in Germany were changing humanity’s understanding of the stars.

To Canada

These cultural advancements coincided with the shifting imperial priorities of King Henri. By surviving the Wars of Religion, Henri managed to fend off an encirclement by his Spanish rivals on the European continent. But if France could have any hope of ensuring stability and security at home, she would have to redouble her efforts at expanding abroad.

And colonization attempts after Jacques Cartier were less than encouraging. This included a 1562 attempt to start a small settlement in Florida, which was quickly abandoned as the crew resorted to cannibalism in an attempt to sail home without food.12

Another disaster unfolded in the 1590s on Sable Island (present-day Nova Scotia), where colonists were plucked from prisons and spared from execution in exchange for their participation. This ‘shockingly’ ended in mutiny and murder, as the land was found to be unsuitable to support crops, and the criminals-turned colonists opted to kill the few officers sent to watch over them, and looted their supplies.13

Despite these failures, French fur traders continued to deal throughout the St. Lawrence Valley. François Gravé du Pont, a trader, and Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit, a naval captain, built a settlement and trading post in the Tadoussac area—located on the north shore of the estuary of the St. Lawrence. In 1602, du Pont brought two Indigenous men from Tadoussac back with him to France.

These men were granted an audience with the king, and they told Henri that the “big river” of Canada discovered by Cartier was much larger than the French knew, and connected to an endless amount of lakes and rivers. They proposed to freely allow the French to settle on the St. Lawrence, if the French would help negotiate a peace, or defeat their enemies, the Iroquois.14

A new opportunity to formally revisit the St. Lawrence; which first appeared to be such a strong candidate for settlement in the past. And now they were actually invited to come! The chance to establish relations with Indigenous people of the area in a cooperative effort of war seemed to be a promising way to build an alliance and clear a path to settlement.

An old but well-respected soldier and chevalier named Aymar de Chaste asked the king to lead the mission to the St. Lawrence. de Chaste had established relationships with fur traders and fishermen, and had recently made the acquantance of Champlain, who he recommended to assist in exploration, and finding suitable areas for settlement.

The world was opening up, and fertile ground across sea just might enable a new type of society to blossom—to raise up the earth to meet what was descending from above.

The king approved the request and Champlain set sail in 1603.

Next we’ll see how Champlain handled Canada differently than any other explorer to this point.

“A glorious era lies before us: we are entering Confederation. Let it not frighten you. After all, it is nothing but the realization of a plan designed by the first European to set foot in Canada, Jacques Cartier… With Confederation, we will realize a vision of this great man: the coming together of all of the provinces he discovered. If he rose from the grave today, he would undoubtedly look with satisfaction on this great country, enlightened by civilization, and soon to enjoy an era of prosperity and happiness…”

George Étienne Cartier, Montreal 1866.1

On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act received royal proclamation. The lands discovered by Jacques Cartier became a country.

In the age of air travel, it’s hard for us to have a sense of what it would have been like to cross the ocean in Jaques Cartier’s time. Back in the 1500s, if everything went according to plan, one could look forward to months at sea, and adding onto the extreme boredom—gruelling physical labour, miserable weather, and your fellow passengers consisting of mostly rowdy and disagreeable men.

At night, if your crewmates finally quieted down for a few minutes, you would fall asleep to the crashing seas, and the creaking wood holding the ship together; the only thing between you and the endless, pitch black waves.

Subscribe now

In these moments, we can glimpse the liminal states in which these explorers lived. Out in the middle of the unknown, between waking and dreaming, living and dying, pushing the limits of the world. With a still largely unknown land of beauty and danger waiting at the end of their journey.

New Kingdoms

On Cartier’s second trip to Canada, having made it across the ocean in one piece, he then traveled over 1500 kilometers through the St. Lawrence Valley. The open sea gave way to the life-giving, vivifying rivers of the interior. Still treacherous at times, these seemingly endless passageways presented new lands, peoples, and possible riches.

Previously we discussed how Cartier was guided by Chief Donnacona’s sons, who had returned with him from Europe after learning to speak French. And so began a long interplay of intepretation, translation, and inter-cultural communication between Europeans and the Indigenous in Canada.

In 1535, with the St. Lawrence River frozen, Cartier and his men stayed near Donnacona and his people for their first Canadian winter. They were unprepared in the small fort they constructed near the village of Stadacona (present day Quebec City). As the days became colder and shorter, nearly all of the French sailors began showing symptoms of an alarming and strange disease:

“The sickness broke out among us accompanied by most marvellous and extraordinary symptoms; for some lost all their strength, their legs became swollen and inflamed, while the sinews contracted and turned as black as coal. In other cases the legs were found blotched with purple-coloured blood. Then the disease would mount to the hips, thighs, shoulders, arms and neck. And all had their mouths so tainted, that the gums rotted away down to the roots of the teeth, which nearly all fell out. The disease spread among the three ships to such an extent, that in the middle of February [1536], of the 110 men forming our company, there were not ten in good health so that no one could aid the other.”2

Donnacona and his people served as guide to Cartier and his men once again. Now they offered miraculous, life-saving remedies to this startling disease. They taught the Frenchmen how to make a tea to cure themselves:

They showed us how to grind the bark and the leaves and to boil the whole in water. Of this one should drink every two days, and place the dregs on the legs where they were swollen and affected. According to them this tree cured every kind of disease. They call it in their language Annedda.3

The tea brewed from the trees contained enough vitamin C to quickly bring Cartier and his crew back from the brink of death after a terrible scurvy outbreak. In all, 25 still died that winter.

At the same time, around 50 Indigenous died from diseases the French had brought with them. The Europeans had no cures of their own to help them.

Donnacona kept Cartier’s spirits up, by telling him stories about a place called the Kingdom of Saguenay, to the north of the St. Lawrence, not far from the mouth of the Ottawa River.4 And Donnacona had also learned certain metals were highly valued to Europeans. As one historian put it, “either by deliberate misinformation or through a misunderstanding, Cartier became convinced of the mineral riches of the country.”5

Donnacona did his best to paint an enticing fantastical picture of this mysterious land, “where there are immense quantities of gold, rubies and other rich things, and that the men there are white as in France and go clothed in woolens.”6

As the weather improved, Cartier didn’t want to return to France empty handed. It was unfortunate for Donnacona that he was such a good storyteller. Because Cartier wanted the chief to come and tell the King of France about it all. He decided to strong arm Donnacona to come to France.

Cartier was able to coax the chief onto one of the French ships, leading him to believe they would discuss plans to abduct a rival of the chief’s son. But as soon as Donnacona came on board, Cartier’s men seized him. Holding Donnacona captive, Cartier made a promise to the chief and his people that Donnacona would return in no less than 12 moons (months).

It would be the last time they saw him.

One historian sums up Donnacona’s ordeal after being taken captive:

Cartier abducted ten Stadaconans, including Donnacona, Taignoagny, and Domagaya, [Donnacona’s sons who guided Cartier] and whisked them to Europe despite the wailing and crying of the victims and their families… Donnacona visited the court of François I where he converted to Christianity, received an annual pension, and spent four glorious years spreading the lore of the Kingdom of the Saguenay… By the time Cartier began preparations for another voyage across the Atlantic, all but one of the Stadaconans in France had died… Donnacona, at least, was given a Christian burial.7

The Iroquoian chief must have experienced a whirlwind of misery, curiosity, homesickness, and awe. Donnacona originally entered into an alliance with Cartier in hopes of using French firepower against his rivals. Like the French sailors who braved the seas only to succomb to a horrible unknown disease, these meetings between worlds could result in riches, fortune, and fame—as well as tragic deaths in strange lands.

The Conquest of Saguenay

In 1541, Cartier made his third and final voyage to Canada. It had the makings of a failure from the start. Cartier was no longer in charge of the mission. He had lost favour at court after his failures thus far to bring back the treaures found by the Spanish or Portugese in the southern regions of the Americas.

Jean-François Roberval was appointed to lead the expedition. Roberval was a good friend of the king and seasoned veteran of war in Europe. He was tasked with settling a French colony along the great river discovered by Cartier, and to find the Kingdom of Saguenay. The King and his advisors had put their trust in Cartier and Donnacona’s tales.

The expedition’s mission objectives were to: “found a colony, begin missionary work, and effect the conquest of Saguenay [and] unlike the previous voyages, this one was organized like those of the Spanish conquistadores and included 300 soldiers as well as cannons.”8

One historian casts serious doubt on Cartier’s judgement, “the sheer incompetence of Cartier is breathtaking. After two previous voyages to Canada, how could he have thought of moving an army and siege cannons through the rugged, heavily forested lakes and river system of the Laurentian Shield, north of the St. Lawrence River?”9

Cartier clearly remained determined to get a taste of the riches explorers had won in places like Mexico and Peru. So he sailed up past Stadacona, to the Cap-Rouge River on the north shore of the St. Lawrence.

Cartier’s men constructed a new, larger settlement of some 400 people, and named it Charlesbourg-Royal, after the king’s third son. It was a short-lived, disastrous first attempt at building a lasting settlement in Canada:

During his stay, [Cartier] was plagued by increasingly deteriorating Native relations and a severe winter. Basque fishermen, who came in contact with some St. Lawrence Iroquoians in the Gulf of St. Lawrence late in 1542, claimed that in open fighting with Cartier’s men the Natives had killed 35 of them.10

With Donnacona never returning from France, Cartier had little sway with the Indigenous of the area—his word didn’t mean much. The new larger settlement also encroached on their territory.

Surveying the situation, Cartier simply decided to cut his losses after one year at the new settlement. He bundled up as many as the mineral riches he had come for and planned to skip town as soon as the river thawed.

Roberval came loaded with new provisions and colonists just as Cartier was trying to sneak away. He ordered Cartier and his men to return to the settlement. Cartier initially seemed to fall in line. But as soon as Roberval let his guard down, Cartier slipped away in the night with his crew, eventually making their way back to France.11

Roberval attempted to salvage what he could. He was a soldier and he had his orders. Roberval expanded the settlement, using his expertise in building fortifications in war. He was also able to use some diplomacy skills, and calmed relations between the region’s Indigenous inhabitants and the remaining colonists.

Roberval expected to reach Saguenay, affect its conquest and to return all in the short space of three weeks.12 The first attempt was cut short due to a capsized boat which left eight men drowned. Other business of the struggling settlement took priority, and trips to find Saguenay were put on hold.

Soon enough, the weather turned and Roberval and his men again encountered a terribly harsh winter, losing dozens of men to scurvy just as Cartier had. By 1543, they had enough. Luckily, ships from France arrived with the welcome news that Roberval was expected back in Europe; France and Spain were at war again. The fort and settlement were abandoned, and Roberval took his men, along with treasures similar to those Cartier had found, and set off for France.

The World Keeps Turning

In 1543, the same year the first permanent French settlement in Canada was abandoned, astronomer and polymath Nicolaus Copernicus published his landmark work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Heavenly Spheres).

We’ve previously discussed how the Renaissance ‘rediscovered’ man, and new technologies such as mapmaking and shipbuilding allowed explorers to travel further than before.

Copernicus’ heliocentric model placed the sun at the centre of creation, rather than the earth—further mapping the world.

For our purposes, we can understand this change as a new technology itself, producing a worldview in which man is no longer at the centre. This break away from the traditional ways of looking at reality had several consequences.

By adopting an increasingly mechanical view of things, European man would gain great material powers over his environment. The Scientific Revolution would accelerate technological progress—leading to material prosperity and breakthroughs across several domains. Change became the norm, and participation in the world required one to be a bit more liminal.

Amidst this reorienation of man’s place among the stars, it was clear that Canada was far from the centre of any European’s world. As it turned out, Cartier hadn’t fared much better than Roberval in getting out of Canada when he did. The gold and diamonds the two of them had managed to scrounge up were actually worthless quartz crystals and iron pyrite.

Through explorer’s eyes, these northern lands first appeared an enticing prize. But efforts to settle or take hold proved too dangerous, too cold. For the time being, Canada looked like Fool’s Gold.

Next:

French explorers would not return to Canada for another 60 years after Cartier and Roberval abandoned Charlesbourg-Royal. Then in 1603, Samuel de Champlain set sail.

“That most magnificent and glorious of all entries to any civilization or any domain. A thing that truly opens a new world. Then I knew, that the Canadians had the foundations of all literature and culture in them, because they had truly and indeed a country.”

1933 - English writer G.K. Chesterton describes his trip up the St. Lawrence River, at a luncheon in London for visiting members of the Canadian Authors’ Association.

We’ve been looking at the ‘discovery’ of Canada through a symbolic lens. And how European explorers first set out into the unknown and unmapped—powered by new technology, economic necessity, and the animating spirit of the Renaissance.

When we last left the story, the King of France, François I, had just been told about a man with the skills to finally penetrate into the interior of the still largely unknown Northern continent across the sea.

The son of a well-respected and seasoned sailor, it’s likely that Jacques Cartier had been to the newly discovered fisheries off of Newfoundland several times before. But Cartier was called on to lead a mission unlike any fishing trip, and go where no European had been before.

His father brought him onto the seas at a young age, and now Cartier was selected by François I to bring the authority of the King of France to the New World, and contribute to the expansion of his domain.

In 1534, Cartier made his official first journey across the Atlantic. He expertly navigated the waters near the fisheries he was familiar with, passing through the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador.

On this first trip, Cartier made it to what would later be called Prince Edward Island, and made contacts with the local inhabitants of a few different areas west of Newfoundland. Indigenous groups spotted his ships and rowed out on canoes to meet him, having become accustomed to seeing European fishermen in the area before. Cartier’s men made signs and gestures to exchange minor goods for furs.

Most of these initial interactions were amicable and productive. But Cartier quickly put a stop to that. Overlooking the Bay of Gaspé, in full view of a group of Indigenous men, Cartier erected a symbol of his royal patron’s sovereignty:

We had a cross made thirty feet high, which was put together in the presence of a number of the Indians on the point at the entrance to this harbour, under the cross-bar of which we fixed a shield with three fleurs-de-lys in relief, and above it a wooden board, engraved in large Gothic characters, where was written, LONG LIVE THE KING OF FRANCE.1

A chief named Donnacona clearly recognized what Cartier’s gesture meant, without the benefit of understanding the inscription, or the theological specifics of the cross itself.

Identification, naming, making a claim, and taking ownership were all implied by Cartier planting the cross. Mircea Eliade; historian of religion, made note of the widespread practice of raising crosses in the New World as “equivalent to consecrating the country… the newly discovered country was ‘renewed’, ‘recreated’ by the Cross.”2 This was understood by Donnacona:

Pointing to the cross [Donnacona] made us a long harangue, making the sign of the cross with two of his fingers; and then he pointed to the land all around about, as if he wished to say that all this region belonged to him, and that we ought not to have set up this cross without his permission. We explained to them by signs that the cross had been set up to serve as a land-mark and guide-post on coming into the harbour, and that we would soon come back and would bring them iron wares and other goods; and that we wished to take two of his sons away with us and afterwards would bring them back again to that harbour… About noon on that day six canoes came off to the ships, in each of which were five or six Indians, who had come to say good-bye to the two we had detained, and to bring them some fish. These made signs to us that they would not pull down the cross, delivering at the same time several harangues which we did not understand.3

Donnacona was willing to look past the encroachment. Possibly he viewed Cartier and his crew as potential allies against his tribe’s enemies in the region, of which they had a few at the time.4 Enough of a rapport was established for Donnacona to also allow two of his sons to return with Cartier’s crew to France.

Although it’s not entirely clear how much of a choice Donnacona had in this instance, the temporary exchange of young men from either party was a common practice in these early encounters between Europeans and the Indigenous, as a gesture of good will, to allow for language exchange, and ensure continued peaceful intentions.

Into the Interior

Cartier returned after a quick trip back to France to report on his discoveries and learn as much as he could from Donnacona’s sons. His second voyage proved much more eventful. In 1535, Cartier and his crew were guided up a huge river, deep into the interior of the continent. Cartier described the river as containing “the richest in every kind of fish that any one remembers having ever seen or heard of; for from its mouth to the head”.5

Cartier initially named the bay outside of the mighty river after Saint Lawrence, as it was his feast day on their arrival. Soon, maps began referring to the large river itself by the same name.

Following the instructions of his Indigenous guides, Cartier passed through an area which he began to refer to as ‘Canada’6 due to a misinterpretation from the Huron-Iroquois word kanata meaning ‘village’ or ‘settlement’.

We’ve mentioned previously how these incorrect or miscommunicated namings are to be expected in meetings between worlds—when meaning and fact (or heaven and earth) do not initially match.

Cartier, continuing up the river, passed by several villages, and arrived at a larger one named Stadacona. Stadacona was situated on a narrow passage on the St. Lawrence, which can stretch up to 100 kilometers at its widest.

Cartier remarked that the region “is as fine land as it is possible to see, being very fertile and covered with magnificent trees of the same varieties as in France.”7 Future French explorers and colonists would agree with his assessment. The Algonquin word for this area, which means ‘where the river narrows’, is kebec—the future site of Quebec City.

At the village of Stadacona, Cartier met again with Chief Donnacona. Cartier wanted to take the river further upstream, and Donnacona’s sons took him to the village of Hochelaga, where he was greeted by nearly a thousand villagers.

Here he describes a “fine land with large fields covered with the corn of the country… near and adjacent to a mountain, the slopes of which are fertile and are cultivated, and from the top of which one can see for a long distance. We named this mountain ‘Mount Royal’”.8 It is near this site that the city of Montreal stands today.

Cartier was shown around the country by his Indigenous guides, and told of lands far beyond impassable rapids. Cartier hoped the distant lands beyond were Asia—that he had discovered the passage East which Europeans had tried and failed to find for many years. But they were unable to cross. Because of this initial belief that the Orient lay beyond them, these rapids became known as the Lachine (China) Rapids.9

Whose Land Is It Anyway?

Cartier was making incredible progress compared to nearly all Europeans who had come before him to these lands. We can see a repeating pattern in his travels of identifying, naming, and making claims amidst the unknown.

Symbolically, Cartier’s cross penetrating into the land can be seen as a meeting of heaven and earth, where a mediator takes a principle from above and changes reality on the ground. In this process, something new is created. One could make the argument that in this moment, ‘Canada’ began to come into being.

Cartier’s unifying symbol was not an appeal to nature, like a maple leaf, or a celebration of difference, like multiculturalism, but a masculine, creative act that was explicitly Christian.

Cartier and his cross endured as unifying structures for French-Canadians—as a reminder of their faith, a connection to the first French explorers and colonists, and the lands their ancestors called home for hundreds of years.

Recent events show that conflict over naming, identifying, and claiming land is just as prevalent in Canada today as in Cartier’s time. Traditional relationships between Canadians and the lands they call home are coming apart.

Most public events in Canada today usually begin with some sort of land acknowledgement. In the place of private prayer, these rituals offer frequent opportunities for contrition of collective sin, and they have power behind them.

The B.C. Supreme Court recently granted Aboriginal title to the Cowichan Nation, to nearly six kilometres of land along the Fraser River in Richmond, south of Vancouver.10 Overnight, homeowners in the area have been left unsure if they actually own their homes.

Similar claims are underway across the province and the country, including the Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick, entering its fifth year of litigation and seeking Aboriginal title to more than half the land in New Brunswick.11

Canadians literally losing their homes is a natural consequence of the widespread belief that the very founding of the nation is illegitimate. In a way, their home is already lost. Judges are simply beginning to follow these ideas to their logical conclusions—taking principles from above and changing reality on the ground.

Whether these developments are seen as unifying and creative, or divisive and destructive, may depend on where one stands in relation to Cartier and his cross.

Next, we’ll continue on with Cartier, as Donnacona tells him of a seemingly mythical kingdom of riches just beyond the Ottawa River.

“The sun shines for me as it does for others. I would very much like to see the clause of Adam’s will by which I should be denied my share of the world.”

– Said to have been uttered by King François I of France after the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which divided all newly discovered lands in the Americas between Portugal and Spain.

In our quest to ‘name’ and ‘discover’ Canada we previously looked at the story of St. Brendan the Navigator, the Irish monk who sailed across the Atlantic in his leather boat in the 500’s; who may have been the first European to set foot on the lands which would one day be called Canada. Following him many years later were the Norse, who reached the tip of Newfoundland, and possibly much further south and inland, around the year 1000.

We’ve seen how myths and legends often compress complex events like these into a single image we can understand without knowing all the dates, facts, or figures. These narratives can be central to an understanding of a people, or a country.

In these discovery stories, an explorer often takes a central role. He has a duty to name and identify the unknown. The explorer occupies an in-between position with no fixed point, extending the boundaries of his physical and social world. He operates on the limits of perception, having to rely on his knowledge of the sea or land to survive, while being assisted by a few trusted companions, or a rowdy crew of men from the margins of society. Often his journey is supplemented by divine favour, or outright luck.

Throughout history, the portrayals of these characters often become warped and confusing. Control over ‘naming’ and identifying this past is still very much alive today.

On October 9, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation celebrating Christopher Columbus and the holiday which bears his name. In 2021, President Biden was the first American leader to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day around what was traditionally Columbus Day.

Trump’s proclamation characterizes Columbus as an American hero, whose arrival in the ‘New World’ served the purpose of “paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”1

As we begin to leave ‘myth’ and cross over into ‘history’ in our journey to discover Canada, we’ll see that whether Canadians like it or not, the beginnings of our story are simarily tied into narratives like these.

A New Europe

The typical approaches today to examine the beginnings of the Canadian story may involve using scientific data detailing the geological formation of the North American landmass; analyzing ancient migration patterns and language groups from Eurasia; looking at anthropological studies of the various peoples who inhabited the continent throughout the ages; as well as consulting the oral histories and traditions of Indigenous peoples.

With the exploits of explorers viewed as crude myths, little more than sanitized exemplars of a shameful system of colonial racism, Western domination and exploitation. The fact being that these men discovered nothing; the peoples of the ‘New World’ had been there all along.

To certain extent, this sort of thought process can help paint a picture of the past. It all sounds logical, and seems badly needed to counter the sort of hero-worship that allowed the great evils that followed the ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’.

But we aim to take a particular perspective on this voyage—to discover Canada as it came into view for Christendom. Not from a birds-eye view, but as a meeting of the margins, where perhaps no other time in history was there such a widespread, self-evident crossing between worlds for everyone involved. In following this trail, we’ve arrived at what could be viewed as a truly ‘multicultural’ and ‘progressive’ era.

The New World was discovered by a new Europe in the 15th - 17th centuries. The expeditions of the Age of Discovery or Exploration were a culmination of European society breaking through barriers.

The chaotic unknown of the seas brimmed with potential for early modern Europe’s visions of expanding trade, acquiring new treasures, and mastering human and non-human nature. Europe seemed poised not only to discover new worlds, but rediscover man himself.

Jacob Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, explains how Italy was at the centre of a movement of discovery, innovation, technology, and art. Buckhardt characterizes the period as a simultaneous leaping in the future, as well as reaching into the past. Detailing how the Western world was incorporating both ancient and modern ideas about itself and man as a whole, enabling a transition between conceptual worlds:

To the discovery of the outward world, the Renaissance added a still greater achievement, by first discerning and bringing to light the full, whole nature of man… Happy, the study of the intellectual side of human nature began, not with the search after a theoretical psychology—for that, Aristotle still sufficed—but with the endeavour to observe and describe … Human nature in its deepest essence and in all its characteristic expressions was not only known by exact observation, but represented by an immortal poetry and art.2

The world itself, as the average Christian understood it, had considerably expanded inside and out. Europe also became much more connected with the east. Trade networks with ‘the Orient’ enabled increased movements of people and goods across the continent. Many city states, merchants, and seamen grew rich from expanding access to ‘world-wide’ markets. Asia as a whole acted as a consistent source of economic and cultural renewal for European society.

Explorers looking beyond the horizon had exciting new technology available to them. In the 1440’s, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press greatly reduced the time and cost required to create maps. Shipbuilding practices were refined as well, which made ocean faring increasingly viable.

But along with this growth came violent and destructive contractions and conflicts. The most devastating was the Black Death, or the plague. Between 1346 and 1353, a continent-wide pandemic took the lives of nearly 50 million people, wiping out almost 50% of Europe’s population.

Nearly 100 years later as Europe still recovered from the plague, Constantinople fell. The crucial link between east and west, and centre of the late Roman Empire, came under the control of Islam, as Constantinople was captured by the forces of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Mehmed II. Europeans needed to find alternative routes to Asia, as they were now forced to pay the Ottomans for passage, or risk being cut off from the east all together.

A major driving force behind the ensuing period of discovery and exploration was certainly economic. Sailors and traders from the Italian city states of Genoa and Venice were particularly resourceful in this era. The Venetians demonstrated a shrewd and cool attitude amidst shifting centres of power. Historian John Julius Norwich gives some insight into the Venetian point of view, as the Ottomans closed in on Constantinople in 1453:

[The Venetians] were realists enough to know that the Byzantine Empire was doomed, and they had no wish needlessly to antagonize its Ottoman successor. In Mehmet’s [The Ottoman Sultan’s] friendship they saw not just the best means of assuring the continuation of profitable trading with the Orient but, in all probability, the only chance of retaining their own colonies in Greece and the Aegean… Such attitudes are not compatible with Crusading fire or with any true feeling of emergency. If Venice did not come to the relief of Constantinople in time, it is because she had no real desire to do so.3

The stakeholders in Venice certainly learned to value diversity when it suited them. For some Christians, during the Renaissance as in our time, the maintenance of the free movement of people and goods came before considerations of kinship or creed.

The seas were places where such enterprising men could make great wealth, but danger always lurked. One could be making a fortune in the trade of luxury goods one day, and find himself sold into slavery the next; thrown into the wretched life of a galley slave, chained to the oars of the massive ships of the age alongside other slaves, prisoners of war, and convicts.4

This era is quite confusing if one tries to apply the morals of today to it. Breathtaking architecture and works of art were crafted during religious wars where popes and kings fought on the front lines. The ideas of humanism stressed the importance of reason and respect towards one’s fellow man, as slavery was viewed as natural.

To Canada, by Way of India

Explorers of this period had varying motives—some more nakedly selfish and ruthless than others. These men took many things for granted: expanding oneself into the world; winning glory on behalf of one’s people and sovereign; and converting lost souls to the one true faith; were all self-evidently good. If one could go on the adventure of a lifetime and win fame and fortune, that sounded pretty good too.

By 1487, Portuguese sailors had made it around what would be called the Cape of Good Hope—the southern tip of Africa. They jumped out to an early lead to find an alternate route to Asia, and established the fact that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were connected.

Around this time, an Italian from the city state of Genoa attempted to convince several kings and queens across Europe of his plan to find a passage east by instead sailing west over the Atlantic Ocean. In 1492, he finally conviced the Spanish monarchy to finance his plan. The Spanish called him Cristóbal Colón.

Columbus had new technology, as well as ancient writings to aid his journey, as noted by one historian:

Many in the Azores affirmed and swore, that every year certain islands were seen towards the west. To that Columbus said that they might be the islands of which Pliny declares in Book II, cap. 97 of his Natural History, that towards the north the sea washes away certain woods from the land, which have such great roots that it carries them like rafts upon the water, which from a distance resemble islands. Seneca supports that, who says in Book III of Naturalia that there is a kind of stones so porous and light that in India they form as it were islands which go floating on the water, and of the same sort must be those which they call St. Brandan’s [sic].5

Here we can see the connections between the ‘mythic’ past and the increasingly ‘real’ or historical present. And that these adventurers didn’t seem to sharply distinguish between the two. On a related note, it was common for explorers in the early modern era to not know how to swim.6 The stakes were high, but simple. Either succeed and cross over into the mythical; or die trying.

Columbus landed in The Bahamas, believing he had found an alternate route to the east and established himself in legend.

Within the decade, another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, crossed over the ocean with the support of the Portuguese. Vespucci believed that he and Columbus had not found Asia at all, but a vast new land hitherto never encountered by Christendom. These strange lands began to be referred to as ‘America’, after Vespucci.

The Italians continued to be at the forefront of exploration, lending their services across Europe to sovereigns eager to make their mark across the sea. Raimondo di Soncino, an Italian ambassador in England, wrote to his boss the Duke of Milan on December 18, 1497, and spoke of the unique abilities of a fellow Italian in the British Isles named “Zoane Caboto”. He had mapped unknown dangerous seas, and found treasures on his journeys:

This Messer Zoane has the description of the world in a map, and also in a solid sphere, which he has made, and shows where he has been… They assert that the sea there is swarming with fish, which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone, so that it sinks in the water.

But Messer Zoane has his mind set upon even greater things, because he proposes to keep along the coast from the place at which he touched, more and more towards the east, until he reaches an island which he calls Cipango [Japan], situated in the equinoctial region, where he believes that all the spices of the world have their origin, as well as the jewels.7

In 1497, John Cabot, as the English knew him, planted the flags of Saint Mark and Saint George on behalf of Venice and England on lands across the sea. He would be credited as the first European since the Norse to reach the mainland of North America. Quickly, news spread of the great quantities of fish in the new found land discovered by Cabot.

The Portuguese believed that according to Treaty of Tordesillas, Newfoundland’s fisheries were actually under Portugal’s dominion. João Fernandes, a landholder or labrador explored the area on behalf of King Manuel of Portugal.8 Soon, maps began to refer to the region as ‘labrador’.

Throughout the first half the of sixteenth century, the English routinely intercepted and captured ships returning to Europe from the region, loaded with cod from “the new founde iland” and labrador.9

Many of these ships were headed back to France. And sailors under the banner of the French King François I were about to surpass the English in exploring this new world.

The first to sail to the Americas for the French was unsurprisingly, actually another Italian; Giovanni da Verrazzano from Florence. In 1524, Verrazzano contributed greatly to Europe’s understanding of this new giant landmass. He was also the first commander to bring back “anything resembling a detailed account of the natives of North America”.10

François was encouraged by this success. And he could not allow Spain and Portugal to simply divide up this new world if he could help it. The King of France had plenty reason to want to get the upper hand against his European rivals. He had been taken prisoner by the forces of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, in 1525. He was released after signing a treaty and ceding territory, but continued to fight on.

He just needed someone who could finally break through to the interior of the vast northern region not under his rivals’ control.

In Normandy, on a trip to the north of France, the King was told by the Abbot of Mont St. Michel about a seasoned sailor from neighbouring Brittany—who had the necessary skills to provide a breakthrough into the interior of the Americas. His name was Jacques Cartier.

Next, we’ll look at Cartier and his role in the discovery of Canada.

The present view of this era often denies a complex inheritance. In Canada, we should not be surprised to be in the midst of struggles over national identity. Our current mythology views the founding of the nation as at best a tragic mistake, with explorers transitioning from traditional heroes to one-dimensional villains.

To write off this period as irredeemably wicked ignores incredible feats of bravery, piety, and perseverance matched with equally brutish and harrowing accounts of violence and conflict—whether on the battlefields of Europe, along the Silk Road, on the seas, or in the New World.

Ironically enough, the current approach, which centres groups in the period perceived as marginalized and oppressed, could only come about in a culture which still views these meetings between worlds through Christian eyes.

Related posts:

Discovering Canada - What’s in a Name?

From Miklagard to Vinland: The Norse in the New World

In the Book of Genesis, God creates the Heavens and the Earth. He creates light, which He calls Day, and divides it from the darkness, which he calls Night. He then creates the sun and the moon; the dry land and the seas. God allows the stars to rule over day and night, and to divide light from dark. He forms the most basic, fundamental components of reality, names them, and sees them to be good.

God then makes man in His own image and likeness, to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”1

God assigns the first man with a task. Adam is to use the authority and power of ‘naming’ to establish his dominion over the animals. In The Language of Creation, author Matthieu Pageau describes this role of Adam as “lowering meaning” from heaven, and “raising matter”, from the earth.2 From the outset of his creation, man is a mediator between heaven and earth. Adam’s ability to use language separates him from the animals, and “serves as a vehicle to communicate between spiritual and corporeal realities.”3

Man uses speech to bring form to matter, just as God does in creating heaven and earth. Once in a Fallen state, Adam names his wife as well. Naming carries with it the power of bestowing identity, dominion, and ownership.

In trying to understand the story of a people or a nation, we are trying to ‘name’ the past—pinning it down, to control and understand it. We play the role of Adam to the best of our ability. Determining one’s origin is central to the name of a person or thing. If our beginnings are unclear, hidden, or shameful, it pervades how we feel about ourselves; it gives us a bad name.

We need to ‘lower meaning’ and ‘raise matter’ when navigating the past; to give things their proper name.

We’re concerned with how Canada first came into view and was ‘discovered’ and ‘named’ by the Christian world.

As the story goes, in the 1530s, the explorer Jacques Cartier encountered Indigenous groups around the St. Lawrence Valley, and asked them the name of the place they were from. Cartier misinterpreted the Huron-Iroquois word kanata meaning ‘village’ or ‘settlement’. The name stuck, and gradually it was applied to the entire region. These incorrect or miscommunicated namings are to be expected in meetings betweeen worlds—when meaning and fact (or heaven and earth) do not initally match.

The figures who ‘named’ Canada in this fashion were explorers, and adventurers who navigate liminal spaces. We should understand these men symbolically as operating on the limits of reality itself—passing into another world of chaos and potential. And away from the sacred, orderly, and safe centres of established knowledge and practice.

Mircea Eliade, the renowned historian of religion, explains the world’s limits according to “religious man”:

One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; everything outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of “other world”, a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, “foriegners”… The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in a sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world.4

Possibly the first European to discover the “other world” of Canada lived long before men like Cartier made their journeys. His adventures lie somewhere between legend and fact, and were spread all throughout medieval Europe. There are 125 surviving manuscripts dating from the tenth to the seventeenth century, of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot).5

Brendan of Clonfert (c. 485-575) is the central figure in these stories. He was one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland; a group of Irish monastic saints of the sixth century. He would become known as Saint Brendan the Navigator.

In the time of St. Brendan, Ireland contained few signs of urban civilization. It was on the fringes of the Christian world—the last outpost of man, home to steep rock cliffs, near constant clouds and rain, and dangerous waters—which all worked to keep it beyond the grasp of great conquerers like Julius Caesar.

It was men like St. Brendan who led the way in establishing monastic communities in sparsely populated settlements on the edge of the world. St. Brendan’s renown grew as he traveled around the British Isles, performing miracles and establishing centres of learning and prayer.

Brendan was always in search of new places to serve. As the story goes, “There grew up in [Brendan’s] heart a great love to the Lord, and he desired to leave his land and his country, his parents and his patrimony. He requested earnestly of the Lord that he would grant him some secret country, far removed from men.”6

Brendan then encountered another holy man who told him of his past travels to the Promised Land of the Saints. This holy man described a monastic community surrounded by all sorts of beautiful natural delights, days where the sun shines without end, and no one requires food, drink, or sleep.

After a brief stay on the island, the holy man was told by the monks there to return home, and tell of the place to his brothers.7 St. Brendan desired to see this island for himself, and asked God for guidance. After praying on top of a mountain, Brendan received a message of approval from an angel to undertake a journey to the island.

Brendan’s story contains both a call to adventure offered by stories of a distant paradisal land, (heaven lowering meaning) and Brendan’s willingness to take the journey (matter raising from the earth). St. Brendan then departs as a mediator of heaven and earth, in search of the Promised Land. He ventures out in a small boat with some 60 dedicated men of his monastic community.

At sea, the fringes of the world are gathered before the monks and their little boat. One island they visit is populated by giant mice, another is filled with dwarf-sized demons, others contain endless amounts of beautiful birds and plentiful fish. Unusual or unnatural proportions, hybrid creatures, and things which do not ‘fit in’—are to be expected in the spaces between worlds.

Through confusing and mysterious encounters, St. Brendan never loses hope that weathering the stormy seas will eventually bring them to the Promised Land. Of course, St. Brendan is blessed by God with the ability to calm his companions and deal with danger—flipping it for God’s purposes.

Brendan is able to wield authority of God in this place of extremes—to put things in order and give them their ‘proper name’. The monsters of the deep even offer themselves up in service of his divine mission:

God is able, said Brendan, to find a land for us in any place He pleases. When then Easter came, a great whale raised its shoulders high above the surface of the waves, so that it formed dry land. And then they landed, and celebrated Easter on it. And they were there one day and two nights. When they had entered their boats, the whale dived into the sea at once. However, it was thus that they celebrated Easter to the end of seven years on the back of the sea monster. For when it was near Easter each year, it would lift its back above the sea, forming regular dry land.8

Celebrating Easter on the back of a whale is actually a very clear example of acting as a mediator between heaven and earth—as Brendan is able to raise matter and imbue it with meaning from above—even on the chaotic and uneven ‘ground’ of the seas.

Ultimately, St. Brendan finds the Promised Land of the Saints. But much like the holy man who told him of the island, he is not to remain there long. St. Brendan encounters an elder monk on the island and asks him what he should do now that he has found paradise:

Is it (God’s) will for me, said [Brendan], that I should remain here till the day of doom? But the elder answered him on this wise: He who shall seek his own will opposes the will of God… depart to your own land, and instruct the men of Erin, for crimes and sins shall be corrected by thee… And when the elder had taken the body of Christ, His flesh and blood, [the elder monk] sent his spirit to heaven, and they buried his body then with great honour and marvellous respect. After this mutual converse Brendan and his monks proceeded to their boat. And they departed over the great-waved sea, and nothing unusual is narrated of their journeyings.9

St. Brendan is to remain a navigator and an explorer, one who enables future settlement in paradise—stopping for a while to plant down roots, without the guarantee that he will see them flower. St. Brendan is among the saints who built the foundations of the Church in Ireland, and along with that, the Irish people themselves. At the end of his journey, St. Brendan returns home—to give up his life:

So then, after traversing sea and land, after raising dead men, healing lepers, blind, deaf, lame, and all kinds of sick folk, after founding many cells, and monasteries, and holy churches, after appointing abbots and masters, after blessing cataracts and estuaries, after consecrating districts and tribes, after putting down crimes and sins, after great perils by sea and land, after expelling demons and vices, after pre-eminence in pilgrimage and (ascetic) devotion, after performance of mighty works and miracles too numerous to mention, St. Brendan drew near to the day of his death. Then said Brendan to the brethren after Mass on the Sunday, and after receiving the body of Christ and His blood: God, said he, is calling me to the eternal kingdom; and my body must be taken to Clonfert, for there will be attendance of angels there, and there will be my resurrection.10

St. Brendan navigates the space between legend and history. Many sites in Ireland bare his name due to his impact on the development of Christianity in Ireland.

And it turns out, even from a more academic, historically grounded perspective, the narrative of St. Brendan offers several insights into the real-life travels and deeds of Irish monastics across the north Atlantic. There are enough geographic markers and verifiable details in these stories that give a concrete sense of place, as historian Elva Johnston tells us:

It must be emphasised, from the outset, that much of the island geography which forms the core of the tale is, actually, real… [the] historical landscape of north Atlantic voyaging, directly inspired by peregrinatio, [monastic exile] underlies the Nauigatio. The use of the real, described using simple direct words, grounds the story and makes it more accessible. For example, the Island of Sheep and the Paradise of Birds, located beside each other and among other islands to the north of Ireland, are almost certainly the Faroes… the Island of Smiths ‘very rough, rocky, and full of slag’, seems to be Iceland.11

There have been several attempts to trace Brendan’s path more precisely, with some making the case the Promised Land he visited may have been North America, and Canada in particular.

Tim Severin, a British historian and explorer, dedicated much of his life’s work to retracing the steps of famous voyages of legend and myth. Over a period of 13 months, from May 17, 1976, to June 26, 1977, Severin successfully sailed from Ireland to Newfoundland in a recreation of a curragh—the traditional small leather boat in which it’s likely St. Brendan would have sailed.12 In his small vessel named the Brendan, Severin proved that such a journey was certainly possible.

We can read stories and look at maps as much as we’d like about these explorer’s voyages. But Severin understood better than almost anyone the real human experience of crossing into the unknown as St. Brendan had. Few places can test ones’ ability to mediate between heaven and earth than the seas of the north Atlantic.

To live as these men did is the only way to truly understand them and see the world as they did. Severin explains some of these moment-to-moment experiences on his journey:

The boat was like an animal, perhaps a whale, and I was lying inside its ribs like Jonah and feeling the boat change her shape to meet the enormous pressures of the sea. All around I could hear creaks and groans from the wood and the leather. The stresses and strains were colossal. The sides of the boat pumped gently in and out as though the Brendan were breathing.13

Severin’s crew also had to deal with monsters of the sea like St. Brendan, but of a slightly different variety:

Night came. A foul, black night complete with driving rain that reduced visibility to a few yards, broken only by the flashing white manes of the breakers and distant flares of lightning… “Jesus Christ! Where the hell did that come from!’’ Peter’s gasp woke me instantly. Something was wrong. In a mad scramble I tumbled out of the shelter, and found Peter heaving desperately on the tiller. Rolf, the rain trickling down his glasses, was gaping into the night. There, less than a hundred yards away, and with all her lights blazing, was a large factory trawler bearing straight down on us. Her bows were sending up huge bursts of spray as she slammed down on the waves, and she was pitching and rolling wickedly… The water boiled white around us from the trawler’s screws, and then she was gone, swallowed up in the raging gale, and totally unaware that she had nearly run us down.14

By recreating the journey, Severin and his crew proved that it was possible for St. Brendan to have been the first European to reach Canada.

Historian Gwyn Jones summed up the claims for these Irish monks being the first Europeans to reach the Americas as, “a good case with bad evidence” as opposed to the Norse some 400 years later: “a good case with good evidence”.15

L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, is the only undisputed site of pre-Columbus presence of Europeans in the Americas. It contains evidence a small community that was home to between 70 and 90 people of Norse origin, from around the year 1000.16

From humble Irish monks to proud Norse raiders, northwestern Europe produced adventurers and explorers who both found a place in the larger Christian story. Both peoples brought Canada into view for Christendom, and many of them would later make North America their new home.

From the time of St. Brendan, to the Vikings, to Cartier, Canada has symbolized the edge of the world. Canadians can and should acknowledge this position on the margins. But for much of our recent past, we’ve reinforced the idea of Canada being a space between worlds without providing a positive way of defining ourselves. For the past 60 odd years, we’ve welcomed the world across our borders. All while being next door to the most powerful empire on Earth.

There’s been tremendous changes to the ‘name’ of Canada as a result of these pressures. The current political moment has seen President Trump simply take prime minister Justin Trudeau at his word when Trudeau said, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” [and that] “makes us the first post-national state.”17 If we are a people without a name, why not try on a new one like ‘the 51st state’?

Embracing our origins of exploration and adventure can help us positively assert what it means to be Canadian. To see that we’re nested inside a much larger Christian story. And as much as we’d not like to admit it, we have quite a lot in common with our North American neighbours in this regard.

Or, we can continue to identify with the foreign and strange, and simply assert what we are not. But with few men around like St. Brendan to help us navigate, there are no guarantees we will rediscover Canada; should we continue down a path of forgetting our names entirely.

Related articles on Canadian history:

On the Norse in Canada: From Miklagard to Vinland: The Norse in the New World.

On Canada’s recent relations with the United States: