The Speares

La Vieille Capitale

Today we're leaving Saint John and heading to la vieille capitale, la ville de Québec. Québec City has long been of vital importance to the First Nations folks, the French and even for a time the English. But interestingly, it owes its very existence to being of no value. At least to the the brand new country of Spain.

In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That was August 3rd, 1492. Eight months earlier, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were broke and an expedition to the Indies was the last thing on their minds. They had suddenly inherited a lot of foreigners.

As early as the time of Solomon, but certainly by the time of Julius Caesar, Jewish folks had been settling on the Iberian Peninsula. A few centuries later, in 711 AD, Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād led an army of 7,000 Berbers and Arabs north from the Maghreb in Africa, across the Rock of Gibraltar (a corruption of Jabal Ṭāriq, or mountain of Ṭāriq) and imposed Muslim rule on the previously Christian and/or Jewish Hispaniola. And then all hell failed to break loose.

Broadly speaking, Muslims were progressive rulers. They tolerated the dhimmis (Jews and Christians) so long as they did not blaspheme the name of the Prophet and paid their special non-Muslim tax. For Muslims, there was one simple rule to follow when interacting with the dhimmis - don't. In particular, you would never enter one of their disgusting churches, "for the priests are fornicators, adulterers and pederasts." And so relations amongst the various peoples of the Iberian Peninsula were strained but mostly peaceful for almost 800 years. And then the Heir to the Kingdom of Aragon married the Heiress Presumptive of Castile and León. And then all Hell did in fact break loose.

The first thing King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella did was to kick the Moors (Muslims) out of the Emirate of Granada. But not their stuff. The second thing they did was to expel all of the Jews. But not their money.

Of course, they weren't being unreasonable about it. Muslims and Jews were quite welcome to stay - they simply had to convert to Christianity. They would then be considered converso Moriscos or converso Marranos, people who were shown the light and baptised under the gentle tutelage of Tomás de Torquemada, whom we'll revisit another day. In any event, with the fire of Christianity blazing like a red-hot pair of tongs and a very sudden improvement in the royal bottom line, the monarchs decided the time was right to turn the newly formed Kingdom of Spain into the Spanish Empire. So they sent Cristóbal Colón off in the carrack Santa Maria accompanied by the caravels Pinta and Niña to find the more direct route to the Indies.

So as not to cause conflict with the only other naval power, Portugal, they entered into the Treaty of the

Tordesillas, which gave Portugal exclusive rights to what would become Brasil, and Spain got exclusive rights to everything else. In the early part of the 16th century there were as many as ten thousand Spaniards living in the New World, mostly around places that would become Florida, California and the Caribbean, and points south. Which left all of the north part unexplored and uninhabited from the point of view of France, a fledgling power being very thoroughly left behind in the race to take the New World from those who lived there. Which brings us back to Jacques Cartier.

In 1541 Jacques was commanded by King Francis to create a settlement in the New World to compete with the Spanish, with whom France was continually at war. The settlement was to be north of New Spain and also away from British held Newfoundland. Jacques had previously sailed to the village of Stadacona, known colloquially as "the village", or kanata, and had friendly dealings there with the locals. So he decided to make his settlement, Fort Charlesbourg-Royal, at the confluence of the Cap-Rouge and St. Lawrence rivers, a few miles upstream from Stadacona. In May of 1541 he set out with one hundred settlers, five tall ships and the new governor of Canada, Jean-François de la Roche de Roberval. And they set off in search of friendly natives.

Now the thing about those friendly natives is that Cartier had kidnapped their chief, his sons, and several others on a previous voyage and sent them all to France where they died. He had also caused outbreaks of disease amongst those who remained in Stadacona, killing at least fifty villagers. So any remaining Iroquois were ill-disposed to friendship towards the French. Which was OK because the Iroquois were being wiped out and replaced by the more war-like Toudaman (possibly Mi'kmaq) who had no reason whatsoever to be friendly towards invaders. So Cartier had a different experience with the locals this time.

That first winter thirty-five colonists were killed by First Nations people. More were lost to scurvy, a devastating disease caused by a lack of vitamin C in the diet. The cure for scurvy was simple - it is a tea called Annedda which is made by brewing cedar leaves in water. But to get it you need to travel outside the fort and into the wilds, which is where the warriors are. Faced with the devastating failure of his new colony, Roberval decided to return to France and come back with yet more colonists.

On his return voyage to Canada, Roberval met Cartier coming the other way. Cartier had wisely decided to abandon Charlesbourg-Royal and return to France. Roberval continued on, and he and his new colonists made it through another agonizing winter before abandoning the newly renamed France-Roy. And that was it for France's attempts at colonizing the New World for almost sixty years.

In 1598 France once again tried to form a permanent colony in the New World. The new Governor, the Marquis de la Roche, wisely decided to try a colony far away from the mainland, out of range of war canoes. He picked Sable Island, a desolate sand spit three hundred kilometers off the mainland and quite uninhabited. Since no one was anxious to accompany him on his voyage, he rounded up two shiploads of convicts, beggars and vagabonds and set about building the colony on the north shore. By October, all was well and la Roche returned to France. He sent further supplies and settlers in each of 1599, 1600 and 1601. But not 1602. By 1603 there were eleven survivors, and they returned to France, abandoning Sable to the wind and the sand.

Meanwhile, Pierre Chauvin, a merchant from Honfleur in Normandy, acquired a monopoly on the lucrative St. Laurent fur trade, which was centered at the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers. He set about building a year-round trading post there and called it Tadoussac. This was the year 1600. Chauvin had discovered the key to successful indigenous relations: trade. And that was just as well; the French still had no idea how to survive a Canadian winter and Tadoussac was abandoned mid-winter. The residents took shelter with their First Nations neighbours. Among them was François Gravé Du Pont, the uncle and mentor of a young man named Samuel de Champlain.

Champlain was at his uncle's side and participated in some of the more successful attempts at settlement.

In 1605, he helped build Port Royal in Acadia. Later on, he was there for the construction of a settlement that would one day be Saint John, New Brunswick. But his first solo claim to fame was in 1608 when he founded a settlement that he called Québec, at the point where the St. Lawrence River narrowed, near the site of the ill-fated Fort Charlesbourg-Royal from two thirds of a century before. Champlain went on to have many adventures which we'll talk about another day, but with the founding of Québec he became, at least unofficially (he was a commoner after all), the Governor of New France.

Québec the settlement has been in existence ever since, although it has changed hands a few times. In 1629 an English privateer (pirate) named David Kirke captured the resupply convoy sailing to the colony from France. It was then an easy matter to lay siege to the settlement until Champlain surrendered. Champlain later cried foul as the Anglo-French War was technically over when Kirke seized control. King Charles of England and Louis XIII of France worked things out, Louis payed the dowry of Charles' wife and the lands of Québec and Acadia were returned to the French Company of One Hundred Associates, a fur trading concern.

Since then, the city has been attacked unsuccessfully by the British in 1690, attacked and taken by the British after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, ceded to the British after the Seven Years' War in 1763, attacked by American Revolutionaries in 1775, massively fortified and therefore not attacked during the War of 1812, and finally, instrumental in the Confederation of Canada in 1867, during which process Queen Victoria decreed that La Ville de Québec would be the capital of the new Province de Québec, but not the capital of the new country of Canada. We'll talk more about that tomorrow.

So here we are at the almost oldest European city in North America, still surrounded in part by the original walls. Bienvenue à Québec!

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