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IX

The Sieur de Monts National Monument

As Commemorating

Acadia and Early French Influences of Race and
Settlement in the United States

ISSUED BY

THE WILD GARDENS OF ACADIA
BAR HARBOR, MAINE

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SIEUR DE MONTS PUBLICATIONS
IX

The Sieur de Monts National Monument
As Commemorating

Acadia and Early French Influences of Race and
Settlement in the United States

GrorGE B. Dorr

The Sieur de Monts National Monument combines in
a remarkable way three separate aspects: It is an ex-
traordinary Nature Monument, as such are termed
abroad, fitted to exhibit and preserve its regional life
in the widest range a single area can, and to set forth
its region’s geologic history; it is a great Recreation
Area, a park in the true popular sense, capable in the
highest degree of drawing city-wearied men and sending
them away refreshed and stimulated; and it is a Historic
Monument of singularly impressive character whose
ancient granite heights, sculptured in bold relief by ice
and sea, commemorate as they look out across the stormy
wilderness of the North Atlantic the men who sailed
across that wilderness in early days from ports of west-
ern France to settle on the Acadian shores or fish in the
Acadian seas.

The first commissions that resulted in permanent settle-
ment on the American continent to the north of Florida
were issued by Henry of Navarre, Henry IV of France,
in December, 1603, to Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts
and Governor of Pons, a Huguenot of noble family who
had served the King faithfully through the recent wars
and stood high in his esteem.

De Monts, then not over thirty years of age and in his
prime, was a native of Saintonge, a district facing on
the Bay of Biscay between La Vendée and Bordeaux,

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which was the home of Champlain also who accompanied
him to the Acadian shores. Born of one of the most
ancient families of France, that had served the Crown
for centuries with credit and distinction, all accounts
agree in praise of him as a brave and gallant gentleman.
Champlain who later wrote the history of the enterprise
speaks of him ever in terms of warm regard, and states
that the King had ‘‘great confidence in him for his fidelity,
as he ever showed, even to his death—,’’ while the Jesuit
missionary Francis Xavier de Charlevoix, writing over
a century later, described him, though a Huguenot, as
‘fa most honorable man of upright views and zealous for
the State, who had every quality necessary for success
in the enterprise committed to his charge.’’? Court in-
trigues and powerful trading influences seeking to control
the valuable fur-trade rights which had been granted him
and his associates to meet the expense of new colonial
establishments on a yet savage coast, forested to the
water’s edge, wrested at length his charter from him, to
be restored again, then lost again, till the assassination
of Henry IV, by a fanatic, on the 14th of May, 1610, in-
volved in a common ruin de Monts and the best interests
of France.

The Jesuits took wp in turn the work de Monts had left,
establishing a colony in 1613 at Mount Desert, the first
land touched on by Champlain within the limits of the
United States, when, in September, 1604, he sailed out from
its future boundary at the mouth of the St. Croix, where
de Monts was establishing his first colony, to explore
the neighboring coast. For a century after, till the peace
of Utrecht, France continued to hold the land it called
Acadia, a name which included until then the magnifi-
cently harbored coast of eastern Maine as well as Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick.

Had France, moved by the spirit of Henry IV and de
Monts, made some present sacrifice to consolidate what
their and other early enterprise had won instead of plung-

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ing again upon the death of Henry into factional politics
and religious strife, she probably and not Anglo-Saxon
nations would have controlled the larger destinies and
development of this continent.

It was a time of new beginnings when mighty rivers of
future history were gathering their first waters and es-
tablishing their yet doubtful course. France, through
the enterprise and adventurous spirit of the early
mariners and nobles on her western coasts, fronting the
Atlantic, won the first advantage in the occupation of the
new continent discovered on its opposite shores; she lost
her opportunity through the triumph of reactionary poli-
ties and selfish privilege which culminated in the French
Revolution’s fearful travail after thwarting for genera-
tions the best energies of the nation and destroying
largely or sending into exile her best blood.

The French Dominion
FRANCIS PARKMAN

The French dominion is a memory of the past; and
when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us
from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again
their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful hght
is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest,
mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close
fellowship on the same stern errand. A. boundless vision
erows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of
forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river,
lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling
with the sky. Such was the domain which France con-
quered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the
shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and
fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique
learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here
spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage
hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene be-
fore the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture,

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heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with
their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons
of toil.

It is amemorable but half-forgotten chapter in the book
of human life that can be rightly read only by widely
seattered lhehts.

W. EF’. Ganone

Striking description of the landing of de Monts and
Champlaim to lay the first foundations of Acadia, taken
from address delivered at the Ter-Centennial Celebra-
tion held at St. Croix Island on June 25th, 1904, in
which France, England and the United States were all
officially represented,

Three centuries ago today all the northern part of
America was one vast wilderness and all its mighty
sweep of forest and plain a solitude, save only where the
little groups of Indian lodges clung to the shores of its
lonely rivers.

In the year 1604 over a century had already elapsed
since Columbus had found the New World, and since
Cabot had explored its northeastern coast for Kngland
and marked it for the empire of the Anglo-Saxon. Over
three-quarters of a century had passed since Verrazano
had explored the same coast for France; and nearly as
long since Cartier had carried the fleur-de-lys up the
St. Lawrence, laying the foundation for the French do-
minion in America. Both nations had thus acquired
elaims to this continent, but neither had obtained any
foothold upon it. Both, indeed, had attempted settle-
ment, the English in Newfoundland and Virginia, and
the French at Quebee and Tadoussac; but both had
failed. Upon the whole continent only the Spaniard had
succeeded, for he had planted a small settlement in
Florida and others around the Gulf of Mexico; else-

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where, and everywhere to the northward, there was only
wilderness.

Such was the state of North America, when, on a fair
midsummer day, just three centuries ago, a tiny vessel
came sailing along the lonely Fundy coast from the east-
ward and turned her prow to the river on whose historic
banks we are now standing. She was a tiny craft that
thus appeared out of the unknown, for she was no larger
than the fishing sloops we know so well in our Quoddy
waters today. She carried about a dozen men, of whom
two bore the unmistakable stamp of leadership.

One was a prominent gentleman of France, lofty in
spirit, devoted in purpose, trusted of his King, the com-
mander of the company, Sieur de Monts. The other was
one of the great men whom France has given to the
world, a remarkable combination of dreamer and man
of swift and wise action. The intentness of his gaze as
one new feature after another unfolds itself along the
coast, and his constant use of compass and pencil, shows
him to be the geographer and chronicler of the expedition.
He was the first cartographer and historian of Acadia,
Samuel de Champlain.

But the little vessel is coming nearer; she reaches
our beautiful Passamaquoddy islands; she winds her
cautious and curious way among them; she crosses the
spacious bay; she enters our noble river; she sails up
the hill-bordered valley; she reaches the island where
today we placed our memorial, then unbroken forest;
her sails are furled; the leaders step ashore and, with
the air of men who have ended a weary search, declare
that it is good and that here they will plant the capital
of the New World.

Whence came this little vessel? What carried she that
we should here assemble three centuries later, to cele-
brate her coming?

She was the herald of the permanent occupation of
the northern part of America by Europeans. From the

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day the keel of her small boat grated on the beach of
St. Croix Island, this continent has never been without
a population of those races which have made the history
of the principal part of America,—the French and the
English. We celebrate today not only an event of great
human interest, but one of the momentous circumstances
of history, the actual first step of North America from
barbarism over the threshold of civilization, and the first
stage in the expansion of two of the most virile races
of Kurope into the wonderful New World.

Notre sy Kprror.—De Monts had left his well-equipped
and furnished larger vessel in safe moorings at St.
Mary’s Bay, upon the Nova Scotia coast—opposite
Mount Desert Island, at the eastern entrance to the
Bay of Fundy—while he and Champlain searched out,
m the little barque of a few tons described, a site wpon
the unknown shore beyond for their first colony.

Acadia at the End of the Seventeenth Century

Francis PARKMAN

Amid domestic strife, the war of France with Ene-
land and the Iroquois went on. Each division of the war
was distinet from the rest, and each had a character of its
own. As the contest for the West was wholly with New
York and her Iroquois allies, so the contest for Acadia
was wholly with the ‘‘Bostonnais,’’ or people of New
England.

Acadia, as the French at this time understood the
name, included Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the
greater part of Maine. The river Kennebec, which they
looked on as the true dividing line between their posses-
sions and New England, they regarded with the most
watchful jealousy. Its headwaters approached those of
the Canadian river Chaudiére, the mouth of which is
near Quebee; and by ascending the former stream and

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crossing to the headwaters of the latter through an
intricacy of forests, hills, ponds and marshes, it was
possible for a small band of hardy men to reach the
Canadian capital—as was done long after by the fol-
lowers of Benedict Arnold. Hence, it was thought a
matter of the last importance to control the river.

Since the wars of D’Aunay and La Tour, this wilder-
ness had been a scene of unceasing strife; for the Eng-
lish drew their eastern boundary at the St. Croix, and
the claims of the rival nationalities overlapped each
other.

Along the lonely coasts one might have sailed for
days and seen no human form. At Canseau, at the east-
ern end of Nova Scotia, there was a fishing-station and
a fort; Chibuctou, now Halifax, was a solitude; at La
Héve there were a few fishermen; and thence, as you
doubled the rocks of Cape Sable, the ancient haunt of
La Tour, you would have seen four French settlers and
an unlimited number of seals and sea-fowl. Ranging the
shore by St. Mary’s Bay and entering the Strait of
Annapolis Basin, you would have found the fort and
settlement of Port Royal, the chief place of all Acadia.
It stood at the head of the basin, where de Monts had
planted his settlement eighty or one hundred years be-
fore. At the head of the Bay of Fundy were two other
settlements, Beaubassin—the Beautiful Basin—and Les
Mines—the Place of Mines, comparatively stable and
populous. At the mouth of the St. John were the aban-
doned ruins of La Tour’s old fort; while at some dis-_
tance up the river stood the small wooden fort of Jem-
sec, with a few intervening clearings. Still sailing west-
ward, passing Mount Desert—another scene of ancient
settlement—and entering Penobscot Bay, you would have
found the Baron de Saint-Castin, with his Indian house-
hold, at Pentegoet, where the town of Castine now stands.
All Acadia was comprised in these various stations, more
or less permanent, together with one or two small posts

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on the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the huts of an errant
population of fishermen and fur-traders.

Rude as it then was, Acadia had charms—and has
them still—in its wilderness of woods and its wilderness
of waves; the rocky ramparts that guard its coasts; its
deep, still bays and foaming headlands; the towering
cliffs of Grand Menan; the innumerable islands that clus-
ter about Penobscot Bay; and the romantic highlands
of Mount Desert, down whose gorges the sea-fog rolls
hike an invading host while the spires of firs and spruces
pierce the surging vapors like lances in the smoke of
battle. Leaving Pentegoet and sailing westward all day
along a solitude of woods, one might reach the English
outpost of Pemaquid, and thence, still sailing on, might
anchor at evening off Casco Bay, and see in the glowing
west the distant peaks of the White Mountains.

Inland, Acadia was all forest, as vast tracts of it are
primeval forest still. Here roamed the Abenakis with
their kindred tribes, a race wild as their haunts. Their
villages were on the waters of the Androscoggin, the
Saco, the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the St. Croix, and
the St. John; here in spring they planted their corn,
beans, and pumpkins, and then, leaving them to grow,
went down to the sea in their birch-canoes. They re-
turned towards the end of summer, gathered their har-
vest, and went again to the sea, where they lived in
abundance on ducks, geese, and other water-fowl. During
the winter, most of the women, children, and old men
remained in the villages; while the hunters ranged the
forest in chase of moose, deer, caribou, beavers, and
bears.

Their summer stay at the seashore was perhaps the
most pleasant, and certainly the most picturesque, part
of their lives. Bivouacked by one of the innumerable
coves and inlets that indent these coasts, they passed
their days in that alternation of indolence and action
which is a second nature to the Indian. Here in wet

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weather, while the torpid water was dimpled with rain-
drops and the upturned canoes lay idle on the pebbles,
the listless warrior smoked his pipe under his roof of
bark; or launched his slender craft at the dawn of the
July day, when shores and islands were painted in
shadow against the rosy east, and forests, dusky and
cool, lay waiting for the sunrise. The women gathered
raspberries or whortleberries in the open places of the
woods, or clams and oysters in the sands and shallows,
adding their shells to the shell-heaps that have accumu-
lated for ages along these shores. The men fished,
speared porpoises, or shot seals. A priest was often
in the camp watching over his flock, and saying mass
every day in his chapel of bark. There was no lack of
altar candles, made by mixing tallow with the wax of
the bayberry, which abounded among the rocky hills and
was gathered in profusion by the squaws and children.
Some of the French were as lawless as their Indian
friends. Nothing is more strange than the incongruous
mixture of the forms of feudalism with the independence
of the Acadian woods. The only settled agricultural
population was at Port Royal, Beaubassin, and the
Basin of Minas. The rest were fishermen, fur-traders,
or rovers of the forest. Repeated orders came from the
court to open a communication with Quebec, and even
to establish a line of military posts through the inter-
vening wilderness; but the distance and the natural diffi-
culties of the country proved insurmountable obstacles.
If communication with Quebee was difficult, that with
Boston was easy; and thus Acadia became largely de-
pendent on its New England neighbors, who, says an
Acadian officer, ‘‘are mostly fugitives from England,
guilty of the death of their late King, and accused of
conspiracy against their present sovereign; others of
them are pirates; and they are all united in a sort of inde-
pendent republic.’’ Their relations with the Acadians
were of a mixed sort. They continually encroached on

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Acadian fishing-grounds, and we hear at one time of a
hundred of their vessels thus engaged. They often
landed and traded with the Indians along the coast.
Meneval, the governor, complained bitterly of their arro-
gance. Sometimes, it is said, they pretended to be for-
eign pirates, and plundered vessels and_ settlements,
while the aggrieved parties could get no redress at Bos-
ton. They also carried on a regular trade at Port Royal
and Les Mines or Grand Pré, where many of the in-
habitants regarded them with a degree of favor which
gave great umbrage to the military authorities, who,
nevertheless, are themselves accused of seeking their
own profit by dealings with the heretics. The settlers
caught from the ‘‘Bostonnais’’ what thei governor
stigmatizes as English and parliamentary ideas, the
chief effect of which was to make them restive under his
rule. The Church, moreover, was less successful in ex-
eluding heresy from Acadia than from Canada. A num-
ber of Huguenots established themselves at Port Royal,
and formed sympathetic relations with the Boston Puri-
tans. The bishop at Quebee was much alarmed. ‘‘This
is dangerous,’’ he writes; ‘‘I pray your Majesty to put
an end to these disorders.’’

“‘Men know little of the consequences of their actions.
It was the Stuart policy of religious intolerance at home
and of allowing colomes as safety valves for dissent which
laid the sure foundation of the future United States.”’

—Cambridge Modern History.

After the Peace of Utrecht

Francis PARKMAN
‘Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was
strengthening with slow but steadfast growth. By name,
local position and character, one community stands forth
as the conspicuous representative of this antagonism—
Liberty and Absolutism, New England and New France.”

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After the Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, the contest between
France and England in America divided itself into
three parts,—the Acadian contest; the contest for north-
ern New England; the contest for the West. Nothing is
more striking than the contrast in the conduct and
methods of the rival claimants to this wild but magnifi-
cent domain. Hach was strong in its own qualities, and
utterly wanting in the qualities that marked his opponent.

On maps of British America in the earlier part of the
eighteenth century, one sees the eastern shore, from
Maine to Georgia, garnished with ten or twelve colored
patches, defined, more or less distinctly, by dividing-lines
which in some cases are prolonged westward till they
touch the Mississippi, or even cross it and stretch on in-
definitely. These patches are the British provinces, and
the westward prolongation of their boundary lines rep-
resents their several claims to vast interior tracts,
founded on ancient grants but not made good by oceupa-
tion, or vindicated by any exertion of power.

These Knglish communities took little thought of the
region beyond the Alleghanies. Hach lived a life of its
own, shut within its own limits, not dreaming of a future
collective greatness to which the possession of the West
would be a necessary condition. No conscious community
of aims and interests held them together, nor was there
any authority capable of uniting their forces and turning
them to a common object. Hach province remained in
jealous isolation, busied with its own work, growing in
strength, in the capacity of self-rule and the spirit of in-
dependence, and stubbornly resisting all exercise of
authority from without. If the English-speaking popu-
lation flowed westward, it was in obedience to natural
laws, for the King did not aid the movement, the royal
governors had no authority to do so, and the colonial as-
semblies were too much engrossed with immediate local
interests. The power of these colonies was that of a

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rising flood slowly invading by the unconscious force of
growing volume.

In the French colonies all was different. Here the
representatives of the Crown were men bred in an atmos-
phere of broad ambition and far-reaching enterprise.
Achievement was demanded of them. They recognized
the greatness of the prize, studied the strong and weak
points of their rivals, and with a cautious forecast and a
daring energy set themselves to the task of defeating
them.

If the English colonies were comparatively strong in
numbers their numbers could not be brought into action;
while if the French forces were small, they were vigor-
ously commanded, and always ready at a word. It was
union confronting division, energy confronting apathy,
military centralization opposed to industrial democracy ;
and, for a time, the advantage was all on one side.

The demands of the French were sufficiently compre-
hensive. They regretted their enforced concessions at
the Treaty of Utrecht, and, in spite of that compact, main-
tained that, with a few local exceptions along the Atlantic
Shore, the whole North American continent, except
Mexico, was theirs of right; while their opponents seemed
neither to understand the situation, nor to recognize the
greatness of the stakes at issue.

“The Articles in the Treaty of Utrecht which dealt
with cessions made by France to Great Britan wm the New
World are justly regarded as the real begimnings of the
expansion of the British Colomal Empire in America—
hence, also, of the United States and its democracy. It
was a notable event accordingly wm the view-poimt of
World History when, by the Treaty’s terms, Acadia—
save Cape Breton Island—was assigned to England.”

—Cambridge Modern History.

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