From 1663 to 1763 the King of France ruled New France. Both Louis xiv and his great-grandson after him, Louis xv, actively shaped colonial policy, and their Ministers of Marine (the Marine department administered the navy and the colonies) were remarkably consistent in giving close attention to colonial matters. Successful ministers stayed in office for decades, and they left the margins of thousands of pages of reports, proposals, and requests marked with their handwritten verdicts: “Bon" “Non" “Non absolument" and with succinct policy directives that their clerks would expand into detailed instructions. The great palace at Versailles, just beginning to be built at the start of royal government in New France, was the real centre of colonial government. In the colony, the King’s authority passed down through two officials. The Governor General, usually a military aristocrat, represented royal power both symbolically and directly. Fie commanded the armed forces, directed “foreign relations” with the British colonies and the Aboriginal nations, and presided as the vice-regal representative at state and public occasions.
No commander ever filled the office more strikingly than Louis de Buade de Frontenac, a bold commander with a flair for dramatic gestures who was Governor General from 1672 to 1682 and again from 1689 to his death, aged seventy-six, in 1698. Frontenac was an inspiring leader in the colony’s wars, but his imperious rule and constant efforts to find fur-trade income to pay the debts of his extravagant style of life alienated many. Frontenac was not the only governor to resent limits on his freedom of action, for much of the daily administration of the royal colony was actually the responsibility of another official, the Intendant. The Intendant, usually from the minor, administrative nobility, handled military pay and provisioning and was New France’s civil administrator as well. His responsibilities included finances, justice, and police—this latter being a catch-all for the order and well-being of the colony.
Governor and Intendant were aided by a council, the Conseil Souverain (later Conseil Superieur), which became the colony’s highest court and was supported by a series of lower royal courts. Under royal government, a colonial military establishment gradually developed. With the royal treasury supporting New France, the governing institutions of the colony could grow far beyond what the Cent-Associes had provided. Clerks, storekeepers, bailiffs, local agents, and port and road officials were gradually added to the Intendant’s staff. Even the church felt the organizing influence of the new royal power. Native resistance, the disaster in the Huron mission, and the growing needs of the colonial population helped tame the missionary fervour that had typified the church’s early years. Bishop Francois de Laval, who had come to the colony under the Cent-Associes, continued to wield great influence, but the coming of royal government generally meant the fading of clerical dominance over the affairs of the colony. On the other hand, royal authority aided the clergy in Shaping a diocese, a parish structure, and a system of tithes to support the coiony’s priests. New France had been reserved for Cathoiic settiers since 1627, and aithough the presence of a few Protestants was toierated, Protestant marriages and reiigious ceremonies were aiways forbidden in the coiony.
For the peopie of New France, the first great consequence of royai government was the end of the Iroquoian wars. Louis xiv was prepared to defend his colony, and the Regiment de Carignan-Salieres, more than a thousand, reinforced the colonial militia that had been resisting the Iroquois onslaught strong. It arrived at Quebec in 1665 with orders to invade the Iroquois country. Though the troops were unable to inflict much damage on the Iroquois, their intervention proved decisive. Already struggling with terrible losses from war and epidemics, the Iroquois made peace with New France and its Native allies. In 1667 a comprehensive treaty ushered in twenty years of peace. Small groups of Catholic Mohawks even moved north to found Kahnawake and other Mohawk communities near Montreal. The King’s colony could now concentrate on its own development.
By the 1660s, as the French colony in the St. Lawrence valley began to grow again, European settlements were taking shape in other parts of what is now Canada. In 1608 Champlain had rejected Port-Royal as a colonization site because of the
Francois de Laval (1623-1708) came to New France in 1659, when the colony had barely two-thousand people; in 1674, after a long power struggle between the Pope and Louis xiv, he became the first Bishop of Quebec. Although a stern and determined cleric, he carried out his duties with charity and practicality, retiring in 1685 into spiritual retreat at the Seminaire de Quebec, which he had founded in 1663. Bishop Laval also established a school of arts and crafts in which sculpture and painting were taught. Portrait in oils attributed to Laval’s protege, Claude Francois dit Frere Luc (1614-85), painted c. 1672.
Difficulty of asserting control over the long, indented coast of Acadia. (The name may come from an Algonquian root, though “Arcadia,” a reference to the classical image of rural contentment, which the explorer Verrazano had applied to part of the American coast, also influenced its adoption.) The events of half a century confirmed Champlain’s insight. Although French fur traders and missionaries had soon reoccupied the abandoned colony at Port-Royal, the rival colonizing efforts of Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt, Nicolas Denys, Charles de St-Etienne de La Tour, and Charles de Menou d’Aulnay mostly generated fruitless skirmishes. One British venture was particularly short-lived. In the 1620s, Sir William Alexander, a Scottish poet and courtier to the Stuart kings of England, made elaborate plans for a Scottish colony north of New England. Elis expedition produced little beyond an enduring name—Nova Scotia.
The outposts these colonizers struggled for years to build and maintain in Acadia were chronically subject to attacks from one another and from New England, Virginia, and other English colonies to the south. Yet, if maintaining a coherent colony was impossible in Acadia, settlement was not. Gradually, starting in the 1630s, a small French population took root, particularly around the trading post of Port-Royal on the Bay of Fundy. The Mi’kmaq, rapidly integrating Christianity into their own culture and with their numbers seriously reduced by epidemics, accepted the colonists’ presence, and the Acadian society was born, less from colonization projects than from the efforts of handfuls of individuals (there were Scots, Irish, Basque, and Mi’kmaq as well as the French) to find lives for themselves in the new Acadian community.
The settlers of Acadia confronted the mighty tides of the Bay of Fundy, which can rise and fall fifty feet at the head of the bay, and they soon began diking to create fertile new land from the tidal flats. The first dikes were simple sod ramps laid between high points, but over the decades they became more elaborate, enclosing an increasing acreage and equipped with sluices to drain away rainwater without letting in the salt tides. Gradually the sheltered parts of the Bay of Fundy shore were ringed with grassy, 1.5-metres (5-foot) dikes enclosing fertile fields where the Acadians raised wheat and livestock. The Acadians were French in origin and language, but the colonies of New England to the south were far closer and easier to reach than Quebec. Trading with the English in peacetime and often controlled by them when wars broke out, the Acadians began to refer to their New England neighbours as “nos amis I’ennemi.” Although the coming of royal government to New France eventually brought French governors, garrisons, and institutions to Acadia, the shaping of Acadian neutrality had begun.
Farther east, settlements were also forming out of the Newfoundland cod-fishing industry. The cod trade, of course, had long preceded settlement. There may have been more fishermen visiting Newfoundland during the obscure sixteenth century than during the early seventeenth-century years when Samuel de Champlain’s colony was being founded. Through both these centuries, fishing remained mostly a transient industry despite some attempts to promote settlement. Fishing fleets came each
Whaling and fishing were European industrial processes transported to the coves and bays of Atlantic Canada. Fishermen caught the cod and delivered them to the wharf, where shore crews split, cleaned, and washed the fish, collected the cod-liver oil, and finally laid out the fish to dry. This engraving, inset in Herman Moll, Map of North America, 1718, is based on a vignette entitled La Pesche des Morues.. .in Nicolas de Fer’s 1698 map of North and South America.
Dutch-born painter Gerard van Edema (1652-1700) travelled to Newfoundland and the American colonies under English auspices around 1690, but if the title of this oil is correct in locating the scene in Placentia Bay, the picture must represent one of the fishing stations of the French colony established on Newfoundland’s south coast from the 1660s to 1713.
Spring from England, France, Spain, or Portugal, and they took their dried or brine-soaked catch back home in the autumn. Although they might spend most of the summers of their lives in Newfoundland, most fishermen never established residence or spent a winter there. The European ports that invested in the cod fishery preferred it that way, fearing that colonial fishing ports would become their competitors.
Cod was at least as expensive as beef, and Europe lacked the means to transport it far inland, so only a minority of Europe’s people ever ate Newfoundland cod, yet the cod trade was always much larger and more valuable than the fur trade. Along the English Channel, the preference was for “green” cod, lightly pickled in brine, but most Newfoundland cod was split, salted, and exposed to sun and air until it was perfectly hard and dry. Dried cod could be preserved for months or years, and it was this dried product from North America that opened a market for cod on the hot southern coasts of Europe. French and English fishermen competed for this market in Portugal, Spain, and into the Mediterranean.
To dry the cod, fishermen occupied the shores of Newfoundland from spring to fall, displacing the Beothuk people of the island, who were forced to the inhospitable interior of the island. By the end of the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had withdrawn from the fishery, so it was England and France that competed for fish and territory in Newfoundland, and a few permanent settlements began to appear. In 1610 John Guy of Bristol led a party of settlers to Conception Bay, and in the next decade Lord Baltimore began a short-lived settlement of English Catholics at Ferryland on the Avalon Peninsula. Baltimore soon shifted his interests south to Maryland on Chesapeake Bay. For most of the seventeenth century the fleets of fishermen who came And went from Europe had overshadowed the handful of settlers in Newfoundland.
By the late 1600s, English Newfoundland meant the eastern shore of the island, from Trinity Bay and Conception Bay to Ferryland and Renews south of St. John’s. Here barely a thousand men—with a few women and children—might winter every year. They were joined every summer by thousands of fishermen from England. St. John’s, a rendezvous of fishermen since the 1500s, was already the largest settlement, but people were scattered among a score of outports, wherever there was a harbour and an adequate supply of fish. French fishermen, travelling back and forth from Basque, Breton, and Norman ports, fished each summer on the northern coast of Newfoundland. About 1660 a small French settlement colony called Plaisance, complete with governor, garrison, fortifications, and a few hundred people, was formed on the south coast of the island.
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