Samuel de Champlain’s decision to make the St. Lawrence valley the focus of New France had been sustained for a century. Except for a few trading posts on Hudson Bay and the fragile colonies in Newfoundland and Acadia, the community that had arisen from Champlain’s Habitation at Quebec remained the only European society in northern North America. By 1700 about fifteen thousand colonists lived in Quebec City, Montreal, Trois-Rivieres, and on the steadily expanding farms that formed an almost continuous band of settlement between them. French traders and explorers had followed Native canoe routes almost as far west as the Great Plains, but outside the narrow St. Lawrence valley the vast northern half of the continent remained almost without European settlement. Shortly thereafter, other French communities in different parts of the continent buttressed the St. Lawrence region of New France, the part that in the eighteenth century came to be specifically referred to as “Canada.” The French territorial claims in North America would grow rapidly, and they would confront an ever-larger British presence, as New England, New York, Virginia, and the other colonies pushed inland from the Atlantic seaboard. As colonial populations and territorial claims expanded, relations with other colonies would begin to loom as large for New France as its relations with the Native nations.
After 1713, British settlement in Newfoundland began to grow. During the war the outports and their vital sea links to Europe had been under constant threat. The lifting of this threat enabled more fishermen to become year-round settlers, and by the mid-eighteenth century Newfoundland had 7,500 settlers, including a growing number of women and children. They were still outnumbered by transient fishermen who came each summer from Europe, but they were becoming a permanent and vigorous community. Most Newfoundlanders were outport settlers, building their homes around scores of tiny, rocky harbours along the eastern coast. Climate and landscape made farming almost impossible, and even the forests grew so slowly that the settlers’ woodcutting soon made the Avalon Peninsula and the northern coast a treeless barren. So the settlers imported most of their food and supplies, and by the mid-eighteenth century these came from New England more than from Europe. They caught salmon and seals and, above all, cod, and shipped it primarily to southern Europe and the Caribbean rather than to Britain. Though Newfoundland still had no official colonial institutions, St. John’s began to develop as a trading port and the home of a number of merchants. As late as 1750, the Newfoundlanders were still
In 1720 the builders of Louisbourg placed a commemorative medal beneath the foundations of one of the town’s bastions, where archaeologists discovered it again in the 1960s. The medal shows the fortress and the fishing boats that were the basis of its prosperity.
In 1684, Intendant Jacques de Meulles found he was short of coins to pay his soldiers; he resolved the problem by signing and distributing playing cards that could be redeemed when the king’s pay-ship arrived in New France. Thereafter, printed forms were used for the colony’s credit needs, but the name monnaie de carte endured. This modern watercolour-and-ink copy, attributed to Henri Beau, shows an example bearing the date 1714 and the signature of Intendant Michel Begon.
Mostly West Country English in origin, but the flood of Catholic Irish settlers who would create the Irish traditions of the island had already begun.
France had been forced by the Treaty of Utrecht to evacuate its fishing outpost of Plaisance on the south coast of Newfoundland. (It would not acquire the nearby islands of St-Pierre and Miquelon until another peace treaty produced further changes in 1763.) It turned to Cape Breton Island, which it renamed He Royale. To make He Royale a centre of power on the seaboard, France installed a full colonial administration and a garrison of troops. Louisbourg, founded on the east coast of the island in 1713, became He Royale’s capital, and twenty-five years of labour gave the town the most elaborate fortifications in New France. By the 1740s Louisbourg was one of New France’s principal towns. Fully two thousand of He Royale’s five thousand people lived behind the town’s encircling stone-and-mortar ramparts.
He Royale quickly developed a fishing industry similar to that which the British settlers were creating in Newfoundland. Its resident fishermen and those of the fleets that came annually from France to join them may have produced as much as a third of the French New World catch. This generated a busy shipping trade in Louisbourg, And in barely a decade the town began to rival Quebec City as a seaport. Although it was part of New France, He Royale lay several days’ sail from the older community that was now referred to as Canada, and it grew into a distinct, and strongly commercial, society. The merchants of Louisbourg shipped cod to Europe and to French islands in the Caribbean such as St-Domingue (Fiaiti) and Martinique. They received sugar, coffee, and rum from the Caribbean, textiles, food, and manufactured goods from France. They passed these on, partly to Canada in trade for foodstuffs, but also to the New England colonies in exchange for ships, building materials, and livestock. Despite the growing commercial rivalry between the British and French empires, the French Crown grudgingly accepted this New England trade, too practical to be forgone. Under the same dispensation, Louisbourg also traded with the Acadians, now living under British rule in mainland Nova Scotia.
Although they had been thrust from French to British rule in 1710, the Acadians thrived in the peace of the early eighteenth century. The small community was so interrelated that half the marriages at Annapolis Royal (formerly Port-Royal) required a dispensation from the usual limits on marriages between relatives. Nevertheless the population grew from barely two thousand in 1700 to more than ten thousand by the late 1740s. Served by French priests but untrammelled by seigneurial exactions or military demands, and with few British settlers to disturb them, the Acadians were left to reap substantial harvests from the rich land that their dikes protected from the Fundy tides. Dealing with both sides but feeling dependent on neither, the Acadians worked out a complicated neutrality. The isolated British commanders in Acadia learned that their subjects would acknowledge British rule but asserted a right not to bear arms against the French. In peacetime the compromise demanded hy “the neutral French” seemed tolerable to all, and the Acadians seemed able to live successfully under alien rule, the first French population in North America to do so.
World History
