Let's do this.
Hi and welcome back to another episode of Maple History.
Joining me today is my husband, Simon, again.
Yet again.
Today we will wrap up the story of Carche's Voyages and the first proper attempts to
colonize Canada by the French.
Wait, should we do like a tagline?
Like it's like season three electric boogaloo or something.
Hashtag Fools Gold.
Fools Gold.
Sorry, spoiler there.
I think we all probably remember that from elementary school, like grade six or seven or
whenever we start this.
I remember finding Fools Gold and I thought it was like the best thing.
I was like, I found gold as a child.
Yeah.
You have that in common with Carche.
Sorry guys, spoilers.
If it's not really spoilers, it happened four or five hundred years ago.
Okay, we left off with Carche, absconding with ten staticonans, including the chief,
Donacona, his sons, Tainone and Dommagaille, some little girls and a few others, probably
Donacona's brothers.
So I hope that Donacona had a great time telling tall tales about one legged people, bat-winged
men and the funniest, the men with no assholes, to King Francis the first.
The best.
I mean, just constantly taking the piss.
Anyways, he likely died of a European disease by 1539.
Okay.
So Carche had planned on going back to Canada pretty quickly after his initial return to
France with Donacona and the others, but those plans were scuttled because Francis the first
had gone to war with Spain over control of part of Italy.
Whatever it was, Kingly crap over control of part of Europe.
Raid and conquer and like take assets and yeah.
Yeah, with other kings and whatever.
That's what they did.
They had sort of themselves out by 1538.
So it was a short little war.
And if you want a piece of trivia for your back pocket, it ended with the truce of Nice
on the 18th of June, 1538.
Okay.
I'm going to quiz you at the end.
Please don't.
Now that the king had more time to be to be influenced by Carche, Carche was able to
secure another commission to go to Canada, this time with five ships.
That's a lot.
So over the next year or so, Carche started gathering resources, finding men who would
be willing to join is this voyage.
It was hard to get people to join because they died all the time.
They died all the time and they were fisher, like the people that would go in these voyages
would be fishermen or just poor people and the risk was too high.
Yeah.
He did find some.
So it seems like the promise of a miserable sea voyage, possible scurvy over a winter beyond
their imaginations did not get the best people to sign up.
But they have heard stories by now of the craziness of Canada and the Canadian winters.
Probably because Saint Malo, that's where Carche was from and where he went back to.
Yeah.
All those people that were with him, they would have told, it would have been around, right?
Yeah.
They would have probably just become almost folk stories.
They would have been news around because they bring back indigenous people all the time.
Yeah.
So that word traveled.
But yeah, I betcha.
So they weren't getting a lot of people to join up because they needed a lot more people
that had five ships.
So Carche got permission to find some of the worst people to join.
He got permission to conscript 50 prisoners.
Oh, sweet.
Yeah.
That's he won.
Yep.
So they originally couldn't be counterfeiters or people convicted of talking smack about
the king or God known as the crime of, let's say, Magiste.
Okay.
Smack talkers.
So yeah.
But eventually one of them was a counterfeiter and they probably chose him because he'd be
able to see how good the gold was or silver, right?
So.
He's someone skilled and that.
Yeah.
Obviously he wasn't very skilled, but we'll get to that.
So Karate thought he was good to go.
And then the king decided to give command of the mission to someone a little fancier
than him.
Jean-Francois de la Roc, Cières de rubber val, an aristocrat.
Oh, nice.
That's yeah.
He was also a Protestant and a friend of the king.
Okay.
So in life Jean-Francois went by the name La Roc.
King ever goes bad when you give stuff away to people that are totally unqualified for
things.
Yeah.
Well, he was a soldier and he was a sailor.
Okay.
So he was.
He may have been qualified.
Okay.
All right.
Somewhat.
I mean, I mean, Karate was also a sailor.
You know, they were.
Yeah.
He was the king's friend and he basically, the king basically gave him this to help him
get out of bankruptcy.
Oh, nice.
So all right.
So he went by the name of La Roc, but historians have decided that the far less cool sounding
name, Robert Val, was what we're going to go with.
Oh, okay.
That's too bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It almost sounded like you said the rock.
That's like the rock.
Yeah.
Literally the rock.
Okay.
So the king had appointed him Lieutenant General Chief Commander Captain of the SED Enterprise
and given Robert Val authorization to distribute land to the supporters, the funders, the associates
of the expedition and then the exchange for the profits were going to go three ways.
So a third for the king, a third for Robert Val to cover his expenses and everything and
obviously make money and a third for the associates.
So Robert Val's commission had a new twist.
He was to distribute land and fiefdoms while spreading the true religion Catholicism.
Oh, did I?
I did imagine he's a Protestant.
Yeah, he did.
Yeah.
Anyways, that didn't matter.
That's amazing.
So he's Protestant.
But his whole thing is going to be spreading Catholicism.
Like that's part of the paper.
On paper, yes.
Okay.
So because it's important to keep the pope happy since France was going to going against
the papal bowl that gave Spain and Portugal the right to colonize the Americas.
Oh, okay.
So as long as proselytizing was part of France's official mission, okay, or official plans,
Francis figure that he could keep the pope off his back.
Okay.
No, that makes sense.
Who knows how devout Robert Val was, right?
Yeah.
Maybe he was.
I don't know.
Yeah.
So Cartier gets the shaft in favor of a Protestant buddy of the king, but keeps getting his
people and materials together as second in command.
Makes sense.
He has five ships and about 400 people.
It's a lot.
Yeah.
It's a men and women this time.
Oh, that's pretty rare, right?
Well, it's a full colonizing mission now.
Yeah.
The previous one was an exploratory mission.
Okay.
And this is like we found the place.
Let's go.
We found out here and then he still wanted to explore West to find Asia.
Okay.
But he needed to felt like that would be a place to stop, right?
Except for the whole, you know, North America to the West.
Yeah.
But they didn't know that yet.
Okay.
So already they were like, this is a settlement.
That's why they have the women and cows.
Yeah.
And cows.
I think they had brought sheep and stuff before for food.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Obviously they didn't last long.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
The 400 people, including the convicts, ready to go.
So he was ready, but Robert Bell was not.
So Robert Bell told him to go on without him and he would see him later in the summer.
So Cartier left France on May 23rd, 1541.
And he did not arrive instead of Kona until August 23rd, 1541.
So what's that?
That's three months.
Three months, yeah.
Anyways, so the must is sucked.
Yeah, that'd be a hard voyage.
Three months at sea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the first time he came to Canada, he got to Newfoundland in 20 days.
Yeah.
So shit must have gone really sideways.
Well, just like storms and like the winds going the wrong way.
Yeah, exactly.
So they finally arrived instead of Kona and Cartier is expecting a happy reception.
And they get one, but that's because they were expecting their people back.
Oh, okay.
So it wasn't Cartier.
They're like, where is he?
Yeah, we're over.
Where's my people?
So the new chief, Agona, if you remember, he was the guy that was part of the set.
That up, that Cartier wanted to take over because he was friendlier.
Yeah.
Is he now happy that Donna Kona didn't come back?
No.
Oh, no, because they were not like that.
Okay.
Historians know that Donna Kona may have warned Agona off.
Oh, wow.
Because he knew what was at play.
Yeah.
They saw Tainone and Damagaya were seeing the, like they knew these people and they spoke
the language, right?
So they would have been hearing whispers, right?
Yeah.
Or they know they knew the language well enough, right?
Yeah.
And maybe Carche had some guile, but the other guys that were with him probably did not.
No, they're probably.
Yeah.
So there was Yammer and Away to each other and Damagaya and Tainone were like, do they
not know to keep your mouth shut?
That's my, that's what I'm imagining.
Because I'm picturing this grand story, right?
Yeah.
Well, what?
You could picture a plate out with the forts and the arguing amongst each other.
Don't go in there.
No, we got to go in there.
We have to create a relationship so that we can get these trade goods and they're like,
don't do it.
This guy is lying.
Yeah.
And they're like, oh, but I have to go.
Yeah.
Anyways, my wife said to get me a pot.
Yeah, I needed a kettle.
Yeah.
So they arrived.
So Agona asks after Donna Kona and Carche tells them he's dead, but the others are alive
and well and they're living like lords.
They got married.
They're, it's great.
They're so happy.
But in truth, only one little girl was still alive.
So Agona seems to accept this story and gives Cartier a gift of a beat it had been
and acts cordially.
He didn't want to get thrown in the ship's hold and take him back to France.
Yeah.
He's seen that story before.
So it becomes pretty clear though that Agona does not believe that all is well with his
people back in France and he trusts Cartier about as far as you can throw him.
Cartier for his part in this thinks that Agona is on his side and is likely happy that Donna
Kona is dead because it leaves him the undisputed king of Canada.
He had the reaction that I did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cartier.
But he did not understand how politics works.
There's like, Stadakona was not the king and then the others were the dukes and lords
and whatever in the other subservient villages.
You were the chief with family ties and as long as those family ties and kinship ties
with the other ones kind of held and you led well, you kept your spot.
Yeah.
Well, I imagine based on how you're describing to me, it also sounds a lot like it was.
It was very merit based.
There's this recognition like they were doing a really good job for leading.
You might have had some disagreements or you wanted some amount of power, but it sounds
like very, very different type of society.
Yeah.
It's not like, you know, the king of the pride, like a lion's pride that he's that there's
always the younger lion who's coming to take him out.
That's not the case.
So Cartier is generally distrustful of the indigenous peoples similar to where he was
before that he didn't trust them.
So he travels up River to Cap Rouge where he sets up camp and calls it Charles Berg
Royale.
He makes some fortifications near the river and builds a fort on top of the cliff overlooking
the area of the river where he had landed.
Okay.
This did not go over well with Agona.
He would not have been pleased that his control of the river was affected by these interlopers
and he set up camp without permission.
He built things with 400 people and five ships.
And Cartier sent two ships back to France with news of what progress he made in Canada
so that they were keeping lines of communication open.
Okay.
So with the ship sent off and the Stata Conan's deeply offended by Cartier setting up camp
without permission, Cartier does what Cartier does best and that is set off for a hochilaga.
So on his way up river, he stops at Adelasi where he had had cordial relations with the
chief there and chief had given him one of the little girls.
Oh yeah.
This time Cartier leaves two boys with him with the intention that they could pick up
the language as future interpreters.
Okay.
He had learned at least one lesson from the last time he was in Canada which is that maybe
kidnapping teenagers from their homeland doesn't make them loyal Frenchmen.
And this is something that we'll see later with Champlain.
Does he try it as well?
Kidnapping?
No, the other way.
Oh okay.
He's like smart.
Yeah.
They leave the young boys with the with the with the indigenous people here on or sorry
with the Wendat.
Mm hmm.
Okay.
So Cartier carried on to hochilaga but the village may have moved or perhaps Cartier
has go far enough in to visit hochilaga so he doesn't actually visit them again.
Okay.
It's not really clear.
So what he does do is he goes and has a look at the Lachine Rapids with some smaller
boats and decides that again they look too dangerous to travel through.
Fair.
So back he went to his ships and found about 400 or so indigenous people surrounding them.
Oh.
So they were just there to trade or exchange gifts and they may or not may not have been
hochilagans.
Okay.
They wouldn't know right?
No.
That's a lot of people.
Yeah.
So since he hadn't stolen any of that group's people they were able to do the gifts exchanging
they were fine.
Cartier has headed back to Charlottesville, Groiel.
He stopped again at Adelessee and found that the chief had gone.
He had actually gone to meet with Agona.
Oh.
Which did not bode well for the new settlement.
So when he finally got back to Charlottesville, Groiel he found that the static covenants did
not want anything to do with the French anymore.
Yeah.
They were not trading with them.
They were not bringing fish.
Mm-hmm.
They were not throwing fish at them.
Okay.
Well, no.
It's not that they didn't want it and it nothing to do with them.
Sorry.
I misspoke.
They were killing them.
Oh.
They were picking them off.
Okay.
So they knew they couldn't take them in the fort with a full frontal attack.
Yeah.
So they were just like, oh, you're going to collect firewood.
No, you're not.
Yeah.
Arrows.
Yeah.
So it wasn't much written about the winter of 1541 to 42, but the static covenants did
travel up to Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Like their traditional hunting grounds where they get porpoises and seals and whatnot.
And then they met with probably their friends, some Spanish fishermen that also go down to
fish cod, right?
Oh.
And they told them that they had killed 35 French.
So clearly another shit Canadian winter for Cartier.
Yes.
Wasn't all bad though.
He found a vein of silver and gold nearest fort.
Oh, sweet.
And diamonds.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah, it's going to be fine.
The classic child finding rocks in the interior wilderness.
There's diamonds.
Yeah.
All right.
So what the hell was Robert Val doing during all this?
He was supposed to be there, right?
Yeah.
Robert Val was a man who liked to live large and in his preparations for departure, his
history of poor money managing reared its ugly head.
So he had wanted to bring an armory with him about ran out of money in this preparation.
So he decided to go privateering in 1541 to raise money for his journey.
So he went pirating.
So totally normal, good guy stuff.
So by the next year, he had enough to embark on his Canadian journey in 1542.
Okay.
Where did he go pirating?
The Caribbean?
No, no, not that far.
No, okay.
Half the coast of Spain, probably.
Oh, okay.
So I just get him when they're coming back.
Yes.
Yes.
So 1542 rolled around and Robert Val was still a no show at Charlottesville.
Royal.
So Cartier decided that he and his group couldn't take it anymore.
They couldn't stand the attacks of attrition by the static covenants.
So in June of 1542, he up sticks and sailed off for Newfoundland.
Okay.
With barrels of what he thought were gold, silver and diamonds.
Wow.
I guess that's how they kept themselves occupied.
They just like mining.
Just mining.
Just like a bunch of eight year olds.
So Cartier and his group had taken a break in what would become St. John's when they saw
Robert Val's fleet coming.
So Cartier had been preparing to leave when he saw Robert Val coming and was probably
like, oh, shit.
Yeah.
Robert Val was not happy that Cartier had boggered off from his place in the static
conant.
So Robert Val told him, get back in the boat, we're going to go conquering, I guess.
We had an armory.
So we must have also had like men fighting men, essentially.
Yeah.
And one of the ships that he had sent back to France had come back.
Okay.
The one that Cartier had sent back to France had come back.
Yeah.
So they had the full compliment of five ships now?
No.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So they sent two and one came back.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Actually, no, I got it twisted in my head here.
It wasn't Cartier's ship that came back.
It was Robert Val's ship.
I got them twisted.
So disregard that earlier.
But they're fine because they'd also lost some people.
Yeah.
Cartier was like, yeah, yeah, sure.
Yeah, we're going to go with you.
It's going to be fine.
That's going to be great.
We're going to do awesome stuff.
And then in the middle of the night, he just booked it.
Just piece of.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
So yeah, they was like, please, he's like, I'm rich.
I'm so rich.
All right.
So, as you said, Cartier thought he was going to be filthy rich and didn't want to share
with Robert Val.
Yeah.
Probably.
Who knows?
I mean, that's probably he's like, I'm going to take my money and run.
They say, start the car.
Start the car.
Start the car.
So Jokes on him, though, as all he had was Fools, Gold and Quartz.
And it gave rise to the French idiom as false as Canadian diamonds.
Oh, okay.
So that's what he's known for for a long time.
Yeah.
So I'm sure Robert Val was super pissed about this, but he had his mission and off he went.
So he set up camp at basically the same spot as Charles, Charles Bergroyel.
And he called it France.
Wow.
Great name.
And he spent August setting up their base.
And in September, he had sent two of his ships back to France to report to the king and bring
back supplies with Cartier gone and not able to tell them about the white spruce scurvy
hit hard that winter.
And they didn't have any friends.
They didn't have they had no damegaya to tell them because Cartier had burned that bridge.
Yeah, I don't know if these guys let them die.
So 50 people died.
Things must have seemed like a horror movie with people falling apart from scurvy.
Holiness turning on each other.
Like one dude was hanged.
Other people were whipped, including women.
Wow.
Things were dire.
Absolute nightmare fuel.
The only good thing is that the indigenous people seem to leave them alone.
Okay.
They're like, oh, there were a wreck.
There wasn't really any mention of attacks.
I mean, maybe there were some, but they just weren't really mentioned.
So by the time spring rolled around, one of the ships where we've all had sent to France
was on its way back to Canada.
And when it got to France, wa everyone loaded up and went home.
So they loaded up on the ships and they were all back by September 11th, 1543.
Never went back.
Never went back.
Okay.
That's that was horrible.
So despite the embarrassment with the courts and fools gold, Cartier just retired to his
estate and lived the rest of his days as a country lord.
He was already wealthy.
And he was fairly well regarded in the community.
And the evidence of this is that he was named godfather often in the baptismal records.
Oh, okay.
So he didn't have any children of his own, but he was just kind of one of the local lords
and people didn't seem to like him well enough.
Yeah.
Okay.
Even though he was a bit of piece of work, but like I guess to his local French man.
I mean, who knows on the scale of pieces of work.
Oh, yeah.
Versus all the other aristocrats.
Aristocrats, yeah.
In France.
He might have been nice.
Yeah.
He knows.
So Robert Val hung around the king and fought for him in different wars and whatever.
Okay.
Just carried on with basically doing the same thing he was doing before, but he was assassinated
when the wars of religion kicked off in France.
Oh, because he was a Protestant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So during during car chase time, this mission to colonize Canada was a failure.
Totally.
No one is a failure.
Loads of people died, which is normal, I suppose for a colonial effort.
And they came back with nothing.
No.
They were like a wing zipper full scalded quartz.
And a funny saying.
Yes.
So the writing and printing of car chase voyages, they were translated into other languages.
And it's those translations that survived not the originals.
Wait, were the first two even considered failures?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess you didn't really bring anything back.
Yeah.
These broad stories, which were awesome.
Yeah.
But I mean, I guess you could say like they were helpful because of the exploratory like
discovering the mouth of the St. Lawrence and descriptions of the wildlife.
He did go into detail about the animals and things like that.
So that is successful.
Yeah.
And that was useful for sampling.
Yeah.
But as for for colonizing, it didn't work.
No, no.
Everybody died in the game.
So Samuel disham plane, he knew about car chase voyages and had been looking forward to seeing
the creatures in just Canada.
So why does car chase loom as large as he does in our cultural awareness?
People know the name.
You've heard the name.
So and how does he go from a failure to a hero?
Yeah, because he wasn't like first.
Yeah, he didn't find Canada.
He found the St. Lawrence.
I mean, he didn't find the St. Lawrence.
Yeah.
Dumbagayan, Tinoine showed him the St. Lawrence.
Yes.
Yeah.
It was the first to be shown to St. Lawrence.
Yes.
How about we use that?
It's the rise of nationalism in the 19th century and the need for all the heroes you
can scrounge up to support your nationalist cause.
Okay.
So this led to in 1893, the people of Saint-Arry, which is part of Quebec City, erected a statue
with a fountain with much fanfare of Jacques Cartier with the following descriptive plaque
attached to Jacques Cartier, born at Saint-Malo on 31 December 1491, sent by Francois I to
the discovery of Canada on 20 April 1543.
Dropping anchor 16 July of the same year by the entrance to the St. Lawrence, he took
possession of the whole country in the name of the king, his master, and called it New
France 1843.
So how do we get from the dude who brought the world as false as Canadian diamonds to
the father of New France?
Alan Gordon explains in his book the hero and the historians, historiography and the
uses of Jacques Cartier, that it was part of how 19th century French Canadians were
inventing a national identity for themselves.
Yeah.
So he talks of Cartier, mania and his broad appeal to intellectuals and ordinary people.
By elevating people of the past to hero status, this helped people form bonds with one another,
which is so important when building a nationalist movement.
Yeah.
Gordon writes, like photographs of ourselves as children, heroic stories provide the framework
of a narrative that connects or identifies previous people with ourselves.
The key is that nations imagine these heroes as part of their community, as part of their
families, as part of themselves.
So that's why we have Car Chiqué.
So nationalism was really building a growing after Napoleon came through, because his concept
of France as a nation and spreading this idea.
So it was New France as you said the plaque was in 1843?
In 1893.
In 1893.
And it's the idea that New France has a country on its own like, yeah.
So in New France, in opposition to Canada.
Yes.
Because Quebec was part of Canada already.
Yes.
And then that grew and grew and so the French nationalist movement would continue to grow,
not to say that Cartier was the fuel for this.
No.
He's just one piece of the story.
He was one of the useful tools that was like deployed.
Yeah.
And it kept growing and building.
And then you get the quiet revolution in the 60s and that changed things in Quebec.
And then you get the 80s and the big separatist movement starting, which you probably remember
the separatist movement in the late 80s and the early 90s with the referendum and the
Meach Lake Accord and all this keeps, listen, I'm not saying that Cartier is the catalyst
to the Meach Lake Accords.
No.
I'm drawing a straight line here.
I'm just saying he's part of the story.
Yeah.
And he was a useful tool for Quebecois people to add his story to this lexicon of heroes.
Yeah.
He got added as a part of the mythology, even though he was pretty much like a failure.
Even Columbus was a failure.
He was a laughingstock.
The king and queen thought he was horrible.
Yeah.
And a monster.
Mm-hmm.
And the most interesting thing about the
who had been with him were like, you're super bad.
So yeah, he died a failure.
Mm-hmm.
But he got reworked into a hero.
Yeah.
And of the discovery of North America.
And same with John Cabot.
He was useful for the English.
Yeah.
Even though he was Italian, he was Giovanni Caboto.
Whatever.
Whatever.
He was working for the English.
He didn't feel bad for using his English-sized name.
No.
He didn't care.
No.
I don't think he gave a crap.
No.
Because he was using that to make money for himself.
So yeah, Jacques Cartier is part of those stories.
Cool.
So that's what happened to Cartier in his story and how it got reworked into this hero
story.
What about the indigenous people?
What happened to them?
Where did they go?
What about their story?
Well, their story got told that they just disappeared.
Yeah.
For about 40 years, people didn't come back to the Quebec area.
But they eventually did come back and they started getting furs and trading, whatever.
Basically using those Spanish-Bask connections, but not trying to colonize, per se.
They're just collecting resources.
And Cartier's nephew, who has a great name of Jacques Noel.
Oh, yeah.
He's like, yeah, my uncle told me that there was, they would have called them Indians.
They, oh, no, they wouldn't have called them Indians.
They would have, Cartier kept calling them Sauvage.
Oh, yeah.
That's not nice.
No.
There were no people there.
Yeah.
And where Ho Chilaga started calling, they're gone.
Oh.
So they disappeared.
Where'd they go?
They disappeared.
So historians started spinning the narrative.
Yeah.
Oh, they must have died of disease.
They, the wars.
It would have been the wars.
Like they're just getting fighting.
They're all died.
There's died.
Yeah.
I would have assumed disease.
Anyhow, that's next episode.
Oh, okay.
An interesting thing about the people, the indigenous people that we do know about in
the story, Donacona, his name gets used.
Guess what his name is used on?
Well, one is, there is a town of Donacona, Quebec.
That's fine.
I have a problem with that.
It's on a federal prison.
Oh.
One of the indigenous people that were kidnapped and imprisoned.
Yeah.
A Cartier.
The Donacona prison.
There's a Donacona prison.
It's a little on the nose.
Yeah.
And, you know, indigenous people are overrepresented in the prison population.
Yeah.
I mean, not okay.
People didn't think it through when they did that.
No.
They're like, oh, that's a great name.
Use that.
No.
So poor Donacona.
I'm fine with the town though.
I personally, I don't know.
I think it's fine to name towns after indigenous people as much as anyone.
All right.
Well, I'm excited for the next episode.
Yeah.
That's with Vanessa.
Yeah.
Oh, I'll have to listen.
Yeah.
And there's going to be talk with pottery bits.
Not looking forward to reading more about that because it's boring.
Oh, because to know you have to get back into archeology.
Yeah.
So we'll find out the story of truly who they were and why they're called the St. Lawrence
Iroquois.
But are they Iroquois?
Well, we'll see.
Okay.
That's listening.
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it.
I figured out to even if you just even if you can't comment, if you don't, if you're like,
I can't be asked to comment on that thing.
Don't don't stress about it.
But if you need to share it or just tell one person like in the old fashion way with talking
to people, that's also fine.
All of this is anything that you can do.
