We Have
Champlain's [284] Authority For This Historical Fact, Though, Charlevoix
Erroneously Asserts That The Great Discoverer Wintered On The Banks Of The
River Jacques Cartier, Twenty-Seven Miles Higher Up Than Quebec.
A careful
examination of Lescarbot's Journal of Cartier's Second Voyage, and
the investigations of subsequent historians leave little room to doubt
Champlain's statement.
[285] Jacques Cartier in his journal, written in
the quaint old style of that day, furnishes us curious descriptions of the
locality where he wintered, and of the adjoining Indian town,
Stadacone, the residence of the Chief Donacona. The Abbe Ferland
and other contemporary writers have assigned as the probable site of
Stadacona that part of Quebec which is now covered by a portion of the
suburbs of St. John, and by that part of St. Roch looking towards the St.
Charles. How graphically Jacques Cartier writes of that portion of the
River St. Lawrence opposite the Lower Town, less than a mile in width,
"deep and swift running," and also of the "goodly, fair and delectable bay
or creek convenient and fit to harbour ships," the St. Charles (St. Croix
or Holy Cross) river! and again of the spot wherein, he says, "we stayed
from the 15th of September, 1535, to the 6th May, 1536, and there our
ships remained dry." Cartier mentions the area of ground adjoining to
where he wintered "as goodly a plot of ground as possible may be seen,
and, wherewithal, very fruitful, full of goodly trees even as in France,
such as oak, elm, ash, walnut trees, white-thorns and vines that bring
forth fruit as big as any damsons, and many other sort of trees; tall hemp
as any in France, without any seed or any man's work or labor at all."
There are yet some noble specimens of elm, the survivors of a thick clump,
that once stood on the edge of the hornwork. The precise spot in the St.
Charles where Cartier moored his vessels and where his people built the
fort [286] in which they wintered may have been, for aught that could be
advanced to the contrary, where the French government in 1759 built the
hornwork or earth redoubt, so plainly visible to this day, near the Lairet
stream. It may also have been at the mouth of the St. Michel stream which
here empties itself into the St. Charles, on the Jesuits' farm. The
hornwork or circular meadow, as the peasantry call it, is in a line with
the General Hospital, Mount Pleasant, St. Bridget's Asylum and the
corporation lots recently acquired by the Quebec Seminary for a botanical
garden and seminary, adjoining Abraham's Plains. Jacques Cartier's fort,
we know to a certainty, must have been on the north bank of the river,
[287] from the fact that the natives coming from Stadacona to visit their
French guests had to cross the river, and did so frequently. It does seem
strange that Champlain does not appear to have known the exact locality
where, seventy years previously, Stadacona had stood; the cause may lie in
the exterminating wars carried on between the several savage tribes,
leaving, occasionally, no vestige of once powerful nations and villages.
Have we not seen in our day a once warlike and princely race - the Hurons -
dwindle down, through successive decay, to what now remains of them?
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