The Last Empty Places Read Online Free Page A

farther south—in Mexico and then South America. After catching wind of Cartier’s expedition for French settlements in the New World, the Spaniards consulted with the Portuguese, who also had their own American colonies, in Brazil. Should they should take action against the French plans for settlement near the St. Lawrence?
    “They can do no harm at Baccalaos,” 2 the Portuguese diplomats soothed the upset Spaniards.
    Baccalaos was the Spanish and Portuguese name 3 for the northern region. It meant “Codland”—the rich shoals of fish on the Grand Banks, the continental shelf off today’s Newfoundland. Since the early 1500s, the Grand Banks had drawn an annual fishing fleet of Basque, Portuguese, and Breton vessels that stuffed their holds with salted codfish and sold them in Europe (Portuguese recipes today still call for the salted cod known as
bacalhau)
. But, thick as these cold, foggy regions were with schools of offshore cod, the Spanish and Portuguese apparently didn’t think it worth fighting the French over settlement claims tothem. The wealth of cod lay offshore, for one thing, and, besides, the Spanish and Portuguese claimed far greater empires—rich with gold and silver—in the lands to the south.
    Initially, they proved to be right. It wasn’t worth fighting for. After suffering a terrible winter from scurvy and cold along the St. Lawrence, Cartier returned to France the next summer commanding what turned out to be a boatload of quartz “diamonds” and fool’s gold. As an explorer, Cartier was put out to pasture 4 in a crude manor house near St.-Malo, while for the next fifty years, throughout the late 1500s, the French mostly ignored their claims to North America as they fought decades of civil war between the Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots. When the religious wars ended, however, eyes again turned to the New World.
    In 1604—this was three years before the British Jamestown settlers arrived down in Virginia—a French ship navigated by Samuel de Champlain anchored off northeastern America in the region known to the French as “L’Acadie,” 5 or “La Cadie” and, eventually, “Acadia.” Delineated simply by lines of latitude on the map, L’Acadie or La Cadie took in everything 6 from 40 to 46 degrees north—roughly from today’s Pennsylvania and New York up through New England to the Maritime Provinces and Quebec. Leading the new settlement enterprise was a French nobleman with the weighty name of Pierre du Gua, sieur de Monts. King Henri IV had granted 7 to de Monts the concession to settle La Cadie. The king specified that de Monts’s mission on behalf of France was to look for wealth (which included gold or beaver skins), create a settlement, and spread Christianity among the heathens. King Henri also granted de Monts the power to press into service any of France’s idlers, vagabonds, and criminals they might find useful. De Monts recruited his friend and fellow aristocrat, Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt, the baron of Saint-Just, to help lead the expedition. A distinguished soldier and enthusiastic adventurer, Poutrincourt’s commitment ultimately established the French colony in Acadia.
    De Monts and Poutrincourt landed their expedition in the New World and then Poutrincourt returned to France for more supplies and men. Those who stayed built a small settlement on an island at the mouth of the St. Croix River (today’s Maine–New Brunswick border). They found it a lonely, windswept, hard-luck outpost.
    “From the Spanish settlements northward 8 to the pole,” wrote thehistorian Francis Parkman a century and a half ago in
Pioneers of France in the New World
, “there was no domestic hearth, no lodgements of civilized men, save one weak band of Frenchmen, clinging, as it were for life, to the fringe of the vast and savage continent.”
    The northern winds blasted down the frozen river and through their crude dwellings. Thirty-five of the seventy-nine members of the