The Last Empty Places Read Online Free Page B

“weak band” perished of scurvy that first winter. While de Monts sailed back to France that spring, the remaining survivors decamped from their exposed island and sailed across the Bay of Fundy, to that great protrusion of land that would soon become known as the Acadian Peninsula and, later, Nova Scotia. There they built a fort on a beautiful harbor, sheltered on virtually all sides from the winds and heavy seas and rich in marine life and pasturelands. They named this idyllic harbor Port-Royal.
    The following spring, in May of 1606, the expedition’s other aristocratic leader, Poutrincourt, departed France with a fresh contingent of forty men and supplies aboard a ship named
Jonas
to restock his and de Monts’s enterprise in La Cadie, or Acadia. On board were not only the senior Poutrincourt, but also his adolescent son, Charles Biencourt, aged fifteen, and his fourteen-year-old nephew, Charles de La Tour. One wonders how the two cousins’ aristocratic mothers greeted the proposal that they should leave home on a colonizing expedition to the New World. It’s not difficult, however, to imagine a teenaged boy’s excitement at joining this great enterprise of men in a largely unknown continent.
    After a rough crossing of two months, the joy of arrival was captured by the passenger Marc Lescarbot, the forty-year-old Parisian lawyer of M. de Poutrincourt. Lescarbot had recently lost a major lawsuit and decided that the New World offered the chance to “fly from a corrupt world” 9 and the opportunity to exercise his flair for poetry.
    Fogs kept the
Jonas
tacking off the Acadian coast for a week. Then, on July 15, after a thunderstorm, the skies cleared and the sun came out, the coastline appeared, and they spied the sails of two longboats approaching from shore. The Frenchmen and young Biencourt and La Tour were crowded at the rail and, at this moment, Lescarbot writes, “…there came from the land odors 10 incomparable for sweetness, brought with a warm wind so abundantly that all the Orient parts could not produce greater abundance. We did stretch out our hands asit were to take them, so palpable were they, which I have admired a thousand times since.”
    From that first visceral taste, the new land captivated the two boys. Uninterested in clearing farms and building rigorous Christian communities, unlike their British counterparts to the south, they would range these wilds in their quest for furs and enthusiastically embrace the Indian life. They would become what Henry David Thoreau, growing up two centuries later in the green-manicured, white-clapboard, God-fearing town of Concord, Massachusetts, wanted to be. They were children of the wilderness.
    The two young Charleses represented a new environmental consciousness for Europeans, whether the boys were aware of it or not. They understood the wilds as a place benign rather than hostile, uplifting rather than evil, generous rather than depriving. Two centuries or more would pass, however, before this wilderness consciousness gained broader currency among most other Europeans who had come to America. That wilderness consciousness had to be mightily helped along by writers and thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Bartram, Emerson and Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold, by the women who shaped their ideas, and by others whose names will never be known.
    I WONDERED HOW MANY TIMES young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour had paddled this same stretch of the St. John River, 11 which from Baker Lake flowed four hundred miles down to the Atlantic’s Bay of Fundy. It was a well-known route through the forest, then, in the early 1600s. Many of my “blank spots,” I would discover, had been far less “blank” in centuries past than now, like northern Maine.
    In the gusty downpour, we waved goodbye to David at the Baker Lake campground and, digging our paddle blades rhythmically into the rain-pocked river, we twisted into the spongy forest. Shallow