Once a month, Le Devoir de literature, written by writers from Quebec, proposes to revisit, in the light of current events, works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature.e. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with “Le Devoir”.
Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine: the migrations of populations affected by war have always marked history. Although cruelly affecting the bombarded populations, these disasters marked their imagination and reinforced their collective identity in the face of the enemy. This also happened, mutadis mutandis, during the endless wars that reconfigured North America. From New France to the first Quebec, more than a century of fighting has upset both non-native and native communities. The latter were drawn up against each other and slowly decimated in what Denys Delâge calls “the overthrown country”. As for the French who settled in Canada, they became “Canadian Creoles” for the metropolitan administrators. A Creole mentality mixed with Amerindianity is then observed, as testified by the adventurers Mathieu Sagean and Robert Chevalier. Figures also stand out among the elites engaged in the army, from the D’Iberville brothers to La Corne Saint-Luc. I will focus here on Luc de La Corne Saint-Luc (1711-1784), author of a Travel diary of Mr. Saint-Luc de la Cornewhich recounts the sinking of the ship Augustin which he sat.
Embarked on an ill-equipped tub to reach France the day after the British conquest of Canada, La Corne ran aground off Cape Breton in November 1761. The year before, Montreal capitulated, shortly after Quebec, bombarded, it , in 1759. France abandoning Canada in 1763, the approximately 60,000 “shipwrecked” Canadians of the Province of Quebec endure military occupation. For his part, Captain La Corne, Croix de Saint-Louis, lost in the sinking of theAugust members of his family and a hundred passengers accompanying him. He tells…
Leaving Montreal in September 1761, the passengers headed against the winds in the Gulf south of Anticosti. A first storm surprises them in November: “on the 4th, a most impetuous North-East wind arose. The sails furled, the rudder seized, seeing at every moment our graves open; the pitching was so strong that the ropes which stopped our males broke in part, the cleats were torn off, also several were crippled or injured […]. Then, fires in the galleys: “Without the diligence of the Captain, of the Passenger Crew, we were consumed by fire in the middle of the ocean. The cries of the women, the lamentations of the men sow terror off the coast of Newfoundland.
Devoid of local navigation charts, we sail “according to the winds and the storm”, while the crew, exhausted, takes refuge in the holds! North of Cape Breton, the ship drifted ashore where it finally ran aground. La Corne himself decides to announce the fatal outcome to the passengers: “What prayers to the Supreme Being, what promises, what wishes! But alas, empty promises, useless wishes…” The dismasted sailboat ran aground on a shoal: “several people who were terrified by the danger, believing they had arrived successfully on land, threw themselves into the water & perished”. Attempting to jump into a rowboat with his children, he loses them in the waves.
Having reached the shore, La Corne rescued the captain and five other survivors. The raging sea throws on the shore one hundred and fourteen corpses. His brother is one of them: “we spent the day doing the funeral duties, as much as our sad situation and our strength allowed”. Hungry, exhausted, the survivors followed in the snow the footsteps of Captain La Corne: “we walked for four days through steep rocks, whose hideous appearance struck us, woods whose darkness frightened us, rivers whose speed stopped us, mountains whose difficulty of climbing put us off”. It is in this tone that the narration of La Corne continues.
Rescued by Micmac hunters and Acadian guides, the robust 50-year-old returned to Quebec in the middle of winter: nearly 1,800 kilometers on foot, on snowshoes and by canoe. He recounts his disappointments throughout the three months of his journey, orally broadcasting a first version of the sinking. This is how the tragedy of the sinking of theAugust and the epic of its hero. Other written versions will follow. In 1762, one of the stops had taken the hero to the De Gaspé mill in Saint-Jean Port-Joli. Grandson of the lord of the place, Philippe Aubert de Gaspé will take over the episode later in Old Canadians.
Upon his return to Quebec in February 1762, the survivor reported his shipwreck to the colonial authorities. The fate of this former Canadian officer now depends on General Murray, who also knows the individual’s military record (the former “general of the Indians” speaks four Aboriginal languages and distinguished himself in the last battles against the English). In 1763, when France ceded Canada to London, the Canadians became British subjects. From now on, the “new subject” La Corne must start a new life in Quebec. No question of him resuming his military career (one is always wary of former enemies). He then turned to trade and real estate. He was one of the wealthiest merchants in Montreal when the Quebec Act (1774) granted Canadians recognition of their language, religion and French laws.
A new war
But a new war is coming, that of American independence, which will restore the stripe to our La Corne. When the Americans invaded Quebec in 1775-1776, Carleton abandoned Montreal, where the notables received the rebels commanded by General Montgomery with open arms. Was the Montrealer La Corne favorable to the invaders, like the lawyer Valentin Jautard, the printer Fleury Mesplet and the judge Pierre du Calvet? Did he want to protect his fellow citizens from the damage of war? Still, among the English loyalists as among the Yankees, we are still wary of the man. Marjolaine Saint-Pierre notes in the beautiful biography that she devotes to him the qualifiers with which he was then decked out: “clever”, “cunning”, “this great devil incarnate”.
Still, with the war raging, La Corne was invited by Governor Carleton to take part in the offensive against the American rebels. In 1777, the sexagenarian launched his Amerindian allies into battle, under the orders of General Burgoyne. The expedition fails at Saratoga due to Native desertion and strategic errors by Burgoyne. The latter tries to justify himself by attributing his defeat to the Canadian militiamen and the Amerindians of La Corne. The latter’s indignant response: in an open letter to the London newspapers, he challenges Burgoyne to prove his accusations. But La Corne’s most definitive response is addressed to the public opinion of his fellow citizens. Calling on Fleury Mesplet, he entrusts the director of the Montreal Literary Gazette publishing his famous diary of the shipwreck of theAugust. What about this incunabula from the Quebec edition and the first local adventure story, analyzed at length in the memoir of Pierre Lespérance?
The 1778 edition was finely revised, carefully embellished and centered on the character of the hero of New France. Everything indicates that Valentin Jautard, friend of the author and presenter of the Montreal Gazette, had to refine the pen of the veteran. La Corne died at the age of 73 in honors, just as the new constitution was announced which would divide the country into Upper and Lower Canada. In the following century, the story of La Corne interested Philippe Aubert de Gaspé senior, who plagiarized the best passages in 1863. By publishing his Former Canadians shortly after the abolition of the seigneurial system, old De Gaspé idealized the New France of his ancestors, whereas La Corne had already turned the page a century earlier. By prospering in trade and real estate, by taking a public position, by committing to the release of the political prisoner Valentin Jautard, La Corne clearly marked the sinking of New France and the transition to a new modernity: that of the in print and public opinion. Nothing defeatist in the sinking published in 1778 on the presses of the first Montreal Voltairian newspaper. In full English conquest, the publication of his story of adventures was a challenge to adversity. It marked the dawn of a new conquest: that of Quebec letters. His daughter Marguerite La Corne, an admirable letter-writer, took over this literary life by animating a Montreal salon with her second husband, Jacques Viger. As for the wreckage of theAugustit will be found two centuries later…
The travel diary of M. Saint-Luc de La Corne, Ecuyer, in the ship Auguste, in the year 1761 is included in The conquest of letters in Quebec (1759-1799).
Anthologyby Bernard Andrès, published by Presses de l’Université Laval in 2007.