The duty continues its journey back to the sources of French America, focusing on the exploration of Quebec newspapers and archives. To broaden our horizons, we will travel from the northern confines of the Hudson to the sunny dreams of Florida, while tracing the thread of a shared history. Today, the Battle of Hudson’s Bay.
At the end of the XVIIe century, Hudson Bay was a battleground for the colonial empires of France and England. Fur traders from both nations supplanted the generation of early explorers, such as Henry Hudson and Thomas James, whose surnames are stuck to the ice of what Canadians then called the North Sea.
The vast commercial stronghold founded in 1670 by the Hudson’s Bay Company arouses covetousness. In 1686, the knight Pierre de Troyes set out to conquer it at the head of a hundred French soldiers and Canadian volunteers. The expedition left Montreal at the end of March aboard dog sleds on which were piled ammunition, provisions and 1,200 pounds of tobacco intended for the pipes of this army of smokers.
Franco-Canadians dressed in blue hoods set off on the melting ice of the Ottawa River under clouds of Canada geese and pies. Arriving at the Long Sault, they see the remains of a pile fort destroyed 26 years earlier. It was here that Dollard des Ormeaux and his companions died at the hands of the Iroquois “barbarians”, as the Chevalier de Troyes noted in his diary.
On May 11, the convoy set up camp below the Mattawa River. At the same time, in Montreal, Jeanne-Geneviève Picoté de Belestre gathered all her courage to file a complaint against one of the most illustrious members of the expedition: Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville. She accuses the latter of having taken her to his bed under the promise of marriage, which constitutes a “abduction of seduction” which is then distinguished from “abduction of violence”. The young woman is shamefully carrying the child of the 25-year-old Montrealer who slipped away six weeks earlier to fight… the English.
By the edge of the sword
In June 1686, the Franco-Canadian detachment reached Lake Abitibi. He crossed it by canoe, before descending the river of the same name to James Bay. He thus reached the end of a grueling journey of 1200 kilometers, interspersed with painful portages.
The silhouette of Fort Monsoni stands out on the horizon. Motivated by the lure of profit, the attackers do not hesitate to step over the palisade of this warehouse overflowing with furs. “At that time, I had great difficulty in stopping the ardor of our Canadians who, making loud cries like the Indians, only wanted to play with knives,” wrote the Chevalier de Troyes.
The success of the operation was based on the surprise effect combined with the relaxation of the English garrison of the fort. The same scenario repeated itself in the days that followed, this time at Fort Charles, located under the current Cree village of Waskaganish. After ramming the doors down, the Franco-Canadians climb onto a wooden dungeon surmounted by a fireplace. An intrepid assailant places a grenade there, which causes the stove below to explode, seriously injuring a woman in the process.
Private Gideon of Catalonia, who would later become known for his maps of New France, observed the damage as he made his way through the smoke: “A plaintive voice made me open the door of a cabinet, where I found this Englishwoman in her nightgown, all bloodied by the effect of a fragment of a grenade in her hip. My presence, judging by its piteous cry, made as much impression on him as the sound of the grenade, since we looked like bandits. »
The capture of the third fort of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that of Albany, requires a little more methods. The knight’s men have recourse to a bombardment in order, but also to the good Saint Anne, to whom they appeal to calm a storm which seems to compromise the initial landing of the troops. The surrender of the post was concluded at the end of July, after negotiations washed down with Spanish wine.
Before the court
D’Iberville made a name for himself through his fearlessness at Hudson’s Bay. He must nevertheless face justice on his return to Quebec for his “abduction of seduction”. Unsurprisingly, the “gentleman” engaged in the service of the colonial powers escaped the galleys. It was then appropriate, by way of reparation, to marry the accused with the plaintiff, in this case Jeanne-Geneviève, in order to at least regularize appearances. That won’t happen either. D’Iberville should at most provide for the subsistence of the child born of his “works”.
In 1693, Jeanne-Geneviève found refuge in the convent of the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. She enters there only six days before the marriage of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville with Marie-Thérèse Pollet. In her society, this 26-year-old woman is considered to have lost her honor, unlike the accused. D’Iberville retains his aura of respectability.
Guy Frégault passes quickly over this scabrous episode in his heroic biography devoted to d’Iberville, even when it was reissued in 1968. grateful from the end of the lips ” [qu’]it seems very difficult not to prove Iberville wrong”.
The Montreal privateer waged war against the English in Hudson Bay until the end of the century aboard ships with exotic names, such as the sun of africa. It is however on the bridge of the Pelican, in 1697, that he realizes his feat of arms: to rout three enemy ships. Heavily damaged, the French ship sank the day after the battle near the mouth of the Hayes River, in present-day Manitoba. His castaways nevertheless manage to seize Fort Nelson with the means at hand.
The wreckage of Pelican would still rest on the site of its sinking, not far from the carcass of the Hampshire, sunk by its balls marked with the fleur-de-lys. Despite their relative proximity, these vestiges of the imperial rivalry between France and England have not been the subject of serious attempts to locate them.
The other shipwreck of the Pelican
In 1967, Frédéric Back reconstructed in the form of a model the Pelican to be used for filming the fight scenes of the television series D’Iberville, featuring a dashing Albert Millaire declaiming his lines as if on the boards of a theatre. Quebec youth were then amazed by the representation of this elegant ship maneuvering in the middle of synthetic foam ice before firing a salvo from miniature guns filmed in very close-up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZI9moyGo4
Montreal philanthropist David Macdonald Stewart is thinking bigger. As early as 1964, the Macdonald Tobacco heir worked on a life-size replica of the Pelican making it possible to embody in wood the national momentum carried by the Quiet Revolution. The federal government convinced him to invest instead in building the great ermine by Jacques Cartier destined for the Montreal World’s Fair and then for the Cartier-Brébeuf park in Quebec. However, Macdonald Stewart retains the idea of a reconstruction of the Pelicana project he relaunched shortly before his death in 1984.
The construction site of Pelican is located in La Malbaie, in Charlevoix. Until its launch in 1992, it mobilized dozens of unemployed workers recruited under a federal back-to-work program. Despite the colossal sums invested — nearly twenty million, in today’s dollars — the ship’s hull rotted before it even touched the water! the Pelican will never be able to navigate, like the great ermine designed 25 years earlier by the same naval architect, François Cordeau. The ship destined to become a school ship for young delinquents is finally transformed into a floating museum that is pitifully moored in the Old Port of Montreal.
the Pelican is just passing through the birthplace of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville. Sold to a Louisiana company in 1995, it was transferred to the municipality of Donaldsonville, upstream from New Orleans. The ship was wrecked in Mississippi in 2004. Four years later, the wreckage still lay at the bottom of the river when it was violently hit by a tugboat, resulting in a fuel spill. A US Coast Guard buoy now indicates the presence of this hazard to navigation.
the Pelican was it destined to be shipwrecked, in the image of this New France whose maintenance and extension had been temporarily ensured, within the limits of the possible, by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville?