The duty continues to go back to the sources of French America, always 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. Second text.
On March 19, 1687, the naked body of René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle was thrown into the bushes by his assassins. Thus ends the adventures of the French “conquistador” who got lost in the inhospitable country of Texas while trying to find “his river”, the Mississippi River.
The “new Cortés” was shot in the head by one of his expedition members, ambushed in the tall grass. The shooter, Pierre Duhaut, opened fire on his victim when the latter challenged his accomplice, Jean L’Archevêque, under a cloud of birds of prey whirling above their heads.
The conspirators hasten to plunder the baggage of their former master. They recover the scarlet coat he wore five years earlier, when taking possession of Louisiana. It was following this territorial appropriation, carried out in the name of Louis XIV, that Cavelier de La Salle obtained the funds allowing him to return, by sea, to the Gulf of Mexico.
Frequently Asked Questions
The first attempt to settle Louisiana brought together 300 soldiers, sailors and settlers crammed into three ships. This overloaded flotilla, which left La Rochelle in the summer of 1684, first landed in Haiti, before heading for the Mississippi delta, which it narrowly missed.
His destination is only about sixty kilometers to the east. Disoriented by a faulty compass, Cavelier de La Salle took a wrong turn west, sailing more than 600 kilometers before dropping anchor far from his goal, at the gates of Mexico. The explorer thus found himself close to this “New Biscay”, whose medium-term invasion was one of the goals of his colonization project. This is what led this rogue to falsify one of his maps to give the court of Versailles the impression that the Mississippi bordered the silver mines of the Spanish Empire.
The French flotilla entered Matagorda Bay at the beginning of 1685. Cavelier de La Salle lost one of his ships there, The Amiable, which quickly runs aground in the mud. It is with his wood that he then erected a fort on the lands of the Karankawa nation. The explorer is lost. “I saw a man who had made fun of the Court and who was making fun of us”, denounces the engineer Jean-Baptiste Minet, the author of one of the travel reports collected by the historian Raymonde Lallemand in Louisiana, an affair of state (North, 2021).
The numbers of the expedition were halved with the return to France of the flagship, the Pretty. Cavelier de La Salle only keeps one boat, The beautiful, which in turn ran aground in 1686 through the fault of a pilot, intoxicated by the Spanish wine on board. The remains of this 16-meter-long building were found in 1995. It still contained three bronze cannons, grenades and boxes of beads intended for the Aboriginals. The perfectly preserved skeleton of a man between 35 and 45 years old was also discovered there, lying in a fetal position near a small barrel. The beautiful is now on display at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. Its extraction at a cost of five million dollars was financed by the State of Texas and by local oil companies.
Cut off from the world, the French colony of Matagorda Bay was decimated by disease, hunger and skirmishes with the natives of the region. These reversals of fortune occur in a country infested with poisonous snakes. All of this contributes to weakening the ascendancy of Cavelier de La Salle, already compromised by the clumsiness of his nephew, the authoritarian Moranget.
After several unsuccessful expeditions, the explorer undertook a final attempt, at the beginning of 1687, to find the Mississippi by land. It was during this exhausting march, at the head of 17 men, that he died on the banks of the Brazos River, not far from the present city of Houston. The conspirators previously eliminated his nephew with an ax while he slept.
Alerted by the trip of the French on the coasts of Texas, the Spanish authorities organize a dozen expeditions to capture the emissary of Versailles. They only find the remains of The beautiful and the remains of the nearby fort, whose last occupants were massacred or captured by the Aboriginal people. It will be necessary to wait for the Montrealer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville so that at the end of the XVIIand century, a French colony was permanently established in Louisiana.
Cornelian hero
Cavelier de La Salle will see his figure erected as a hero by a whole nationalist current, from which comes the historian Ægidius Fauteux (1876-1941). A renowned scholar, Fauteux was also curator of the Montreal Municipal Library. He declaimed his admiration for the “prince of explorers” in 1938 during the inauguration of a monument erected in Lachine, within the limits of the character’s former seigneury.
“If it were necessary to erect statues to all the dead who made this unique corner of the earth famous, who shed their blood there for colonization or who simply made it the springboard for their heroic undertakings, the space would quickly run out and there would soon be no more room for the living,” says Fauteux in a 6,000-word speech reproduced in the pages of the Homework of the time. “If a monument to La Salle is everywhere in its place on this American land that it has traveled in all directions, there is no place where it is as much as here, where there are first hatched his genius. »
Originally from Rouen, in Normandy, Cavelier de La Salle is a former Jesuit relieved of his vows by his “moral infirmities”. In 1667, this “disappointed man” who first dreamed of becoming a missionary landed in Canada, in a colony revitalized by the arrival of the King’s Daughters and soldiers from the Carignan-Salières regiment. He was granted the seigneury of Lachine, whose toponym underlined his dream of reaching Cathay country.
He quickly parted with his stronghold to travel the Great Lakes watershed, where he launched The Griffin in 1679. For Ægidius Fauteux, this modest barque “looms on the screen of history with the same prestigious brilliance as the legendary nave of the Argonauts”. The ship loaded with furs, however, was engulfed by the waves with its five crew members on its maiden voyage. Shipwreck hunters are still searching for this mythical vessel, believed to be discovered each time an ancient beam emerges from Lake Huron.
Following in the footsteps of the Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet, Cavelier de La Salle finally reached the “sphinx of the rivers” from the north at the turn of the 1680s. discovery of the Mississippi, warns Fauteux in 1938. La Salle is rich enough in glory for Louis Jolliet not to be stripped unjustly for his benefit. The protege of Governor Frontenac goes further than his predecessor by descending the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682.
“This contemporary of Corneille was truly a Cornelian hero, explains Fauteux, that is to say generous, valiant, high-minded and noble of heart. The librarian was impressed by his cruise to Louisiana the previous year, which made him appreciate the explorer’s physical stamina compared to “we, who, limply seated on the cushions of a comfortable limousine, ride so at ease on superb roads”.
Ægidius Fauteux is not tender towards the remarkable forgotten expeditions of his hero, these “illiterates” and other “sinister companions whom necessity forced him to drag after him”. “He truly died on a battlefield, the forever glorious battlefield where civilization finally conquered barbarism. »