1662: BARTHÉLÉMY VERREAULT ARRIVES IN CANADA
(Chapter 1 of the forthcoming book Here to Stay: Lives in 17th Century Canada)
Author’s Note: The story of colonization is written with a bias for the Canadien colonist, who came and settled on land that had been inhabited by Indigenous Peoples for centuries. I have endeavored to see through—and evaluate—my sources, which were admittedly written by the victors. These sources accentuate the heroism and selflessness of the French in bringing Catholicism and European civilization to the wilds of North America. At the same time, the sources accentuate the treachery and cruelty of the Indigenous Peoples.
In writing this story, my focus has been on the first French Canadians, but I hope to have portrayed honestly all the people depicted herein. Some depiction is flattering and some is not, but I believe none of it is dishonest.
Not wishing to sanitize the texts, I have retained the use of the word “sauvages” in the historical texts as it appeared there. In my narrative, I have used “sauvages” when it is in the voice of a character. In my own voice, I have used Natives or Indigenous People. Living in Canada, they are not, of course, Native Americans. In contemporary Canada, they are often called First Nations.
Chapter 1
1662: Barthélémy Verreault Arrives in Canada
The trip from La Rochelle ought to have taken only two months, but after three on the open sea—months when food and water had run short—L’Aigle d’Or and the Saint-Jean-Baptiste were still far from New France. In July, the small crafts had set sail, going between the two stone towers that guarded the La Rochelle harbor and into the channel that led to the Atlantic. Now it was early October, and at last, the anxious passengers had begun to spot land birds and then the shore of Newfoundland—rock-bound with huge cliffs, alternately thick with firs or barren of vegetation.
A number of the passengers had not survived the trip, but Barthélémy Verreault, a fine toolmaker who was known as Le Bourguignon, a man in his early thirties, had fared well. An able-bodied man, Barthélémy was indentured as an engagé to work for three years in Ville-Marie, the westernmost outpost of the colony. Numbering barely four hundred French men and women, the palisaded village was situated on the fertile plain that bound the great Saint Lawrence near its confluence with the Ottawa River. Ville-Marie lay at the south side of Mont Royal—or Mont Réal as the explorer Jacques Cartier, speaking in his native dialect, had named the mountain in 1535.
While the Société de Notre-Dame, the charter company that had backed the founding of Ville-Marie in 1642, hoped many of the men they had indentured would choose to settle in Montréal after fulfilling their three-year contracts, they did not make staying a prerequisite of signing on. Had they done so, few men, learning how difficult conditions were, would have agreed to come. Every year, three-quarters of the hired hands whose contracts expired returned to France rather than stay in Canada. Workers continued to be in such short supply that men such as Barthélémy had to be continually recruited to serve as engagés for thirty-six months.
Although it is likely the Société probably wanted Barthélémy to practice his trade of fine tool making at some point, the first order of labor was to wrench pastureland and fields for crops from the dense boreal forests. Because the settlement was at the end of the supply line and the deep freeze of long winters sealed the port and blocked off contact with the outside world for five to six months each year, Ville-Marie’s survival depended on agricultural self-sufficiency.
In Ville-Marie, Barthélémy was expected to work alongside the Montréalistes to plow, sow, and harvest. He would also be called on to serve as a militiaman to defend the fort from Iroquois marauders, and if necessary, to fight them hand-to-hand.
He had heard much about these Iroquois whose brutality was at the heart of many tales he’d been told on shipboard. Their villages lay south of the first of the Great Lakes in country the Dutch disputed with the French. The Jesuit Relations averred—and who would not believe such a source?—that the Iroquois ate their French and Indian captives.
Pierre Boucher, the governor of the Trois-Rivières settlement, was on board, and he had many stories of his own that supported those the recruits may have heard in France but not entirely believed. Had he not lived for years with the Hurons, many of whom had once been Iroquois slaves and whose bodies bore the scars of torture?
Since the French had come, the Iroquois had never let a three-year period pass without waging war on them and their Algonquian allies. Like all the recruits on board, Barthélémy could expect, once in Ville-Marie, to be under Iroquois attack almost any day and he would have to repulse them, be killed, or, worse, be taken captive. If he made it through his thirty-six-month contract alive, however, Barthélémy would have a choice. The Société hoped recruits like him would choose to remain on the free concession of land he would be offered on Montréal Island, but he would also be free to go anywhere in Canada—or to return to France as most recrues did, taking their accumulated wages and their futures away with them.
In Newfoundland, L’Aigle d’Or and the Saint-Jean-Baptiste renewed their exhausted supplies of water, meat, and fish. Passengers were almost always weakened by the long trans-Atlantic trip and, for Barthélémy and his peers, the crossing had indeed been long—longer than expected.
Restocked, the two ships sailed into the Golfe du Saint-Laurent and entered the great river. Day after day, as the ships tacked westward, the passengers saw mountains rising out of the fleuve and watched beluga whales and seals romping beside the ships. Everywhere were the late October remnants of fall foliage, its fading beauty giving the new arrivals no hint that deep snows and frigid winds would soon hold everything and everyone in their grip. How could they know, these recruits who came from a temperate climate, what cold could be like?
L’Aigle d’Or and the Saint-Jean-Baptiste sailed past the Island of Anticosti which separated le fleuve into north and south branches—each one broader than any river in Europe. Barthélémy could see for himself that the island stretched for many, many lieues. Canada was indeed a massive land, as Pierre Boucher would write. It offered what seemed like uninhabited land everywhere, land the governor envisioned French settlers arriving in large numbers to inhabit and farm.
With Anticosti now days behind them, the ships moored for the second time in North America at Tadoussac, a trading post just a few sailing days downriver from the settlement at Québec. On the north shore of the fleuve near the mouth of the turbulent Saguenay, Tadoussac held a choice position for the fur trade. The Hurons reached it by paddling easterly on the Saint-Laurent, and the Montagnais and the Etchemins by going westerly. The distant Naskapis came down the Saguenay. Those Natives who came on the Saint-Laurent—especially the Hurons—did so at great peril to themselves, as the Iroquois attacked those who brought fur pelts to trade with the French for European goods.
Beaver skins for hats and coats were currently in high fashion in France. With the Native furs they purchased at Tadoussac, merchants could easily amass fortunes for themselves—men like Pierre Boucher had already done so—and the Indigenous Peoples wanted only inexpensive goods in return. The Natives, who dressed in skins and feathers, prized fine European articles made of iron as well as the cloth and the jewelry they received for their old, worn furs the Europeans were so eager to pay for.
In Tadoussac, the new arrivals aboard L’Aigle d’Or and the Saint-Jean-Baptiste could see curious long boats—Indian canoes—turned over on their sides near the dock and Indian teepees set up just beyond the palisades.
“Red and yellow trees! Cone-shaped houses made of sticks and animal skins! Boats with bark covering!” Barthélémy and his shipmates must have marveled.
Before the two ships could leave Tadoussac, something unexpected happened. According to Mère Marie de l’Incarnation who wrote an account in her journal of what transpired, the captain understood his responsibility for not having made contingency plans in case his trip were to last longer than the expected two months. He was afraid of being punished for having brought inadequate stocks of food and water. He probably wasn’t worried about having mistreated recruits such as Barthélémy—the captain might have let peasants starve with some impunity—but he was also carrying two passengers of some import. There was Monsieur Boucher himself, bearing letters from the king to various colonial officials as well as documents that announced his reappointment as governor of Trois-Rivières. And, there was a gentleman, le Sieur de Monts, whom the king had sent to reconnoiter the country. De Monts was to report directly to the king on the colony’s needs. After docking in Tadoussac, therefore, the captain refused to go even though he had been commissioned to bring his passengers all the way to Québec.
There was nothing to be done but for Boucher, De Monts and the new settlers to transfer to another ship, a barque, to complete the trip upriver. Eleven miles north of their destination, they entered the north channel of the Saint-Laurent where the river is divided by the Île d’Orléans.
Here, for the first time, Barthélémy saw a large number of farms, both on the island and on the Beaupré shore to the north. Along the waterfront, between virgin lands, long, narrow fields and pastures were laid out perpendicularly to the Saint-Laurent. There were stumps in many of the clearings, and some of the fields already had abundant regrowth of the dreaded bushes and saplings. Many houses were plastered and whitewashed, but enough were still under construction to permit him to see they were built of short logs placed horizontally between the wood framing—so different from the wattle and daub or the solid plaster he had known in Burgundy. The roofs were steep in the Normand fashion but shingled with wood rather than thatched. The little farmhouses were surrounded by outbuildings. There were cows in the fields, but in 1662, Barthélémy saw neither horse nor sheep. On neither side of the channel was there a village—only a broken line of farms. Once he saw a church but no other. Up and down the waterway, both Indians and French paddled canoes going to and from Québec. There were also other ships like theirs—shuttles heading north, back to Tadoussac. It was on this Beaupré shore that Pierre Boucher’s parents lived and where he had grown up.
In his report to the king, the Sieur De Monts described the Beauport shore as having "lovely farms and many houses."
From the deck of the ship as it headed upriver, Barthélémy began to see rooftops—the village of Québec commanding the river from its height on Cap-Diamant above le fleuve. On the Cap, in the Château Saint-Louis, lived and worked the Governor-General of the Company of New France, Dubois D’Avaugour. The Château was merely a wooden fort, primitive in comparison to what Barthélémy had known in Dijon where the governing dukes lived in a large stone château that ran the length of the main square. (Other lesser Burgundian officials lived in large stone and brick mansions with roofs patterned in many colors.) Around the Château Saint-Louis were a church and many structures. Below the Cap was a lower town with its docks and a variety of buildings. The whole settlement looked to be the size of a small quartier in Dijon, perhaps no bigger than the district of St-Jean where Barthélémy himself had been born not far from the ducal palace.
A sloop was sent out on November 6, wrote Marie de l’Incarnation, to meet the transport ship arriving from Tadoussac bearing the distinguished passengers Messieurs Boucher and De Monts.
Soon, the distinguished gentlemen, Barthélémy and his fellow passengers had disembarked in the Lower Town and were immersed in the small crowd, which had gathered to greet the newcomers. Farmers and merchants scanned the passengers for the engagés they had hired the previous year, and men searched for the wives they were finally to be reunited with while government officials sought out Boucher and De Monts.
Since the Société de Notre Dame owned a storage building on Cap-Diamant in Québec’s Upper Town where it housed recruits on their way to Ville-Marie, it is likely that Barthélémy climbed the cliff to find lodging there. On his ascent, he would have passed the house where Jean Bourdon, the cartographer, lived. Once on Cap-Diamant, the Château Saint-Louis nearby, Champlain’s Habitation below in the Lower Town, Barthélémy could see beyond the St Charles River to the farms on the Beaupré shore and on the Île d’Orléans. In the opposite direction, to the west, there was the endless stretch of the Saint-Laurent. It was into this infinity, to what must have seemed the edge of the world, that Barthélémy would soon sail to Montréal.
During the four long months it had taken to cross the Atlantic, how could Barthélémy and his fellow passengers not have chatted with Pierre Boucher and not have asked him to divulge all he could about what awaited them in their new lives? While Boucher was a seigneur, the governor of Trois-Rivières, and an entrepreneur who had grown wealthy in the fur trade, he was also a man who had come from the common folk. He had immigrated to the colony as a boy when his father had come as an engagé no different from Barthélémy and most of the other men on board the small vessel.
On deck, as the anxious passengers scanned the horizon for sight of land, it seems likely that the two men would have talked, leaning against the sides of the ship as it rocked to the endless motion of the sea. Boucher had been to the royal court, and the king had given him an audience. “What was the king like? What was the Louvre palace like?” So many titillating questions! But once the topic of the royal presence had been exhausted, perhaps Barthélémy pumped the older man with more important considerations: questions about Canada and how one lived there, about the new land he was committed to for the next thirty-six months. How did one survive there?
It was a difficult life, as Boucher knew so well, but Canada had been good to him and it could be good to Barthélémy.
Boucher had advanced the fares of many of the engagés. Because of this investment, it must have been important to him that they be prepared to survive and prosper. Boucher’s best interests called for him to teach them all he could about life in New France on those long days when the ships seemed never to arrive at the New World.
In 1629, the Kirke brothers, English privateers, had seized New France—which then consisted only of Québec and the neighboring region—and held it until the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye restored Canada to France. Eighteen months later in the summer of 1634 arrived a group of Pecheron settlers, among whom were Pierre Boucher and his family. The Bouchers were from the Mortagne area, in the western French province of le Perche. Pierre Boucher, twelve years old, was accompanying his father, Gaspard, a carpenter, who had signed up to serve as an engagé to the Jesuits at their seigneurie of Notre-Dame-des-Anges.
In 1640, six years after arriving in Canada, eighteen-year-old Pierre Boucher entered the service of the Jesuits as a donné and traveled with the “good fathers” to their Huron missions at Georgian Bay in what is now Ontario. The Jesuits had fanatical zeal to convert the Indians, and they risked all—their health and their lives as well as those of their donnés—to search out the people they considered to be “God’s unfortunates.” At Georgian Bay, like many young French men of his generation, Pierre became adept at several Indian languages. This language proficiency gave him an insider’s view of Native cultures and customs. During his time with the Hurons, he also experienced the hatred the Iroquois and the Hurons had for each other and how it flared into cruelty.
On his return to Québec in 1641, nineteen-year-old Boucher decided to serve as a soldier, defending the colony (as well as parents, brothers and sisters) from Iroquois incursions. The colonists, of course, were responsible for defending themselves and their families from the Iroquois, and every man between sixteen and sixty served in the militia for varying periods. By becoming a soldier, however, Boucher committed himself to full-time military duty and received some salary.
By 1645, Boucher once again left his family to venture upriver to the new colony of Trois-Rivières, at the mouth of the Saint Maurice River. The Saint Maurice and its tributaries reached far into the strategic Canadian northland. That’s why the governing Company of the Hundred Associates had gambled on the Saint Maurice River as a lucrative source for Indian furs and on Trois-Rivières as worthy of becoming a viable and important trading center.
In Trois-Rivières, Boucher served first as an interpreter between the Natives and the French. But he was an enterprising young man, and in this colony where there were not many people, a person who wanted to rise could do so by working hard and accepting responsibilities. By 1648, at age twenty-six, he was already commissary-general of the settlement’s trading station.
That same year, Boucher married a Huron, Marie-Marguerite Chrétienne. The metropolitan government promoted miscegenation of the French and the Indigenous Peoples’ populations by offering one hundred and fifty livres as a dowry to any Indigenous woman who married a Frenchman. The reward notwithstanding, only four Indigenous women opted for such unions before 1663 when the stipend was terminated. Marie-Marguerite Chrétienne was one of these four. Unfortunately for the program of intermarriage, Marie-Marguerite died in childbirth in 1649, and their son Jacques died soon afterward.
It is fairly certain that Boucher was wellconsidered by his fellow settlers because, in 1651, they elected him captain of the Trois-Rivières militia. Because the Iroquois raids were constant—bringing death and destruction on an almost regular basis—this captaincy was most crucial to the survival of the settlement. With this election, Boucher definitely proved himself a young man on the rise.
In 1652, Pierre remarried, this time to a Canadienne, Jeanne Crevier, whose father and mother had come to Trois-Rivières in 1639. Pierre and Jeanne had surviving children.
In 1653, while in command of troops at Trois-Rivières, Boucher successfully repelled an Iroquois attack. Owing to the role he had played in repulsing the raiders, Boucher was placed in charge of the settlement as interim governor, a position he retained until 1658. The former Jesuit donné, a man from the common folk, had become the most influential man in Trois-Rivières, and in a few years, he would exercise an even greater influence to the benefit of the entire colony.
New France had many challenges, Boucher must have told Barthélémy and the other engagés, as they leaned over the rails in the evening, watching the sunset. Just the previous year, the French had again been in the throes of a brutal Iroquois offensive. By 1661, this offensive had already lasted into its second year without a break. French men and women lived in constant fear of sudden death or, worse, of torture. Three thousand miles away in France, directors of the holding company continued to regard and administer Canada as a trading post whose raison d’être was to produce profits from the fur trade. They were not interested in settling it with people to be protected.
Meanwhile, the young king Louis XIV was dallying with the idea of developing a viable province outremer where French people might extend his domain as they made homes for themselves, but the king’s government had not as yet provided the military, economic, and administrative support required to keep the population secure enough to fulfill this plan.
The discrepancy between the profit motive of the Company of the Hundred Associates and the mandate the king had given it to populate the land in security was a cruel one for Canadiens. The Iroquois remained resolved to dominate the northeast of the continent. The Company of the Hundred Associates, in providing too little protection, was acquiescing to the slaughter of many of the migrants as the Iroquois, intent on opposing French trading ambitions in that part of North America, sought to destroy the new colony.
The previous year (1661), Dubois D’Avaugour, newly appointed governor of New France, had been appalled at the situation in which he found the colony. In a fact-finding mission that took him from Tadoussac to Montréal, he witnessed the discouragement of the colonists and saw firsthand their struggles to survive. Everyone he met who had been in New France any length of time had lost a husband or a wife, a friend or a neighbor to the Iroquois. People lived day by day, hour by hour, in terror of being seized while working in their fields or pulled from their sleep and force-marched to Iroquoisie to be tortured—slowly burned at the stake after having their nails pulled out, their body parts bitten off, their skin excised slice by slice so that gangrene set in in the slow days—one hopes not weeks—it took to be burned to death.
Shocked by his findings, D’Avaugour mandated the rising star Boucher to travel to France to argue for a stronger military presence in Canada. Only with more soldiers to protect the colonists and the promise of sure retaliation against the Iroquois would the Canadiens be safe. Boucher was also to make the case for creating a stable economic, legal, and administrative infrastructure to allow daily life to develop in New France as it would in a province in France. The royal government, Boucher was instructed to plead, must respond quickly and aggressively to the needs of Canada. The colony deserved to become a place where French people lived daily lives rather than as a place where they were only background for the fur trading the Company of the Hundred Associates was effecting. If Boucher could not prevail on the king, the Iroquois would prevail on the colonists, and the king’s opportunity to establish a viable province outremer would be lost.
Boucher also traveled with a second mandate that he was not to reveal until the right time. If he could not prevail on the king to take colonization seriously, he was to hand the monarch the governor’s letter of resignation. D’Avaugour was determined not to preside over the slaughter of his countrymen.
Since Boucher had grown up in the colony far from the refinements of the mother country, it must have been both intimidating and exhilarating to plead the colony’s case before the sovereign. Yet, this son of a carpenter engagé must have been eloquent and cogent because he succeeded in persuading Louis XIV to make many of the changes D’Avaugour proposed. Implementation of these reforms would be the focus of French colonial policy in Canada for the next decade.
Extensive recruitment of colonists was crucial, Pierre Boucher understood, to the development of New France as well as to the success of his own newly formed seigneurie. Recruits however needed to receive some pay in advance, and they had to be transported to Canada at the recruiter’s expense. Boucher himself had become a wealthy man by trading in furs, and with his wealth, he had acquired land holdings. By putting these up as collateral, Boucher secured a loan to finance recrues both from his native province of le Perche and from elsewhere. Many of those he attracted would be his censitaires, but others he perhaps recruited on speculation, knowing that seigneurs, merchants, and craftsmen would buy the extra indentures from him.
New workers, in short supply everywhere in Canada, were always welcome and quickly put to work. Barthélémy seems to have been one of the recruits Boucher brought over on speculation because it was not until November 5, 1662, when he was almost in Québec harbor, that Barthélémy signed a contract to serve as an engagé for the Montréaliste Jean Milot who would be his master for three years. Like Barthélémy, Milot was a Burgundian and a taillandier (a fine tool maker).
Barthélémy left Québec in mid-November 1662 for Montréal. Sailing past present-day Sillery and Cap Tourmente, directly west of Québec, he saw the last of the farms. After these, there was no trace of the French—only forests. The ship passed the Saint-François River on the south shore and then, after a few days, it came once again upon farmhouses on the north shore. These were set at the river’s edge with long narrow fields stretching down to the water. There were many fewer farms however than Barthélémy had seen on the Beaupré shore the previous month. There were also canoes on the edges of the Saint Lawrence. These were used by the Allied Indians as well as by the French for whom the fleuve was not only the quickest but also the most comfortable avenue of travel to Trois-Rivières just upriver from where they were. Soon the ship came upon the Saint Maurice and the palisade of the trading post village. Trois-Rivières was surrounded by farms, and there was an Indian village of summer teepees and winter wigwams.
The settlement was larger than Tadoussac, but with only three hundred people both in the village and on the nearby farms, Trois-Rivières was smaller than Québec which had about nineteen hundred inhabitants. There being no reason to linger beyond picking up and discharging passengers—notably Pierre Boucher—and goods, soon the ship resumed its journey to Montréal.
Still some distance upriver from Mount Royal, the passengers spotted the mountain. It rose above the flat land and the forests that surrounded them and provided the passengers a good while to anticipate arriving at their destination.
Montréal was a palisaded village, set in a plain of cultivated fields. Next to the walled village, a second smaller palisade encircled the Hôtel-Dieu whose chapel also served as the community’s church. The fields that bordered the Saint-Laurent held four fortified houses—maisons redoutes. When attacked by the Iroquois, settlers who found themselves too far from the palisade could flee to these redoubts. Paths leading to them were always kept clear. Rising above this embattled settlement was Mount Royal and the huge cross the settlers had erected in 1643 to implore divine help.
It was at what is now known as Pointe-à-Callière that Barthélémy landed that November day of 1662. He would soon meet the man to whom he was indentured, Jean Milot, who was also a blacksmith and from Burgundy like his new engagé. Jean Milot and his wife Marie-Marthe Pinson lived inside the larger village palisade where there were several dozen houses, barns and stables. Most structures were built of wood, but a few were of stone. The houses were small, perhaps twenty feet by twenty feet, with shingled roofs and stone chimneys. Governor Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve’s house stood at the far side of the entrance at the end of a pathway that served as the main street of the village.
There was even a stone building that had once been a stable where boys and girls received the rudiments of an education. While there were as yet only a handful of school-age children, the number of women had increased in the last years, and there had been many marriages and subsequent births.
Everywhere in the two palisades were stacked cords of firewood—each small house needed to burn a dozen or more cords if its inhabitants were to be kept warm throughout the winter. Soon the snow that could reach up to a man’s waist would begin to fall, and the intense cold would seep through every crack and crevice of the buildings. While the winter was to be feared for its intensity, it was also welcomed: during the cold weather, the Iroquois usually did not travel north from their longhouse villages to make war on the Canadiens. (This, unfortunately, was not always true.)
Everywhere one looked, one saw Indians in the village. In 1662, there were more Natives —Christians separated from their tribes by the new religion the Jesuits had brought—living near Ville-Marie than there were French. Many of these were Iroquois. Among these Indigenous People lived captives of many Amerindian nations as well as English people from New England. The Natives were not allowed to camp within the palisades, and so they set up their own villages nearby. The Christian Iroquois camped with their fellow Iroquois, and the Christian Algonquins with their kind also.
With Jean Milot lived his wife Marie-Marthe who was seven months pregnant and their two children. On January 22, 1663, a couple of months after Barthélémy arrived at the Milot household, Madame Milot gave birth to a girl, Françoise. The delivery did not go well, however, and with Barthélémy serving as godfather, the infant girl was immediately baptized. The mother was having a hard time of it, and the next day Marie-Marthe Pinson died, leaving two older children and the baby. Françoise was not to survive her mother long. On the twenty-ninth, the baby also died.
While the Milot family was grieving, the governor was organizing a militia to protect the village. While there had been a hiatus in Iroquois warfare in 1662, Ville-Marie did not let down its guard. Many in the settlement believed that the Iroquois were merely regrouping before raiding began again. Too often in the past, Ville-Marie had been paralyzed by warfare, its inhabitants unable to farm or clear new fields beyond the palisade’s gunshot range. Because Iroquois snipers lurked at the forested edges of the cleared land and regularly ambushed the Montréalistes, it was often too hazardous to harvest food or to go hunting and fishing. Many times, the Montréalistes had been held near starvation by Iroquois assaults, the abundant natural resources of the land beyond their safe reach.
While Boucher had brought a promise from the king to send soldiers, there was no knowing when this would happen. On January 27, 1663, Maisonneuve, deciding not to wait, established the Milice de la Sainte-Vierge.
The Milice was twenty squadrons strong with seven men per squadron—each man and each squadron pledging to respond quickly and valiantly to defend Ville-Marie against the Iroquois. Every able-bodied man from age sixteen to sixty was conscripted to defend the settlement.
Jean Milot, ever mindful of protecting his surviving children, served as did his engagé, Barthélémy Verreault, who was assigned—after only a couple of months in Ville-Marie—to the Fifth Squadron. Another family man, Louis Ledoux’s eventual father-in-law, Jean Valiquet, served as a corporal in the 19th squadron. Boys were taught to handle firearms by the age of fourteen.
Soon after Barthélémy began to serve in the Milice de la Sainte-Vierge, a large ball of fire transformed the night sky into “a rather clear day.” This was not an isolated experience. Celestial occurrences had been frightening the European settlers throughout the previous fall and continued to do so into the winter.
On Monday, February 5, 1663, nine days after the founding of the Milice de la Sainte-Vierge, sometime after five o’clock in the evening, the phenomenon of the year occurred: an earthquake that reportedly lasted for as long as a half hour.
In Québec, Marie de l’Incarnation wrote about hearing a loud noise and a “terrible buzzing sound” coming from far away. She described it as the sound of many coaches rushing recklessly over cobblestones. Almost as soon as the people of Québec heard the sound in the air, they heard it coming from the ground as well. Then, the earth began to move. It was about 5:30 in the afternoon.
Rafters snapped and houses collapsed. Fires ensued. Church bells rang and rang in what seemed an eerily spontaneous response as the earth rose and then collapsed upon itself. Some habitants knelt in the snow crying for mercy while others passed the rest of the night in prayer. After the quake, the few churches in the colony were filled with the faithful seeking consolation—and absolution. It was said afterward that many colonists throughout New France abjured evil and sought to live holier lives. Many believed that God was punishing them for their contraband sale of alcohol to the Indians, and the Jesuits appeared to be vindicated for their condemnation of this practice.
“God is seeming to want to get even for the slights against him,” the Jesuit Relations reported.
At Trois-Rivières, trees slid into the Saint-Maurice, and entire banks disappeared, flowing into the Saint-Laurent where they were said to have interfered with the current of the great fleuve for as long as three months.
In Montréal, the earthquake was less violent than it had been downriver. But even there, spectators wrote that it shook houses “as a wind shakes a tree branch.” People fled their houses, leaving fires unattended in open hearths, creating a great risk of a conflagration. Even the sick fled the Hôtel-Dieu. Madame D’Ailleboust, wife of the ex-governor and a woman known for her piety, was thrown out of her bed, half-clothed. Hurriedly followed by her woman servant carrying Madame’s skirt, she rushed through the cold night to the Abbé Souart, pastor of Montréal, shouting, “Confession, mon père. Confession.”
The earthquake was also frightening to the Indigenous Peoples who lived in winter longhouses on the outskirts of the French settlements. Converts crowded into the French churches, while those who held to traditional beliefs professed the ancestors were speaking angrily because the land was being lost to the French. The old people were demanding their territory back. Frightened, some traditionalists shot bullets into the air to ward off evil spirits.
There were many subsequent earthquakes that year. While less severe and frequent than the February 5 quake, they continued to alarm the colonists, and it was not until some time in August that they stopped.
By the following summer, as the quakes were subsiding, Jean Milot, was ready to remarry and, as was customary at the time (and prescribed by law), an inventory was made of all the goods that he and Marie-Marthe Pinson had held in common. Under the Coutume de Paris, the code of laws in effect in New France, Jean Milot did not inherit Marie-Marthe Pinson’s share of common goods, or the goods she had brought to the marriage. Both belonged to the Milot children, Claude and Jeanne. Accordingly, an inventory of Marie-Marthe Pinson’s assets was required to protect their interests.
Compiled in July of 1663, the inventory states that Milot, his two children, and Barthélémy lived in a house, twenty feet by twenty-one feet, located within the larger palisade. The walls were constructed of short logs placed horizontally between the wood framing. This was a popular early construction method and was the type of housing that Barthélémy had seen on the Beaupré shore in November. Because the logs were placed horizontally, it was easy to chink between them, and because short pieces were used, one man alone could build most of the house without help. Short pieces also meant little waste of labor and materials as ends of longer logs or odd pieces could be used. Such houses were often started in March when the warmer sun made the snow heavy and wet, and it was no longer feasible to snowshoe into the woods for logging, and they were completed by June in time to free the colonists for the planting. The whole structure was then whitewashed. Milot’s house had a chimney, a floor made of oak and ash, and an earth and stone cellar. There was no floor to this understory. While the inventory does not state so, it was likely the stone of the cellar wall extended to below the frost line. The roof was constructed of overlapping boards. While again the document is mute, it was likely a Normand-style roof. The house was valued at eight hundred livres tournois.
The document also revealed that Milot owed Barthélémy two hundred and forty-six livres. This debt can be presumed to comprise the full sum of his three annual salaries. Milot also held some merchandise (“daciers)” due to Barthélémy.
The inventory done and recorded, Milot was now ready to remarry. However, there was a shortage of women in New France, and he would have to wait for a shipload of filles du roi before finding a wife. One such ship did arrive in September bearing a twenty-nine-year-old, Mathurine Thibault, who accepted his proposal. Their marriage took place on November 26, 1663. After the ceremony, she moved into Milot’s twenty-by-twenty-one-foot house in which already lived four people. In this circumstance, with its minimum of privacy, housing a second man, the couple procreated the first of their six children.
This is where Barthélémy would spend the years of his indenture.