Champlain and the Sieur de Mons
Sieur de Champlain Xainctongeois.
—title page of Champlain’s last book,
Les Voyages (1632)1
CHAMPLAIN, like most of us, was a man of multiple identities. In his first book, he introduced himself to the world as “Samuel Champlain, De Brouage.” Later he described himself in another way as “Champlain Xainctongeois,” a man of Saintonge.2 As he grew older and traveled widely in the world, he increasingly identified himself with the old French region in which he was raised. Here is a paradox of our modern condition, which Champlain helped to create. The more he saw of the world, the stronger was his kinship to what Eudora Welty called the “places of the heart.”3
Champlain’s place was Saintonge. In his time it was the name of a province, a people, a language, a culture, and a way of life. Today, the old province of Saintonge has been replaced by several French departments with administrative names such as Charente-Maritime, but many people who live there still think of themselves as saintongeais, and are deeply aware of their culture and history.4
The name descended from a Celtic tribe called the Santoni, a fiercely independent people with a strong sense of their own ways. Julius Caesar’s legions fought them, and Roman settlers built their villas along the coast of Saintonge. Two millennia later the Roman villas are ruins, but the descendants of the Santoni are still there, clinging stubbornly to their land. They absorbed the Roman population and invented a dialect that combined Celtic, French, and Latin elements in unique ways.
The Santoni had a talent for survival. In the Middle Ages they were assaulted from the sea by the Vikings, and attacked from the land by a multitude of warrior tribes. They took refuge in islands and marshes along the coast, and survived catastrophes that extinguished many other cultures in Europe.5 A key to their endurance was the Gulf of Saintonge, which two thousand years ago was a huge body of water, much larger than today. Nathalie Fiquet describes it as a great sea, “formed of protruding peninsulas, and sprinkled with islands and islets.” It stretched from the present coast to the higher ground of Saint-Sornin and Saint-Agnant, ten miles inland.6
Along the coasts and islands of this great gulf, descendants of the Santoni took their living from the sea. The water yielded an abundance of fish and mollusks, and the area is still a major center for France’s oyster industry. Marshes around the gulf also supplied salt, the commodity that sustained Champlain’s home port of Brouage. The people of coastal Saintonge flourished in many maritime trades. Historian Hubert Deschamps, himself a man of this region, described them as “fishermen, seamen, fishmongers, marsh workers, independent people who love struggle and adventure.”7
Others lived inland along the river valleys, where fertile fields produced large crops of grain, and pastures supported flocks of sheep. The vineyards of the Charente Valley became the cognac country of France and still supply the world with much of its best brandy.8 It is a very beautiful landscape. Deschamps wrote lyrically of the “Saintonge of the interior, with its gentle undulations, its fields, its patches of woodland, its vines, its clear rivers, its white villages, a territory humanized through the centuries by a pacific people.”9
Inland and coastal Saintonge had many differences, but they were part of the same region. They shared a bright and sunny climate, with more hours of sunshine than any other part of France. Most of the region has long views of a large sky. Much of it is near the water, either on the coast or along its rivers. The people of this place speak of the water as the beautiful robe bleue that cloaks their homeland. The strong sun, big sky, and flowing waters all lift the spirit in Saintonge, and they have entered into the soul of its population.
Through much of this province and especially along the coast, there is also a comparative abundance of material things. At the end of the sixteenth century a local poet wrote that it was so even for the humble saulniers who earned their living from the salt marshes:
The marsh worker on his salty plain
Gets bread, fish, and game without pain.10
Peasants in the interior and traders in the towns flourished in other ways—more so in some periods than in others. Even in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a time of many troubles in much of western Europe, the governor of Bordeaux reckoned in 1570 that of all the many regions of France, “the most opulent and richest province of the King is that of Saintonge.”11
With all of these advantages, the people of Saintonge also had their full share of adversity. In the Hundred Years War between England and France (circa 1337 to 1453) they suffered much from the ravages of marching armies. It happened again in the wars of religion during the sixteenth century. As in much of Europe, plague and pestilence spread across the countryside, and the farmers of Saintonge experienced shortages during the difficult years of the mid-1590s.12
But the troubles of the late sixteenth century were less severe in Saintonge than in other provinces. The cold temperatures of the little ice age caused sea levels to fall a little, which enlarged the productive marshland on the coast of Saintonge. The bounty of the sea and the rivers tended to diminish the hungry seasons that the French called disettes, which came each year when the old grain supply ran out, and the new crops were not in.13
Military insecurity was also a problem. The peaceable people of coastal Saintonge were often attacked, but they adapted to a dangerous environment and learned to defend themselves. More than one king remitted their taxes because they “always had arms on their shoulders” and knew how to use them in defense of their land. Another official visited the coast of Saintonge in the mid-sixteenth century and was amazed to find an “incredible number of people” living in the marshes. He described them as a strong and sturdy population “hardened to pain, knowing well the movements of the sea and its malign perils and dangers,” a people “bellicose, adventurous and skilled in war, both on sea and land,” and “valiant and hardy at sea, where they make great voyages.”14
The people of Saintonge faced their challenges and overcame them without much help from others. They were able to rise above their difficulties by their own effort, and there was a buoyancy in their culture. From their environment and history they developed a sense of themselves that set them apart from other regions of France. Champlain wrote of neighboring Brittany as a foreign country, and that attitude was reciprocated. As late as the sixteenth century, people from other parts of France regarded the Saintongeois as a breed apart. The Parisian writer Theodore de Bèze described them as “a rude people nearly without humanity—pirates and parasites of the sea.”15 It would be more accurate to say that they had a different idea of humanity. A leading historian studied “the regional mentality” of Saintonge, and concluded that one of its distinctive qualities was “a very strong individualism,” a word that has long been a pejorative in other parts of France. He writes that one “searches in vain” for the “communitarian constraints that exist elsewhere” in the nation. This regional mentality had many striking features. They found expression in a unique culture and language that made a difference in Champlain’s life.16
Through the years, the people of Saintonge developed a language of their own. It was very French, but with a special character. Today linguists in Paris call it the patois charentais after the modern departments of Charente and Charente-Maritime. Native speakers think of it not as a patois but a language. They still call it the langue xaintongeaise, or simply le parlanjhe, the speech.17
These speechways of Saintonge were shaped by its heritage and its linguistic location, between the dialect-regions of northern and southern France. The langue xaintongeaise combines elements of both French dialects with a vocabulary of its own. The leading example is its word for “snail,” which in other parts of France is escargot. In Saintonge it is cagouille. Throughout this old province, cagouilles are gathered in great abundance and farmed as well. They are highly prized and have a ceremonial function at festivals and harvest rituals. Cagouilles are also cultural symbols of great antiquity. Cathedrals and village churches that date from the eleventh century have cagouilles carved into their medieval stonework. In the modern era the cagouille became the leading emblem of the region, and the people of Saintonge proudly call themselves cagouillards. The snail made a perfect symbol of this culture, with its hard shell and soft interior, its slow pace and steady progress, its careful ways and sensitive antennae.18
Champlain was a cagouillard and always remained so, even as he traveled far from his native place. When he went to the West Indies and Mexico, he described the flora and fauna of the new world in the old langue xaintongeaise. A French botanist who studied the text of Champlain’s report on the West Indies concluded that it could only have been written by a man who was a native of Saintonge in the sixteenth century.19
The language of Saintonge was mainly the product of an oral culture, with many special words for people who were important to its transmission, such as conteur and bonconteur, conteuse and conteusine, who are skilled at recounting stories and histories in public.20 It is a language rich in its description of special systems of material production, some of which would be carried to New France. An example is its complex language of dikes and canals that were important to the marshes and salt basins of Saintonge. Especially important to Champlain’s new world was the aboteau, abotiâ, aboitiâ, abouèta, or aboiteau— which described the earthworks and wooden sluices that were used in the managing of the marshes and would become central to the material world of Acadia.21
The langue xaintongeaise also offers many clues to the cultural world in which Samuel Champlain was raised. It is a happy language, full of laughter. Children are called drôles in Saintonge, and a young girl is a drôlesse—without any pejorative connotation, we were assured with the wink of an eye. The people of this region have a highly developed vocabulary of happiness, as in their word benèze, for a free and easy, good-natured sort of habitual happiness that is more than merely heureux, even as they have that word as well. The two words together become bienheureux, which means not only “good-natured” but “blissfully happy.” Some of these words appear in metropolitan French, but a person of Saintonge who speaks the parlanjhe of the region is uniquely called agoulebenèze, literally, a happy mouth. The word for mouth, bouche in standard French, is goule in the parlanjhe of Saintonge. Champlain was a goulebenèze in every sense, and he had that happy way of speaking. Even late in life, when he was old in years and high in rank, a Montagnais said to him in Canada, “You always say something jolly to cheer us up.”22
* * *
The proverbs of Saintonge have the same spirit. A favorite saying is “Qui va chap’tit, va loin; he who goes gently goes far.”23 A folklorist has written that this maxim is the “motto of the region.” Another calls it “the currency of Saintongeais.” It became part of Champlain’s style of leadership through the course of his career, as we shall see. Other proverbs in this region have similar themes:
Bien aise peut éprer; mal aise reste à l’aise.
Good nature gets more; bad nature gets nothing.
Beunaise se mâche à bout de ne rin faire.
A good touch does no harm.
Beunaise thiéllés quiavant des sous peur fazir oublier zeu sottise.
Very happy are those who have enough sous (silver coins) to forget their stupidity.24
Another proverb advises: “In piasit en attire in aute; to give pleasure is to gain it.” The folk wisdom of Saintonge recommends that rule of reciprocity. This is a culture that is comfortable with differences among people. It shows tact for the feelings of others, and a concern for treating them decently. That spirit always suffused Champlain’s relations with others.25
The Saintongeois are a practical people, very much down to earth. Their proverbs combine large purposes with a spirit of caution and prudence which is common to many rural cultures in France:
Avant de feire in fagot, o faut ârgader la riorte.
Before starting something, study the means.
Pour bin finir, o faut bin commencer.
To finish well, start well.
Meûx vaut chômer que mal moudre.
Better to do nothing than do it badly.
Meûx vaut pardre un pain qu’ine faumée.
Better to lose the loaf than the oven.
Tache de seug’ ton chemin dreit, d’Angoleme à la Rochelle, pas d’besoin d’passer prr’ Potiers.
To take the best road from Angoulême to La Rochelle, there’s no need to pass through Poitiers.26
Champlain followed these practical maxims all his life. He made a point of preparing carefully, acting prudently in bold ventures, and going directly toward his objective.
The culture of Saintonge also had a strong ethical compass. More than that, it taught that the right way was most successful in the long run. Another proverb was “Farine dau Yab tourne en bran; the Devil’s flour turns into bran.” This mode of thought stressed the importance of doing the right thing in the right way. In the spirit of the region, it is cast not in terms of a moral imperative, but a practical rule of thumb. It is a flexible idea about getting on with others by doing the right thing, rather than a rigid rule of absolute morality.27
One of the great classics of French sociology is a study by Maurice Bures called Le type saintongeois, first published in 1908 and still in print a century later. It centers on the farmers of the Charente Valley in the late nineteenth century. They were Champlain’s country cousins, and they shared a cultural kinship with maritime towns such as Brouage.28
Bures found among the inland people the same sunny temperament that he observed throughout the region. He observed that this “amiable Saintonge” had a culture that “encouraged its inhabitants to the love of well-being (l’amour du bien-être) and to a peace of the soul (calme de l’âme).” But this peace of the soul was combined with a style of life that was lively in body and spirit, “vif d’esprit et de corps.” He added that the essence of the Saintonge character was to love joking, good-natured banter, and wordplay.29
Bures also found something else in the culture of Saintonge—an outlook essentially “positif,” by which he meant a way of thinking that was both positive in its English meaning and also practical. He called it the sens pratique, which he thought was one of the strongest qualities of this culture. In practical decisions this spirit was always sheathed in a fourreau de prudence, a scabbard of caution.30
The people of Saintonge carried these attitudes into their writing. Bures observed that a typical writer of the region tended to be an easygoing storyteller who “does not invent but recounts.” He specifically found that pattern in the writings of Samuel de Champlain, and identified him as a leading example of “le type saintongeois.” It appeared in Champlain’s words and thoughts throughout his life.31
These ideas and values developed in Saintonge in large part because of its location, which had a direct impact on Champlain’s life. His extended family lived in a broad area of western and southern France. Cousin Marie Cameret and her husband resided in La Rochelle, about twenty-five miles north of Brouage. His maternal uncle Guillaume Hellaine hailed from Marseilles on the Mediterranean coast of France, and was called le capitaine provençal.32
The environment of Champlain’s youth, and the distribution of his extended family, spanned two ecological regions. To the north was an Atlantic world of cool, wet summers that supported a North European farming system. His relatives to the south lived in a Mediterranean region of long, hot summers that sustained a regime of the olive and the vine.
Champlain’s family also lived on a borderland between two cultural regions. In the sixteenth century each had its own family of languages, called the langue d’oc and the langue d’oïl, from their pronunciation of the word for yes. Champlain’s cousins in La Rochelle spoke the langue d’oïl. His relatives to the south came from the region of the langue d’oc. Historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie writes that “a literary language developed out of … the langue d’oc, very different, despite a common Latin origin, from the langue d’oïl, in use north of the Central Massif.”33
These speechways were vehicles for different cultures. Le Roy Ladurie explained: “Incompletely unified, the langue occitane nevertheless made possible the formation of a vast community of culture which from Languedoc extended nearly to Catalonia, Provence and Gascony, and to the north nearly to Limousin, Auvergne and Dauphiné.” He described the process by which the very different langue d’oïl also spread among nobility and bourgeoisie in the south during the sixteenth century, so that “those two classes remained more or less bilingual.” But the langue d’oc persisted in a monolingual way among country people throughout the south in Champlain’s lifetime.34
Champlain moved back and forth across this linguistic and cultural borderland, as did his Rochelais cousins and his uncle from Provence. He came of age in the midst of a broad diversity of language, culture, religion, and ecology. Raised in the midst of cultural variety, he became comfortable with diversity even within his own family. He was also tolerant of differences among people, deeply interested in the infinite varieties of the human condition, and enormously curious about the world. These attitudes would shape his career. They gave him a broad idea of the human condition, and helped to inspire a dream of humanity that guided him through his life.35
Champlain was not alone in the possession of this cultural heritage. Another founder of New France was also a man of Saintonge, and he had similar attitudes, temperament, values, and purposes. He was Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons. In New France he was Champlain’s superior from 1604 to 1606, and a prime mover in the planting of the first permanent French colonies in North America. Like others of the French aristocracy, he was a man of many names and they were spelled in many ways. Sometimes he signed himself by his nom de famille, Dugua, which he wrote as one word in a big, bold, rolling, confident script that said much about his character. Often he used his nom de terre, which appeared in various forms even on the same page: De Mons, De Monts, De Montz, or simply Montz (his favorite).36
No authentic image of De Mons survives. He is not widely remembered in the country of his birth, or in the American nations that he helped to create. A handsome statue of the sieur de Mons, as his biographers now call him, stands high on a grassy hill at Annapolis Royal, overlooking the waters of Port Royal Sound in what is now Nova Scotia. But it is an imaginary likeness and bears the wrong baptismal name on its base.37
Historians have judged the sieur de Mons in various ways. For many generations the writing about him was positive but very thin, and he remained in the shadow of his lieutenants. In the early twentieth century more material began to emerge through the efforts of American antiquarian William Inglis Morse, and his stature started to grow. In the mid-twentieth century popular debunkers and academic iconoclasts weighed in. They knew nothing about him, but attacked him viciously. One iconoclast called him “a greedy explorer,” selfishly devoted to the “defence of his monopoly,” which is a complete miscomprehension of the man and his purposes.38
Only at the end of the century did de Mons at last receive his due, in books by Jean Liebel, Guy Binot, and Jean-Yves Grenon. These scholars believe that he was truly the father of New France, and the most important figure in its early history. Jean Liebel calls him the true “fondateur de Québec.” Jean Glénisson, a distinguished scholar and another son of Saintonge, writes that “at the moment when all seemed lost for France in America, it was to Pierre Dugua that New France owed her survival.”39
De Mons and Champlain were both of high importance in the founding of New France, and they reinforced each other. Marcel Trudel writes of de Mons, “Without him, one could assume there would never have been a Champlain.”40 Rival writers in New France, even as they criticized each other, all thought highly of de Mons, and wrote of him with respect and affection. One of them praised his “sturdy loins, in times of difficulty,” and wrote in 1609 that de Mons had “done more than all the rest,” despite many obstacles in America and France. De Mons was praised for his decency and for a spirit of humanity “that would not have been felt by many others in his position.”41 Champlain added in 1613, “He never wavered in pursuit of his plan, for the desire he had that all things should redound to the good and honor of France.”42
Champlain and de Mons were linked in many ways. They were raised only a few miles apart. Pierre Dugua is thought to have been baptized about 1558 or 1560, and was at least ten or twelve years older than Champlain. His native place is not known, but probably it was the old village of Le Gua or the small seaport of Royan on the north bank of the Gironde River, near the narrow mouth of its great estuary. Both towns lay only a few miles south of Brouage.
His parents were of the nobility. The title “de Mons” came from a hill that rose above the town of Royan. The crest of that hill, overlooking the River Gironde, was the seat of the family’s château. It belonged to Pierre Dugua’s grandfather Loubat Dugua, who was also known as the “capitaine du Château de Royan.” The old château burned in 1737 and was quickly rebuilt in 1739. The eighteenth-century building still stands today behind the medieval walls that surrounded the old château. It is now a private club in a close-built residential neighborhood. The sieur de Mons probably grew up in his father’s house on that hill, near his grandfather’s château with its walls and towers. Both buildings had “a magnificent view of ships going and coming in the Gironde estuary.”43
Pierre Dugua was raised a Huguenot but married a Catholic, Judith Chesnel. Her aristocratic family lived in the Château de Meux near Jonzac, southeast of Royan. Like Champlain, de Mons entered the service of Henri IV as a soldier, and fought in the French wars of religion against the de Guise family. De Mons distinguished himself for “grand courage” and loyalty to the king in heavy fighting for control of Normandy. It was a desperate struggle. In 1589, the Catholic ligueurs held every major town in Normandy but two: Caën and Dieppe, where de Mons fought valiantly against them. The citizens of Dieppe elected him one of their captains, and he led them to a great victory.44
The sieur de Mons rose rapidly in royal favor, and the king showered honors on him. In January, 1594, Henri IV gave him a pension of 100 écus a month and many offices: Gentleman in Ordinary of the King’s Chamber, Governor of the Château de Madrid, Governor of the Bois de Boulogne, and later Governor of Pons, a Huguenot fortress twenty-five miles inland from Royan.45 De Mons was said to have the manners of a “grand seigneur” and was known for “his affability, his calm, and his generosity,” which “drew sympathy while inspiring respect.” He was tolerant of others, in particular those of “the Roman Catholic religion, which was not his own.” Most of all he was thought to have a quality of “tact,” and a gift for getting people of different beliefs to live and work together, “which was no small thing in that time of religious passions and hatreds.”46
Like many noble families in this region, de Mons was deeply involved in commerce, and became a wealthy venture capitalist, despite the prohibitions that kept many noblemen out of trade. He sold some of his landed property in the seigneury of Puy-du-Fou and obtained a capital of 29,416 écus or 88,248 livres tournois in liquid assets, a large sum by the standards of that age. His purpose was to invest in enterprises “in new lands beyond the sea.”47 To that end he formed an association with Pierre Chauvin, sieur de Tonnetuit, a Protestant and rich bourgeois of Honfleur, and later with Aymar de Chaste. They did well by their investments in the fisheries and fur trade of North America. Some historians have written that de Mons was ruined by the failure of his American investments. This is not correct. For many years he continued to invest actively in American affairs. As late as 1621, he and associates were sending two ships a year to New France, and he became an investor in many trading companies that operated in North America.48
At the same time, the sieur de Mons preferred to live the quiet life of a country gentleman, and in a very old-fashioned way. In 1619, he used some of his profits in the American trade to buy a new estate called “d’Ardennes,” after the beautiful forest of Ardennes, five miles south of Pons in Saintonge—not to be confused with the Ardennes in Belgium and northeastern France. His house was a medieval château with walls flanked by towers of squared stone, and crowned with crenellated walkways. The main gate was protected by a portcullis and drawbridge, and the house was surrounded by polygonal moats. It had been the seat of a very large seigneury. De Mons bought only part of the property in 1618, and later succeeded in reuniting the entire fiefdom before his death. He made the house into a maison noble, and the retreat of a wealthy gentleman who preferred the rural life. There he died on February 22, 1628, and was buried in a small enclosure near the main gate of the Château d’Ardennes.49
A friend who knew him well wrote that “the absence of signs of egoism, of greed, of cupidity was remarkable in this man, in whom it was easy to see generosity, benevolence, and sensibility.” Another observed that “amiability and good manners came naturally to him. He had no need to intrigue or give himself importance by craft or cunning.” His acquaintances added that he was “always the master of himself, calm in all circumstances, never impulsive, [and] he reflected before he acted. His ideas had the merit of being guided by the quality that we call judgment (bon sens). They were simple [and] well ordered.”50
In Champlain and the sieur de Mons, Saintonge produced the two leading founders of New France. Their conduct was always an expression of the culture and values of the region in which they were raised. They had a unique spirit, very different from the Castilians who ruled New Spain, the East Anglian Puritans who dominated New England, the Dutch merchants and patroons of New Netherland, the Cavaliers who ran Virginia, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the North Britons and Ulster Scots of Backcountry America. All these groups were admirable in many ways, but no two were quite alike. These men of Saintonge, Champlain and the sieur de Mons, shared a distinct regional culture, and they brought a special character to colonial enterprise.
Other Frenchmen also settled in the new world: Normans, Bretons, Percherons, Parisians, Loudonnais, Bordelais, French Basques, and many others. The multiplicity of these groups gave the men of Saintonge another importance. The ancient history of the Santoni, the medieval geography of their region, diversity of their world, and the modern values of their culture helped them to work with others, and gave them strength as mediators among many groups. The spirit of their homeland appeared in the way that Champlain and the sieur de Mons conducted themselves and worked with others.