The following article appeared in the LE FORUM magazine, Volume 32, #1 & 2, Printemps/Spring 2006 - Été/Summer 2006, page 6. It is reprinted here with permission from the author, Denise Rajotte Larson, and the Managing Editor, Lisa Michaud. Merci bien.
As we drag out the backyard grill to celebrate Father’s Day, let’s give a nod to Louis Hebert, the first father and farmer in Quebec, and Samuel de Champlain, who is called the Father of New France.
The Heberts, Louis, his wife, Marie, and their children, Guillaume, Guillemette, and Anne, left Paris in 1617. Louis had given up his position as an apothecary in the king’s court, tending to the medicinal needs of royalty and courtiers, to become the ad hoc doctor and de facto official at a fur trading post in the wilds of the New World. He was the very first Frenchman to bring his family to the North America, and he did so three years before the Mayflower arrived in Massachusetts.
The Hebert family landed at Tadoussac and transferred to a smaller vessel to take them to Quebec, where Louis had cleared some land in the hopes of developing a medicinal herb garden, something that would not have been possible in Paris. Plants were the basis for most treatments of ailments in the seventeenth century, and the study of herbs was extremely important. An apothecary of good repute and skill with herbs was considered more valuable than a physician, whose most common treatment for practically any illness was purging with laxatives or bloodletting with cuts or leeches.
In addition to herbs, Louis experimented with growing plants that he found growing in the countryside and those that native people brought to him. These included corn, melons, squashes, and pumpkins. As an employee of the mercantile company who had sponsored the establishment of the trading post at Quebec, and like many other fathers who have to do the gardening after coming home from work, Louis had to tend his fields on his own time. He and his family were able to supplement the diet of the colonists, who numbered only about fifty during the first twenty years or so of the settlement. If there had been a Father’s Day in the seventeenth century, on the spit at the Hebert’s house would have been the meat from deer, moose, possum, or turkey, which were common and plentiful in the area.
Louis gave ten energetic years to the community at Quebec before he fell from scaffolding while repairing a roof and died in 1627. His only grandson, Joseph, was still a youth when he died while a prisoner of the Iroquois, but his wife and daughter Guillemette continued to live in the settlement.
Sam Champlain looked out for those under his care at the remote trading post at Quebec. Crossing the stormy North Atlantic twenty-three times during his career as cartographer, navigator, and explorer, Champlain was like a mother hen to the small settlement. He often sought an audience with the king of France to ask for more funding from the mercantile companies, more troops for security, more settlers for the land.
Though most of his pleas fell on deaf ears, and the king’s advisors felt as Voltaire later quipped -- that Canada was no more than “a few acres of snow” -- Champlain continued his work of mapping North America and making alliances with the native people. He was respected by the colonists, fellow mariners, and even his rivals in exploration, who used his charts and sailing directions when approaching the American coast.
Champlain died on Christmas day in 1635. His gift to the world was Quebec, the birthplace of Canada and a World Heritage City as designated by UNESCO in 1985. In 2008 Quebec will celebrate the 400th anniversary of its founding. Many descendants of the first families will attend, and the memory, and perhaps even the spirit of Champlain will be there.
Source: “La belle France: a Short History” by Alistair Horne, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Denise Rajotte Larson is a freelance writer whose "Companions of Champlain," a story of life in early Quebec, will be published by LeForum (www.francoamerican.org.) in 2007.
This article also appeared in the online magazine Késsinnimek - Roots - Racines, the December 2006 Issue
