Showing posts with label Iroquois. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iroquois. Show all posts

April 20 - Jacques Cartier begins a “Voyage of Discovery”

 Posted on April 20, 2021

This is an update of my post published on April 20, 2010:



On this date in 1534, Jacques Cartier set sail from France, attempting to find for his king just what so many other explorers were trying to find: a westward passage to Asia, to lands filled with gold and spices.

He didn't find these things.

What he did find was the mainland of Canada, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island.


He found what he called the "Islands of the Birds," and his crew slaughtered around 1000 birds, most of them great auks. (Great auks are now extinct, but presumably not entirely because of Cartier's men!)


And of course, he found people already living on the land!


He engaged in some trading, but he also planted a 10-meter (30 foot!) cross in the ground and declared the territory the property of his king.


That was a prequel to kidnapping two Iroquoians. (Yikes!)

This event may not have been quite as violent as the word “kidnapping” suggests, because (after they had the native chief's sons in their possession), Cartier apparently bargained with the chief, Donnacona, for the right to take them back to Europe. Donnacona at last agreed on the condition that they return with European goods to trade.

On Cartier's return the next year, he brought back the two Iroquoians and things to trade.

Cartier and his men ended up staying the winter that year. Scurvy broke out among the Iroquoians and the French, but one of the men he had previously kidnapped paid a friendly visit to the French and told them of a medicine they could make from a local tree. According to Wikipedia, the remedy probably saved the French expedition, with 85 of the 110 men surviving the winter. (Cartier guessed that perhaps 50 of the Iroquoians died from scurvy, despite the medicine.)

At the end of Cartier's second voyage, he kidnapped
Chief Donnacona, his two sons, and at least six others
and took them all back to France! Horrible stuff -
but Donnacona (and I hope the others?) was at least
treated well in Europe.

Cartier ended up describing and mapping the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, and he gave Canada its name.

Cartier is usually given credit for "discovering" Canada,
even though (1) there were already a lot of people living
there - people whose ancestors must have "discovered"
Canada long before Cartier was born! and (2) Cartier
only explored a teeny portion of Canada. On the map above,
Cartier's route is depicted in green.





Learn about Canada.


Canada has 10 provinces and 3 territories, and
Cartier only explored a wee bit of three or four provinces.

Canada is the second largest country in the world, after only Russia. (We're talking area, not population.) Also, the border it shares with the U.S. is the longest in the world.

Canada is a bilingual nation, with both English and French as official languages. As you might guess, this is because both England and France laid claims to parts of Canada. France let go of its claims to the land in 1763, and soon Canada became a federal dominion of the United Kingdom (which is made up of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).

Canada never fought a war of independence against England. Instead it slowly-and-steadily became more and more independent, until 1982 when the Canada Act ended the nation's dependence on the British parliament. Even now, however, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is considered the head of state of Canada is pictured on some of its money!

Play a simple Sudoku-style game with Canadian symbols.

Zoom School is a cool place to learn about Canadian animals, geography, flag, culture, and more.
Play a game about explorers. Here is a matching game, and this is a version of concentration. 
Yukon 
British Columbia


 

Alberta




 

Canada is one of the most beautiful nations in the world. When I think of the nation's natural beauty, I think first of rugged Yukon, gorgeous British Columbia, and - my personal favorite - the Canadian Rockies, in Alberta.

But of course there are many beautiful landscapes and seascapes in eastern Canada, as well!


Prince Edward Island


Newfoundland and Labrador


Saint Lawrence River



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August 23 – Anniversary of Cartier Founding a Town

Posted on August 23, 2014


A lot of early European explorations of the so-called New World were focused on finding a passage to the “East Indies” – a place with silks and spices to sell – or on finding gold and other treasures.

Of course, soon Europeans focused on creating settlements – new towns that would grow to become new cities and countries – in the New World.

That certainly could be a tricky proposition. After all, there were already people living in the New World. These Native Americans had more know-how about the land and the resourcefulness and, in many cases, weapons to defend their rights to that land.

Perhaps that is why Jacques Cartier, a French explorer tasked to found a permanent settlement in the New World, in what is now Canada, chose not to settle too close to Iroquois Indians.


What is recorded about Cartier's encounter with the Iroquois is that he became worried about their “show of joy.” Also, there were an awful lot of Iroquois. Cartier decided to sail upriver to found a town in an emptier spot.

And so it was that, on this date in 1541, the fortified settlement called Charlesbourg-Royal was created. The colonists and cattle aboard Cartier's ship landed after three months at sea, and they began to farm.

Cartier continued to explore, to fulfill another of his assigned tasks, to find the rich kingdom called “Saguenay.” The Kingdom of Saguenay was, according to the Iroquois, a kingdom of blond men, of gold, of furs, of treasure galore. Cartier (and later other French explorers) searched and searched for this kingdom, but they never found it; scholars are not sure if the place was just a legend that the French mistakenly took literally, or if the Iroquois were deliberately lying in order to trick the French.

However, some of Cartier's men were delighted to find diamonds and gold, and soon the ship was full of the precious substances!

When Cartier gave up the search for the Kingdom of Saguenay, he learned that the settlement he had helped to start had fallen on hard times: the Iroquois had attacked and killed about 35 French settlers, and the rest of the settlers sounded pretty miserable. Cartier knew he didn't have enough men to protect the base, so he set sale for France.

Remember, he was convinced that his ship was laden with precious diamonds and gold.

It turned out that, not only had Cartier failed to find the treasure-filled kingdom, but he had also badly misjudged the minerals his men had collected. Instead of being diamonds, the crystals were merely common quartz. Instead of being gold, the sparkling mineral was iron pyrite (also called “fool's gold,” because...yeah). For centuries later the French expression “faux comme les diamants du Canada” referred to this disappointment: “as false as Canadian diamonds.”

This photo shows the difference between pyrite (L) and gold (R).

This diagram shows one difference between
diamonds and quartz; light bent within a
quartz crystal often has rainbow colors.

(Thank goodness for the fine jewelry company of Cartier, the common expression didn't mention Cartier's name in connection with the fake diamonds!)





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July 19 – The “Treaty of Nanfan” Signed (or was it?)

Posted on July 19, 2013

Before I get to the "Treaty of Nanfan," I want to mention something exciting that is happening today, July 29, 2013:

 It's Wave at Saturn Day!
As it has twice before, the robot space explorer named Cassini will be photographing Earth from a billion miles away. This time, scientist Carolyn Porco is urging everybody to go outside, smile really big (you can say "cheese" if you want), and wave at the camera at the time that this photo is being taken. 
Porco has called today "The Day the Earth Smiled."
Where I live, with Pacific Daylight Time, the photo is being taken at 2:27 in the afternoon. Here is a website that tells people in other time zones when they can wave at the (invisible to our eyes) camera. And here is an article with more info.

Now...back to Nanfan!

 This is what was supposed to have happened on this date in 1701:

The green portion is the land
that was supposedly granted
to England in 1701.
Representatives of the Five Nations (the Iroquois Confederacy, a group of Native American nations) sat down with John Nanfan, the acting governor of the British colony of New York. They hammered out a treaty that granted to the British king an enormous swath of land that includes the present-day states of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and southern Ontario, Canada. This chunk of land was sometimes called the Beaver Hunting Grounds.

These lands were, at that point, pretty much controlled by Native Americans who were aligned with French colonists rather than by the Iroquois, and France did not recognize this treaty. So it was pretty unimportant.

But there are historians who say that this treaty was even less than unimportant--they say that it never existed at all!

Thomas Kennedy is one of these historians. He says that what many call the Nanfan Treaty is really the Albany Deed of 1701; the Five Nations deeded a large chunk of land to the British New York Colony in return for the king's protection against the French. Rather than being connected to acting governor Nanfan, Kennedy states that this deed (not a treaty) is the result of New York Governor Bellomont, who died in office on March 5, 1701.

It seems clear to me that Governor Bellomont could have worked toward gaining rights to this land, but it finally came to pass during Nanfan's brief acting-governorship, and that the name passed down in various histories got fudged around and changed for reasons that are not very nefarious—such as confusion or forgetfulness. But I can also clearly see that this is one of several possibilities—and I really do not know the truth of the matter.

By the way, the "Five Nations" of the Iroquois
Confederacy eventually became Six Nations. 
From what I can tell, the Iroquois deeded the same land several times, sometimes to the same people and other cases to different people. I have heard that the concept of land ownership and land rights meant very different things to the various peoples—and I imagine that, as the British and American governments reneged on (backed out of) signed treaties, over and over, Native American tribes became more and more skeptical of any new treaties. Apparently the same thing happened with the deeds given out by Native Americans to European settlers—the latter became increasingly skeptical of any “deed” or “title” given by Five Nations peoples as something that cannot be counted on.

It seems to me that all the groups active in that corner of North America at the time took turns conquering and being conquered, and that there was little that an agreement or law could do when force was used to take land and resources. But it's definitely hard to know what really happened in New York in 1701. Even if we could examine historical documents, we would be hard pressed to authenticate them and certainly have no hope of discovering what people were thinking as they wrote or signed those documents!

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And here are my Pinterest pages on August holidays, historical anniversaries in August, and August birthdays.


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