Abstract

The vital link between New France and old France was the commercial one. The monarchy and the church depended on merchants to send ships with people, goods, and mail back and forth across the Atlantic. The colonies in New France were not self-sufficient: hardware, houseware, grain, flour and other foodstuffs (not to mention wine and brandy) had to be shipped over to Canada, Newfoundland, Acadia, and Louisbourg. Nearly all of the supplies that were dispatched to fight the four long wars with Great Britain between 1688 and 1763 were sent on merchant ships under contract with the government. Most of the ships were sent by merchants from the southwestern ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle. A few sailed out of Rouen in Normandy or Bayonne near the Spanish border, fewer still out of other Atlantic or Channel ports such as Saint Malo, Nantes, Saint Valerysur-Somme, Le Havre, and occasionally even Marseille, but most were loaded at La Rochelle or Bordeaux or sent on behalf of merchants at those ports. The incentive was, of course, private profit. Willing as they sometimes were to accommodate ministers of the Crown by shipping men, messages, and munitions, shipowners always had financial benefits in mind, and they drove a hard bargain in wartime. Full records of this trade have not survived; there are only a few scattered letters, accounts, notarial contracts, and official reports. Faced with this dearth, we might cope with the history of the trade by taking refuge in statistics, dressing up our fragments of information with graphs and columns of figures to give an impression of scientific and technical mastery. But a social study of the merchants themselves can hardly be approached that way. Because information is too meagre

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