Introduction After the French had built their first permanent settlements on the east coast of Canada, Ste. Croix (1604), Port Royal (1605) and Quebec (1608), it took them only until 1681 to explore and roughly map the shores of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. This was an astonishing achievement considering that the first Dutch and Englishmen did not even see Lake Ontario until 1685. Conventional wisdom gives one to understand that the French were strongly motivated to explore westward in order to expand their fur trade, to proselytize the Natives and to seek a route across the continent; and what enabled them to do so were the river systems that connected the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River. By contrast, it is said, these motives were all but absent among the Dutch and English as were the easy routes leading westward. Motives are of course only an essential first step in defining goals; by themselves, without further development, they remain a pipedream. To reach goals successfully involves compromises and the development of appropriate cultural and technological innovations necessary for the desired outcome. Penetrating westward into the continent was a very real problem for Europeans who had to move through an alien physical environment inhabited by people about whom they knew nothing. The key to European inland exploration and fur trade expansion was learning how to cope with the physical environment through which they had to travel and seeking the co-operation of the Native populations who controlled that environment. By the end of the sixteenth century, the French had discovered that the magnificent rivers that supposedly led westward were in fact un-navigable to them; they were full offalls and rapids, and flowed swiftly eastward from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence and Atlantic coast making it difficult to travel westward, upstream. The St. Lawrence River was a cul-de-sac. European transportation technology (boats, horses, even walking) was useless under these conditions. Europeans who wanted to use these rivers had to change the way they traveled before any movement inland was possible. The canoe, which could have solved part of this problem at an early date, was, until the early seventeenth century, an item of Native technology that no European knew anything about. To Europeans, at first glance, it was obviously inferior to their technology because it could not carry the loads they were accustomed to take with them and required the skill to paddle that only the Natives had. The canoe was in fact a technological innovation that belonged to an alien culture, developed to overcome an alien environment. Even if the canoe was recognized as a technological solution to a transportation problem, knowledge of its construction and operation was still required. This meant peaceful relations with the Native populations who controlled not only the knowledge about canoes but also access to the lands in the interior and how to live on those lands. The expansion of the fur trade into the interior of Canada was also a powerful motive to the French. Since trade has to be mutually beneficial to both partners, it can only function adequately under peaceful relations. The fur trade was a partnership to exploit a resource that provided furs to one partner and durable utilitarian goods to the other. But once trade was established there was still no reason why the Natives should give the French access to their lands
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Feb 1, 2014
Yangyoon + 1
Open Access
