Champlain saw great potential in Montreal’s site
His hopes for a permanent settlement were not to be realized in his lifetime
Montreal was founded 375 years ago, in 1642. It might have been founded a few decades earlier, if Samuel de Champlain had had his way. And its first name might have been just that, Montreal, instead of Ville Marie.
For Paul de Maisonneuve, Montreal’s eventual founder, for his fellow settlers and for their sponsors in France, Ville Marie was to be a mission colony, dedicated to converting indigenous people to Christianity. For Champlain, by contrast, a settlement on Montreal Island would have been the more usual sort of European outpost, focused primarily on commerce.
Champlain first came to Canada in 1603. In an expedition commanded by François Gravé Du Pont, he ventured up the St. Lawrence as far as the Lachine Rapids, beyond which their vessels, like those of Jacques Cartier nearly a century before, could proceed no farther.
The St. Lawrence valley, its climate growing milder in its upper reaches, mightily impressed Champlain as the heart of a future colony. Perhaps there’d be gold, gemstones and other minerals to exploit; certainly there already were furs. Timber was another obvious source of wealth. And, underlying everything was the hope that the great river could somehow become part of a shortcut to the riches of Asia.
Champlain became increasingly familiar with the area in the years after his first visit, especially once he’d established his famous habitation at Quebec in 1608. But it was not until 1611 that his thoughts returned in earnest to Montreal Island. A settlement there, he calculated, would make it easier for nations like the Huron, who lived up the Ottawa River and west toward Georgian Bay, to bring in furs to trade with the French. Champlain saw the Huron as allies, and such a settlement would also be a protective buffer between them and hostile Iroquois to the south.
Champlain sailed from France and reached Quebec late in May 1611. He was gratified to see that the 17 men who’d overwintered in the habitation had survived comfortably.
On May 28 he reached the Lachine Rapids and spent the next two weeks exploring the neighbourhood. He closely examined some 30 kilometres of riverbank below the rapids and, at today’s Pointe à Callière, found what he was looking for.
It was an open, triangular tract of about 20 hectares that indigenous people had once cleared for the planting of corn but had long since abandoned. True, it was a little upstream from the St. Mary’s Current, but the impediment to navigation presented by that minirapid was more than offset by the meadow’s potential for settlement.
Champlain quickly grasped its natural defences, the St. Lawrence on one flank, the Petite Rivière St. Pierre on the second and a stretch of marshy ground on the third. The land looked fertile and, after planting seeds of various sorts, he was delighted when shoots soon “came up quickly and in perfect condition.” He erected a small house and a masonry wall “to see how it would last during the winter when the waters came down.”
Champlain called the meadow Place Royale. And the map he drew of the area, for the first time on any map, used the name Cartier chose in 1535 to describe the small mountain overlooking the meadow: le mont Royal, or Montreal.
Alas, Champlain’s hopes for a permanent settlement — in fact, he thought Île-SteHélène would eventually make an ideal townsite — were not to be realized in his lifetime. The demands of consolidating the French presence at Quebec, Tadoussac and elsewhere, of forging alliances with various indigenous groups and of manoeuvring among the constantly shifting centres of power in France left him little time for a new venture on Montreal Island.
He died at Quebec in 1635. And, seven years later, where did de Maisonneuve establish Ville Marie? Indeed, on Place Royale.