A WANDERING ROGUE
Four centuries ago, explorer Étienne Brûlé set foot in what is now Toronto,
He’s been dubbed the “Columbus of the Great Lakes,” having been the first European to see at least four of them, but also an “Immortal Scoundrel.”
Such is the tortured legacy of Étienne Brûlé, who 400 years ago first passed through Toronto as part of his epic wanderings around eastern North America, and whose name now adorns a sprawling park near Old Mill subway station.
That Brûlé would become such a complex man of mystery is little wonder, since he left no documented account of his travels. We must rely instead on scattered references to him in the writings of Samuel de Champlain, Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard and the Jesuits Jean de Brébeuf, François-Joseph Le Mercier and Paul Le Jeune. And even then, following Brûlé’s adventures involves no small dollop of conjecture and supposition.
He’s believed to have been born circa 1591 at Champigny-sur-Marne, near Paris, and to have made the voyage to Quebec with Champlain in 1608. Brûlé would thus have been among the very few who managed to survive that first, terrible winter, which is perhaps why Champlain was initially so impressed with the young man.
Brûlé also wanted to live among the Algonquin and Huron tribes, a wish Champlain duly granted in 1610.
“I had with me a youth who had already spent two winters at Québec and wanted to go among the Algoumequis (Algonquin) to master their language . . . learn about their country, see the great lake, take note of the rivers and the peoples living along them, and discover any mines, along with the curious things about those places and peoples, so that we might, upon his return, be informed truthfully about them.”
Brûlé returned the following year, dressed in Indian garb, to meet briefly with Champlain, who seems to have emerged as almost a father figure. “My lad,” wrote Champlain, “had learned their language well.” The young man was soon decamping to rejoin the Huron to the west, whose main territory was the peninsula between today’s Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. To reach that area, Brûlé would have followed a traditional native route — up the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers, across Lake Nipissing, and then down the French River to Georgian Bay.
He was, in a sense, doing reconnaissance for Champlain, who in 1615 could claim to have “discovered” Lake Huron after meeting Brûlé there. But it was the latter who ended up travelling much further afield in North America, thanks in part to his next task: heading south to meet with another Indian group, the Susquehannock, and enlist their help in a planned attack on the Iroquois by the Huron and French.
Brûlé and his Huron guides left Lake Simcoe in early September, 1615, and set off on an ancient Indian trail, the “Toronto Passage” or “Toronto Carrying-Place Trail,” following the Humber River to Lake Ontario. From there, he would have likely crossed the lake towards the Niagara River and present-day Buffalo before continuing south.
But having succeeded in wooing the Susquehannock, Brûlé and his new allies arrived too late to do battle with the Iroquois; the Huron had already been routed.
Brûlé then appears to have lingered around the northern branches of the Susquehanna River and, in a later account he gave Champlain, ended up “making his way along a river which discharges on the coast of Florida” (i.e. the eastern coast of North America, though far to the north of Florida (and continuing “along said river to the sea, past islands and the coasts near them.”
In other words, it seems likely that Brûlé travelled down the Susquehanna to Chesapeake Bay, making him the first European to explore present-day Pennsylvania.
It’s on his way back, however, that the mystery starts to accumulate. Brûlé claimed that he got lost and was captured by the Seneca, an Iroquois tribe, who planned to torture him to death. In Brûlé’s telling, he saved his life by a clever ruse, insisting that a sudden storm was a heavenly signal for his release. Another, more likely, answer is that Brûlé persuaded the Seneca that he could help them trade furs with the French, something they dearly wanted.
Having survived this real or imagined ordeal, he was now about to make good on an earlier promise made to Champlain — that he would search for the rumoured inland sea beyond Lake Huron. In 1618, Brûlé and a companion named Grenolle began their westward journey. Consensus holds that they likely paddled through the North Channel of Georgian Bay, and then ascended St. Marys River to Lake Superior.
One possibility is that they then crossed Superior along its northern shore until they reached today’s Duluth, Minn. There is no direct proof of this, although the missionary Sagard seems to have accepted it as fact: “The Interpreter Bruslé (sic) and a number of Indians have assured us that beyond the mer douce (Lake Huron) there is another very large lake, which empties into the former by a waterfall.”
As if in further proof of his journey, Brûlé even showed Sagard a copper ingot, ostensibly taken from an Indian mine on the north shore of Georgian Bay, after his return in 1621.
But as Brûlé’s travels widened, his reputation dimmed considerably — though in fairness circumstance played a major role. He had, after all, been sent as an 18-year-old to live among Indian tribes known for their liberal sexual mores. So it’s slight wonder that French missionaries were appalled at how readily Brûlé embraced the temptation all around him. As Champlain was to write, “this man was recognized as being very vicious in character, and much addicted to women.”
Even this might have been overlooked had it not been for the curious case of the privateering Kirke brothers, who in 1629 took advantage of English/French hostilities in Europe to sail up the St. Lawrence and capture Quebec. Champlain duly returned to France, but with the bitter knowledge that Brûlé, among others, had opted to side with the Kirkes.
Rejected by what remained of French society in Quebec, Brûlé had no option but to return to live among the Huron, lest he be hanged for treason in France. But salvation proved elusive. For reasons now lost in the mist, the Huron eventually killed (and ate) him.
Were the Huron tired of his “vicious” and womanizing ways? Did they resent his abandonment of their traditional allies, the French? Or were they just eager to dispense with Brûlé’s lucrative role as a middleman in the fur trade? Whatever the reason, Brûlé ended his remarkable travels around a vast portion of North America with nowhere to turn.
As historian David Hackett Fischer notes in Champlain’s Dream: “This very gifted young man who moved so easily in many cultures was ultimately rejected by all.”