Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 3

The French in Gaspé, 1534 to 1760

by David Lee

Part II: The Communities

Mont-Louis

An early attempt to establish a sedentary fishery was made at Mont-Louis, another cove on the St. Lawrence, 75 miles down-river from Matane. The cove was smaller than that of Matane, and, as at Matane, a sandbar closed the harbour at low tide. The harbour could accommodate only a few ships up to 100 tons. This would be small for sea voyages but in this case it was no disadvantage, for 100-ton vessels were not too small for use on the St. Lawrence and it was only to Quebec that Mont-Louis sent its fish. The harbour was secure enough, however, and the beach suitable for drying cod. Here, at the end of the 17th century, Denis Riverin formed elaborate plans to establish a fishery with a sound agricultural base able to support a large resident population.

Denis Riverin was born in Tours about 1650 and came to Canada in 1675 as secretary to the Intendant, Duchesneau.¹ He had long been interested in the fisheries of New France, and in a few years he left the government service to try his luck at them. He made his first attempt in 1687 when he hired a crew of experienced fishermen, but he never got started for his ship was wrecked in the Bay of Chaleurs.² The government wished to encourage him but all it did in the next few years was grant him four seigneuries in Gaspé and one in Labrador. These were of little use to him except that later he was able to sell one for the cash that he needed so badly. For several years he experimented with fishing in these seigneuries but found them of little use; he was more attracted to areas like Matane and Mont-Louis where he had no seigneurial rights.³ The king later did send out some Basque fishermen to help Riverin and to teach Canadian habitants how to fish, but Riverin appears not to have been able to use them, perhaps because he still could not raise enough capital for a concerted fishing enterprise. France was at war with England so capital was scarce, and besides, the English captured at least one of his ships right in the St. Lawrence.

During the 1690s, Riverin seems to have been held in high favour in government circles for they tried to help him all they could. In 1693 he applied for a seat on the Sovereign Council adding that it would assist him in his fishing enterprises.⁴ He suffered from war and bad luck and perhaps, as La Mothe de Cadillac observed, he was a bit of a dreamer too.⁵ He was honest and sincere, however, in his schemes to develop a fishery but, when the opportunity finally arrived for him to begin a large-scale fishery, his partners failed him.

In 1696, Riverin joined two Parisian financiers to exploit the fisheries of the lower St. Lawrence, but the project was not pursued in earnest until 1699. In 1697, the government prevented Quebec fishermen from venturing down-river where English ships might capture them. Some advance men had already been sent to claim beaches and they had to be recalled and paid off. Riverin, however, sought to salvage some of the season's preparations by diverting his men to Mont-Louis which was apparently considered close enough to Quebec to be safe. By 1698, Britain and France were (temporarily) at peace again and Riverin had been awarded a seat on the council, so the times were riper now for him to invest in fisheries. In 1699, Riverin took a few settlers to Mont-Louis and provisioned them from Quebec. The same year, the Paris partners, Bourlet and Mageux, agreed that the next year (1700) they would supply the post from France.

For some reason, perhaps because of the physical distance between France and Canada, there was a disagreement or misunderstanding between Riverin and his partners as to the principal interest of the company. Their agent and their ship arrived at the post long after the fishing season began but, in any case, it turned out that their agent, Chaumont, was not really interested in fish but rather in furs. Chaumont apparently did trade in furs but the return was very poor, and certainly the fur trade could not employ the number of settlers Riverin had brought to Mont-Louis for the fisheries. Chaumont refused to allocate any of the company's equipment or provisions for fishing or fishermen. Some of the settlers were sent or taken back to Quebec. Charges and countercharges went on in France for two years before the courts decided that Riverin was responsible for the losses of his partners. He was allowed to return to Quebec to find the means to pay the debt and he found it: he was appointed official representative of the colony at the French court. He soon settled the matter with Bourlet and Mageux who carried on the post as a fishery for several years. However, despite occasional favours by the king (free gunpowder, free freightage of salt) their post gradually died out. Riverin died in Paris in 1717, never having returned to New France.⁶

The failure of the original partnership demonstrates that only someone on the spot, like Riverin, could recognize that Mont-Louis was in an area distinct from Canada, that it was unsuited to fur trading, but well suited to fishing. While operating out of Quebec, Riverin had concentrated on the fisheries of Mont-Louis but when he was forced to bring in capital from France and operate out of France, trouble began.

The Mont-Louis fisheries required Riverin's knowledge and his partners' capital; Riverin could not bring his developmental plans to fruition alone, without European capital (perhaps as much as 60,000 livres was spent). And although the French financiers eventually did recognize that Riverin was correct and switched their interests to fishing, Riverin was no longer around to lead the project and it died. Riverin's ideas were essential and it was long before an other promoter (or dreamer) ever planned such elaborate schemes for Gaspé again. Pierre Denys had earlier made great plans for an establishment at Percé but had never come as close as Riverin to gaining sufficient capital to test his ideas.

Riverin's idea was to combine agriculture with fishing to provide the post with a more solid, diversified and self-sufficient economy. He believed that Mont-Louis would become "one of the most considerable establishments in the country."⁷ In 1699, he had brought a total of 53 people to Mont-Louis — including 9 heads of families and 6 young unmarried men. The next year he had 26 families and a total of 91 people. Most of the men were apparently expected to engage in at least two activities. These were usually farming and fishing but there were other combinations of specializations: stonemasons, carpenters, sawyers, blacksmiths, beachmasters and even a surgeon. One Michel Arbour, who had just married the 13-year-old daughter of another fisherman, is listed as a fisherman-blacksmith-carpenter. Riverin allotted each adult a plot of land to cultivate — 21 arpents deep with 3 arpents of frontage on the Rivière Mont-Louis, presumably for a drying beach. They were also allotted a 4,000-square-foot house lot in town. By 1700, Riverin reported a busy population blissfully harvesting crops, tending livestock, fishing and cutting timber in the new sawmill. Apparently most of the settlers returned to Quebec that autumn, never to return. The company carried on for a few years with three families reported there in 1706 and 1707 and four in 1712. By 1725, Mont-Louis was a seigneury owned by Louis Gosselin, a Quebec merchant; in an aveu et dénombrement of that year he reported only two families resident there. Neither were descendants of Riverin's original settlers.⁸ Riverin's plans had been drawn with ambition, enthusiasm and experience, but no Gaspé seigneur seems ever to have followed the model.

Louis Gosselin or his heirs must have sold the seigneury around 1750 to one Michel Maillet, who succeeded in reviving the settlement somewhat. Certainly the fact that he resided on the seigneury permanently must have contributed to the revival. We know little about this seigneury until the English under Wolfe ravaged Gaspé in 1758.

After seizing the settlement at Gaspé Bay at the end of August, Wolfe sent detachments out to Pabos, Miramichi and Mont-Louis. Major Dalling left Gaspé Bay on 14 September, leading a party of about 300 men north and west along the shore. The march took five days and was accomplished only with extreme difficulty; sometimes they were forced over jagged rock and other times they were forced to wait for the tide to go out. Shortly after they arrived on the nineteenth, M. Maillet returned from a voyage to Quebec where he had bought 22,000 livres of supplies (presumably for the winter). Dalling turned down a ransom, the goods were seized and the fish and buildings burned. The party returned to Gaspé Bay in sloops taken at Mont-Louis. They returned with Maillet and his wife, 22 men, 4 women and 14 children as prisoners. The French say the prisoners were well treated when they were taken from Gaspé Bay to Louisbourg and then sent to Cancalle in France where they landed on the first of November.

The following spring, Maillet returned to Quebec to recover some debts but he reached there, as he says, "only... to be a witness of the two Seiges which that City bore." A prisoner again, he was returned to France on the same ship as Governor Vaudreuil.⁹

In 1758, Mont-Louis was a small but thriving community of 40 to 50 souls. Maillet seems to have prospered from it for he was willing and able to offer a ransom of 3,500 livres to keep it. Provisions worth 22,000 livres also represent a substantial outlay for a small settlement. The English claimed they burned 6,000 quintals of dried cod there but some of it had probably already been taken to Quebec for sale. Colonel Monckton estimated that about 10,000 quintals of cod were dried at Mont-Louis every year; and that one quintal sold at Quebec for from 36 to 40 livres; thus, the community's gross income from fishing approached 400,000 livres. All the cod not consumed by the community itself was presumably sold at Quebec and, at the same time, most of the provisions must have been purchased there. This commerce must have represented a contribution of some importance to the economy of New France.