Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
Primo, our heartiest New Year greeting to all. We have just returned from the journey advertised in my “Christmas” post, a brief visit to the Montreal branch of our family—son Luke, daughter in law Melanie, and grandkids John Henry and Hazel. Most clichés concerning grandchildren happen to be true. They are delightful, and they grow very fast. If they live at a distance from you, you probably don’t see them often enough. So our reunion was joyous. The holiday was quite white, deeply chill, and marvelously mellow, its chief achievements being gastronomy, the completion of an impossible jigsaw puzzle from piece one to piece one thousand, and attendance at one or two (I being one of the slacking oners) festival eucharists at Christ Church Cathedral. There was a nearly Dickensian richness to our festivities, but mainly without the Dickensian schmaltz. It is hardly more than four hundred miles from our house to theirs, but age and infirmity conspire to make the journey a real trial for me, and therefore something of an accomplishment. I have pointed out before in these pages the linguistic spoor that links French travail (labor, work) and English travail (taxing difficulty, the pains of a birthing mother). In earlier epochs almost all journeys required hard traveling. But in earlier times grandchildren generally lived close by.
French Canada is not far away, but it is always surprising to me. The kids, who are of course in local schools are now naturally bilingual. Unsurprisingly, our recent American election has generated some awkward international results, and the presumption of some major international politicians is often enough to shock us. Being a good neighbor is not always easy, and being a neighbor to the United States has its special challenges. Somewhat more than a century past the revolutionary Mexican President Porfirio Diaz thus lamented his country’s situation: “Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States!” In our day Donald Trump, whose activities as a troll qualify him for a prime residential lot beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, has taken as his target the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau; but his crude hauteur may seem a model of moderation when compared with the behavior of some Renaissance potentates, secular and religious alike. Naturally certain episodes from history invade my historical mind. Consider for a moment the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) brokered by Pope Alexander VI between the kings of Spain and Portugal. (Tordesillas is a little place in north-central Spain not far from Valladolid.) The treaty established a longitudinal line running from the top of the globe to its bottom, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This line divided the known world into two areas, with Spain claiming ownership of all non-Christian lands west of the line, and Portugal claiming all non-Christian lands east of the line.
The principal maritime powers in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century were Spain and Portugal, both of which had been busy claiming insular properties newly discovered or at least newly colonized in the North Atlantic Ocean. The Western coast of Africa was already somewhat known territory to Iberian sailors when Columbus (a naval agent of the Spanish monarchy) threw a spanner into the works by coming across what he assumed to be India but was in actual fact the huge land mass comprising the continents of North and South America.
The Pope thought that it was important for the peace of Christendom that the rivalry between the Iberians be regulated; so with staggering presumption he proposed that all the “new” territories being found in the “New World” be equably divided between them for the purposes of pacific commerce and of course evangelism.
This may have been the most stupendous real estate transaction ever effected. Quite apart from the absurdity of assuming a freehold claim to two vast continents, the arrangement had what seems in retrospect one glaring peculiarity: the peculiarity of Brazil. Because of the way Brazil’s upper eastern bulge extends far into the South Atlantic, it was counted among the new provinces of Portugal rather than of Spain. I doubt that the principals realized Brazil was also destined to make up roughly half of the total land mass of South America. This scheme, though satisfactory to the Iberian potentates, failed to satisfy some other important Europeans who, by chance, did not live in Spain or Portugal. Needless to say, what the large populations who already lived in the Americas thought was not an issue of discussion. And it is only natural that the Pope’s tidy plan failed to satisfy a number of important players in Europe who had been left out of it.
And in fact the histories of
European expansion in the northern sections of the New World would be
determined not primarily by a contest between the Iberians but by a later one
between France and England. Competition in land claims among the
European powers was brisk but such claims could in the long run be secured only
by significant colonization and credible military backing. France’s plausible land claims in North America were enormous, including
Newfoundland and Labrador, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi River. This
land they called New France.
But the French colonial experience in terms of Francophone settlement in America never approached the level of French territorial claims. Tentative Francophone settlement was effectively limited to a few places in southern Illinois and, especially, Mississippi River and coastal sites surrounding New Orleans. Actual French-speakers are few in contemporary Louisiana, and the number is declining rapidly. The contrast with Spanish speakers is dramatic. It is significant that the huge American land purchase of 1803 (more than eight hundred thousand square miles of land) is called the Louisiana Purchase despite the fact that the area called “Louisiana” is a small fraction of the land purchased. Maybe this was history’s second greatest land deal. And since there was an actual exchange for money—however paltry in retrospect—it plausibly can be described as a land deal rather than a land-grab!
We tend perhaps to think of our early American history from too narrow a view, but our national formation was in part an episode in the large and complex picture of the intense European rivalries working their way out on the North American Continent. The major work of one of America’s greatest early historians, Francis Parkman, the erudite and eloquent author of France and England in North America (1892), is as exciting a read today as when it was published in the nineteenth century. And Parkman is in print in the Library of America.
