The Last Best Place Read Online Free PDF

which they placed with due formality upon the long high table set with gleaming pewter before a great stone fireplace. There sat the other gentlemen, Membertou and the other visiting Indian chiefs. The role of steward for the day rotated among the fifteen gentlemen members. Each hit the woods and waters in the hope of bringing back something exceptional to outdo the others. Everyone, as a result, ate like true trenchermen: wildfowl, sturgeon and moose in the fall; beaver, otter, wildcat and raccoon in winter. There was wine, peas, beans, rice, prunes, raisins, dry cod and oil and butter. A specialty for dessert sounds suspiciously like the first crabapple jelly—“certain small fruits like small apples coloured red, of which we made jelly,” wrote Lescarbot. And, there were toasts, lots and lots of toasts to go with the singing of folk songs and rounds that pushed the festivities deep into the night. “Whatever our gourmands at home may think,” observed Lescarbot, “we found as good cheer at Port-Royal as they in Paris and at a cheaper rate.”
    Of course it couldn’t last. One day in 1608 they arose and noticed a small ship on the horizon. Bad news: de Monts’s monopoly had been cancelled. He had done nothing to establish the fur trade; worse, he and a few others may have defrauded the enterprise’s backers, which is something that
never
gets mentioned when someone in my family gets bragging. The company was dissolved and the lot of them were to return to France. Champlain and de Monts by then were already more interested in “Canada,” the St. Lawrence region where they would found Quebec.
    Only Poutrincourt held on to his dream of turning Port Royal into a new world paradise. Back in Paris he presented the French monarch with some Canadian geese, corn, wheat, rye, barley and oats and showed him a knife made out of New World iron. He talked about Membertou’s interest in the French monarch and the native curiosity about the Christian faith. Henri bought it. Poutrincourt and his son took some Jesuit priests and returned to the habitation, which Membertou and his folk had been minding in the meantime.
    For another four years they scratched out an existence. Meantime, on the strength of Cabot’s explorations, England claimed all lands north of Florida. In 1613 an English raiding party travelled the Atlantic seaboard, burning and plundering all the French settlements it could find. They arrived at Port Royal by moonlight with most of the inhabitants on work detail or visiting their Indian friends. With no opposition to stop them the Virginians rounded up pigs, horses and colts and herded them onto theEnglish ships They took hammer and pick to the huge boulder nearby, obliterating the carved fleurs-de-lys, the triangular hillocks of de Monts’s coat of arms and Poutrincourt’s family’s lion. When the French returned they found nothing but smouldering ruins.
    I stand a few feet from where the Virginians sailed in, sucking on cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup while wondering what the whole futile effort meant. For that was pretty much it. Poutrincourt, still desperate for glory, died back in France, his sword drawn, shouting “Kill, kill! God save the King and Poutrincourt,” shot by one of his allies during a civil uprising. As for the habitation, Poutrincourt’s son kept it up for a while. Then he died. In the great French–English war over the continent that followed, French, English or Indian forces besieged the citadel innumerable times and it changed hands repeatedly. With British conquest in 1710, Port Royal became Annapolis Royal, the lovely little town that now stands nearby. Three years later a treaty gave mainland Nova Scotia to the English; the French kept Cape Breton Island.
    This, of course, is history on the grand scale. The sort of thing you can’t escape in the school textbooks growing up. Important things had to happen here, midway between the New World and the Old. For everything after