if it’s a boy, we’ll baptize him René-Gabriel in your father’s honor.”
The cabin groaned as an especially strong gust of wind punctuated Joseph’s wish.
“The weather doesn’t get this bad in Quebec,” Joseph complained.
“This is unusual. We expected a bad winter though, because of how high the bees built their hives in the trees. But it won’t last; there’ll be a lull in January, and we’ll be able to go on the trapline.”
“Do you trap the same animals found around Quebec?”
“I think so: mink, ermine, marten, red fox, muskrat, but mostly beaver. It pays, too. Before, the French – some of them anyway – gave worthless objects in exchange for our furs: mirrors, necklaces, alcohol to get the Indians drunk before robbing them. But ever since my father started looking after the trade, they’ve had to pay us with weapons, munitions, tools, fabric…”
Angélique spoke with feeling, proud to have a father who knew how to stand up for himself.
* * *
In February, Joseph went with Saint-Jean to the woods to choose two white pines for his schooner’s masts. Before chopping them down, they waited for the waning phase of the moon, when the sap barely runs. Joseph spent the winter in a state of euphoria, revising almost daily his plans and calculations for his ship. His joy was all the greater with the swelling of Angéliques belly and the approaching birth.
In Aprils budding season, Geneviève was born, a rosy bundle of life like a dancing electrical storm off Pointe-de-Roche. That same evening, while the baby slept soundly, Joseph played his violin. In the melting snow, he danced on and on along the cliffs; he hadn’t danced like this since Emilie had left him, a wild, crazy, exuberant dance, which led him to believe that in another time and place, someone in his family must have had a dancer’s gift. Joseph was happy – a little girl for him, for Angélique, for the two of them. As for Membertou, he was a bit hesitant and jealous at first because of all the attention being lavished on the baby, but it didn’t take long before he started helping his mother look after Geneviève.
In May, Saint-Jean traded furs with merchants from La Rochelle in exchange for ironwork, oakum, sails, pitch, Riga hemp, and other invaluable building material. They also took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on rum from Martinique, which made the work go by more agreeably. Saint-Jean already had a store of wood: logs had been soaking for a long time in a ditch at the mouth of Saint-Jean Creek since the sea water there made them exceptionally resistant. Pinewood for the bridge, oak and beechwood for the ribs, gunwales, and yards, and hemlock for the keel. He laid the wood out to dry for part of the summer and, by the fall of 1741, the schooner was beginning to take shape. This was Joseph’s first boat, but he had spent so much time watching the shipbuilders in Quebec at the Cul-de-Sac shipyard that he felt capable of building a three-decker warship. What’s more, his partner was an old hand. During his stay in convict prison, Saint-Jean had spent a great deal of time repairing galleys. Moreover, the Mi’kmaq were happy and eager to help. They showed them how to use the tools and do the caulking and the tarring. The sight of his two-master measuring sixty-two feet long from stem to stern and eighteen feet wide, with a draw of eleven feet, two decks, and a castle fore and aft, made Joseph feel as free as the cormorants that plied the bay.
The travel demon bit him, infecting him with a thirst for adventure. Excited by the prospect of setting out onto the high seas like his childhood hero Sinbad the Sailor, he baptized his ship the Phantom Ship. To the prow, he added the carved dragon that had decorated the Viking drakkar run aground not far off Miscou.
1. From the Mi’kmaq word “sepagunchiche” meaning “duck crossing.”
2. Prince Edward Island today.
3. A point of land one league north of Ruisseau.
Chapter 5
Sedentary fishing is seen here as a guaranteed benefit.
– Intendant Jean Talon, November 2, 1671
In January 1742, Jean-Baptiste, Angélique’s brother, returned like the prodigal son to Ruisseau after two years spent wandering. He had visited Quebec and Montreal, then spent time with the Odawas1 in the region of Ottawa, an Algonquin name meaning “Father of Nations,” a prophetic title for a future capital! He stayed long enough to learn to play lacrosse. Then he stopped off with the Hurons and the Eries in the Great Lakes region. On the Mississippi2 he admired great canoes twelve metres long, pointed at both ends, paddled by fourteen men, fur traders who travelled as far as the Michillimackinac3 post. Jean-Baptiste bore a scar on his forehead, a painful souvenir of his run-in with an Iroquois chief in an unusual battle, which, once fought, spared him from having to run between two rows of warriors armed with cherry tree branches. The young man had matured, his judgment grown more sound. He had discovered what he was looking for during his travels. His trips inland and in the Great Lakes region had reminded him of his love for the sea and fishing; a rarity among the Mi’kmaq. Even before his travels, the Basque and Norman captains used to have him watch over the fishing gear they left in Ruisseau during the winter before picking it up again the next spring. They also asked him to supervise in Miscou and Chipagan the shabby canvas-covered huts that looters liked to ransack looking for hardware and nails. Huts in which the fishermen stayed after their day at sea, sleeping on dried herb mats laid out on rope beds.
Jean-Baptiste did not come home empty-handed. He made quite a stir when he brought out a powerful bow, four feet in length, that he had been given by the Abnaki. He brought back a pair of skates made of deerbone for Membertou, for his father delicious recipes from the Great Lakes, and for Angélique sacred masks used in healing rituals as well as a beaver-tail medicine bag. For Jeannette-Anne, the young Mi’kmaq who had caught his eye before his departure and had begun to haunt his dreams, he brought a game of dice called “waltestan,” made by the Mi’kmaq of the Gaspé. He had not forgotten the other members of the tribe, to whom he distributed beaded tobacco pouches, decorated knife sheaths, and pipes of all kinds, including one called a tomahawk pipe because the peace pipe came with a tomahawk blade, of which Foaming Bear was the lucky recipient. Fiery Elouèzes received an amulet (a small bag covered in glass beads and containing the umbilical cord of a newborn child), which was to be hung over a child’s cradle to guarantee long life to that child.
Jean-Baptiste’s money bag bulged with gold French Louis, British guineas, and Spanish coins that he planned to use as a deposit on a cod business. I’ll be guaranteed a profit on the European, West Indies, and near East markets, he thought. Why there’s even gold cod on the ceiling of New England’s parliament building! His dreams were made of gold, which worried his father since he didn’t want to see his son become like the white man – a money hoarder. Jean-Baptiste was as dark as Angélique was fair, as solitary as she was sociable; his nose as pointed as hers was snub. It seemed as though his genes hadn’t been touched by the white man. At twenty-two, he was as passionate about fishing as his father was about hunting. So he spent the winter months getting ready, gathering stores of salt and bait – smelt fished under the winter’s ice and fresh spring
