A tangled tale: were early British moves in the St. Lawrence the result of sophisticated diplomacy or commercial greed?

A tangled tale: were early British moves in the St. Lawrence the result of sophisticated diplomacy or commercial greed? A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the MerchantAdventurers to Canada Andrew D. Nicholls McGill-Queen's University Press 246 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780773537781 IN THE ROGUES' GALLERY OF I Canadian history, few figuresmeasure up to the men of the Kirke family, who carved a remarkablyeventful swath through the 17th century. These English wine merchants,with French roots and an elbows-up attitude, tried hedging their risksby diversifying into the St. Lawrence fur trade through brute force.Beginning with a privateering raid on French assets in the St. Lawrencein 1628, they were best known for booting Samuel de Champlain out of hisQuebec habitation in 1629, and keeping it until diplomacy allowedChamplain and the French to return in 1632. Less appreciated is theprominent role Sir David Kirke (knighted in 1631) went on to play inNewfoundland's colonization and inshore fishery at Ferryland. Lessappreciated still is that his brother, John, was one of the originalinvestors in 1667 in the Hudson's Bay Company; John's daughtermarried Pierre Radisson, whose exploration efforts helped open upRupert's Land for the HBC. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Some day, hopefully, a historian will tackle afresh the full storyof this deservedly notorious clan. In the meantime, AndrewNicholls's A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the MerchantAdventurers to Canada is the latest contribution to the Kirkeliterature, focusing on their capture of Quebec and this action'srelationship to the star-crossed colonizing enterprises of two Scots,Sir William Alexander around Port Royal in Nova Scotia and lamesStewart, Lord Ochiltree, in Cape Breton. Nicholls strives to credit Charles I (who would lose his head inthe Cromwell rebellion) with attempting to forge a coherent strategy ofcolonization and conquest out of these seemingly disparate initiatives.His story's value lies in expanding our knowledge of Alexander andStewart, and placing their actions in the courtly politics of Charlesand the wars and diplomacy of Europe. The story's weaknesses are onthis side of the pond, particularly in not taking any measure of thestrategic implications of the Dutch colonial presence, and in Nichollsnot making a persuasive case for his thesis of Charles's strategicvision. We are also left with an incomplete portrait of the Kirkes'three-year reign in Quebec, in large part because Nicholls declines todevote any space in this thin volume to the perspective of theaboriginal peoples who were the fur trade the Kirkes strove to capture. Nicholls, who teaches at Buffalo State College, calls his work"analysis from a British perspective." He casts the 1629ventures of the Kirkes, Alexander and Stewart--usually seen asdislocated, historically marginal, dead-end events--as a coherentinitiative guided by the hand of Charles, king of England and Scotland,that was "British" in ambition and character before there wasan actual political union. In particular, Nicholls argues that bringingAlexander within the Kirkes' Company of Merchant Adventurers toCanada in February 1629 was in part a means of "carrying the warwith France to the North American theatre." A narrative that frustratingly and routinely dispenses withchronology does not help the reader assess the thesis. There is a lot oftraffic direction: regular reminders of what has been discussed already,forewarnings of what is about to come and notices of an impendingdetour. It is a difficult story to follow, and Nicholls himself knowsit. "The narrative cannot proceed smoothly," he declares inhis introduction. I am not sure about "cannot" but itcertainly does not. Nicholls allows in his introduction that "at firstglance" the merger of the Kirkes' and Alexander'sinterests within the Company of Merchant Adventurers to Canada"might appear to be nothing more than a solution for acomparatively minor court squabble," but argues "in reality,it was more." But was it? Alexander's patent rights had been granted by Charles'sfather, who was both lames VI of Scotland and lames I of England.Charles, who had succeeded him in 1625, then doled out privileges to theKirkes that appeared to infringe on Alexander's rights. Such amisstep was par for the course in the new king's rule, as furtherevidenced when Sir David Kirke usurped the holdings of George Calvert inNewfoundland's Avalon Peninsula in the late 1630s. "Charles Ihabitually sold overlapping monopolies to competing interests,"Peter Pope tells us in his masterful Fish into Wine: The NewfoundlandPlantation in the Seventeenth Century. "Charles'scommercialization of patronage was a departure from the exchange offavors typical of lames I's court." Nicholls, by contrast, would have it that Charles'sinfringement on the Alexander patent with the award to the Kirkes wasdue to the "exigencies of war." Reeling from the humiliationsof a war against France (and Spain) that was going badly, the kingwanted to build on the public popularity of the Kirkes'privateering raid of 1628 with a capture of Champlaln's Quebechabitation the next summer. Nicholls further argues a"synthesis" of British commercial, colonial and militaryagendas through the king's support of the Kirkes and Alexander inconcert with a new scheme by lames Stewart, Lord Ochiltree, to plant acolony in Cape Breton. If all went according to plan, Charles would"tangibly increase his area of claimed dominion in North America,so as to virtually eliminate a French presence." One can argue that this should have been Charles's coordinatedmilitary-colonial strategy in northeastern North America in 1629;whether it actually was is another matter. Nicholls states that Charles"seems to have taken an active role in bringing the factionstogether" but offers no smoking gun. He further argues that"British" interests "seem to have recognized the need tosecure Cape Breton Island and its adjacent waterways ... because in thespring of 1629, hasty plans [by Ochiltree] were laid to plant a Britishcolony there." Nicholls could be on to something, but there remainsa formidable counterargument: the events of 1629 were not coordinated byany sort of visionary statecraft and, moreover, at that time Charles wasmost interested in ending the war with France, not expanding it. As Nicholls himself notes, some of the main obstacles to peace withFrance already had been removed in 1628, with the assassination of thehawkish Duke of Buckingham in August and the capitulation of theHuguenots at La Rochelle in October. Indeed, the coincidental war withSpain was over, and Charles was weary of the one with France by January1629, when his queen, Henrietta Maria, sister of the French king LouisXIII, proved to be pregnant. Apart from the way this happy eventencouraged closer ties between the royal families, the cash-strappedCharles wanted the war to end so that he could collect on the balance ofthe dowry promised to him on his 1625 marriage to Henrietta Maria. Why then would Charles proceed with a plan to escalate the war in adistant theatre, provided that indeed was his gambit when he allegedlyadvanced the merger of interests of the Kirkes and Alexander in February16297 Peace negotiations apparently were underway, and would concludewith a treaty at Susa in the Duchy of Savoy in April; it included anobligation for France to pay Charles the remaining dowry, which Nichollsvolunteers he "desperately needed." Both sides also wererequired to relinquish any territories captured after that date. Thevery taking of Quebec by the Kirkes (whose fleet had departed in March)in July violated Susa and suspended any hope of collecting on the dowryuntil Quebec's inevitable, if delayed, return to Champlain andFrance. Nicholls says "almost nobody related to theAlexander-Kirke-Ochiltree efforts in the spring of 1629 realized thatdiplomacy had already intervened and that the war was over."Charles knew that his own diplomacy had been doing the intervening forseveral months. Leaving aside the fact that "almost nobody"falls short of "no one" we thus come back to the question ofwhy he would have been engineering a coordinated offensive on Frenchterritories in the New World at the very same time. This is a tangledtale told in a tangled way, and readers will have to make up their ownminds on whether or not Nicholls's case is fully made. And rather than rounding up the usual suspects of early explorationas he does, from Columbus to Verrazzano to Raleigh, Nicholls could haverevealed earlier English ambitions toward the St. Lawrence. Nichollsmentions Humphrey Gilbert's 158:3 voyage to Newfoundland, but Iwould have welcomed him delving into the activities of Gilbert'sassociate, Edward Hayes, who formulated a plan for colonizing the St.Lawrence in the early 1590s in concert with Christopher Carleill. Therewas also a failed English attempt in 1597 to oust French and Basquewalrus hunters from the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence andinstall a Brownist colony--a not inconsequential tidbit, given thatNicholls tells us Brownists, a breakaway congregational sect of theChurch of England, were part of Lord Ochiltree's Cape Breton colonyin 1629. The introduction's assurance that Nicholls advocates a"transnational" approach to history would have been more fullyembraced had he not bypassed altogether the enormously important fact ofthe New Netherlands colony centred on the Hudson River. If the Kirkeswere to make a fortune off the fur trade up the St. Lawrence by seizingQuebec, they would have to deal with the considerable challenge posed bythe Dutch West Indies Company. Having ramped up their colonizationefforts on the Hudson in 1626 and introduced a new era of feudallandowners (patroons) in 1629 reaching all the way north to present-dayAlbany, the Dutch were transforming the fur trade. At the same time theMohawk of the Five Nations confederacy seized control of the main supplyof furs to the Dutch and escalated war with Algonquin and Huronsuppliers to Champlain's commercial partners at Quebec. To write about an essential objective of the supposed planorchestrated by Charles--to drive out the French and seize control ofthe St. Lawrence's main commercial asset, the fur trade--and not torecognize the massively complicating presence of the Dutch innortheastern North America is an unfortunate omission. The story sailsright past the establishment of a threat to English colonial ambitionsarguably more pressing than anything Champlain was up to in hisstruggling little outpost. In 1615 the Dutch began touting a rival claimall the way up the Eastern Seaboard to latitude 45. The rapidlyescalating dispute led to a significant diplomatic incident when NewNetherlands director general Peter Minuit was seized after his shipcalled at Plymouth, England, in 1632. The substantial complication ofthe Dutch needs to be acknowledged for this book's approach to beconsidered truly transnational. One might argue (I would not) that the indigenous peoples werebeyond the scope of this study. Yet Nicholls chooses to open the book inthe historic region of Huronia of southeastern Georgian Bay, with thefirst chapter devoted to the Huron, the Jesuit mission of Ste-Marie andChamplain's visit there in 1615-16. Only in the epilogue do wereturn rather awkwardly to the Huronia mission of the Jesuits and thedestruction of the Huron, a "once mighty civilization," by theIroquois in 1649 (who he does not tell us had been armed with powderweapons largely by Dutch traders). Nowhere in the main narrative doesthe supposedly mighty aboriginal civilization make an appearance. Nicholls says little is known about the Kirkes' tenure atQuebec, but Bruce Trigger in his landmark study of the Huron, TheChildren of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, provideddetails and promising lines of inquiry where the Huron and the Kirkesare concerned--including the Kirkes' abduction of Amantacha, son ofthe prominent Huron trader Soranhes--that Nicholls does not address.Exploring English relations with the Native traders would have helpedassess what the prospects for the Kirkes, England and the aboriginalpeoples would have been like had Quebec not been returned through treatyto France. Nicholls also simplistically accuses the interpreter EtienneBrule of a "betrayal" of Champlain when he served the Kirkesduring their brief Quebec tenure. Trigger observes that Frenchmen likeBrule were glad to rid themselves of the meddling presence of Jesuitmissionaries among the Huron and in their own lives during the Kirkeinterregnum, and one can hardly blame them. While Nicholls serves up a stew of details about the denouement ofthe doomed colonization efforts in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, he isultimately concerned with diplomacy and courtly politics as schemed backin the Old Country, not in the full slate of complications of New Worldcolonization and commerce. For those readers satisfied with an approachto colonial history concerned foremost with affairs in France, Englandand Scotland, the book will more than suffice. However, the colonialtheatre also involved the Dutch and, above all, the aboriginal tradingallies--who, after all, occupied the lands these strangers were deigningto claim for their Eurocentric visions. I wonder if Nicholls was striving valiantly to invest Charles witha strategic vision to which these messy events and the king'sgrasping ways did not entitle him. Academic history is built on thefoundation of a thesis, but had Nicholls dispensed with the problematicone at the heart of this book and done a little more digging, he wouldhave had material aplenty to craft a scholarly and compelling narrative.The cast of characters are boundlessly entertaining, their activitiesdeeply informative about the early 19th century on both sides of theAtlantic. Meanwhile, the full story of the Kirkes waits to be told. Douglas Hunter is a past winner of the National Business Book Awardand a finalist for the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize and theGovernor General's Literary Award.