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After two years in South Africa, a Scottish civil servant began turning out best-selling adventure tales.
John Buchan (1875-1940), 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, was a man of many talents: classicist, barrister, writer of serious history and rattling adventure yarns, influential member of the Church of Scotland, high-flying Westminster MP, and from 1935, Governor-General of Canada.
Jacques Cartier made history and made friends along the St Lawrence, but then threw all that goodwill away.
In the Spring of 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St Lawrence River (so he named it) to Stadacona, near what would soon after become Quebec, and then further upriver to Hochelaga, which he named Montreal. Everything went well until winter came, for which the French were hopelessly unprepared.
In 1692, a girl of fourteen was left to defend her father’s manor from angry Iroquois raiders.
In 1672, the Count de Frontenac came to Canada as governor of the French settlers around Montreal. He built good relations with the Iroquois by casting himself as father to their nation, but the French found him high-handed and in 1682 King Louis XIV of France recalled him. His replacement, the Marquis de Denonville, treated the Iroquois barbarously and provoked reprisals which Frontenac, restored in 1689, struggled to contain.
Following the disastrous Seven Years’ War, France agreed to quit Canada and leave it to the British, which was not at all what the local tribesmen wanted.
In 1763, King Louis XV promised to leave the Great Lakes to the British, and French merchants duly went away south. The indigenous peoples were dismayed, for the easy-going French had always kept the surly English (and their prices) in check. So when Pontiac, leader of the Ottawas, heard a rumour that the French might return, he decided to help bring back the good times.
Canada’s Hudson Bay has been a cause of war and an engine of prosperity, but long before that it was the scene of cold treachery.
In the autumn of 1534, Frenchman Jacques Cartier reached what later became Quebec and Montreal, the first European to do so. Then in 1576 the English began to take an interest. Martin Frobisher went further north looking for a path to Asia, followed by John Davis; but both men missed a region tucked into Canada’s northern heart, which afterwards emerged as the foundation of her prosperity.
A ‘slight and delicate’ Canadian woman defied twenty miles of rugged terrain in sweltering heat to warn of an impending attack by American invaders.
In 1813, US President James Madison seized the opportunity afforded by Napoleon’s rampage across Europe to order his troops into the British colony of Upper Canada, where they sacked York (Toronto). Monday 21st June found US General Henry Dearborn in Queenston readying a nasty surprise for Lieutenant James Fitzgibbon, garrisoned in a country home at Beaver Dams near Thorold, Ontario.
Lord Durham warned Westminster that colonial Canada must be run by elected MPs, not career bureaucrats.
In 1839, Lord Durham, Governor General of Canada, reported to Westminster on mounting civil unrest in Canada. He was expected to blame Anglo-French antagonism, but chose to highlight a system in which elected Parliaments were mere window-dressing, while real power lay with bureaucrats appointed by the Crown.