Louisiana, 1699
by Jon Kukla
Louisiana Life Magazine, Winter 1998/99 - Vol. 18 - Issue 5 - Page - #185
In 1699, when the 38-year-old Canadian Pierre Le Moyne
d'Iberville founded the colony of Louisiana, 16,000 French
colonists resided along the Saint Lawrence River and its
tributaries. They were outnumbered 15 to one by a quarter
million English colonists living along the Atlantic coast
between Boston and Charleston, S.C. A few Englishmen
were venturing across the Appalachians toward the
Mississippi Valley, but for the previous 15 years Iberville
had been fighting Englishmen far to the north in Hudson
Bay.
Born in Montreal in 1661, Iberville and his 11 brothers
earned their prominence in New France by military
prowess and shrewd trading. Their father, Charles,
embodied the North American dream. He came to Canada
in 1641 as a 15-year-old indentured servant to a group of
Jesuit missionaries, mastered several dialects of the Huron
and Iroquois languages, and learned the ways of the
beaver and fur trade. By his death in 1685, Iberville's
father had royal letters patent for a title of nobility and was
among the wealthiest citizens of Montreal.
New France was founded in 1608, one year after
Jamestown and a dozen years before Plymouth. Each
season thereafter, the colony expanded as its inhabitants
pursued beaver, whose fur was in high demand in Europe
as the fiber of choice for the manufacture of felt, especially
for hats. Tracking the waterways of North America in a
great arc, New France sprawled from Quebec westward
to the Great Lakes and the upper reaches of the
Mississippi River, near modern Illinois and Wisconsin by
1699. To the north, both the French and the English were
competing for the opportunity to trap beaver on the shores
of Hudson Bay.
When Iberville sailed his fleet into the Gulf of Mexico in
1699, his strategic objective was to secure the mouth of
the Mississippi for France. From Canada, Pere Marquette
and Louis Joliet had canoed down the Mississippi as far as
the Arkansas River. And in 1682, Robert Cavelier de La
Salle had reached salt water at the mouth of the
Mississippi. On April 9, 1682, La Salle raised a column
and a cross painted with the arms of France, claimed the
interior of the continent for Louis XIV and named it in
honor of his king. By this little ceremony, in the words of
historian Francis Parkman, "the vast basin of the
Mississippi . . . passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of
Versailles . . . by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible
at half a mile."
Iberville's mission was to make good on that claim. Fifteen
years had passed since La Salle had attempted to find the
Mississippi from the gulf - overshooting the mark by
hundreds of miles and dying near Matagorda Bay along the
Texas coast. With English rivals encroaching on French
claims in the Hudson Bay and along the Gulf Coast from
South Carolina, the lucrative French fur-trading empire of
North America hung in the balance.
The French were active in the interior of the continent as
well. In 1699, priests of the Seminary of Foreign Missions
established the first permanent European settlement in the
Illinois country. Cahokia was situated on the east bank of
the Mississippi near the mouth of the Missouri River and
across from modern-day St. Louis.
Iberville was well known to the English as a ruthless
frontier commander and naval raider. As early as 1686 he
and his brothers were contending with Englishmen for
control of the beaver trade in Hudson Bay. Throughout the
1690s, Iberville raided English outposts and forts there in
naval expeditions mounted from his French estate at
Rochefort, on the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle.
LEAVE IT TO BEAVERS
Like other privateers of his day, Iberville's patriotism was
also extremely lucrative. How lucrative? On a raid of
English fishing villages along the Newfoundland coast - a
sideshow en route to the real action in Hudson Bay -
Iberville captured 200,000 pounds of dried cod and
shipped it back to France for sale. But the big money was
in beaver pelts. Iberville and his family were already major
players in the normal fur trade of New France, valued at
500,000 English pounds annually.
His raids on English trading posts were lagniappe. On two
of the half-dozen skirmishes for which there is evidence,
Iberville captured beaver pelts worth 136,000 pounds.
This was roughly 12 times the value of all the furs exported
annually from all the English colonies along the Atlantic
coast. Not surprisingly, Iberville's 1699 Louisiana
expedition yielded 9,000 beaver pelts that French and
Indian trappers happily conveyed to his vessels in the
lower Mississippi rather than paddling them upstream to
Montreal.
The four vessels of Iberville's first Louisiana expedition -
including the frigates Badine and Marin - sailed from
Brest in October 1698. Aboard were Iberville, his
18-year-old brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville,
and some 80 men. Like the path of many a hurricane then
and since, they visited Saint Domingue (The island that is
now divided by the Domican Republic and Haiti) before
sailing north to Florida and west along the Gulf Coast,
passing the small Spanish outpost at Pensacola.
In March 1699, a severe storm blew Iberville's fleet into
the bird's-foot delta of the Mississippi. Unsure of his
location after the weather cleared (and mindful of La
Salle's disastrous voyage in 1684), Iberville sailed up the
great river. There he encountered Indians who
remembered La Salle and could demonstrate the accuracy
of their memories by showing Iberville European trade
goods as proof.
Confident that he had in fact found the Mississippi, Iberville
built a temporary fort on Biloxi Bay (Fort Maurepas at
modern day Ocean Springs, Miss.,) midway between the
river and the Spanish base at Pensacola. New Spain, with
its wealth of gold and silver, stretched west and south from
Texas to Peru and posed no threat to New France. Once
again, Iberville's rivals were Englishmen.
Leaving Bienville as second in command over a garrison of
70 men, Iberville carried news of his success back to
France. There he also mustered support for the immediate
colonization of Louisiana and became the first native-born
Canadian to be honored with the cross of the Order of
Saint Louis. Bienville had started his career at age 12 as a
midshipman aboard his brother's vessels, and was a
seven-year veteran of Iberville's frontier warfare in Hudson
Bay, Newfoundland and New England.
Bienville's military experience and natural cunning,
bolstered by his brother's fierce reputation among English
veterans of the frontier skirmishes, soon proved invaluable.
THE BIG BLUFF
From Biloxi, Bienville and five men in two canoes set out
through the Rigolets and Lake Pontchartrain to explore the
lower Mississippi. Paddling south in the bends of the river
below modern-day New Orleans, Bienville's party
surprised an English warship commanded by Capt. Lewis
Banks anchored against the current. Banks had come
upriver with orders to establish an English outpost and
challenge French claims to Louisiana. Bienville and his two
canoes were no match for a 12-gun British corvette, but
the history of empires can turn on individual acts of
courage or chutzpah:
Bienville pretended that his canoes were part of a French
fleet just around the bend upriver - a fleet perhaps
commanded by the fearsome Iberville, who more than
once had defeated superior English forces in Hudson Bay.
Feigning a signal to the fleet for support, Bienville ordered
Banks out of the French monarch's river. Banks fell for the
bluff, but not without good reason.
Three years earlier, in the most gallant action of his career,
Iberville and his 44-gun flagship Pelican had defeated
three attacking English warships with a total of 124 guns.
Banks knew his 12 cannons were no match for that kind of
firepower or that kind of seamanship. He hoisted anchor,
turned his ship around, and sailed off toward the gulf.
When the story reached France, cartographers promptly
etched the words Detour a l'Anglois on their maps and
onto the landscape of Louisiana. Today, a gated
community and famous golf course along the curve in the
river known as English Turn continue to mark that moment
in the spring of 1699 when, as Bienville modestly reported,
"I obliged the English to abandon their enterprise."
When Iberville returned to Louisiana in January 1700, his
younger brother had explored the lower Red and Ouachita
rivers. Together they erected a second outpost, Fort
Mississippi, on the left bank of the river about 40 miles
from the gulf, and began to establish friendly relations with
the area's native tribes. As elsewhere in New France, the
Le Moyne brothers recognized that Louisiana could not
expect adequate support from Europe and must have
native allies in order to survive. In May, Iberville left
Bienville in charge of Louisiana and sailed for France,
stopping at New York to sell the 9,000 beaver pelts
collected from French trappers and Indians.
Arriving at Versailles in August 1700, Iberville was
encouraged by news of the accession of Louis XIV's
grandson, Philippe d'Anjou, to the throne of Spain. With
Bourbons on both thrones, perhaps an alliance could be
arranged to allow French and Spanish vessels to use
Pensacola's natural harbor as a joint base against the
English. Spanish colonial officials vetoed the idea, and in
September 1701, France sent Iberville on his third and
final expedition to Louisiana with instructions to build Fort
Saint-Louis on Mobile Bay.
When Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville departed Louisiana for
the last time in April 1702, his three-year effort to give
France a strategic presence at the mouth of the Mississippi
had succeeded - barely. Three tiny fortifications along the
Gulf Coast and river gave New France a tenuous anchor
for the woodland empire that stretched 2,000 miles north
and west to Quebec. Decades would pass before
Louisiana became a successful residential colony, but it
was a start. Iberville gave France a foothold at the mouth
of the Mississippi for the next century of imperial
competition in North America. To his brother,
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, Iberville entrusted
the responsibility for developing Louisiana into a colony.
Historian Jon Kukla lives in New Orleans and is
currently writing a narrative history of the Louisiana
Purchase.
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