Authors: Timothy Brook
THE DREAM OF GETTING TO China is the imaginative thread that runs through the history of early-modern Europe’s struggle to
escape from its isolation and enter the wider world. The thread begins where the fourteenth century ends, when a Venetian
merchant returned from his travels in China and regaled anyone who would listen with stories of strange lands and fabulous
wealth in the East. The Venetians called him Il Milione, “the Man of a Million Stories,” Marco Polo. His enthralling
Travels
, written down for him by a writer of popular romances while they were both whiling away their time in prison, became the
bestseller of the fifteenth century. Polo’s vision of China under the Mongol rule of Khubilai Khan—“the great Cham,” as Europeans
knew him—was compelling for the simple reason that there was no court as splendid, no realm as vast, no economy as large,
and no cities as grand in fourteenth-century Europe. The place called Cathay was the epitome of wealth and power at the far,
unreachable end of the Eurasian world.
When Christopher Columbus launched his fleet of three tiny ships westward across the Atlantic a century later in 1492 (taking
a copy of Marco Polo’s
Travels
with him), he already understood that the world was round, and that sailing west would convey him to Asia. He knew enough
to expect to reach Japan first, with China just beyond it. What he didn’t know was how great a distance separated Asia from
Europe. And what he didn’t expect was that a continent lay between them. When he returned to Spain, he reported to King Ferdinand
that, upon reaching the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic), “I thought it might be terra firma, the province
of Cathay.” It wasn’t, so Columbus had to convince the king that the first voyage had almost reached its destination, and
that the second could not fail to complete the journey. If the island wasn’t China or Japan, then it must be an island off
Japan’s east coast. The fabled riches of China were therefore within reach. In the meantime, he assured Ferdinand, the island
he had discovered was sure to yield gold, once his sailors went looking for it. He thus turned his losing card—Hispaniola
wasn’t Japan or China—into a winning card. But he believed that the next island would be Japan, and beyond that would be China.
China’s fabled wealth was Europe’s obsession, which is why Ferdinand agreed to fund Columbus’s second voyage. As Europeans
developed a better sense of global geography, the passion for getting to China only grew stronger, and the possibility of
actually doing so more within reason. Shakespeare echoes this fantasy when he has Benedick scorn the company of Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
by declaring that he would rather fetch “a hair of the Great Cham’s beard” than speak to her. His London audience knew what
he was talking about. They would have agreed that it might be about the most difficult vow a man could put on himself, but
it could be done. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the idea of this fabled realm was very much alive, and the dream
of riches that went with it only shone brighter. A Chinese proverb of the time held that Chinese have two eyes, Europeans
have one, and the rest of the world is blind—a backhanded compliment for a people consumed with a single vision.
This is why Champlain was journeying up the St. Lawrence: to find a transcontinental water route to China. The idea was well-established,
for the great Antwerp mapmaker Abraham Ortelius marks such a channel in red on a map he printed in 1570. Even after Champlain,
the French cartographer Jean Guérard perpetuates the idea on the map of North America in his
Universal Hydrographical Chart
of 1634, noting in the blank space west of the Great Lakes that “it is believed there is a passage from there to Japan.”
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Asking Natives what route to take to get to China elicited no response, so Champlain instead asked them about saltwater. One
Native up the St. Lawrence River told him in the summer of 1603 that the water of the lake (today’s Lake Huron) beyond the
lake (Lake Erie) that flowed into the next lake (Lake Ontario) was salty. This was the news Champlain thirsted after, but
other Algonquins in the area contradicted this report. Still he kept asking. An Algonquin youth claimed that the water at
the far west end of the first lake he would come to (today’s Lake Ontario) was brackish. This was all the encouragement Champlain
needed. He vowed that he would return and taste it for himself, though it would be years before he could go that far into
the interior. In 1613, Étienne Brûlé, the symbolic son Champlain had exchanged with Ochasteguin, reported to him that Lake
Huron was after all not salty. It was two more summers before Champlain himself visited the lake. He tasted the water and
found it
douce
, “sweet.” This confirmed the sad fact that Lake Huron was not linked to the Pacific Ocean.
Champlain was a cartographer—it was his mapmaking skills that first brought him to the attention of his superiors on his first
voyage—and through his life he drew a series of detailed maps of what was then called New France. His third map, produced
in 1616, is the first to show Lake Huron. He labels it Mer Douce, the Sweetwater Sea, acknowledging the new truth while perhaps
reminding himself that the search was still underway. Champlain introduces one ambiguity into this map, and one exaggeration.
The ambiguity is where the Sweetwater Sea ends—he has allowed it to extend mysteriously off the left-hand side of the map,
for who knows where it might lead? The exaggeration lies to the north. He has drawn the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean, the
Mer du Coté du Nord, such that it sweeps south and comes very close to Lake Huron—a link to saltwater was surely out there
somewhere. His message? The French need only to persevere with their explorations and they (he) will find the hidden transcontinental
passage connecting France to China.
Sixteen years later, Champlain published his final map of New France. This version provides a much fuller portrait of the
Great Lakes, though Erie and Michigan have still not appeared. Champlain has learned that Mer Douce, the Sweetwater Sea, does
not stretch on forever westward to the Pacific but comes to an end (this name would soon fade away in favor of Lac des Hurons,
or Lake Huron). Beyond this freshwater lake and connected by a series of rapids, however, there appears yet another body of
water, a Grand Lac of unknown size and extent (today’s Lake Superior): another lake in a chain that might one day prove to
be the route to China.
Champlain never got to Lake Superior, but Jean Nicollet did. Nicollet was one of Champlain’s
coureurs de bois
, or “woodland runners,” who were infiltrating the interior and operating extensive networks of trade. A year or two before
Champlain published his map of 1632, Nicollet reached a tribe that no European had yet encountered, whom he, or someone, called
the Puants, the Stinkers. Champlain includes them on his final map, on which he indicates a “Nation des Puants,” or Nation
of Stinkers, living beside a lake that drains into the Sweetwater Sea. “Stinkers” is an unfortunate translation of an Algonquin
word meaning dirty water—which is the term Algonquins used to describe brackish water, that is, water that tasted of salt.
The Stinkers did not call themselves Puants. They were Ouinipigous, a name we spell today as Winnebagoes.
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But the word got attached to them by a convoluted logic that was always insisting that the next body of water over the horizon
must be salty, must be “stinky”—must be the Pacific Ocean.
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The chief of the Winnebagoes invited Jean Nicollet to be his guest at a great feast of welcome. Nicollet understood the importance
of protocol. When he presented himself before the thousands who came great distances to attend the feast hosted in his honor,
he wore the finest item he had in his baggage: a Chinese robe embroidered with flowers and birds.
There was no way that an up-country agent such as Nicollet acquired this garment on his own. He would not have had access
to such a thing, let alone the money to buy it. The robe must have been Champlain’s. But how did Champlain acquire it? Only
in the early years of the seventeenth century were curiosities of this sort starting to make their way from China to northern
Europe. As this garment no longer exists, we have no way to trace it. The likely origin was a Jesuit missionary in China,
who brought or sent it back to Europe as a testimonial of the cultured civilization to which he had devoted his life. The
English traveler John Evelyn saw a set of Chinese robes in Paris, and marveled at them. They were “glorious Vests, wrought
& embroidered on cloth of Gold, but with such lively colours, as for splendor and vividnesse we have nothing in Europe approaches.”
Nothing like Nicollet’s robe could have been obtained in Paris during Champlain’s early years in Canada, so he must have bought
it on his two-year furlough in 1624–26—and paid an exorbitant price—because he believed the thing had value for his enterprise
in Canada. He knew that Jesuits dressed themselves in the Chinese manner when they appeared at court, and if he himself did
not have a chance to wear the Chinese robe, then his envoy might. When you show up at court, you have to be correctly dressed.
As things turned out, it was the Winnebagoes, not the Chinese, who got to enjoy the sight.
Nicollet’s robe is simply another sign that Champlain’s dream was to reach China. The dream had been with him right from the
beginning of his adventures in North America. As a poet friend who composed a dedicatory verse for his first memoirs in 1603
wrote, Champlain had dedicated himself “to travel still further, convert the peoples, and discover the East, whether by North
or South, so as to get to China.” All his exploring, alliance building, and fighting was for this purpose alone. China was
the reason why Champlain risked his life to shoot and kill the three Mohawk chiefs on the shore of Lake Champlain. He needed
to control the trade that supplied the felt makers of Europe, but far more than that, he needed to find a route to China.
Nicollet’s robe was a prop for this vision, Vermeer’s hat a by-product of the search.
CHAMPLAIN’S GREAT VENTURE DID NOT succeed, of course. The French would never get to China by canoeing across Canada. Whether
they failed or succeeded, their effort imposed terrible losses on the inhabitants of the eastern woodlands. Worst hit were
the Hurons. Waves of infectious diseases spread from the Europeans into the Huron Confederacy in the 1630s, climaxing in 1640
with a virulent smallpox epidemic that slashed the population to a third of its original number of 25,000. Desperate to save
their communities from annihilation, some Hurons turned to the teachings of the French Jesuit missionaries, who started infiltrating
Huronia in the 1620s. Some may have gained comfort from Jesuit lessons in Christian humility, but that benefit did little
to offset the more tangible effect of a collapse in their capacity to resist the Iroquois. The French decision to reverse
the ban on firearms sales to the Hurons in 1641—though only to Christian converts—came too late for this nation to arm itself
effectively against its enemies.
In the summer and fall of 1649, several thousand Hurons withdrew to Gahoendoe, an island in the southeastern corner of the
Sweetwater Sea. Some four dozen French missionaries, artisans, and soldiers joined them. The Hurons preferred to set up camp
by the edge of an inland lake, whereas the French decided to construct a visible palisade by the shore, preparing for a last
stand against the Iroquois. This last stand is commemorated in today’s name for Gahoendoe, Christian Island.
That last stand turned out to be a battle not against Iroquois warriors but against hunger. The island was too small to support
enough game to feed so many refugees, and the corn they planted went in the ground too late to ripen. As fall lengthened into
winter, the fish they could catch and the six hundred bushels of acorns they bought from tribes further north proved insufficient
to feed everyone, and famine struck. Hardest hit were the children. A Jesuit missionary who visited the village describes
a slack-breasted mother who watched her children “die in her arms, one after another, and had not even the strength to cast
them into the grave.” The melodrama of his account communicates the severity of the suffering that winter, though he was wrong
about that last detail. When a team of archaeologists and Native assistants excavated the site some three decades ago, they
uncovered in the sandy soil next to the village the skeletal remains of children who died of malnutrition, and those remains
had been buried with care. After the dig was completed, the bones were just as carefully relaid, and the young deciduous forest
allowed to reclaim the site so that no one would know where the graves lay, and none could come again to disturb them.
Toward the end of the winter, several hundred Hurons decided to take their chances crossing the ice and surrendering to the
Iroquois parties patrolling the mainland, but the ice underneath their feet gave way and many drowned. The rest waited for
the thaw, then set out on different courses. One group disappeared northward into the interior, and another escorted the French
back to Québec. Their descendants, the Wendat, still live there today. An airy grove of beech and birch trees has grown over
the site of the last Huron village on Christian Island. Unless you happen to know where the village was, you will never find
it. I spend my summers on Christian Island, which is now an Ojibwe reserve, and I cannot walk the dappled path that angles
past the place where the children are buried without thinking back to the starvation winter of 1649–50, marveling at the vast
web of history that ties this hidden spot to global networks of trade and conquest that came into being in the seventeenth
century. The children are lost links in that history, forgotten victims of the desperate European desire to find a way to
China and a way to pay for it, tiny actors in the drama that placed Vermeer’s hat on the officer’s head.