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Updated: June 26, 2025
Colonel Bienville, being but a lubberly fellow, nigh choked with amazement at the English governor's warmth; but before we knew our leader's drift, the marquis and La Chesnaye were each in turn presented as commanders of our different land forces.
While the cook was preparing our supper and Ben disguising as a French wood-runner, we wandered at will, M. Radisson all the while uttering low laughs and words as of thoughts. It was "Caught neat as a mouse in a trap! Don't let him spill the canoe when we're running the traverse, Ramsay! May the fiends blast La Chesnaye if he opens his foolish mouth in Gillam's hearing!
Sometimes, when long exemption from attack had emboldened them, they ventured back to their farm-houses, an experiment always critical and sometimes fatal. Thus the people of La Chesnaye, forgetting a sharp lesson they had received a year or two before, returned to their homes in fancied security.
Where the currents of the two rivers joined, the wind had whipped the waters to a maelstrom. The night was moonless. It was well we did not see the white turmoil, else M. Radisson had had a mutiny on his hands. When the canoe leaped to the throb of the sucking currents like a cataract to the plunge, La Chesnaye clapped his pole athwart and called out a curse on such rashness.
All of them spent the better part of the first weeks at sea full length below deck. Of a calm day they lolled disconsolate over the taffrail, with one eye alert for flight down the companionway when the ship began to heave. "What are you doing back there, La Chesnaye?" asks M. de Radisson, with a quiet wink, not speaking loud enough for fo'castle hands to hear.
His warning to prepare for instant siege set all the young fire-eaters of our Habitation working like beavers to complete the French fort. The marquis took a hand at squaring timbers shoulder to shoulder with Allemand, the pilot; and La Chesnaye, the merchant prince, forgot to strut while digging up earthworks for a parapet. The leaven of the New World was working.
The governor says that all the coureurs de bois would be brought to submission but for the intendant and his allies, who protect them, and carry on trade by their means; that the seigniorial house of Duchesneau's partner, La Chesnaye, is the constant resort of these outlaws; and that he and his associates have large storehouses at Montreal, Isle St.
Sea-birds caught the first breath of storm and wheeled landward with shrill calls, and once La Chesnaye and I made out through the ship's glass a vast herd of caribou running to sniff the gale from the crest of an inland hill. "If Radisson comes not back soon we are storm-bound here for the winter. As you live, we are," grumbled the merchant.
La Chesnaye had introduced the brothers-in-law to Frontenac, the governor of New France, and had laid before him their plans for a trading company to operate on the great bay; but Frontenac 'did not approve the business. He could not give a commission to invade the territory of a friendly power; still, if La Chesnaye and his associates chose to assume risks, he could wink at an invasion of rival traders' domains.
In a memoir of 1697, Aubert de la Chesnaye says: "At first, the French went only among the Hurons, and since then to Missilimakinak, where they sold their goods to the savages of the places, who in turn went to exchange them with other savages in the depths of the woods, lands and rivers.
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