The Bishop's Sea: St. Nicholas

 

St. Nicholas, Washington Irving tells us, was first seen by a Dutch scouting party checking out Manhattan. Shipwrecked on its shores, they had a vision in which good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children." St. Nicholas becomes the founding father of New York, which is why he is the patron of he New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804, and to which Washington Irving belonged when, in 1809, he published this in an extended parody of Samuel L. Mitchell's Picture of New-York, the publishing sensastion that was Irving's History of New-York. The history of Santa Claus being a crowded field, especially at this time of the year, I'll leave the rest to silence except for the confusion of dates for St. Nicholas' advent, whether on the 6th of December, the 24th, 25th, or New Year's Eve, and the indigenous North American parallel that seems relevant  here, Le canoe volant, or, as the Wikipedia entry more primly has it, La Chasse-galerie, which in the story carries voyageurs home to their loved ones on New Years Eve. And, as always, I should acknowledge the brilliant connection that Lauren Golf makes between the legend of the flying canoe and the Sullivan Expedition, or boats floating above the flooded countryside in general. 

But "the first Christmas" in North America was at the second permanent European colony in North America, Port Royal, Nova Scotia. It was celebrated by Samuel de Champlain, Membertou, the sachem of the Micmacs, and Champlain's Order of Good Cheer, more than two centuries before in 1605. 

Second?

 

The explanatory text is by Astrofella, the very patient  blogger at Books & Boots, which doesn't seem to have an "About" page so that I can credit them by name. It's from back in the day when the turkey shoot was the big thing at Christmas. Girls aren't supposed to come out for the turkey shooting, but we're making an exception for Elizabeth Temple because there's only two girls in Templeton and the other one is the pastor's daughter. 

So if Port Royal is the second permanent French colonial establishment in North America (outside Newfoundland, which doesn't count), what was the first? A place I only learned about the other day, from the incredibly deep and scholarly practice of following Wikipedia links:

Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay River is sometimes associated with the mythical Kingdom of Saguenay, a northern El Dorado that might have been said to lie up its namesake river rather than beyond the rapids above Montreal. The Wikipedia article for the Kingdom obligingly links to "Blond Eskimos," "Greater Ireland," and an assortment of pseudo-history which coalesces around the vague idea that the Saguenay River might have been the route by which Greenland Norse goods reached the rest of North America. The geography makes no sense, but at least it is on the right side of the St. Lawrence, and it was a trade route, albeit one serving a fur country, and not bullion mines. It's also the homeland of Maria Chapdelaine, although this crucial bit of geography is for some reason left out of the Wikipedia article. 

The Saguenay/Kingdom of the Saguenay connection comes to the fore with Jacques Cartier, and there was a Basque whaling port there later in the century, until it was formally founded as a fur trading post in 1599. Abandoned four years later after a "feast of reunion" with the Champlain party, the "settlers" removed to Acadia and then Quebec, leaving the settlement to be refoiunded as a mission in 1615, and be converted into a Mohawk holding during the Beaver Wars under obscure circumstances. 

Tadoussac asks us to question what it means to "settle" a place. The comparison that comes to mind for me is Patuxet, Massachusetts. Like Tadoussac, it was a port of trade, visited by Champlain (or "Port St. Louis") and John Smith ("Accomack"). It is not quite perfectly located, as the best portage around Cape Cod is occupied by the modern Canal, which was commanded by the Aptucxet Trading Post, some twenty miles south of Patuxet. However, there were plenty of water routes for avoiding Cape Cod. A portage to the Taunton River headwaters looks enticing, and as near as I can tell from the map there would have been both a falls and a portage in the town's immediate hinterland. 

The comparison with Tadoussac seems a bit scandalous at some level, since, as we all know, Patuxet became Plymouth in 1621, the capital of Plymouth Colony and a European colony occupied by families of pious Christians straight out of Leiden. Or Yorkshire. Devon? One or the other. 

Now, we know, of course, that Mayflower is an obscure ship, that no list of the passengers on Mayflower survives, and that the Mayflower Compact, which has been used as an alternative, has an uncertain provenance. We know that only a third of the colonists were Leiden brethren, and that as a ship of 180t burthen, the claimed single-lift establishment of the colony is implausible, to say the least. But perhaps there is not enough focus on the one author from which our history of the colony descends, long term Governor William Bradford. 

Marmaduke Temple was widowed just before the events of The Pioneers begins, just as Bradford was widowed just before Of Plimouth Plantation begins to be about Patuxet/Plymouth. In 1613, at the age of 23, William Bradford married Dorothy May (16) in Leiden. They had one son before, on 17 December, Dorothy fell from the deck of Mayflower and drowned. On 16 August, Bradford remarried. At his death, Bradford was married to Alice Bradford, whose much later will names Carpenters and Southworths as beneficiaries. Genealogists have reasonably linked Mrs. Bradford with an Englishwoman of Leiden named Alice Carpenter, who married, and was bereaved of, an Edward Southworth. However, because no record of  Alice's marriage survives (the bride in the 1623 marriage goes unnamed in our one source), I remain unreasonably suspicious. Could the bride of 1623 have been an unnamed Indian princess? It's irresponsible not to speculate! My theories about the subtext of The Pioneers need not be repeated here. 

The point here is less conspiracy theories about America's origins as a secret Mestizo aristocracy than the advent of the domestic and female in the making of settlement out of "ports of trade": And Christmas!  Merry Christmas!