17th and 18th c. Canada

Return to the Front Page.
Go to the Next Section" 19th c. Canada

John Cabot, an Italian immigrant to England, was the first to map Canada’s Atlantic shore, setting foot on Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island in 1497 and claiming the New Founde Land for England. English settlement did not begin until 1610

In 1604, the first European settlement north of Florida was established by French explorers Pierre de Monts and Samuel de Champlain, first on St. Croix Island (in present-day Maine), then at Port-Royal, in Acadia (present-day Nova Scotia). In 1608 Champlain built a fortress at what is now Quebec City. The colonists struggled in the harsh climate. Champlain allied the colony with the Algonquin, Montagnais and Huron, historic enemies of the Iroquois, a confederation of five (later six) First Nations who battled with the French settlements for a century. The French and the Iroquois made peace in 1701.

The French and Aboriginal people collaborated in the vast fur-trade economy, driven by the demand for beaver pelts in Europe. Outstanding leaders like Jean Talon, Bishop Laval, and Count Frontenac built a French Empire in North America that reached from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

Jacques Cartier was the first European to explore the St. Lawrence River and to set eyes on present-day Quebec City and Montreal

In 1670, King Charles II of England granted the Hudson’s Bay Company exclusive trading rights over the watershed draining into Hudson Bay. For
the next 100 years the Company competed with Montreal-based traders. The skilled and courageous men who travelled by canoe were called voyageurs and coureurs des bois, and formed strong alliances with First Nations. English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, dating from the early 1600s, eventually became richer and more populous than New France. In the 1700s France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. In 1759, the British defeated the French in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Quebec City – marking the end of France’s empire in America. The commanders of both armies, Brigadier James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm, were killed leading their troops in battle.

Count Frontenac refused to surrender Quebec to the English in 1690, saying: “My only reply will be from the mouths of my cannons!”

Following the war, Great Britain renamed the colony the “Province of Quebec.” The French-speaking Catholic people, known as habitants or Canadiens, strove to preserve their way of life in the Englishspeaking, Protestant-ruled British Empire.

To better govern the French Roman Catholic majority, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act of 1774. One of the constitutional foundations of Canada, the Quebec Act accommodated the principles of British institutions to the reality of the province. It allowed religious freedom for Catholics and permitted them to hold public office, a practice not then allowed in Britain. It established English criminal law and French civil law.

In 1776, the thirteen British colonies to the south Quebec declared independence and formed the United States. North America was again divided by war. More than 40,000 people loyal to the Crown, called “Loyalists,” fled the oppression of the American Revolution to settle in Nova Scotia and Quebec. Joseph Brant led thousands of Loyalist Mohawk Indians into Canada. The Loyalists came from Dutch, German, British, Scandinavian, Aboriginal, and other origins and from Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Jewish, Quaker, and Catholic religious backgrounds. About 3,000 black Loyalists, freedmen and slaves, came north seeking a better life. In turn, in 1792, some black Nova Scotians, who were given poor land, moved on to establish Freetown, Sierra Leone (West Africa), a new British colony for freed slaves.

Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, was a great hero of New France, winning many victories over the English, from James Bay in the north to Nevis in the Caribbean, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries

Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester), as Governor of Quebec, defended the rights of the Canadiens, defeated an American military invasion of
Quebec in 1775, and supervised the Loyalist migration to Nova Scotia and Quebec in 1782-83

Democratic institutions developed gradually. The first representative assembly was elected in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1758. Prince Edward Island followed in 1773, New Brunswick in 1785. The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the Province of Quebec into Upper Canada (later Ontario), which was mainly Loyalist, Protestant, and English-speaking, and Lower Canada (later Quebec), heavily Catholic and French-speaking. The Act also granted to the Canadas, for the first time, legislative assemblies elected by the people. The name Canada also became official at this time and has been used ever since. The Atlantic colonies and the two Canadas were known collectively as British North America.

The first elected Assembly of Lower Canada, in Quebec City, debates whether to use both French and English, January 21, 1793

Return to the Front Page.
Go to the Next Section" 19th c. Canada