A Tangled Tale

In the rogues’ gallery of Canadian history, few figures measure up to the men of the Kirke family, who carved a remarkably eventful swath through the 17th century. These English wine merchants, with French roots and an elbows-up attitude, tried hedging their risks by diversifying into the St. Lawrence fur trade through brute force. Beginning with a privateering raid on French assets in the St. Lawrence in 1628, they were best known for booting Samuel de Champlain out of his Quebec habitation in 1629, and keeping it until diplomacy allowed Champlain and the French to return in 1632. Less appreciated is the prominent role Sir David Kirke (knighted in 1631) went on to play in Newfoundland’s colonization and inshore fishery at Ferryland. Less appreciated still is that his brother, John, was one of the original investors in 1667 in the Hudson’s Bay Company; John’s daughter married Pierre Radisson, whose exploration efforts helped open up Rupert’s Land for the HBC.

Some day, hopefully, a historian will tackle afresh the full story of this deservedly notorious clan. In the meantime, Andrew Nicholls’s A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada is the latest contribution to the Kirke literature, focusing on their capture of Quebec and this action’s relationship to the star-crossed colonizing enterprises of two Scots, Sir William Alexander around Port Royal in Nova Scotia and James Stewart, Lord Ochiltree, in Cape Breton.

Nicholls strives to credit Charles I (who would lose his head in the Cromwell rebellion) with attempting to forge a coherent strategy of colonization and conquest out of these seemingly disparate initiatives. His story’s value lies in expanding our knowledge of Alexander and Stewart, and placing their actions in the courtly politics of Charles and the wars and diplomacy of Europe. The story’s weaknesses are on this side of the pond, particularly in not taking any measure of the strategic implications of the Dutch colonial presence, and in Nicholls not making a persuasive case for his thesis of Charles’s strategic vision. We are also left with an incomplete portrait of the Kirkes’ three-year reign in Quebec, in large part because Nicholls declines to devote any space in this thin volume to the perspective of the aboriginal peoples who were the fur trade the Kirkes strove to capture.

Nicholls, who teaches at Buffalo State College, calls his work “analysis from a British perspective.” He casts the 1629 ventures of the Kirkes, Alexander and Stewart—usually seen as dislocated, historically marginal, dead-end events—as a coherent initiative guided by the hand of Charles, king of England and Scotland, that was “British” in ambition and character before there was an actual political union. In particular, Nicholls argues that bringing Alexander within the Kirkes’ Company of Merchant Adventurers to Canada in February 1629 was in part a means of “carrying the war with France to the North American theatre.”

A narrative that frustratingly and routinely dispenses with chronology does not help the reader assess the thesis. There is a lot of traffic direction: regular reminders of what has been discussed already, forewarnings of what is about to come and notices of an impending detour. It is a difficult story to follow, and Nicholls himself knows it. “The narrative cannot proceed smoothly,” he declares in his introduction. I am not sure about “cannot,” but it certainly does not.

Nicholls allows in his introduction that “at first glance” the merger of the Kirkes’ and Alexander’s interests within the Company of Merchant Adventurers to Canada “might appear to be nothing more than a solution for a comparatively minor court squabble,” but argues “in reality, it was more.” But was it?

Alexander’s patent rights had been granted by Charles’s father, who was both James VI of Scotland and James I of England. Charles, who had succeeded him in 1625, then doled out privileges to the Kirkes that appeared to infringe on Alexander’s rights. Such a misstep was par for the course in the new king’s rule, as further evidenced when Sir David Kirke usurped the holdings of George Calvert in Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula in the late 1630s. “Charles I habitually sold overlapping monopolies to competing interests,” Peter Pope tells us in his masterful Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. “Charles’s commercialization of patronage was a departure from the exchange of favors typical of James I’s court.”

Nicholls, by contrast, would have it that Charles’s infringement on the Alexander patent with the award to the Kirkes was due to the “exigencies of war.” Reeling from the humiliations of a war against France (and Spain) that was going badly, the king wanted to build on the public popularity of the Kirkes’ privateering raid of 1628 with a capture of Champlain’s Quebec habitation the next summer. Nicholls further argues a “synthesis” of British commercial, colonial and military agendas through the king’s support of the Kirkes and Alexander in concert with a new scheme by James Stewart, Lord Ochiltree, to plant a colony in Cape Breton. If all went according to plan, Charles would “tangibly increase his area of claimed dominion in North America, so as to virtually eliminate a French presence.”

One can argue that this should have been Charles’s coordinated military-colonial strategy in north-eastern North America in 1629; whether it actually was is another matter. Nicholls states that Charles “seems to have taken an active role in bringing the factions together,” but offers no smoking gun. He further argues that “British” interests “seem to have recognized the need to secure Cape Breton Island and its adjacent waterways … because in the spring of 1629, hasty plans [by Ochiltree] were laid to plant a British colony there.” Nicholls could be on to something, but there remains a formidable counterargument: the events of 1629 were not coordinated by any sort of visionary statecraft and, moreover, at that time Charles was most interested in ending the war with France, not expanding it.

As Nicholls himself notes, some of the main obstacles to peace with France already had been removed in 1628, with the assassination of the hawkish Duke of Buckingham in August and the capitulation of the Huguenots at La Rochelle in October. Indeed, the coincidental war with Spain was over, and Charles was weary of the one with France by January 1629, when his queen, Henrietta Maria, sister of the French king Louis XIII, proved to be pregnant. Apart from the way this happy event encouraged closer ties between the royal families, the cash-strapped Charles wanted the war to end so that he could collect on the balance of the dowry promised to him on his 1625 marriage to Henrietta Maria.

Why then would Charles proceed with a plan to escalate the war in a distant theatre, provided that indeed was his gambit when he allegedly advanced the merger of interests of the Kirkes and Alexander in February 1629? Peace negotiations apparently were underway, and would conclude with a treaty at Susa in the Duchy of Savoy in April; it included an obligation for France to pay Charles the remaining dowry, which Nicholls volunteers he “desperately needed.” Both sides also were required to relinquish any territories captured after that date. The very taking of Quebec by the Kirkes (whose fleet had departed in March) in July violated Susa and suspended any hope of collecting on the dowry until Quebec’s inevitable, if delayed, return to Champlain and France.

Nicholls says “almost nobody related to the Alexander-Kirke-Ochiltree efforts in the spring of 1629 realized that diplomacy had already intervened and that the war was over.” Charles knew that his own diplomacy had been doing the intervening for several months. Leaving aside the fact that “almost nobody” falls short of “no one,” we thus come back to the question of why he would have been engineering a coordinated offensive on French territories in the New World at the very same time. This is a tangled tale told in a tangled way, and readers will have to make up their own minds on whether or not Nicholls’s case is fully made.

And rather than rounding up the usual suspects of early exploration as he does, from Columbus to Verrazzano to Raleigh, Nicholls could have revealed earlier English ambitions toward the St. Lawrence. Nicholls mentions Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 voyage to Newfoundland, but I would have welcomed him delving into the activities of Gilbert’s associate, Edward Hayes, who formulated a plan for colonizing the St. Lawrence in the early 1590s in concert with Christopher Carleill. There was also a failed English attempt in 1597 to oust French and Basque walrus hunters from the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and install a Brownist colony—a not inconsequential tidbit, given that Nicholls tells us Brownists, a breakaway congregational sect of the Church of England, were part of Lord Ochiltree’s Cape Breton colony in 1629.

The introduction’s assurance that Nicholls advocates a “transnational” approach to history would have been more fully embraced had he not bypassed altogether the enormously important fact of the New Netherlands colony centred on the Hudson River. If the Kirkes were to make a fortune off the fur trade up the St. Lawrence by seizing Quebec, they would have to deal with the considerable challenge posed by the Dutch West Indies Company. Having ramped up their colonization efforts on the Hudson in 1626 and introduced a new era of feudal landowners (patroons) in 1629 reaching all the way north to present-day Albany, the Dutch were transforming the fur trade. At the same time the Mohawk of the Five Nations confederacy seized control of the main supply of furs to the Dutch and escalated war with Algonquin and Huron suppliers to Champlain’s commercial partners at Quebec.

To write about an essential objective of the supposed plan orchestrated by Charles—to drive out the French and seize control of the St. Lawrence’s main commercial asset, the fur trade—and not to recognize the massively complicating presence of the Dutch in northeastern North America is an unfortunate omission. The story sails right past the establishment of a threat to English colonial ambitions arguably more pressing than anything Champlain was up to in his struggling little outpost. In 1615 the Dutch began touting a rival claim all the way up the Eastern Seaboard to latitude 45. The rapidly escalating dispute led to a significant diplomatic incident when New Netherlands director general Peter Minuit was seized after his ship called at Plymouth, England, in 1632. The substantial complication of the Dutch needs to be acknowledged for this book’s approach to be considered truly transnational.

One might argue (I would not) that the indigenous peoples were beyond the scope of this study. Yet Nicholls chooses to open the book in the historic region of Huronia of southeastern Georgian Bay, with the first chapter devoted to the Huron, the Jesuit mission of Ste-Marie and Champlain’s visit there in 1615–16. Only in the epilogue do we return rather awkwardly to the Huronia mission of the Jesuits and the destruction of the Huron, a “once mighty civilization,” by the Iroquois in 1649 (who he does not tell us had been armed with powder weapons largely by Dutch traders). Nowhere in the main narrative does the supposedly mighty aboriginal civilization make an appearance.

Nicholls says little is known about the Kirkes’ tenure at Quebec, but Bruce Trigger in his landmark study of the Huron, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, provided details and promising lines of inquiry where the Huron and the Kirkes are concerned—including the Kirkes’ abduction of Amantacha, son of the prominent Huron trader Soranhes—that Nicholls does not address. Exploring English relations with the Native traders would have helped assess what the prospects for the Kirkes, England and the aboriginal peoples would have been like had Quebec not been returned through treaty to France. Nicholls also simplistically accuses the interpreter Étienne Brûlé of a “betrayal” of Champlain when he served the Kirkes during their brief Quebec tenure. Trigger observes that Frenchmen like Brûlé were glad to rid themselves of the meddling presence of Jesuit missionaries among the Huron and in their own lives during the Kirke interregnum, and one can hardly blame them.

While Nicholls serves up a stew of details about the denouement of the doomed colonization efforts in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, he is ultimately concerned with diplomacy and courtly politics as schemed back in the Old Country, not in the full slate of complications of New World colonization and commerce. For those readers satisfied with an approach to colonial history concerned foremost with affairs in France, England and Scotland, the book will more than suffice. However, the colonial theatre also involved the Dutch and, above all, the aboriginal trading allies—who, after all, occupied the lands these strangers were deigning to claim for their Eurocentric visions.

I wonder if Nicholls was striving valiantly to invest Charles with a strategic vision to which these messy events and the king’s grasping ways did not entitle him. Academic history is built on the foundation of a thesis, but had Nicholls dispensed with the problematic one at the heart of this book and done a little more digging, he would have had material aplenty to craft a scholarly and compelling narrative. The cast of characters are boundlessly entertaining, their activities deeply informative about the early 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the full story of the Kirkes waits to be told.