“Towards the end of May 1633, a band of Algonquians travelling in eighteen canoes arrived at Quebec from upriver. Their leader was a man known to the French as Capitanal, a name or title that seems derived from a trading pidgin word for “captain” or chief, rather than rooted in his own people’s idiom. He was considered to be the “principal captain of the Three Rivers,” the place called Metaberoutin by Algonquian speakers and Trois Rivières by the French, where the waters of the Saint Maurice River flow by three channels into the Saint Lawrence. Capitanal is otherwise an elusive figure, seldom mentioned in the sources.
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Fearing that Capitanal’s canoes would continue downstream to Tadoussac to offer their furs to several English vessels still anchored there, Champlain visited his encampment on 24 May. Both men shared a desire to reestablish the longstanding relationship between their peoples, and to expand on its foundations.
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Capitanal listened attentively to the Frenchman, and responded with disarming eloquence and modesty. He and his people cherished dearly the old alliance with the French, and he protested that he did not intend to meet with the English downriver. He had sent some moose skins in that direction, it was true, but they were destined for other Algonquian nations, and meant to strengthen the alliance that united them against the Iroquois.
As far as the claim that his people had asked for the establishment of a French post at Metaberoutin or Trois Rivières was concerned, he declared emphatically that he could not recall it. “I do not know that I have asked for it,” he said, adding that he could not remember his elders speaking of it either. He saw through Champlain’s benevolent rhetoric and understood that French inroads upriver were not purely altruistic. Still, Capitanal and his people welcomed the project, seeing that it could be mutually advantageous. “You will make, to begin with, a house like this to live in,” he responded, designating a small space with his hand, “that is to say, you will make a fortress” – an impressive word perhaps, but referring here merely to a fortified trading compound like those the French had already built at Tadoussac and Quebec. “Then you will make another house like that,” he went on, gesturing at a larger space, “and then we shall no longer be dogs who sleep outside, we shall go into that house.” The missionary chronicler who reported on this meeting observed that this second house was metaphorical, and that the speaker meant by it a “bourg fermé ” (enclosed village). “You will sow wheat,” added Capitanal, having noted that the land was better upriver, in his country, than at Quebec. “We shall do as you do, and we shall no longer go to seek our living in the woods; we shall no longer be wanderers and vagabonds.”
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Capitanal’s words thus pandered to his interlocutors and mirrored, with diplomatic dexterity, their aspirations and prejudices. He flattered them with hyperbolic self-abasement, disavowing his people’s “wandering, vagabond” way of life, declaring, for example, that he was “only a poor little animal, crawling about on the ground,” while the French were “the great of the earth, who make all tremble The Algonquian laughter which concluded the meeting was understood by the French as joyful agreement with all that had been said, but with hindsight we might also interpret it as a giddy response to the fanciful character of French ambitions. Surely, the two parties did not have quite the same thing in mind when they spoke of villages and fields."
- Jean-François Lozier, Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: Queen's-McGill Press, 2018), p. 43-46.
