The district of Quebec was the first to be allotted in seigneuries, and here of course agriculture had made better headway.  Grondines, La Chevrotiere, Portneuf, Pointe aux Trembles, Sillery, and Notre-Dame des Anges were all thriving properties ranging along the river bank eastward to the settlement at Quebec.  Just beyond the town lay the flourishing fief of Beauport, originally owned by Robert Giffard, but now held by his heirs, the family of Juchereau Duchesnay.  This seigneury was destined to loom up prominently in later days when Montcalm held Wolfe at bay for weeks along the Beauport shore.  Fronting Beauport was the spacious island of Orleans with its several thriving parishes, all included within the seigneury of Francois Berthelot, on whom the king for his zeal and enterprise had conferred the title of Comte de St Laurent.  A score of other seigneurial tracts, including Lotbiniere, Lauzon, La Durantaye, Bellechasse, Riviere Ouelle, and others well known to every student of Canadian genealogy, were included within the huge district round the ancient capital.

The king’s representatives had been much too freehanded in granting land.  No seigneur had a tenth of his tract under cultivation, yet all the best-located and most fertile soil of the colony had been given out.  Those who came later had to take lands in out-of-the-way places, unless by good fortune they could secure the re-grant of something that had been abandoned.  The royal generosity did not in the long run conduce to the upbuilding of the colony, and the home authorities in time recognized the imprudence of their policy.  Hence it was that edict after edict sought to make these gentlemen of the wilderness give up whatever land they could not handle properly, and if these decrees of retrenchment had been strictly enforced most of the seigneurial estates would have been mercilessly reduced in area.  But the seigneurs who were the most remiss happened to be the ones who sat at the council board in Quebec, and what they had they usually managed to hold, despite the king’s command.

CHAPTER III

Three seigneurs of old Canada—­Hebert,
la Durantaye, le Moyne

It was to the seigneurs that the king looked for active aid in promoting the agricultural interests of New France.  Many of them disappointed him, but not all.  There were seigneurs who, in their own way, gave the king’s interests a great deal of loyal service, and showed what the colony was capable of doing if all its people worked with sufficient diligence and zeal.  Three of these pioneers of the seigneuries have been singled out for special attention in this chapter, because each prefigures a type of seigneur who did what was expected of him, although not always in the prescribed way.  Their work was far from being showy, and offers a writer no opportunity to make his pages glow.  The priest and the trader afford better themes.  But even the short and simple annals of the poor, if fruitful in achievement, are worth the recounting.