The favorite inn! What a call to food and wine and cheer the name of
the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the
mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath
one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages
were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed
flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the
mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar
inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow and the bowl
of a Holland clay propped in a horny fist, he might listen tranquilly
to the sobbing of the tempest in the gaping chimney. What if the night
voiced its pains shrewdly, walls encompassed him; what if its frozen
tears melted on the panes or smoked on the trampled threshold, glowing
logs sent forth a permeating heat, expanding his sense of luxury and
content. What with the solace of the new-found weed, and the genial
brothers of the sea surrounding, tempests offered no terrors to him.
Listen. Perhaps here is some indomitable Ulysses, who, scorning a
blind immortalizer, recites his own rude Odyssey. What exploits! What
adventures on the broad seas and in the new-found wildernesses of the
West! Ah, but a man was a man then; there were no mythic gods to guide
or to thwart him; and he rose or fell according to the might of his arm
and the length of his sword. Hate sought no flimsy pretexts, but came
forth boldly; love entered the lists neither with caution nor with
mental reservation; and favor, though inconsiderate as ever, was not
niggard with her largess. Truly the mariner had not to draw on his
imagination; the age of which he was a picturesque particle was a brave
and gallant one: an Odyssey indeed, composed of Richelieus, sons and
grandsons of the great Henri, Buckinghams, Stuarts, Cromwells,
Mazarins, and Monks; Maries de Medicis, Annes of Austria, Mesdames de
Longueville; of Royalists, Frondeurs, and Commonwealth; of Catholics,
Huguenots, and Puritans. Some were dead, it is true; but never a great
ship passes without leaving a turbulent wake. And there, in the West,
rising serenely above all these tangles of civil wars and political
intrigues, was the splendid star of New France. Happy and envied was
the mariner who could tell of its vast riches, of its endless forests,
of its cruel brown savages, of its mighty rivers and freshwater seas.
New France! How many a ruined gamester, hearing these words, lifted
his head, the fires of hope lighting anew in his burnt-out eyes? How
many a fallen house looked longingly toward this promised land? New
France! Was not the name itself Fortune's earnest, her pledge of
treasures lightly to be won? The gamester went to his garret to dream
of golden dice, the fallen noble of rehabilitated castles, the peasant
of freedom and liberty. Even the solemn monk, tossing on his pallet,
pierced with his gaze the grey walls of his monastery, annihilated the
space between him and the fruitful wilderness, and saw in fancy the
building of great cities and cathedrals and a glittering miter on his
own tonsured head.