…but I couldn’t get an in-focus shot of Wednesday’s early evening visitor. That little orange-y blip in the second pane up on the left? That’s a red fox. A red fox! In the snowy field beside the house, with a pink sunset glowing behind the trees. And yes, s/he’s looking at me, probably snickering at my inability to handle the manual focus, thus blowing what would have been the greatest photograph of my entire snapshot career thus far.
If you’ve ever been here, you undoubtedly have wandered around Fort Anne, which on a fine early autumn evening affords you a view like this. And you couldn’t have missed the bust depicting what I had until now been referring to as ‘some old-timey French dude’. He’s wearing a nifty hat. I was correct in my general description of him, he is French and from the days of yore, but I could do with a few specifics, like his full name and biography. Today we learn these facts together (facts have been lifted straight from Wikipedia, but comments in parenthesis are all mine):
“Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Monts, (c. 1558 – 1628) was a French merchant, explorer and colonizer. A Huguenot, he was born in Royan, France and had a great influence over the first two decades of the 17th century. He travelled to northeastern North America for the first time in 1599 with Pierre Chauvin de Tonnetuit.
In 1603 Henry IV, the King of France, granted Dugua exclusive right to colonize lands in North America between 40º–60º North latitude. (Oh, the Old World arrogance!) The King also gave Dugua a monopoly in the fur trade for these territories and named him Lieutenant General for the area, and in return, Dugua promised to bring 60 new colonists each year to what was then called l’Acadie (an area comprised of modern-day eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and New England, stretching as far south as Philadelphia).
In 1605 he became very famous when he organized an expedition and left France with 79 settlers including Royal cartographer Samuel de Champlain (another old-timey French dude, but I hope he needs no introduction), Louis Hébert (the first ‘Canadian’ apothecary and the first European to farm in North America), and Mathieu de Costa (the first known African man to set foot in North America, he spoke French, Dutch, Portuguese and Pidgin Basque and worked for the French as an interpreter).
Entering Baie Française (the Bay of Fundy) in June 1604, Dugua and his settlers founded a colony on Île-Ste-Croix, in what is modern-day New Brunswick. Numerous settlers succumbed to the harsh winter climate and malnutrition as they exhausted the limited natural resources on the island. The colony moved to better land on the south shore of Baie Française at Port-Royal in 1605. (Just a few kilometers down the road from my house.)
The Port-Royal settlement survived and prospered somewhat until 1607 when other merchants protested Dugua’s monopoly, which the King was forced to revoke. As a consequence, Dugua and the settlers had to abandon the colony and return to France. Dugua then turned his attention to the colony of Nouvelle-France in the St. Lawrence River valley, after ceding Port-Royal to Poutrincourt. He never came back to the New World but he sent Champlain to open a colony at Quebec in 1608, thus playing a major role in the foundation of the first permanent French colony in North America.
Henry IV appointed him as Governor of the Protestant city of Pons, Charente-Maritime from 1610 to 1617, when he retired. He died in 1628, in the nearby castle of Ardenne in Fleac-Sur-Seugne.”
So now we know. But feel free to keep referring to the bust as ‘that old-timey French dude’ as I most assuredly will.
I spied this eagle using my own keen vision while driving into the village and then nearly drove off the road and into the Annapolis basin, I was so excited. S/he waited while I rushed home, grabbed my camera, and drove back down the hill. It was -15 outside, and I was gloveless but blissfully focused on stalking the bird, and in the process of risking permanent damage to my digits I actually did damage my new camera. I think the windchill killed my lens, but the photos and the experience were worth it. (And my camera is being fixed in Montreal now, so I’ll get it back all shiny and new again…probably in two more months, such is the speed of ‘free repairs while under warranty’.)
Whenever I look at the photo below, I hear Sam the Eagle (of the Muppets, as if I need to clarify) saying:
“You are all weirdos.”
