He heard the name the way the notary said it, and he let it stand.
Cap-Rouge, 14 July 1670. The lot ran down toward Rivière-aux-Roches, a strip Jean Juchereau, sieur de Maure, had granted him a year or two after he came ashore. Quebec in 1668 had been a timber town with a stone upper city and a lower town that smelled of tar, fish, and wet wool. He had arrived as João Rodrigues, a sailor out of Lisbon, probably from the parish of São João, born about 1641, son of João Rodrigues and Susana da Cruz. On the paper Romain Becquet was drawing up, he was Jean Rodrigue, and his parents were Jean Rodrigue and Suzanne Lacroix. Pierre Renaud dit Locat was buying the strip. The price was what a small river lot would bring. João signed the French spelling. Correcting it would have meant explaining Lisbon to a room that had no use for the explanation.
Six days later he was in front of another notary, Audouart, buying a different piece from Isaac Harnois at Saint-Ange du Cap-Rouge. The same day he signed an IOU for 150 livres to Harnois. A sailor’s bet: land on credit, to be paid out of seasons not yet sailed. He bought the neighbor’s lot as well, or meant to. In July 1671 he traded that holding to François Savary for a piece in the seigneurie of La Durantaye. The Harnois purchase was later wiped out, nullified in 1673. Nothing in those years sat still long enough to look like a fortune. It looked like a man trying lots on, the way he tried harbors.
Anne Le Roy came over as a fille du roi, daughter of François Le Roy and Anne Bourdais, from Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois in Paris. On 13 October 1671 they signed a marriage contract at Beauport, again before Becquet. On the 28th the wedding was celebrated at Notre-Dame de Québec. She was about his age, near thirty, which in that colony was not late so much as ordinary for people who had crossed an ocean first. They took a house in the village of Saint-Michel at Beauport and stayed. The moving, after that, was seasonal, and it was his.
In May 1673 Pierre Niel, a Quebec merchant, hired him from the feast of Saint-Jean-Baptiste through the end of the sailing season. Duquet wrote the contract. On 7 August, while that season was still running, Marie-Anne was born at Beauport and baptized on the 16th. The next June he renewed with Niel. Suzanne came around 1675. That May he hired to Bertrand Chenay, sieur de La Garenne, again through Duquet, from late April to the close of navigation. When the ships stopped, Vivien Jean took him on until spring. A winter hire, for wages and a living, because the land and the summer pay had not been enough. He was back with Chenay in April 1677. The missing contract for 1676 is easy to imagine and impossible to prove.
René was born in the village on 28 July 1678 and baptized the next day. Vincent followed on 9 August 1681. The census that year still found them at Beauport: four children, and about ten arpents of land. Jacques was born in May 1685 and baptized on the 27th. In March 1686 Jean bought another piece from René Dubois dit Brisebois. Ten arpents and a sailor’s seasons. The house was never described, in the records that survive, as rich.
The daughters left first, in the way daughters left. Marie-Anne married Jean Moreau in Quebec in February 1692. Suzanne married Vincent Guillot in October 1699. By 1701 Jean was selling. A lot to René Toupin in April. Another, in August, to his son-in-law Guillot. A third, in October, to his son René. René married Élisabeth Dauphin at Beauport in November 1703. Vincent married Marie-Angélique Giroux there in January 1707. The sales read, at this distance, like a man converting land into cash and into roofs for his children, because cash and roofs were the same problem.
On 30 January 1711 he gave what remained to Jacques, on condition that Jacques house and feed his parents until they died. Jacques canceled the donation in April 1712. The burden had been too large. In February 1713, under what the later reading of the contracts calls great financial stress, Jean made the same gift to René and Vincent together, same condition: shelter, food, care, until the end. It was the old arrangement of the colony, written down because the parties wanted it written down. Parents passed the last lot. Children passed back a place at the table.
Suzanne had already died, in June 1711, about thirty-six, buried at Beauport. René died on 22 March 1715, thirty-seven, also at Beauport. Two months later, on 26 May, Anne died in the Hôtel-Dieu at Quebec, about seventy-four. In August Jean donated what was left to Vincent and to René’s widow, Élisabeth Dauphin. Jacques married in 1718 at Cap-Saint-Ignace, Geneviève Caron, a widow. The sons were scattered into their own households. The sailor stayed at Beauport.
He died there on 14 November 1720, about eighty, and was buried the next day under the name the notaries had used for fifty years. Somewhere in Lisbon a register may still say João, son of João Rodrigues and Susana da Cruz. In Quebec the paper says Jean, husband of Anne Le Roy, father of the children baptized at Saint-Michel, a matelot who bought on credit, shipped for Niel and Chenay, hired himself out for a winter, and at the end gave the last of the land away for a bed and a meal. Between the two spellings there is only the river, and the fact that he answered, every time they asked, in the language of the shore that kept him.
A Lisbon sailor, a Parisian bride, a francized name, seasonal wages, and a household at Beauport are already a true account of how people actually crossed into this continent and stayed.
Thank you Grok xAI for your wisdom and research assistance. -- Drifting Cowboy
