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often done by men who had been on the spot; but, apart from
the
fact that the English settlements got far less attention than the West
Indies and Brazil, the interest was mainly scientific, and the artists
had no more real connection with the art of the countries they visited
than the explorers who to-day illustrate the Congo basin or Man-
churia. Few of the draughtsmen were English, and if we wish traces
of a taste for art, we must turn to the French rather than to the
English settlers. Even before De Bry's publications in Ramusio's
Voyages of 1556, there was a
recognizable view of Hochelaga (later
Montreal), and in 1558 there appeared at Antwerp, Thevet's
Les
Singularitez de la France Antartique, which contained a cut of a
buffalo, probably from a drawing by Thevet himself, and fairly well
done. Later there appeared another artist who, though also an
amateur, was far better known than even Le Moyne. Samuel de
Champlain, that gallant, steadfast gentleman, adorned his journal
with colored pictures of harbors, rivers, animals, blockhouses, skir-
mishes with Indians (who shoot their unfortunate victims full of
arrows until they look like porcupines), and other occurrences of
interest, as may be seen in the manuscript preserved in Dieppe to
this clay. Parkman says they are " in a style which a child of ten
might emulate," but they elucidate the text, and no English pioneer
had advanced even as far as that.
There was continually among the French explorers of
Canada
an effort toward a life adorned with the graces and refinements
which they had left behind. Champlain himself, on his return from
an exploring expedition, was welcomed at Port Royale by a
fete
where Neptune and his
tritons, issuing from beneath an arch
blazoned with scutcheons and the arms of France, declaimed a
greeting in good French verse. And later yet the fiery Frontenac,
who in his early days in France had lavished money and boasted
of the perfection of his cuisine and establishment generally,
cared
for the intellectual pleasures of cultivated life and got himself into
difficulties with the clergy through his masquerades and plays.
But these incursions into art left no permanent results; no
more
did the portraits of saints and the lurid representations of the
suffer-
ings of the damned which the Jesuit priests carried through the
wilds to turn the hearts of the bloodthirsty Hurons to grace, nor
the
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