♂Claude Saint-Étienne de La Tour

Claude Saint-Étienne de La Tour (about 1570 – after 1636) was a Paris mason’s son who married into a noble family of Champagne, followed his wife’s kinsman to Acadia and spent much of his life in the fur trade there. In 1630 the Scots he sailed with attacked the fort held by his own son, who had refused to follow him over to the English. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Charles Saint-Étienne de La Tour (1593–1666).

Early life and marriage

He was born about 1570, the son of Guyon Turgis, a master mason of Paris, and Marie Condor, and is said to have been baptized Nicolas. All his life he used both names, Nicolas and Claude, and both surnames, Turgis and Saint-Étienne, signing himself “Desainctestienne”.

About 1592 Marie de Salazar, a young widow of a noble family of Champagne, married Claude Saint-Étienne de La Tour, and the couple settled at Baigneux, near Saint-Just in Champagne. As guardian of her two daughters by her first husband, Paul de Verrines, he took the title of sieur de Vouarces, and on 28 June 1593 he bought a water mill there, the Moulin Colin, for 300 livres. They had a son, Charles, born in 1593, and two daughters, Louise and Angélique, born about 1599 and 1602.

Acadia

His wife’s kinsman Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt^W lived nearby at Saint-Just, and it was Poutrincourt who drew him to the New World. In August 1601 Marie borrowed money from his father to equip him for a voyage to Canada. He probably sailed with Poutrincourt and Pierre Dugua de Mons^W in 1604, and he came home to Champagne with Poutrincourt in the autumn of 1607. Marie died in 1609 or a little before, and on 5 April 1609 his father died in Paris.

On 25 February 1610 he sailed from Dieppe for Port-Royal with Poutrincourt and his own son Charles, then about sixteen. From then on he went back and forth between Acadia and Paris, buying furs at Pentagouët, on Penobscot Bay, and selling them in France. About 1614 he built a fortified trading post there, Fort Pentagouet^W. In 1615 he signed a marriage contract with Marie Guedon, the widow of François Gaudart, a procurator of the Châtelet of Paris; in the deeds of these years he called himself one of the hundred gentlemen of the King’s household. By 1618 he was a man of property, with farms at Baigneux, Saint-Just and near Dourdan, perhaps bought with the profits of the fur trade.

The trade turned against him in the 1620s. He is said to have lost the post at Pentagouët and its furs to the English of Plymouth Colony^W in 1626, and he sold land in Champagne to pay the merchants of Dieppe who had backed him.

Going over to the English

In 1627 his son, now commanding the last French fort in Acadia, at Cap de Sable, asked him to carry his letters to Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu and to seek a commission for him. Claude sailed from Dieppe on 28 April 1628 in command of a supply ship of the Company of One Hundred Associates^W, but the fleet was taken at sea by David Kirke^W, and he was carried a prisoner to England.

In London he changed sides. In 1629 he sailed with the Scottish colonists of Sir William Alexander’s son, and on 6 October 1629, at Port-Royal, he signed an agreement granting himself and his son large estates in what the Scots called Nova Scotia. On 30 November 1629 he was made a baronet of Nova Scotia^W. In London he married a third time, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria; he was by then a widower for the second time.

In May 1630 he sailed for Cap de Sable with his new wife and two English warships, went ashore in a boat and urged his son to accept an English title and English lands. Charles refused, and the Scots attacked the fort without success before Claude withdrew with them to Port-Royal.

Last years

With the Scots of Port-Royal losing faith in him, he asked his son for leave to come back to Cap de Sable. Charles agreed on one condition, that neither his father nor his wife should ever set foot inside the fort, and built them a house some distance from it. His wife chose to stay with him rather than go home. Nicolas Denys^W, who passed that way about 1635, called on the old man, dined with him and his wife, and found their house well furnished.

On 25 January 1636 the Company of New France granted him the post of Pentagouët, ten leagues square, but the men of Charles de Menou d’Aulnay^W held it and he seems never to have taken possession. He died after 1636, it is said at Cap de Sable.

Notes

Sources

His life rests on two compiled histories drawn from the documents of the period: George MacBeath’s biography of him in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1, and the chapter on him and Marie de Salazar in Léopold Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes, tome II (1994), pp. 48-72, which quotes the Paris notarial deeds found by Robert Le Blant. The Dictionary gives his birth about 1570 “in the province of Champagne”; Lanctôt gives Paris, 1570. The Dictionary gives his mother as Marie Condor, Lanctôt as Marie Condot. The marriage contract with Marie Guedon (Lanctôt: Guesdon) is dated 2 September 1615 in the Dictionary; Lanctôt prints 1616 in one place and 1615 in another.

Nicolas and Claude

The inventory of Guyon Turgis’s goods, taken 22 April 1609, names his son as “Nicolas Turgis, sieur de La Tour”, living at Baigneux; a later deed for his daughter Louise begins “Nic”, strikes it out and writes “Claude”. The Dictionary notes that he “often used the patronymic Turgis and sometimes the first name Nicolas”.

The 1604 and 1606 voyages

Lanctôt places him on Dugua de Mons’s voyage of 1604 and Poutrincourt’s of 1606 as very probable, not proven; John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme first names him among the recruits of 1610, as one of “Poutrincourt’s kinsmen and associates from Champagne”. Lanctôt also suggests he went on Pierre de Chauvin’s trading voyage to Tadoussac in 1602.

The loss of Pentagouët

The seizure of the post by the English of Plymouth in 1626 is Lanctôt’s account. N.E.S. Griffiths notes that his whereabouts between 1614 and 1627 are largely conjecture, and that he seems to have been more often in France than in Acadia.

The children

Lanctôt gives the three children with Marie de Salazar as Charles, born at Saint-Just in 1593; Louise, born about 1599, who married Charles Simony, a sea captain, before 1626; and Angélique, born about 1602, who was living at Saint-Just in 1627. In 1626 and 1627 the two daughters claimed from him their shares of their mother’s and grandmother’s estates.