Caring for a Colony: The Story of Jeanne Mance

By Joanna Emery

This is a story of pioneering courage and compassion in the New World. Jeanne dreamed of devoting her life to caring for others. In 1641, she courageously gave up her comfortable middle-class life in France to journey to the French colonies, today’s province of Quebec. In overcoming incredible hardships, massacres, illness, deprivation and seven gruelling trips across the ocean, Jeanne proved to be a remarkable leader. She ended up founding the first hospital in Montreal as well as being a pioneer and founder of the city of Montreal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Nov 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781459726352

Joanna Emery

Joanna Emery is the author of many books for young readers, including Melville Smellville, Brothers of the Falls, and Caring for a Colony. Her work has also appeared in several magazines and anthologies including The Canadian Writer's Guide, 13th Edition and Chicken Soup for the Single Parent's Soul. Joanna is a member of CANSCAIP, IBBY, and the Canadian Children's Book Centre. She lives in the historic town of Dundas, Ontario.

Book preview

Credits

Was It a Miracle?

Jeanne cradled the urn in her lap. She closed her eyes and thought of her old friend, the founder of the St. Sulpice Order, abbé Jean-Jacques Olier. He had died the year before her arrival in Paris and before her accident back in New France. A slip on the ice had left Jeanne’s right arm badly damaged and completely immobile for more than eighteen months.

I ask only for strength in my duties, she prayed softly. Inside the urn was the preserved heart of Monsieur Olier. As her lips moved in silence, a warm sensation tingled throughout her arm. Jeanne could not believe it. Her withered arm looked the same, but the pain was gone! She could move it as well as before the injury.

Was it a miracle? Or was it simply mind over matter? Jeanne certainly believed it was a miracle. One thing is sure: Jeanne Mance had a strong will. Once she made a decision, nothing could stop her. She possessed an intense desire to serve and care for others. Her courage carried her across the ocean seven times. Her devotion made her the founder of Montreal’s first hospital, and her resourcefulness saved the new settlement from near destruction.

Jeanne has rightly been called The Mother of Montreal.

This miniature painted on wood is the closest image we have to an authentic portrait of Jeanne Mance. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sister Paquette, a nun and archivist at Hôtel-Dieu in Montreal, wrote on the back the words true portrait of Miss Mance before coming to Canada, 1638.

Caring...and Curiosity

From an early age, Jeanne Mance was taught to care. Perhaps, as a young girl, she treated wounded birds or fussed over the latest litter of newborn barn kittens. These fragile but determined creatures may have reminded Jeanne of herself. She had never been in perfect health, but that did not stop her.

Like most females in seventeenth-century Europe, Jeanne knew that when she grew up, she would be expected to devote her life to others. She could marry and tend to a husband and children or join a religious order and become a nun. Many nuns taught or actively served the poor. Some were cloistered and remained secluded in convents. Their duty was to pray for the welfare of the world.

Jeanne had something else in common with those barn kittens, an intense curiosity. Outside her comfortable home was a world of adventure. For the kittens, this meant the fields and meadows. For Jeanne, her destiny lay five thousand miles away in a colony in North America called New France.

BIRTHPLACE

Jeanne grew up in Langres, France, a medieval town in the province of Champagne.

Jeanne would have loved the barn kittens, just as this little girl does.

Bravery Required

The name Canada comes from kanata—an aboriginal word for village. In 1608, the year Jeanne Mance turned two, the French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, founded a settlement on the shores of today’s St. Lawrence River and called it New France.

Decades earlier, another explorer named Jacques Cartier had travelled up the St. Lawrence River to the site of present-day Quebec City.

Quebec means where the river narrows, although at the time, the First Peoples called their village Stadacona. They greeted the Europeans warmly, but when Cartier continued on to the village of Hochelaga, the site known today as Montreal, he offended the Native chief, Donnacona. Cartier and his men also unintentionally brought disease. During the first winter, at least fifty Native people died from European illnesses they had never known before, such as smallpox (or purple fever) and flu.

At first, France didn’t have much interest in the new colony. Imagine that you have decided to live on Mars. The comments from friends and family would probably be the same: You’re crazy! It’s dangerous! You’ll get killed there! Most people thought the same about New France. But there were two main reasons why some took the risk. One was for God, and the other was for money.

JACQUES CARTIER

Who discovered Canada? In 1534, Jacques Cartier claimed the land for France. But the discovery of a Norse settlement in today’s Newfoundland proved that other Europeans had arrived at least as early as 992 A.D.

Valuable Furs

The tails side on a

Reviews for Caring for a Colony

[juva_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A clear and easy to read history of one of the most serious disease brought about by the age of exploration. Caused by a vitamin C deficiency, the ravages of scurvy decimated any ship away from land for more than a month or two. As ocean travel became more common, and military maneuvers necessitated longer and longer voyages, British scientists where under great pressure to come up with a cure. Unfortunately, this was before the era of double-blind studies or verifiable results. Many physicians who had never been to sea or even seen a man afflicted by scurvy attempted to offer cures based entirely upon medical theory. Not surprisingly many died as a result of political and ego-driven non-solutions.This is a fascinating history of a deficiency disease that played a huge roll in Western European history.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

adult nonfiction. got to page 89--really enjoyed it, but apparently there's only so much information about scurvy my brain can absorb.

[richardderus · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

DNF @ 18%I'm callin' it. No more. I KNOW THAT ASCORBIC ACID IS THE ANSWER IT'S THE 21ST GODDAMNED CENTURY so tell me how people who *couldn't* have known it was ascorbic acid firgured it out without saying it's ascorbic acid EVERY MOTHERFUCKIN PAGE. Cartier could've saved tens of thousands of lives with the white-cedar bar tea discovery. Boo hiss on him for not doing it.The full star is for the subject of the book causing me to learn that scurvy is on the raise among gastric-bypass surgery recipients. And the Cartier discovery, I'd never heard of that or the Iroquois possessing the secret before now.

[abvr_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Scurvy is the story of how dozens of smart, highly motivated people tried, for hundreds of years, to solve a medical mystery. That solving it took hundreds of years, even though thousands of lives and the viability of Europe’s oceangoing navies hung on a solution, suggests the difficulty of the problem. That the solution is now well-known, and can be summarized in terms simple enough for a child to grasp, suggests the difficulty of recounting the story for modern audiences. After only a chapter or two, the urge to shout “Fresh citrus juice, you fools!” back across the centuries is nearly overwhelming.This is where Scurvy falls short. It narrates the story in novelistic detail, with an excellent sense of pace, and well-rounded portraits of the three figures mentioned in the subtitle. It shows the non-specialist reader everything about the history of scurvy-prevention research . . . except a comprehensive picture of the social and intellectual landscape within which that research took place. Bown’s narrative, good as it is, never brings alive a world where nobody knew which facts about scurvy and its mitigation were crucial, and which were irrelevant “noise.” It never sketches the conceptual framework – ideas about health, disease, medicine, nutrition, and cooking – into which 17th- and 18th-century researchers attempted to fit those facts. Instead, present-day knowledge (the solution was so simple!) subtly colors Bown’s analysis of their work.His heroes’ struggles to find an answer thus, almost inevitably, come across as hopelessly clumsy and maddeningly pig-headed. They cling to “solutions” that we know to be useless, and, after stumbling on clues that we know to be vital, toss them aside and move blindly on. Bown never scolds them outright for these “failings,” but his tone of frustration and disapproval is palpable. Scurvy never breaks free of its present-day viewpoint, or explores the problem as it would have been seen by those who tried so hard, for so long, to solve it. Yet, understanding the past requires that we do just that.

[satyridae · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This would have been a really good magazine article.

[beccabgood1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I found this book fascinating, even though I'm not particularly interested in any of the subjects it might be listed under. First off, I had no idea how large a role scurvy played in the world before it could be prevented. The suffering of all those on board, including officers, was unbelievable, and the death toll staggering. This of course meant that ships had to set off with huge crews, just so there were enough staggering survivors to do the necessary work by the end of the voyage. The impact on the economy and other elements of society is hard to overstate - long ocean voyages were just not practical without some huge payoff.The discussion of how the problem was solved was less compelling, for me. Even here, however, we see clearly how human foibles and fashions influence what we might think of as basic science. The efficacy of lemon juice was discovered, but discounted because the discoverer insisted on creating a lemon syrup by heating the juice, thereby destroying the vitamin C. Perhaps it was my frustration with this setback which made the remaining discussion less satisfying to me.All in all, however, an amazing book. I highly recommend it.

[mahallett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

very interesting. so much i didn't know. as another reviewer noted, a little drawn out.

[helcura_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought I knew about scurvy - it was a disease of sailors caused by vitamin C deficiency. This book showed me how ignorant I was. I had no understanding of how severe scurvy could be, how widespread it was, that it still exists on a large scale. Bown's book is particularly enlightening about the effects of politics and economics on medical treatment and research in Britain. If I hadn't already appreciated the scientific method, I would now. The failure to find an effective treatment for scurvy was directly due to the lack of an experimental outlook. There were vast quantities of data available, but it was rarely recorded and not analyzed. The author's writing style is engaging and the topic fascinating. The book is tightly focused, with no digressions, addressing scurvy in the exclusive context of the British navy. Worth owning.

[chriswise_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating look at the impact of dealing with and then solving the problem of scurvy. Very worthy addition to libraries of O'Brian fans.