This story was first published on May 16, 1992, in the Montreal Gazette.
Happy birthday, Montreal. Too bad we really don’t know just when your birthday is.
All over Montreal this weekend, the celebrations are under way. They mark that epic day 350 years ago when Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, and his 50-odd companions founded Montreal.
But precisely which day was it? Did it all happen on May 17, 1642, or May 18? No one seems to know for sure.
Robert Rumilly’s monumental five-volume Histoire de Montreal confidently states the 17th. Stephen Leacock, a respected McGill economist and chronicler of this city as well as a humorist, says Maisonneuve’s party, coming upstream from Quebec City, sighted the island on the morning of the 17th; they then came ashore, celebrated mass and set about establishing themselves – all on that same day.
Yet a plaque on the obelisk in Place d’Youville near Place Royale, commemorating the spot where the settlers landed, proclaims May 18. So does a rival camp of historians, including Francois Dollier de Casson. Dollier’s assertion in particular cannot be idly dismissed. He was a Sulpician priest who first came to Ville Marie (as Montreal then was called) in 1666 and wrote his history of the settlement when memories of its heroic early days would still have been green.
But perhaps not green enough, for what are we to make of the Jesuit Relations?
There were Jesuits in New France as early as 1611. Intermittently until 1632 and then annually for another 40 years, they sent accounts of their missionary work to their headquarters in Paris. From the Relations of 1642, we learn that on May 17 “monsieur the governor put the Sieur de Maisonneuve in possession of this island … in order to start the first buildings there. Father Vimont sang the Veni Creator, said holy mass and exposed the holy sacrament in order to obtain from heaven a happy commencement of this work.” An eye-witness account – for this one in fact was written by Rev. Barthelemy Vimont himself – is hard to dispute.
Some historians avoid the dispute between the two dates by opting for both. Leslie Roberts insouciantly writes that the arrival of the settlers “took place on May 17 and 18.” Does he mean that their boats straggled in over two days? Or that they all arrived together a few minutes before and after midnight? Or that the party simply arrived one day and came ashore the next? Roberts doesn’t say.
A more confident Kathleen Jenkins asserts the party reached the island on the 17th but waited until next morning to came ashore at Place Royale and celebrate that first mass. William Henry Atherton likes this version, too, so much so that he actually acknowledges Rev. Vimont’s account but in effect dismisses it – on grounds that are not at all clear.
At Montreal’s stunning new museum of archeology, which opens tomorrow at Pointe a Calliere, they prefer not to get bogged down in the squabble. During the lively multimedia show that greets visitors to the museum, a disembodied but decidedly cheerful voice says, “It was the 17th … or the 18th. Whatever.”
Exactly. In a way, it doesn’t much matter which date is really our birthday. The important thing is that Montreal was founded and that it thrives to this day. Happy birthday, indeed.