Ebook The Plains of Abraham, 1759

It was from this Martin that the famous battlefield derived its name. Sir James M. Lemoine, in his Picturesque Quebec, states that from 1621 to 1700, only one individual in Quebec appears, from references to the Parish Register, to have borne the name of Abraham. That person was Abraham Martin, a man of so much distinction in the infant colony that both in the Journal of the Jesuits and in the Parish Register of Quebec, he was frequently designated only by the name Maitre Abraham. The earliest mention of Martin's name occurs in the very first entry of the Parish Register of Quebec, on the 24th October, 1621, when his son Eustache, who died shortly afterwards, was baptized by Father Denis, a Franciscan friar. Champlain, the distinguished founder of Quebec, and father of New France, was god-father to one of Abraham's daughters, Helene, and the then owner of the Plains is described in a legal document, dated 15th August, 1646, and preserved in the archives of the Archbishop's Palace here, as (the King's) pilot Of the St. Lawrence; an appointment, says lieut.-col. Beatson, of the Royal Engineers, in a work on the Plains, published at Gibraltar, in 1858 — which probably con ferred on its possessor considerable Official rank, for we find that Jacques Cartier, the enterprising discoverer and explorer of the St. Lawrence, when about to proceed in 1540, on his third voyage to Canada, was appointed by Francis I, captain-generaland master pilot of the expedition, which consisted of four vessels. Such, in brief, is the history of the ownership of the Plains of Abraham, from the earliest days of the colony up to the present time. Within the last quarter of a century there have been proposals to beautify the place and transform it into a park, but these have all failed in consequence of the discovery that the land reverts to the Nuns in May, 1901.