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Mar 26,2006 - Apr 2,2006 |
21 - When Italians Raised Their Heads
Immigrants among early settlers in Quebec when they fought British in 1800s
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-15
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Angelo Principe
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The fact that in the mid-19th century Montreal was the Canadian city with the highest number of Italians was well known to the Kingdom of Sardinia, so that a Consulate General was opened there. After the Unification, in 1861, it became the Consulate General of the Kingdom of Italy.
Italians had come in large numbers to Nouvelle France, as artists, traders and soldiers for the French Crown, since the 17th century. However, military immigration had an impulse in the early 19th century, when the British Crown stationed two regiments, Watteville and Meuron, along the St. Lawrence, with the purpose of defending Lower Canada (today's Quebec) from the expansionist intentions of the recently born United States. Those two regiments were Swiss and formed with mercenaries. They included over 600 young Italians recruited in the territories occupied by Napoleon. They had chosen to fight as soldiers of fortune over enlisting with the French. They were Piedmontese, Lombards, Neapolitans and Sicilians; their names have been preserved through the payrolls still kept at the War Office in London.
Hostilities between Great Britain and United States ceased in 1815, and the following year those two regiments were dismissed. A hundred mercenaries of German origin went and fought in Manitoba; the Italians stayed in Quebec where they got some land and became colonists. Many of them Frenchified or Anglicized their names: e.g. Burchisi became Burchési, Verdi became Verdy, Paillazzo became Pallatio. "Is this enough for you to realize," Filippo Salvatore, poet and author, teacher of Italian Literature at Concordia University, asks me, "that we are not late arrivals here? Far from being des Italiens qui vivent parmi nous, we are full-blown Canadians, proud of our Italian origins."
Browsing through history books we stumbled upon the reproduction of an article from the Gazette. It includes a curious bit of news: "Montreal," the title reads, "got its name from an Italian map." The author of the article, David Johnston, says that when Jacques Cartier arrived on the place where Montreal would be built, he wrote in his journal: "We call this mountain Mont Royal." The year was 1535. Some 20 years later, in 1556, Italian cartographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio was asked to draw a map of the area; while following Cartier's journal, he called the place Monte Real. Incredibly, this Italian name was adopted in 1575 by historian François de Belleforest, who was used as a source by Samuel de Champlain when he made his famous 1612 map. He made only a slight change, turning Monte Real in Montreal.
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