Québec is both the starting point and the constraint in Charles Duquet’s transformation from fur trader to timber entrepreneur. Its surrounding forests supply the hardwoods he sends into Atlantic markets, but the city’s distance from commercial centers and vulnerability to English attack expose the limits of building a durable fortune from New France alone. Across these episodes, Québec is less a fixed urban portrait than a position in a contested network of forests, ships, markets, and imperial ambitions.

Commercial base and timber ambitions

After the fur trade’s fluctuations convinced Duquet that animal resources and markets could fail unpredictably, he began to see the forest as a more lasting source of wealth. He regarded New France’s vast woods as capable of supplying timber for ships, houses, and fuel, and planned to use profits from furs to prepare for a move into timber. When he outlined the plan to the Trépagny brothers, they offered no clear enthusiasm, leaving the prospect of partnership uncertain.

The city’s business potential was tied to its forests, but turning that potential into sustained trade required more than access to trees. Duquet later converted low-quality hardwood and other wood waste into firewood, sending twenty wagonloads each autumn to the Kébec market. When ships were available, he also sent cargoes toward Paris, hoping to secure valuable return goods such as tea, coffee, textiles, spices, or china. The returns were not guaranteed, however, and he wanted ships of his own rather than continued reliance on Piet Roos’s vessels. Because efforts to establish a shipyard in New France had stalled, Duquet began to contemplate founding one himself.

Distance, partnership, and overseas markets

Boston became an alternative base in part because it was closer to the colonies’ shipping and commercial networks. At meetings there, Benton Dred-Peacock urged Duquet to move his operations south, arguing that Massachusetts Bay was busy with shipping and that the southern colonies offered more hardwood, open land, and easier transport. Maine’s white pine, particularly valuable for ship masts, could be sold to markets in Scotland, England, Spain, and Portugal. Dred-Peacock’s case was not simply for leaving Québec: it was that timber could be more easily gathered, shipped, and financed from Boston.

Duquet hesitated. He had valuable connections in New France and disliked speaking English, even as he recognized the practical advantages of Boston. He ultimately entered the timber trade with Dred-Peacock, while ships associated with Duquet, Piet Roos, and Outger Verdwijnen sailed under British flags between Portsmouth, Boston, and the Clyde shipyards. The arrangement enriched the partners, but its secrecy and expense also made the business politically and commercially precarious. Québec was the point from which Duquet’s timber enterprise expanded, yet the more international it became, the more conspicuous the city’s distance from the world’s centers of finance appeared.

War and the security of the forests

Québec’s commercial future was entangled with imperial conflict. In discussion of England’s plans to attack, Louis warned that if English forces took Québec, they would take Duquet’s woodlands as well. Bernard answered that New France had a strong militia, capable regional troops, and assistance from Indigenous allies; he also contrasted the region’s woodland fighting methods with European-style warfare. The exchange places the forests at the center of the city’s strategic importance: control of Québec meant control not only of a settlement but also of valuable timberland.

The conversation also reveals how uncertain the political loyalties around Québec had become. A Boston judge regarded Bernard as too sympathetic to French Canada and warned that his views could sound treasonous in Boston. The city thus stands between rival colonial powers and competing expectations of allegiance. The same geography that made its timber commercially valuable made the land vulnerable to seizure.

A name and a contested forest economy

Québec’s importance extends beyond Duquet’s own commercial calculations. The account of timber activity in New Zealand later shows the consequences of the kind of extractive enterprise he helped envision: overseas logging stations, trading posts, warehouses, sawmills, and shipyards drew timber into distant markets, while cutting and burning transformed the forests at the source. That episode does not describe Québec itself, but it sharpens the larger contrast between timber as a seemingly permanent commodity and the ecological damage left by the pursuit of supply.

The narrative also registers the city under competing names. In one passage, New France is increasingly called Canada, traced there to the old Iroquois word kanata; elsewhere, Québec is rendered as Kébec or Kweebeck. Such variations accompany the shifting political and commercial meanings attached to the place. Québec is at once Duquet’s base, a route into the forests, a location whose timber can be claimed by an advancing empire, and a point that an expanding business may outgrow. Its significance lies in that tension between local attachment and the demands of a trade reaching across the Atlantic.