Mathieu Da Costa

Mathieu Da Costa, also recorded as Mateus Da Costa, Mathieu de Coste and Matheus de Cost, is regarded by historians as the first Black person known to have visited what is now Canada. The records of his life are sparse and written in several languages, and his dates and places of birth and death are unknown. Because so little evidence survives, some historians have even questioned how much of his story can be confirmed.

What the documents show is that Da Costa was a free African man who worked as an interpreter for French and Dutch traders and explorers in the early seventeenth century. Interpreters of this kind were valuable on the Atlantic coast of North America, where Europeans and Indigenous peoples such as the Mi'kmaq were trading, and where understanding the languages of both sides was essential to doing business.

In February 1607 he was in Amsterdam. Apparently the Dutch had seized the ships of the French merchant and explorer Pierre Dugua de Mons near Tadoussac, on the St Lawrence, in a trade dispute, and had taken Da Costa as well, a sign of how highly his skills were valued. French records show him working for the leaders of Port Royal in Acadia in 1608.

In May 1608 Da Costa signed a service contract in Amsterdam with Nicolas de Bauquemare, a merchant of Rouen, agreeing that in 1609 he would sail with or on behalf of Dugua de Mons as an interpreter on voyages to Canada, Acadia and elsewhere. It is widely assumed that he accompanied Dugua de Mons and Samuel de Champlain on at least one of their voyages, though the documents do not prove it.

Da Costa's name appears in a series of lawsuits between de Mons and de Bauquemare beginning in 1609, and his contract was cancelled on 15 June 1609. After that his trail goes cold. In 2009 a bill was tabled in the Canadian Parliament to make the first Monday in February Mathieu Da Costa Day, but it did not pass. His name is nevertheless used to honour Black Canadian history, and he is remembered as the first recorded Black person in Canada.