begun to share with the English in the fisheries which were begun upon the banks of Newfoundland immediately after Cabot's voyage, and have been kept up ever since. As early as 1506 fishermen from Brittany discovered and named the island of Cape Breton, and began making rude charts of the gulf of St. Lawrence. For a century the Newfoundland fisheries were almost the only link between the North American coast and Europe. In 1524 Francis I. sent the Florentine navigator Verrazzano on a voyage of discovery. Verrazzano entered New York harbour and Narragansett bay, and sailed northward along the coast as far as the 50th parallel. Ten years later came Jacques Cartier, and explored and named the great river St. Lawrence and the site of Montreal. In 1540-43 an unsuccessful attempt was made by the Sieur de Roberval, aided by Cartier, to establish a French colony in Canada. Then the French became so much occupied with their wars of religion that they gave little thought to America for the next half-century. During this period, however, there was one attempt at colonization which grew directly out of the wars of religion. The illustrious Protestant leader Coligny conceived the plan of founding a Huguenot state in America, and in 1562-64 such a settlement was begun in Florida, at Fort Caroline, on the St. John's River, under the lead of Jean Ribaut and René de Laudonnière; but in the autumn of the latter year it was wiped out in blood by the ferocious Pedro Menendez. That Spanish captain landed in Florida and laid the foundations of St. Augustine, the oldest town in the United States. He then attacked the French colony, took it by surprise, and butchered everybody, men, women, and children, some seven hundred in all; a very few escaped to the woods, and after various adventures made their way back to France. The government of Charles IX. was so subservient to Spain that it did not resent this atrocious act, although it was perpetrated in time of peace. But a private gentleman, named Dominique de Gourgues, who does not seem to have been a Huguenot, took it upon himself to avenge his slaughtered countrymen. Having fitted out a secret expedition at his own expense and with the aid of a few friends, he sailed for Florida, surprised

the Spaniards at Fort Caroline, slew them every one, and returned to France.

Champlain. It was not until the religious wars had been brought to an end by Henry IV. that the French succeeded in planting a colony in America. They now began to be interested in the northwestern fur trade as well as in the Newfoundland fisheries; and in 1603 the Sieur de Monts obtained permission to colonize a vast tract of land extending from New York harbour to Cape Breton, and known as Acadie, a name which gradually became restricted to the northeastern part of this region. A monopoly of the fur trade within these limits was granted by the king to a company of which De Monts was the head. The enterprise, so far as De Monts was concerned, was a failure; but one of his companions, Poutrincourt, succeeded in 1607 in establishing the first permanent French settlement in America at Port Royal in Nova Scotia. Another of the party, Samuel de Champlain, made a settlement at Quebec in the following year, and became the founder of Canada. Champlain was one of the most remarkable Frenchmen of his day, a beautiful character, devout and high-minded, brave and tender. Like Columbus and Magellan, like Baker and Livingstone in our own time, he had the scientific temperament. He was an excellent naturalist, and he has left the best descriptions we have of the Indians as they appeared before they had been affected by contact with white men. Champlain explored our northeast coast very minutely, and gave to many places the names by which they are still known; as, for example, Mount Desert, which has kept its traditional French pronunciation, with the accent on the final syllable. He was the first white man to sail on the beautiful lake which now bears his name, and he pushed his explorations so far into the interior as to discover lakes Ontario and Huron. He was made the first viceroy of Canada, and held that position until his death in 1635, by which time the new colony had come to be large and flourishing. In 1611 Jesuit missionaries came over to convert the Indians, and laboured to that end with wonderful zeal and success. Missions were established as far inland as the Huron country, and the good priests often dis

tinguished themselves as brave and intelligent explorers. The fur trade began to assume large dimensions, and French rovers formed alliances with the Indian tribes in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes. The French usually got on well with the Indians; they knew how to treat them so as to secure their friendship; they intermarried with them, and adopted many of their ways.

The North American Indians. Nevertheless in one quarter the French offended the Indians, and raised up for themselves a powerful enemy who had much to do with their failure to secure a permanent foothold in America. In the sixteenth century the territory bounded by the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Gulf of Mexico, seems to have been occupied by five varieties or races of Indians. These were, 1. in the northwest, beyond the Mississippi river, the Dakotahs; 2. in the southwest, the Natchez; 3. in the south, the Mobilians, comprising the Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, etc.; 4. in the north, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic coast, the Algonquins; 5. in the centre of the Atlantic region, the Iroquois. Of these the Algonquins and Iroquois played by far the most important part in the development of American history. The Algonquins comprised such tribes as the Pequots, Mohegans, Narragansetts, and Wampanoags in New England; the Delawares, to the south of the Susquehanna; the Shawnees of the Ohio, the Miamis, Pottawatomies, Ojibwas, and Ottawas. Of the Iroquois the most famous tribes were the so-called Five Nations, dwelling in central New York; to the south of them were the Susquehannocks; the Eries lived on the southern shore of the lake which bears their name, and the northern shore was occupied by a tribe known as the Neutral Nation. To the north of these came the Hurons. One Iroquois tribe the Tuscaroras

lay quite apart from the rest, in North Carolina; but in 1715 this tribe migrated to New York, and joined the famous Iroquois league, which was henceforth known as the Six Nations.

Between the Algonquins and the Iroquois were many important differences. They differed in their speech, in their modes of building their wigwams and fortifying their villages, and in their

knowledge of agriculture. The Iroquois were superior to the Algonquins and looked down upon them with immeasurable contempt. Of all the Iroquois the bravest in war and most formidable in numbers were the Five Nations, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. For ferocious cruelty they have scarcely been equalled by any other race of men known to history. Their confederated strength made them more than a match for all their rivals, and during the seventeenth century they became the terror of the whole country, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from Canada to North Carolina. In 1649 they overwhelmed and nearly destroyed their kindred the Hurons, putting the Jesuit missionaries to death with frightful tortures; then they exterminated the Neutral Nation. In 1655 they massacred most of the Eries, and incorporated the rest among their own numbers; and in 1672, after a terrible war of twenty years, they effected the ruin of the Susquehannocks. While they were doing these things, they were also carrying the firebrand and tomahawk among the Algonquins in every direction. They drove the Ottawas westward into Michigan, laid waste the country of the Illinois, and reduced the Shawnees and Delawares to the condition of vassals. There is no telling how far they might have carried this career of conquest if the white man had not appeared upon the scene.

It was these formidable Iroquois whom the French at the very outset made their enemies. It was natural that Champlain should court the friendship of the Algonquin tribes on the St. Lawrence. He undertook to defend them against their hereditary foes, and accordingly in 1609 he attacked the Mohawks near Ticonderoga and won an easy victory over savages who had never before seen a white man or heard the report of a musket. But the victory was a fatal one for the French. From that time forth the Iroquois hated them with implacable hatred, and when the English came, these powerful savages entered into alliance with them. Even alone the Iroquois were capable of doing enormous damage to the Canadian settlements. In 1689 they even attacked Montreal, and roasted and devoured their prisoners in full sight of the terror

stricken town. This hostility of the Iroquois kept the French away from the Hudson river until it was too late for them to contend successfully for the mastery of New York. But for this circumstance the French might have succeeded in possessing New York, and thus separating the New England colonies from those in the south.

$ 3. THE ENGLISH IN VIRGINIA.

Sir Walter Raleigh. As John Cabot had discovered the North American continent for the English, they claimed it as their property; but many years elapsed before they came to take possession. From the reign of Henry VII. to that of Elizabeth their attention was absorbed by affairs at home. During Elizabeth's reign the great struggle between Catholic and Protestant assumed the form of an international contest, in which the gigantic power of Spain was pitted against England and the Netherlands, while France was divided within itself. In 1588 the defeat of the Invincible Armada marked the overthrow of Spanish supremacy and the triumph of Protestantism. England had prepared the way for this glorious victory by training up such a set of naval captains as has never been surpassed in any age or country. The most famous of these were Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Thomas Cavendish, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Lord Howard of Effingham, and Sir Walter Raleigh. They began as buccaneers and raiders upon the Spanish possessions in all parts of the globe; they ended as colonizers; while from first to last they were explorers. Drake and Cavendish carried the British flag into the Pacific, visited the coast of California, and circumnavigated the earth. Frobisher, in quest of a northwestern passage to India, entered the Arctic Ocean and explored a part of it. Hawkins to our shame and sorrow in later days-began the practice of kidnapping negroes on the Guinea coast and selling them as slaves. At length Gilbert and his half-brother Raleigh attempted to found colonies in America. Gilbert was wrecked and perished in the sea. Raleigh obtained from the queen a grant of the vast region included between the 34th and 45th parallels of latitude, which the maiden