Laut, Pathfinders of the West. Semple, 25-31. Neither gold mines nor the Northwest Passage rewarded the zeal of the French explorers. The Indians told of veins of pure copper cropping to the surface near Lake Superior, but mines could not be profitably worked for lack of labor. The natives were good hunters, however, and fortunes might be made in the fur trade. All the energies of the French government were bent toward the development of this promising traffic. Trading posts were established wherever a river or an Indian trail gave access to the hunting grounds. Forts were built at strategic points and missions rose beside them. The Indian tribes were held in check by a diplomatic alternation of bullets and the gospel. The characteristic types in these forest settlements were the soldier, the fur trader, and the priest. The bateaux of the voyageurs were ever seeking new channels of trade. Making their way up the rivers that flow into the Mississippi, they succeeded in monopolizing the traffic in peltries over the vast forested valley lying between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains. It was a French trader, La Verendrye, who penetrated the wilderness (1731) to the upper Missouri and caught the first glimpse of the western range, the peaks of the Big Horn Mountains, full seventy-five years before the exploring expedition of Lewis and Clark. The French settlements were determined by considerations of water transportation. Quebec and Montreal gave control of the St. Lawrence; Frontenac, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac and St. Marie guarded the entrances to the Great Lakes; St. Xavier watched beside the first and best trade route to the Mississippi. Fort Duquesne dominated the upper Ohio; Vincennes, the Wabash ; Fort Crevecoeur, the Illinois. Traffic on the Mississippi was equally well protected by a series of fortified posts. Mobile (1701) and New Orleans (1718) were founded on the Gulf coast in defiance of Spanish preoccupation. Thus was outlined a noble empire quite worthy of the ambition of Louis XIV. Infinite courage, devotion, selfsacrifice went into the effort to establish the claim of France to this portion of the New World, but the enterprise ended Docs. Col. in failure and loss. The French domain was forfeited because the French colonies had no lasting industrial basis. French settlements did not strike root because neither soldier, priest, nor voyageur had a life interest in the country. When the fur-bearing animals were killed off and the Indian tribes retreated into the interior, the mission trading post dwindled into insignificance. Only along the St. Lawrence, where agricultural colonies were planted, did the French secure a permanent hold upon the region opened up by their explorers. To Sir John Hawkins, who visited Port Royal in 1565 and found the colonists starving in the midst of plenty, the difficulty was evident. 'Notwithstanding the Hakluyt's great want that the Frenchmen had, the ground doth yield Voyages, victuals sufficient, if they would have taken pains to get the same; but they being soldiers, desired to live by the sweat of other men's brows." Great Britain. 66 III, 396. X, 56. Old Virginia and Her - England's right to a share in North Fiske, America rested upon the exploring expeditions sent out by Henry VII. John and Sebastian Cabot (1497-1498) skirted the coast from Cape Breton to Cape Hatteras and laid claim to the territory in the name of the niggardly monarch who financed the expedition. The opening was little prized at the time and not immediately followed up. The region. seemed unpromising. No gold mines were discovered, and nature was far less kind than in the tropic islands farther south. There was no lack of adventurous mariners in sixteenth century England, but the nation's energies were absorbed in a life and death struggle with Spain. English sea captains found more honor and profit in sacking the rich towns of the Spanish Main and pillaging the treasure ships on their homeward voyages, than in exploration along the bleak Atlantic coast. Yet credit for the first important discoveries in the north Pacific belongs to England. Sir Francis Drake (1577-1580) sailed through the Straits of Magellan and up the west coast of South America, where he plundered the Spanish galleons on their way home from Peru. Not wishing to risk his booty farther in Spanish First Series, waters, he sailed on up the coast of the northern continent 196–229. Hakluyt's Payne, voyages of Elizabethan Osgood, I, Pt. I, Ch. I. Winsor, Narr. and to the forty-third parallel and then across the Pacific and Indian oceans, around the Cape of Good Hope, and so on home to Plymouth harbor. Drake was the first navigator to "put a girdle around the earth," but he had no thought of colonies. The first attempt to settle the British possessions in America was made by the brave and knightly Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Obtaining the queen's commission he sailed directly across the Atlantic and landed somewhere on Newfoundland in June, 1583. The season was delightful and raised false hopes of success, but winter brought cold and tempests such as these Englishmen had never experienced, and the enterprise was abandoned. On the homeward voyage Gilbert's ship, the Squirrel, went down with all on board. His younger half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, succeeded to his commission and his task. Ralegh was the son of an English sea captain. While still a student at Oxford he conned with Hakluyt, compiler of "The Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation," the perplexing maps of the New World and read all the narratives of the explorers then available. Student though he was and courtier, he was a man of action as well. Consumed by the passionate desire to secure for England her due share in the wealth of the New World, he staked fame and fortune, life itself, on the undertaking. Three separate expeditions this great patriot sent out at his own charge. Forty thousand pounds was spent in the endeavor to plant an English colony at Roanoke Island (1585-1589), but a series of misfortunes thwarted the enterprise. On the accession of James I, Ralegh was thrown into the Tower, where he was finally beheaded. His undaunted soul never lost faith in the ultimate realization of his dream. Of Virginia, the land his devoted service had won for England, he said, "I shall yet live to see it an English nation." Though Ralegh's colonies failed and his hope of discovering an El Dorado on the Orinoco came to naught, the explorations undertaken at his expense reënforced England's claim to the territory south of Cape Hatteras and indicated the most favorable location for future endeavor. The physical conditions of the Atlantic coast were highly favorable to colonization from England. The British possessions lay directly across the sea from Plymouth and the Cinque ports. Throughout the sixteenth century English sea captains had followed the Spanish route and steered south to the Canaries, then due west to the Antilles, and thence north to Cape Fear. Ralegh's costly expeditions had made this circuitous voyage. In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, one of Ralegh's associates, ventured to sail straight across the Atlantic and came, happily, upon Massachusetts Bay. This adventure proved that England lay one thousand miles nearer to her American provinces than did Spain to hers. Thereafter the direct route was usually followed. The strip Semple, of coast open to British enterprise was, moreover, peculiarly Ch. II. accessible from the sea. A fine series of rivers -the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the James- take their rise in the Appalachian highlands and, being navigable for small boats well-nigh to their sources, proved as serviceable to explorers and pioneers as so many macadamized roads. Fiske, and Her Neighbors, I, Ch. III. The first successful English settlement, Jamestown, was made on a tributary of the wonderful bay that Ralegh had Old Virginia divined to be an open highway to the wealth of Virginia. The feasibility of an agricultural settlement once demonstrated, others quickly followed. Plymouth colony was planted in 1620, Salem in 1628, Boston in the year following. From 1630 to 1640 no year passed but saw some shipload of colonists leave Bristol or Plymouth or London bound for America. No harbor or inlet or river in his Majesty's plantations but was explored by these brave home seekers. By 1640 there were twenty-one thousand settlers in New England alone and perhaps half as many more in Virginia. During the next twenty years, the Puritans stayed at home and the Royalists were fain to find a refuge in Virginia. The restored Stuarts forced the migration of another crop of traitors and malcontents. Oglethorpe's colony in Georgia (1753) attracted poor debtors and other unfortunates from Europe as well as from the British Isles. Semple, Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies, I, Ch. III, IV. Scattered along the coast from Pemaquid to Savannah, rarely venturing inland beyond reach of navigable water, divided from the interior of the continent by a discouraging mountain barrier, settlers in the English provinces were forced to make the most of the land within their reach. Geographic conditions favored the formation of compact communities. The lands available for settlement were in a narrow strip of territory rising from the sea to the foothills of the Appalachian range. The northernmost third, since it is largely mountainous, offered the least attraction to colonists. Southward the lowlands broaden to a tract of three hundred miles width. Geologically this lowland is divided between coastal plain and Piedmont plateau. The coastal plain is the ancient sea beach lifted a few feet above the level of the tide. To the north it is represented by detached areas Cape Cod, Nantucket, Marthas Vineyard, Long Island, New Jersey, and Delaware. To the south it becomes the dominant physical feature. Pine barrens cover its undulating levels. In the river bottoms the original sand and gravel are covered with alluvial deposit. Near the sea the land oozes away into swamp and morass, heavily wooded with cypress and live oak. Along the Jersey and Carolina coasts, bayous and open sounds divide the mainland from a chain of shifting sand dunes that form the outer boundary. The lands of the coastal plain throughout were easily reached and cleared. The Piedmont plateau from Maine to Georgia is rough hill country, heavily forested before the advent of the white man with pine, hemlock, and hard woods. The soil is glacial drift, thinly coated with vegetable mold. The "fall line" that divides the coastal plain from the Piedmont indicates the drop from the foothills to sea level and marks the head of navigable water. Settlers did not penetrate this "back country" till the supply of fertile lowlands was exhausted. Holland. Of the maritime countries of Europe, the Dutch were by no means the least enterprising, but their energies were largely absorbed in developing their trade interests in the Orient. The commercial opportunities of |