TRANSLATION
"Behind our house there is a pond,
Fal lal de ra.
There came three ducks to swim thereon;
All along the river clear,
Lightly my shepherdess dear,
Lightly, fal de ra."
Cartier opened the way as far as Hochelaga, now the site of Montreal, which was soon to become the very centre of all commerce with the Wilderness. Attempts were made by the French to found settlements down the coast, and one, on St. John's River, in Florida, seemed to have some life in it till the Spaniards entrenched themselves at St. Augustine, and from there crushed the French fort and the French power in that quarter for all time. This St. Augustine of the Spaniards was the first permanent settlement of Europeans within the limits of the United States (1565), antedating by forty years Oñate's founding of his first village at San Juan, New Mexico, now marked, as previously mentioned, by the little town of Chamita.
About the time that Oñate was organising New Mexico there came over to the north-east coast one Sieur de Monts, who established Port Royal for France in a region named Acadia, lying between the Lower St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, a title later restricted to the portion now called Nova Scotia, and immortalised in Longfellow's poem, Evangeline. But it was not till the illustrious Champlain, afterwards so justly famous, founded Quebec, in 1608, that France really closed her grip on the north-eastern part of the continent; a grip that was later to be broken for ever by the British. Having permanently settled Quebec, Champlain, with his voyageurs, extended his travels westward by watercourses and lakes as far as the Straits of Mackinaw, founding many trading-posts and missions, and marking the first practicable highway to the Wilderness. He was efficiently supported in his efforts by monks of the Jesuit and Franciscan orders, brethren of those who were labouring diligently in the south-west, and who, though their energetic and sincere labours to Christianise the natives amounted to no more than a puff-ball tossed against the side of a battleship, performed a great and indispensable work in this breaking of the Wilderness.