The early colonists seem to have had a remarkable preference for islands; accordingly the company of De Monts selected an island near the mouth of the river St. Croix, in New Brunswick; here they passed a winter of intense suffering, and in the spring removed to a place in the Bay of Fundy, where was formed the first permanent settlement of the French in America, three years before a cabin had been erected in Canada. The settlement was called Port Royal, and the whole country, including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the neighbouring islands, received the name of Acadia.
De Monts was superseded by Pourtrincourt, one of his company. The undertaking now assumed a religious character. The pope gave his benediction to all who went thither to evangelise the heathen; Marie de Medici contributed money, and the Marchioness de Guercheville gave her support. Jesuits were sent over, and the order itself enriched by imposts on the fishery and fur trade.
Jesuit priests commenced the conversion of the natives and the exploration of the country at the same time. The Indians of the Canadian territory, affected by the confiding humanity of the French priests, listened reverently to their teachings of salvation. A French colony within the United States was soon established, under the safeguard of religion. “The conversion of the heathen,” says Bancroft, “was the motive of the settlement; the natives venerated the Jesuit Biart as a messenger from heaven, and beneath the summer sky, round a cross in the centre of the hamlet, matins and vespers were regularly chanted. France and the Roman religion had appropriated the soil of Maine.”
In 1608, the company of merchants of Dieppe and St. Malo, who had been instrumental in depriving De Monts of his monopoly, founded Quebec, the whole undertaking, nevertheless, originating with Samuel Champlain, in concert with De Monts. Brick cottages were built, a few fields cleared, a few gardens laid out; the city of Quebec was begun. The following year, Champlain, attended by his two Europeans, joined an expedition of Indians against the Iroquois, and advanced as far into the interior as the lake which bears his name.
Seven years later, he once more advanced against his old enemies, the Iroquois. Wounded and alone, he spent a winter with the Hurons, and thus “a knight-errant in the forest, he carried his language, religion, and influence even to the hamlets of Algonquins near Lake Nipissing.”
The presence of Jesuits and Calvinists led to contentions; religious animosity and commercial jealousy checked for a time the progress of the colony; nevertheless, the wisdom and good conduct of Champlain established successfully the dominion of the French on the banks of the St. Lawrence. He lies buried in the land which he colonised.
About the same time that the French adventurer Champlain advanced inland to the lake which since then has borne his name, another discoverer, the celebrated Henry Hudson, was penetrating in the same direction from an opposite point. The great field for commercial enterprise which had been opened by traffic with the East, and the immense profits thence accruing, still kept alive the hope of a nearer passage than that by the Cape of Good Hope. Almost every maritime power of Europe had sent out ships in the vain hope of discovery, and so persevering was the quest, that no sooner was one failure recorded, than another expedition set forth.
It was on the failure of Denmark in this respect that a company of London merchants contributed a large sum of money for another attempt, under the command of Henry Hudson. Sailing to the north, with his only son as his companion, he deliberated, while coasting Greenland, as to whether he should circumnavigate that country or attempt to cross the pole; he discovered Spitzbergen, however, and was then compelled to return, from the immense icebergs which he encountered. The next year found him again amid the horrors of the polar seas, cherishing the vain hope of advancing across the pole into the warm, genial regions of southern Asia.
These two unsuccessful expeditions, though they could not daunt the courage of this bold navigator, quite discouraged the rich London merchants, and Hudson, who seems to have had a passion for the northern seas, hastened to Holland and offered his services to the Dutch East India Company, to explore for them this much-desired passage. Hudson had applied in the right quarter; the Dutch at that time took rank as one of the most maritime and commercial nations of Europe. Commerce was the breath of their lives, maritime adventure their occupation. The device on the first Dutch coin was a ship labouring on a stormy sea, without oar or sails. Speaking of the Republic of the United Netherlands, the historian Bancroft says, “the rendezvous of its martyrs had been the sea; the musters of its patriot emigrants had been on shipboard; they had hunted their enemy, as the whale-ships pursue their game, in every corner of the ocean.” Holland is but a peninsula, intersected by navigable rivers, protruding itself into the sea. And Zealand is composed of islands. Its inhabitants were nearly all fishermen; both provinces were by nature a nursery of sailors; the principles of navigation were imbibed from infancy; every house was a school for mariners. They became affluent through commerce. They were the connecting links between hemispheres. Their enterprising seamen displayed the flag of the republic from Southern Africa to the Arctic circle. The ships of the Dutch, said Raleigh, outnumber those of England and the other kingdoms. Amsterdam, the depôt of the merchandise of Europe and of the East, was esteemed, beyond dispute, the first commercial city of the world.
England and Holland had been allies in the contest with Spain; both had sent their ships to the Indian seas; they were both desirous of obtaining settlements in America. The Dutch, like all other nations connected either with the commerce of Asia or inquisitive with regard to America, turned their efforts to the discovery of a north-west passage. The unsuccessful attempts of the English mariners, Cabot, Frobisher, Willoughby, and others, mattered nothing to them; with that perseverance which, if it attain not to its object, generally wins some unlooked-for good, they, too, had sought repeatedly for the north-west passage, coasting for this purpose Nova Zembla and Muscovy. In 1596, one of their ships in this quest advanced within ten degrees of the pole; during the winter, when it was frozen in, on the shores of Nova Zembla, the sufferings of the unfortunate crew have hardly their parallel in any narrative of human endurance, misery, and terror at sea.