THE TEA IN BOSTON HARBOR.
In 1774, the quarrels between the mother country and her now mighty American colonies—of which the most thrilling incidents were the Stamp Act riots of Boston in 1768, and the revolt against the payment of the tea dues in the same city in 1773, when the boys of Boston, disguised as Indians, flung the cargoes of tea into the sea to prevent the payment of the tax—resulted in the War of Independence, during which, strange to say, took place those first explorations of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio which were to add so greatly to the power of the American Union about to be formed. But before we join the pioneers of the new era of discovery in the West, we must turn once more to the South, to bring our account of the work of the French down to the important date we have reached in the history of their English rivals in the East.
INDIAN ORNAMENTS.
CHAPTER IX.
THE IMMEDIATE SUCCESSORS OF LA SALLE, AND EARLY COLONIZATION BETWEEN THE ALLEGHANIES AND THE MISSISSIPPI.
THE work begun by La Salle was taken up, after the peace of Ryswick (1697) had terminated the war between the French and English, by Lemoyne D’Iberville, a Canadian by birth, who, in 1698, sailed for the mouth of the Mississippi from San Domingo, accompanied by his two brothers, Sauville and Bienville, two hundred colonists, and a few women and children.
After a successful voyage, our hero cast anchor in the present Mobile Bay (N. lat. 30° 40′, W. long. 80°), and on the 2d February, 1699, landed his people on Ship Island, where huts were at once erected for the temporary shelter of the emigrants. While this work was in progress, D’Iberville explored the neighboring Bay of Biloxi and the mouth of the Pensacola River—already, as we know, visited more than once by the Spanish—and at the end of the month made his way thence, with forty-eight picked followers, to the mouth of the Mississippi.
Entering the muddy waters, encumbered by the floating trunks of rotting trees, which formed the outlet of the great Father of Waters, the explorers sailed slowly on between the low alluvial banks till they came to a Bayagoula village, just below the junction of the Red River with the Mississippi, where all doubt as to their having found the mighty stream they sought was set at rest by the production of a letter, in their own language, left with the Indians by Tonti long years before.