Champlain went back to France that fall. Once more the monopoly had been cancelled; the company had lost its exclusive patent. The government was permitting free trade to all Frenchmen in the St. Lawrence valley. However, the company decided to stick it out in the face of this competition. Champlain became affianced, under a marriage contract, to a girl of twelve who was to join him later as his wife, and then he returned to Canada.
The French captain now carried the war to the Iroquois nations again, successfully urging his Indian allies to help him push farther west. All his battles with the Five Nations were not victories, for the Iroquois were fiercely stubborn foes. However Champlain forced his way to Lake Ontario and Niagara. He ascended the Ottawa and visited Lakes Nipissing and Huron, blazing a trail west for the beaver traders to follow. Because of his tireless efforts in the western wilderness the economy of the new country rested solidly on the fur trade for many years, and the beaver rightfully came to occupy a prominent place in the Canadian coat of arms.
Samuel de Champlain became the first Governor of French Canada, the ruler of all New France. But he didn’t find the western sea, or a passage to China.
He did force the Five Nations of the Iroquois into alliances with the enemies of the French, the incoming Dutch fur traders who furnished the savages with guns, and then with the English. The story of the brutal border wars that resulted is in large measure the story of the colonial struggle for most of the American continent.
V
England Moves to Extend Her Realm
England came of age in the sixteenth century. Labor troubles helped to bring this about.
When the tenants on demesne land asserted their right to sell their labor to the best advantage, the lords in turn claimed their right to use their lands to the best advantage. Since profitable sheep farming required fewer laborers than ploughing and reaping, less and less acres were kept in cultivation by the lords. Frustrated and starving, the tenants were forced to abandon their homes and seek precarious employment in the towns and cities.
But feudalism retreated before this shift to community life and a nation of five million restless people emerged from its former agricultural isolation. Although the sheep farmers and wool merchants improved their capital fortunes at the expense of the poor laborers, they had notwithstanding built up a great national industry. England at last had something to sell!
In 1553 an expedition carrying woolens for trade with the Tartars attempted unsuccessfully to reach Cathay by a northeast polar passage. Defeated by ice and death, a surviving remnant did nevertheless manage to reach the White Sea and to journey south into Russia to Moscow. There they made a trade agreement of sorts with Ivan IV, called “the Terrible.”