Reference should also be made to Sir J. BOURINOT'S monograph on 'Cape Breton,' first published in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, vol. ix, 1891, and since published separately.

CHAPTER II

SAMUEL CHAMPLAIN AND THE FOUNDING OF QUEBEC

The history of Canada has been so often and so well told, that an attempt simply to reproduce the narrative would be worse than superfluous. The scheme of the present series is, in the field of colonization and within the present limits of the British Empire, to trace the connexion between history and geography; and from this point of view more especially the story of New France will be recorded.

New
France.

Various parts of the world, now British possessions, were once owned by other European nations, notably by the Dutch or French. The last volume of the series dealt with what was in past times a dependency of the Netherlands, the Cape Colony, the mother colony of South Africa. The present volume deals with a land which the French made peculiarly their own; where, as hardly anywhere else, they settled, though not in large numbers; not merely conquering or ruling the conquered, not only leaving a permanent impress of manners, law, and religion, but slowly and partially colonizing a country and forming a nation.

Lower Canada, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was rightly included under the wider name of New France, for here France and the French were reproduced in weakness and in strength. It was a land well suited to the French character and physique. Much depended on tactful dealings with the North American Indians, a species of diplomacy in which Frenchmen excelled. The commercial value of Canada consisted mainly in the fur trade, an adventurous kind of traffic more attractive to the Frenchman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than plodding agriculture or the life of a counting-house. On the rivers and lakes, coming and going was comparatively easy; the short bright summers and the long winters made the country one of strong contrasts. To a bold, imaginative, somewhat restless people there was much to charm in Canada.

But Canada meant far less in earlier days than now it means. It meant the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, and of the lakes from which it flows. The Maritime Provinces of the present Dominion, or at any rate Nova Scotia, were not in Canada properly so called, but bore the name of La Cadie or Acadia,1 and the great North-West was an unknown land.