The result can hardly have confirmed the American colonies in their allegiance to England. As a matter of fact, England had been fighting their battle against France, but her successes had been on the other side of the Atlantic; whereas in America, under the eyes of the colonists, there had been little but failure. One substantial gain there was—the capture of Port Royal; but this easy feat had been previously achieved by Massachusetts alone without any aid from home. The conquest of Canada, which had been well within reach, now seemed as far off as ever; and the Treaty of Utrecht—which, if Marlborough had been left to follow up his career of victory, and if a commander of his choosing had been sent with his troops across the seas, might have forestalled the famous treaty of fifty years later—did not even secure the whole seaboard to England, or confine the French to the river of Canada. Acadia, according to its ancient limits, was ceded to the British Crown, the French gave up their possessions in Newfoundland, and their hold on Hudson Bay: but on a section of the Newfoundland coast they were granted fishing rights, to be a fruitful source of future trouble; and, keeping Cape Breton Island, they reared in it the fortress of Louisbourg, to be a stronghold second only to that of Quebec. Once more England lost her opportunity, and the settlement, which should have been made in 1713, was postponed till 1763.
NOTE.—For the substance of chaps. iii, iv, and v, see among modern books,
KINGSFORD'S History of Canada, vols. i and ii,
and the following works of PARKMAN:
The Jesuits in North America;
The Old Régime in Canada;
Count Frontenac and New France;
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West.
CHAPTER V
THE MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA
| French and English views in North America. |
What were the French and English fighting for in North America? The answer seems obvious, for North America itself. But what did North America mean? It had a different meaning to different interests. The New Englander cared for little but the New England colonies, and the immediately adjacent lands and seas. To the Acadian settlers the Acadian peninsula, to the Canadian habitant the banks of the St. Lawrence, were all in all. The inland colonists of New York had in their minds not merely the safety of their colony, within its ill-defined boundaries, but also paramount influence over the Five Nations, and unrestricted trade with the western Indians. Longheaded governors of New York and Massachusetts took a still wider view; but the widest of all was held by the French Governors of Canada, and by the roving Canadians, who, with restless spirit and undaunted enterprise, claimed seas and rivers before they were reached or known, magnifying tales of far-off lands and peoples, building in the air and bringing down to earth a fabric of continental dominion. As a rule, the English view was too circumscribed, the French view was too diffuse. The strength of the English lay in effective occupation within narrow limits; the French committed the blunder of perpetually forcing competition upon rivals who had larger resources; but to them belonged the great merit of grasping in some sort the true meaning of North America, and never letting slip the problems of the future.
| The search for the Western sea. |