Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/183

 insure to the French the peaceful possession of the vast tracts allotted to them by their monarch, extending from the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo del Norte, now forming the boundary between Texas and Mexico, to the 85th degree of west longitude.

Having thus laid the foundation of what he hoped would become a great French empire in the South, which should gradually extend until it met and coalesced with that of the North, D'Iberville returned to France to win new recruits for his enterprise, leaving his brothers in charge of the infant settlement.

Thus left for a time to its own resources, the little colony struggled on as best it could—the monotony of its life in the barren wastes on which it had been set down broken only by an occasional visit from some missionary, who would appear suddenly at the mouth of the Mississippi, after a wild trip from his distant station, in his birch-bark canoe—until its very existence was threatened by the sudden appearance of two well-armed English vessels, under the command of Coxe, a physician, who had bought up an old patent granting the territory occupied by the French to Robert Heath.

Coxe had come to claim the lands on either side of the Mississippi, and too explore his new possessions. Entering the great highway, he sailed up unmolested for about fifty miles, when he was met by Bienville, also engaged in explorations, who, seeing how powerless he would be to resist the intruder, solved the difficulty by assuring him that the river was not the Mississippi, but another stream belonging to the French.

Suspecting no treachery, Coxe turned back, and the spot which witnessed this somewhat ignominious retreat is still known as the English Turn. The emigrants—most of them Huguenot refugees, who had accompanied the unsuccessful Englishmen—settled in Carolina; and though they subsequently begged to be allowed to join their fellow-countrymen in Louisiana, they were refused permission to do so by the French monarch.

The close of the year witnessed the return of D'Iberville with sixty emigrants from Canada, whom he settled at a spot about fifty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. While engaged in erecting a fort for the protection of the new colony, he was visited by our old friend Tonti, the companion of La Salle's early explorations, and in company with him he ascended the river as far as the Natchez country, where a third settlement, first called Rosalie, and afterward Natchez, was founded.

A little later, the knowledge of this part of the country was further ex