Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/311

Rh few women, and few children are born. Not out of such beginnings will a sound colony grow; not out of such materials can a normal society be built up. Commerce alone can not generate a true colony.

The traders desert the coast, and the more daring become hunters and trappers like the natives. This pioneer form of colonization is best seen in the coureurs de bois of old Canada—bold, adventurous men who had broken away from the restraints of civilization and plunged into the free life of the forest. They intermarried with Indian women, and their half-breed sons formed the personnel of the companies which controlled the fur trade for two centuries. Their meeting places with the Indian trappers were scenes of drunkenness and debauchery which threw the missionaries into despair. They jealously guarded their game preserves against the approaches of settlement. It was a degraded type of civilization, and, though it was the base, it was never the root of Canadian society. Not out of it could a true colony spring.

The big-game hunters of old days were men of a similar type, and were at least the beginners of the French colony of Louisiana. The big-game hunter of to-day is an Englishman or a Frenchman in whom the instincts of the savage periodically break out under a polished surface. One of the best specimens of the race, Mr Selous, claims that such men rank with missionaries as pioneers. The biggame hunters, he contends, opened up Rhodesia. The hunters of gorillas in the south and of lions in the north of Africa have been the precursors of settlement. But they have seldom themselves settled in the country they roamed over, and left few descendants to inherit their strength and courage.

Often associating with the hunters and trappers and merchants, and sometimes (like Joliet, the discoverer of the Mississippi) differentiating from them, are the explorers. An adventurous race, who traverse continents while the hunters scour kingdoms, the Ibervillcs and La Salles, the Stanleys and the host of African and other travelers are the indispensable forerunners of annexation. Baker and Speke and Grant almost compelled the English occupation of Egypt. European travelers of many nationalities led inevitably to the wholesale partition of the Dark Continent. Missionaries sometimes accompany them, as Marquette did Joliet, or they sacrifice, like Livingstone, their own high calling to the broader vocation of the explorer; or they follow in his track, as three hundred missionaries arrived in the wake of Stanley's explorations; or, themselves the first explorers, they found villages, as the Jesuits did all over Canada and in Illinois and Michigan, some of them to become centers of colonization or great cities like Montreal; or they occupy and administer wide territories like Paraguay; or they pioneer civilized