Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/286

266 commotion in France, when the doctrines of Luther, or rather of Calvin, were finding their adherents, and even in the civil war of dynasty and heresy and against the League, which soon followed, the fishing trade was pursued with ever increasing vigor. There seemed to be a truce over the briny treasure, and even at the French seaports out of which sailed the cranky crafts which multiplied their venturesome voyages. The truce was first broken by piratical plunderings of the earliest cargoes of peltry. It was the familiarity with foreign seas thus acquired that prompted many of the French and English voyages of discovery and enterprises of colonization. The kings of France based their claims to transatlantic territory upon the sighting of the coast of Florida by Verrazano in 1524, and upon the voyages of Cartier to Canada ten years later. To all but the venturous mariners themselves these were easy terms for the acquisition of territorial rights over this present realm of human thrift and prosperity now called our “National Domain,” in succession to its previous titles of New Spain, Spanish Florida, New France, and (to a certain extent) New England.

The Frenchman then followed the Spaniard in his voyages of pelf and conquest to the new-found world. The rude and simple minds of the bewildered savages were to be exercised with further perplexities as to the realms beyond the great sea, whose restless adventurers, with rival aims, seemed to be flocking to these wildernesses to fight out the battles which had begun in the Old World. It was in Florida, as is soon to be related, that our natives had the first occasion to know that Europe contained rival nationalities, and to have an opportunity to compare representatives of each of them. In some very important qualities, the difference of which the natives of this continent could appreciate, their first French guests proved themselves less hateful and less blasting in their presence and errand than were the Spaniards. Their chivalry was of a reduced and