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276 France, to enjoy the plaudits of its nobler people, and the secret approbation of the monarch who dared not express it, while the Spanish ambassador at the court demanded the head of the hero. He lived to do splendid service for his country against the Spaniards.

Here closed till a much later period the relations between the French and the natives near our Southern bounds. We must now shift the scene to the North, where Spanish Florida was to be converted into New France. Still holding to the claim of territorial right by the discoveries of Verrazano, the French monarch became as lavish as he was inconstant and inconsistent in granting patents, seigniories, and monopolies of dominion and trade to such of his subjects, glowing with zeal and love of adventure, as could make interest to secure them. These royal gifts, however, as the event proved to the discomfiture and ruin of the receivers, were held on an uncertain tenure, often forgotten, annulled, or overridden by influence and favoritism. Beginning from the years 1534-35, with the voyages of Jacques Cartier to the Gulf and up the River St. Lawrence, there was a series of tentative enterprises on the islands and in Acadia, running on to the actual foundation of Quebec, by Champlain, in 1608. After the taking of the cod and the whale on the coast had secured enormous profits, a yet more enriching traffic followed. Paris offered a steadily extending market for the peltries of the wilderness, — the beaver, the otter, the marten, the fox, the lynx, and the larger robes of the moose, the deer, the caribou, and the bear. The king and his patentees found it as difficult to secure a covenanted monopoly in this traffic as it would have been to exhaust the supply of these precious spoils spread over the vast and limitless expanse of a mighty continent. Sixty-eight years after the first voyage of Cartier, and fifteen years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the noble Champlain — a hero in every nerve and muscle, a saint too in some of his lofty and generous