oung naval officer named Iberville applied to the King for leave
to take out an expedition and found a colony at the mouth of the
Mississippi, just as La Salle had attempted to do. Permission was
readily given, and in 1698 Iberville sailed with two ships from France,
and in February, 1699, entered Mobile Bay. Leaving his fleet at anchor,
he set off with a party in small boats in search of the great river. He
coasted along the shore, entered the Mississippi through one of its
three mouths, and went up the river till he came to an Indian village,
where the chief gave him a letter which Tonty, thirteen years before,
when in search of La Salle, had written and left in the crotch of
a tree.

Iberville now knew that he was on the Mississippi; but having seen no
spot along its low banks suitable for the site of a city, he went back
and led his colony to Biloxi Bay, and there settled it. Thus when the
eighteenth century opened there were in all Louisiana but two French
settlements--that founded on the Illinois River by La Salle, and that
begun by Iberville at Biloxi. But the occupation of Louisiana was now
the established policy of France, and hardly a year went by without one
or more forts appearing somewhere in the valley. Before 1725 came,
Mobile Bay was occupied, New Orleans was founded, and Forts Rosalie,
Toulouse, Tombeckbee, Natchitoches, Assumption, and Chartres were
erected. Along the Lakes, Detroit had been founded, Niagara was built in
1726, and in 1731 a band of Frenchmen, entering New York, put up
Crown Point.[1]

[Footnote 1: Parkman's _A Half-century of Conflict_, Vol. I., pp.
288-314. For the French posts see map on pp. 74, 75.]

The meaning of this chain of forts stretching from New Orleans and
Mobile to Lake Champlain and Montreal, was that the French were
determined to shut the English out of the valley of the Mississippi, and
to keep them away from the shores of the Great Lakes. But they were also
determined at the first chance to reconquer Annapolis and Nova Scotia,
which they had lost by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. As a very
important step towards the accomplishment of this purpose, the French
selected a harbor on the southeast coast of Cape Breton Island, and
there built Louisburg, a fortress so strong that the French officers
boasted that it could be defended by a garrison of women.

%75. The Struggle for New France; "King George's War."%--Such was the
situation in America when (in March, 1744) Fr