came a purely French possession,
as did, later, the adjoining portion of the island of Hispaniola (San
Domingo). The French did, indeed, like the English, plant sugar
colonies in some of the lesser Antilles; but during the first half of
the seventeenth century they attained no great prosperity.

For the greater enterprises of trade in the East and colonisation in
the West, the French relied almost wholly upon government assistance,
and although both Henry IV. in the first years of the century, and
Richelieu in its second quarter, were anxious to give what help they
could, internal dissensions were of such frequent occurrence in France
during this period that no systematic or continuous governmental aid
was available. Hence the French enterprises both in the East and in the
West were on a small scale, and achieved little success. The French
East India Company was all but extinct when Colbert took it in hand in
1664; it was never able to compete with its Dutch or even its English
rival.

But the period saw the establishment of two French colonies in North
America: Acadia (Nova Scotia) on the coast, and Canada, with Quebec as
its centre, in the St. Lawrence valley, separated from one another on
land by an almost impassable barrier of forest and mountain. These two
colonies were founded, the first in 1605 and the second in 1608, almost
at the same moment as the first English settlement on the American
continent. They had a hard struggle during the first fifty years of
their existence; for the number of settlers was very small, the soil
was barren, the climate severe, and the Red Indians, especially the
ferocious Iroquois towards the south, were far more formidable enemies
than those who bordered on the English colonies.

There is no part of the history of European colonisation more full of
romance and of heroism than the early history of French Canada; an
incomparable atmosphere of gallantry and devotion seems to overhang it.
From the first, despite their small numbers and their difficulties,
these settlers showed a daring in exploration which was only equalled
by the Spaniards, and to which there is no parallel in the records of
the English colonies. At the very outset the great explorer Champlain
mapped out the greater part of the Great Lakes, and thus reached
farther into the continent than any Englishman before the end of the
eighteenth century; and although this is partly explained by the fact
that the St. Lawrence