Charles Le Moyne
of Montreal, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, who ended his days in the
task of founding the French colony of Louisiana. He was perhaps the most
notable of all the adventurous leaders whom New France produced. He was
first on Hudson Bay in the late summer of 1686, in a party of about a
hundred men, led by the Chevalier de Troyes, who had marched overland
from Quebec through the wilderness. The English on the Bay, with a
charter from King Charles II, the friend of the French, and in a time of
profound peace under his successor, thought themselves secure. They now
had, however, a rude awakening. In the dead of night the Frenchmen fell
upon Fort Hayes, captured its dazed garrison, and looted the place.
The same fate befell all the other English posts on the Bay. Iberville
gained a rich store of furs as his share of the plunder and returned
with it to Quebec in 1687, just at the time when La Salle, that other
pioneer of France, was struck down in the distant south by a murderer's
hand.

Iberville was, above all else, a sailor. The easiest route to Hudson Bay
was by way of the sea. More than once after his first experience he led
to the Bay a naval expedition. His exploits are still remembered with
pride in French naval annals. In 1697 he sailed the Pelican through
the ice-floes of Hudson Straits. He was attacked by three English
merchantmen, with one hundred and twenty guns against his forty-four.
One of the English ships escaped, one Iberville sank with all on board,
one he captured. That autumn the hardy corsair was in France with a
great booty from the furs which the English had laboriously gathered.

The triumph of the French on Hudson Bay was short-lived. Their exploits,
though brilliant and daring, were more of the nature of raids than
attempts to settle and explore. They did no more than the English to
ascend the Nelson or other rivers to find what lay beyond; and in 1718,
by the Treaty of Utrecht, as we have already seen, they gave up all
claim to Hudson Bay and yielded that region to the English.

Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, was a member of
the Canadian noblesse, a son of the Governor of Three Rivers on the St.
Lawrence. He was born in 1685 and had taken part in the border warfare
of the days of Queen Anne. He was a member of the raiding party led
against New England by Hertel de Rouville in 1704 and may have been one
of those who burst in on the little town of Deerfield, Mas