the French were even more active than their principal
rivals and comrades, the English. The word ‘buccaneer’
itself comes from the French: boucan means the
wood-fire at which the pirates dried and smoked their
meat, and these fires, blazing on deserted islands,
must often have warned merchant vessels to avoid an
ever-present danger. The island of Tortuga, which
commands the passage between Cuba and Hispaniola through
which the bulk of the Spanish traffic passed on its
way from Mexico to Europe, was the most important of
the buccaneering bases, and although it was at first
used by the buccaneers of all nations, it soon became
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
