Such was the position, the power, and administrative framework of France when her kings and people turned their eyes westward across the seas.  From the rugged old Norman and Breton seaports courageous mariners had been for a long time lengthening their voyages to new coasts.  As early as 1534 Jacques Cartier of St Malo had made the first of his pilgrimages to the St Lawrence, and in 1542 his associate Roberval had attempted to plant a colony there.  They had found the shores of the great river to be inhospitable; the winters were rigorous; no stores of mineral wealth had appeared; nor did the land seem to possess great agricultural possibilities.  From Mexico the Spanish galleons were bearing home their rich cargoes of silver bullion.  In Virginia the English navigators had found a land of fair skies and fertile soil.  But the hills and valleys of the northland had shouted no such greeting to the voyageurs of Brittany.  Cartier had failed to make his landfall at Utopia, and the balance-sheet of his achievements, when cast up in 1544, had offered a princely dividend of disappointment.

For a half-century following the abortive efforts of Cartier and Roberval, the French authorities had made no serious or successful attempt to plant a colony in the New World.  That is not surprising, for there were troubles in plenty at home.  Huguenots and Catholics were at each other’s throats; the wars of the Fronde convulsed the land; and it was not till the very end of the sixteenth century that the country settled down to peace within its own borders.  Some facetious chronicler has remarked that the three chief causes of early warfare were Christianity, herrings, and cloves.  There is much golden truth in that nugget.  For if one could take from human history all the strife that has been due either to bigotry or to commercial avarice, a fair portion of the bloodstreaks would be washed from its pages.  For the time being, at any rate, France had so much fighting at home that she was unable, like her Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English neighbours, to gain strategic points for future fighting abroad.  Those were days when, if a people would possess the gates of their enemies, it behoved them to begin early.  France made a late start, and she was forced to take, in consequence, what other nations had shown no eagerness to seize.

It was Samuel Champlain, a seaman of Brouage, who first secured for France and for Frenchmen a sure foothold in North America, and thus became the herald of Bourbon imperialism.  After a youth spent at sea, Champlain engaged for some years in the armed conflicts with the Huguenots; then he returned to his old marine life once more.  He sailed to the Spanish main and elsewhere, thereby gaining skill as a navigator and ambition to be an explorer of new coasts.  In 1603 came an opportunity to join an expedition to the St Lawrence, and from this time to the end of his days the Brouage mariner gave his whole interest and energies to the work of planting an outpost of empire in the New World.  Champlain was scarcely thirty-six when he made his first voyage to Canada; he died at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1635.  His service to the king and nation extended over three decades.