What were the French and English fighting for in North America? The answer seems obvious, for North America itself. But what did North America mean? It had a different meaning to different interests. The New Englander cared for little but the New England colonies, and the immediately adjacent lands and seas. To the Acadian settlers the Acadian peninsula, to the Canadian _habitant_ the banks of the St. Lawrence, were all in all. The inland colonists of New York had in their minds not merely the safety of their colony, within its ill-defined boundaries, but also paramount influence over the Five Nations, and unrestricted trade with the western Indians. Longheaded governors of New York and Massachusetts took a still wider view; but the widest of all was held by the French Governors of Canada, and by the roving Canadians, who, with restless spirit and undaunted enterprise, claimed seas and rivers before they were reached or known, magnifying tales of far-off lands and peoples, building in the air and bringing down to earth a fabric of continental dominion. As a rule, the English view was too circumscribed, the French view was too diffuse. The strength of the English lay in effective occupation within narrow limits; the French committed the blunder of perpetually forcing competition upon rivals who had larger resources; but to them belonged the great merit of grasping in some sort the true meaning of North America, and never letting slip the problems of the future. {148} [Sidenote: _The search for the Western sea._] The explorers' aim was always to reach the further sea. That it must be somewhere to the west, in the opposite direction to the homes from whence they came, they knew or conjectured; but of the immense distance at which it lay, and of the Rocky Mountain barrier which must be surmounted to find it, they were wholly ignorant. They followed the water, and, when they had gained some knowledge of the great lakes, they reached the closely adjoining sources of the tributaries of the Mississippi, the Wisconsin, the Ohio, and the Illinois; and, borne with the stream, they came in due course not to the west but to the south, not to the Pacific but to the Gulf of Mexico. [Sidenote: _The missionaries and Western discovery._]