About the time that Oñate was organising New Mexico there came over to the north-east coast one Sieur de Monts, who established Port Royal for France in a region named Acadia, lying between the Lower St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, a title later restricted to the portion now called Nova Scotia, and immortalised in Longfellow's poem, _Evangeline_. But it was not till the illustrious Champlain, afterwards so justly famous, founded Quebec, in 1608, that France really closed her grip on the north-eastern part of the continent; a grip that was later to be broken for ever by the British. Having permanently settled Quebec, Champlain, with his _voyageurs_, extended his travels westward by watercourses and lakes as far as the Straits of Mackinaw, founding many trading-posts and missions, and marking the first practicable highway to the Wilderness. He was efficiently supported in his efforts by monks of the Jesuit and Franciscan orders, brethren of those who were labouring diligently in the south-west, and who, though their energetic and sincere labours to Christianise the natives amounted to no more than a puff-ball tossed against the side of a battleship, performed a great and indispensable work in this breaking of the Wilderness. [Illustration: A Reception Committee. Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey.] The British also began to turn their attention to the New World, and after several explorations along the coast—Raleigh's attempt at settlement in what is now North Carolina; Davis's exploration in the Far North, where his name still remains to designate the strait he discovered—they finally founded on James River their first permanent settlement in 1607, two years after the establishment of Santa Fé, New Mexico. To this they gave the name Jamestown, and from it as a centre they expanded their power. The French were pushing out at the North; the Spaniards controlled the South and West. Then a fourth nation appeared—the Dutch—who settled at what is now New York in 1614, five years after Hudson discovered the river now bearing his name to mark the event. Not long after this Hudson found for England the immense bay to which his name was given, and where his mutinous crew turned him, with some of his adherents, adrift on the icy sea. Never was he heard from again. Then the _Mayflower_ came, freighted heavily with new and forceful ideas and a hardy company, who entered by Plymouth Rock; so that by 1625 all the forces that were to battle for the mastery of North America had established their footings, and with the various native tribes, who opposed their encroachment and their cruelty, they soon turned the land into a pandemonium. Almost daily the natives were given exhibitions of treachery, brutality, butchery, on the part of these newcomers among themselves, even while the good priests held aloft the crucifix and repeated, "Thou shalt not!" Is it a wonder the Amerind