The French disputed the Spanish claims to North America and established a colony of Huguenots in South Carolina, but France’s discoveries and possessions in North America were principally in the north. Cartier discovered and explored the St. Lawrence river in 1535, and that was thought to be a part, if not all, of the water-way through the continent of America to the South sea or Pacific ocean en route to India. No nation was more zealous and successful than France in making discoveries and settlements in Canada, and what ultimately became the northwestern of the United States along the upper lakes and the upper Mississippi river, by those wonderful religious orders, the Franciscans and Jesuits. Eighty-five years had elapsed after the discovery in North America by the Cabots, under which the English based their claim to the territory, before they made any attempt at colonization or even to establish a permanent settlement. In 1584 that unique, able, versatile, vain Queen Elizabeth of England granted a most remarkable charter to, at one time her especial favorite, the highly gifted but eccentric Sir Walter Raleigh, to lay claim to any land in the west “not actually possessed by any Christian prince.” Raleigh sent out several expeditions to make a settlement on Roanoke island, off the coast of North Carolina. It was represented to the Queen as a remarkably fine land, so that she named it in her own honor as the Virgin Queen Virginia and thereupon knighted Raleigh. Raleigh, though he made determined and prolonged efforts and at great personal expense to establish permanent English settlements in America, failed. To Sir Walter Raleigh is given the credit or curse of having discovered in Virginia a weed which King James called “the vilest of weeds” and Edmund Spencer, the famous poet, “divine tobacco.” To Sir Walter also is generally given the credit of having introduced the most valuable of all the vegetables known to man—the potato. Justin Winsor, a distinguished American historian, said that the scheme to form a West India Company was first broached in 1592 by William Usselinx, an exiled Antwerp merchant. It was many years before it could be accomplished. The longing for a share in the riches of the New World conduced in the meantime to the establishment of the “Greenland Company” about 1596 and the pretended search by its ships for a northwestern passage led to a supposed first discovery of the Hudson river, if we may rely upon an unsupported statement by the officers of the West India Company in an appeal for assistance to the Assembly of the Nineteenth in 1644. According to this statement ships of the “Greenland Company” had entered the North and Delaware rivers in 1598; their crews had landed in both places and had built small forts to protect them against the inclemency of the weather and to resist the attacks of the Indians.