In 1604, and for several years thereafter, Champlain was much upon the New England coast, helping Du Monts in a colonizing scheme under a charter of Henri Quatre; had they succeeded, New France would have reached Long Island Sound. Champlain landed at Barnstable and named the harbor “Port aux Huistres,” “for the many good oysters there.” He judged, also, that it would have been “an excellent place to erect buildings and lay the foundations of a state, if the harbor were somewhat deeper and the entrance safer.” The tip of the Cape he called “Cap Blanc,” the treacherous shoals at the elbow “Mallebarre,” and at Chatham he was like to have been swamped in the shoals had the Indians not dragged his boats over into the harbor—“Port Fortune” he called it. But it held no good fortune for him: for his men quarrelled with their rescuers, and after two of them had been killed, he sailed away. Champlain, a scientific man, the king’s geographer, wrote interestingly of the savages, their appearance, customs, agriculture, dwellings, and weighed the advantages of colonization there, but French the land was not to be. After Gosnold came several Englishmen, Martin Pring among them, searching for sassafras, which he knew was to be found in sandy soil, and was then much esteemed in pharmacy as of “sovereigne vertue against the Plague and many other Maladies.” Pring coasted along to Plymouth, where at last he found “sufficient quantitie” of his sassafras, and camped for several months. There one of his company played the “gitterne” to the joy of the savages who danced about him “twentie in a Ring, ... singing lo la lo la la and him that first brake the ring the rest would knocke and cry out upon.” Henry Hudson spent a night off the Cape and had some difficulty with shoals and tides and mists; but he testified that “the land is very sweet,” and some of his men brought away wild grapes and roses; as did also Edward Braunde, who hoped to discover “sertayne perell which is told by the Sauvages to be there,” and found near Race Point, where he landed, only some “goodly grapes and Rose-Trees.” It should be noted that as Hudson cruised thereabouts, Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayney of his crew saw “the mermaid.” And in 1614 Captain John Smith set sail for these shores to look for whales and gold-mines, failing which they would take “Fish and Furres,” as the event proved to an amount of some fifteen hundred pounds. Smith, with eight men in an open boat, explored and charted the coast and dedicated his map to Prince Charles, with the request that he change “the barbarous names” thereon. “As posteritie might say,” writes Smith, “Prince Charles was their godfather.” New England, the river Charles, Plymouth retain the royal nomenclature. But his Stuart Bay and Cape James are still Cape Cod and Cape Cod Bay, and Milford Haven is Provincetown Harbor. Cape Cod, “a name, I suppose, it will never lose,” said Cotton Mather,