After the English became entrenched on Hudson’s Bay, furs were diverted to them that otherwise would have been collected by the French. In time French traders became aggravated enough to make repeated attacks on the rival posts. Attempts to dislodge the English from the bay proved futile however. Although the “Honorable Company,” as the Hudson’s Bay Company was to become known, moved ponderously at times due to its conservative absentee directorship in England, it managed to endure and to expand at the expense of the French. In fact, it was destined to become the world’s largest fur trading organization. It would shift the course of trade to London, to make it the center of the western world’s fur market. Meanwhile, the adventurous French were spurred on by the discovery of the upper Mississippi. Radisson called the Mississippi, in conjunction with the Missouri, the Forked River “because it has two branches, the one towards the west, the other towards the south, which we believe runs toward Mexico.” Jesuit priests, probing the hinterland, wrote that the savages assured them the Mississippi was “so noble a river that, at more than three hundred leagues’ distance from its mouth, it is larger than the one flowing before Quebec; for they declare it is more than a league wide.... Some warriors of this country, who tell us that they have made their way thither, declare that they saw there men resembling the French, who were splitting trees with long knives, and that some of them had houses on the water--for they thus expressed themselves in speaking of sawed boards and Ships”--and Spaniards! Already, young Louis XIV had considered occupying the mouths of continental rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico to threaten the Spanish possessions there. If Radisson’s Forked River was really one of these waterways, the strategic value of such a move would be immensely enhanced. It would provide a backside approach from New France, an interior line of communications safe from Spanish attack. It was an intriguing prospect, to say the least. Then, in 1673, a fur trader and mine prospector named Louis Joliet together with a Jesuit priest, Father Jacques Marquette, descended the Mississippi far enough to learn that it assuredly did flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Whereupon the French not only tasted the stimulating prospect of threatening Spanish possessions there, they excitedly envisioned an inland empire of trading citadels stretching from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, to the Gulf of Mexico. The continent would be theirs, with great ports of entry at the distantly separated mouths of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers. The English colonies would be completely encircled--to be pinned down on the coast, or eliminated!