To explore the West, then, was the ambition of more than one brave Frenchman who left the new settlements behind and paddled up the St. Lawrence,—not to find homes for their people in this new world, but to find a waterway through to the Pacific. In 1666 one of these explorers, La Salle, set out from Montreal for the Great Lakes. Missionaries and fur traders had already reached Lake Huron, and Indians had told them of a great river, the Mississippi, which La Salle thought might flow into the Pacific. He reached first the Ohio and then the Illinois, but did not follow them to their junction with the great river; for he learned, to his great disappointment, that the fur traders had already discovered it to flow south instead of west. La Salle gave up the idea of reaching China, and, on another adventurous journey, went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. He proclaimed the sovereignty of France over all the country through which the great river and its tributaries might flow. Long afterwards, accordingly, when traders from the growing English colonies along the Atlantic made their way farther and farther inland, they found the way barred by French forts. Mother England sent troops to their aid, and the united British force, in which George Washington himself was a colonel, broke down French opposition and enabled the colonists to spread westward into the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. The war was carried on until even Canada in the north was brought under the British flag, by Wolfe’s crowning victory at Quebec. It was, in fact, Britain’s action in freeing her colonists from French opposition that enabled the colonists to turn on Britain herself a few years later, and, this time with the help of French soldiers, to separate themselves from the rest of the English-speaking brotherhood. * * * * * Let us turn back now to the earlier days. The English, like the Spanish and French, were bent on finding a western route to Asia. Nearly eighty years after Cabot’s voyage to Labrador, another little English ship, of only twenty tons, sailed from London on this adventure. Martin Frobisher was her captain’s name. Passing Newfoundland and Labrador, he entered a channel, where he verily believed the land on his right was the coast of Asia. As a matter of fact the channel led nowhere, being only the mouth of a bay—Frobisher Bay, in Baffin Land, as we call it now. A lump of mineral picked up on shore excited a belief that the barren country was a land of gold. Accordingly, the London merchants sent out a second expedition, and even a third. No gold was found; but Frobisher discovered a new inlet, which became a highway of commerce under the name of Hudson Strait.