This envenomed home feeling had early crossed the Atlantic, and lost none of its acridity on the passage. In point of time the English were before the French in their American discoveries, but in settlement the French preceded the English. While the Cabots, the first Englishmen who ran down our country, touching in 1498 at Newfoundland, and thence coasting along our shores as far as Florida, without leaving any colonists behind them, anticipated Verizzanni, the first French discoverer in America, by twenty-five years, the French under Cartier in 1534, Roberval in 1542, and Ribault in 1562, landed and made fugitive settlements at various points, from the Huguenot plantation in South Carolina northwards around the present Provinces of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and up the St. Lawrence as far westward as Montreal. Over this entire broad strip they had affixed the label “New France.” The English made no further discoveries of, nor any settlements in, America, after Cabot’s expedition, until 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert, freighted with a charter from Queen Elizabeth, sailed for Virginia with a company of settlers. This was rapidly followed up, with little permanent result, however, by Raleigh, Granville, and Gosnold. The French settlement of Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, antedated that of the English at Jamestown five years. England and France now vied with each other in granting large deeds of American territory, most of which conflicted with each other, as their martial deeds had done at home. The English Henry VII. granted to Mr. John Cabot all the lands which he might discover, reserving to his royal self a small commission of twenty per cent. Five years later the French Henry IV., without employing any lawyer to search the title, gave to De Monts so much of the same North American lot as now embraces Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, the New England States, and the confederated Dominion of Canada. Other unwarrantable warranty deeds were subsequently made and done by the rival grantors, involving the titles in distressing doubt and confusion. Military actions of ejectment followed. As early as 1629, Champlain and his French colony were driven from Quebec, like squatters on the property of another, and the French would then have been all ejected from New France but for an unwise and ignorant settlement between the two large European landlords, called the Treaty of 1630. Subsequently the French were dispossessed, as we have elsewhere recorded, of patches of the large estate given to De Monts,—Nova Scotia in 1710, and Cape Breton in 1745,—mere strips, it is true, compared with that broad-sweeping tract around which they had carried chain and compass, and planted the boundary stakes of stockades and forts, but which touched their national pride at its very heart centre. [Illustration: JOLIET AND MARQUETTE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI. (p. 216) ]