Leaving out of consideration the early coasting voyages, in which the Dutch had no part whatever, they had recently been preceded to within a reasonable distance of both the mouth and the source of the Hudson. The English had made a detailed discovery as far as the entrance of the Sound, while Champlain was within a few miles of the source of the river some months before the Dutch ascended it. If rights of discovery were to be limited only to the points actually visited, with no extension thence in any direction, the country would have become a veritable checker-board of warring nationalities. The Dutch themselves held no such view, and claimed all the land from Cape Cod to Delaware Bay, with indefinite limits toward the interior. Acknowledgment of any such claim would have to be based upon a theory of extension which would seem, therefore, equally to validate the claims of English and French, arising in both cases from discovery prior to the Dutch. When, owing to the annulling of De Monts's patent, the French colony at Port Royal had been temporarily abandoned in 1607, de Poutrincourt, who still retained his rights, intended to return speedily, and to continue his settlement. Various delays, however, kept him in France for three years, and it was not until the spring of 1610 that he again set sail. The houses and their contents, untouched by the friendly Indians, were found intact, and life at the little colony, which had thus been merely interrupted, was resumed. In the following year, a certain Captain Plastrier, who had been fishing near the Kennebec, complained to the Sieur de Biencourt, Poutrincourt's son, that he had been attacked and robbed by English, who claimed title to the coast.[121] These may have been Captain Williams and his party, who were annually sent out by Francis Popham, or Captains Harlow and Hobson, who were on the coast, in 1611, on a voyage of discovery and Indian-kidnaping, for the Earl of Southampton.[122] Thus obscurely, off the New England coast, between a French fisherman and English seamen, whose very names are unknown to us, began that duel for empire between France and England, which was to last a century and a half, and which was to decide the fate of the vast continent of North America and the teeming millions of India. Clive and Dupleix, Wolfe and Montcalm, were the successors of these humble pioneers striving to assert the claims of their rival nations to the empire of the world. Footnote 121: Brown, _Genesis_, p. 534. Footnote 122: The accounts of the latter voyage are slight. John Smith, in a page, gives us all we know, and says nothing of Plastrier. _Works_ (ed. Arber, Glasgow, 1910), vol. II, p. 696. Purchas had a full account, which he did not print and which is now lost. _Pilgrimes_, vol. XIX, p. 296.