The French in the Heart of AmericaFinley, John H. (John Huston)
History
The French in the Heart of America
Finley, John H. (John Huston)
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); French -- North America; Mississippi River Valley -- History
One wonders--if to little purpose--what would have been the consequence if
De Monts, whom Champlain accompanied to America in 1604, had planted his
little colony at some place farther south in his continental grant made by
Henry IV, stretching, as it did, all the way from what is now Philadelphia
to the St. Lawrence--if, for example, he had anchored off the Island of
Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years before Hudson came up
the harbor in the _Half Moon_, had settled there instead of on the sterile
island of Ste. Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand, the
sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the commissioners to fix the
boundaries between the United States and Canada discovered in 1793--nearly
two centuries later--the foundations of the "Habitation de l'isle Ste.
Croix" that the French had built in the gloom of the cedars. Or if, when
the scurvy-stricken colony left that barren site, they had followed
Champlain to the mouth of the Charles, la rivière du Guast--the site of
Cambridge or Boston--or even to the Bay St. Louis--which is remembered in
Champlain's journal as the place where the friendly Indians showed him
their fish-hooks made of barbed bone lashed to wood, but which has become
better known as Plymouth Bay where the Pilgrims landed fifteen years
later--there instead of Port Royal, where even Lescarbot's "Ordre de Bon-
Temps" could not overcome the evil reports in France concerning a
"churlish wilderness"! Or if Champlain, instead of seeking later the Rock
of Quebec--whose rugged charms he could not forget even in the presence of
the site of Boston or in the streets of Paris--had laid the foundations of
his faith and his courage on the Susquehanna, for example! In any one of
these contingencies there might have been a more prosperous Acadia. New
England might conceivably have become Nouvelle France, and New York City
might be bearing to-day the name of a seventeenth-century French prince.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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