It is well to have the atlas open at the map of North America when we discuss these colonies. We shall see thereon a name Pennsylvania, which tells us of the pilgrims led out by the Quaker, Penn. Maryland, we should note, which is called after the Catholic queen, was resorted to largely by the Catholics. New England was the centre of Puritan migration. There was a religious reason, in the first instance, for many of the settlements in America. We have seen before how glad men were to be quit of those of an alien religion from their midst; and also how glad those aliens were to go. Montreal, on its first settlement, in 1542, was a Catholic establishment. The Jesuits were pressing out to the farthest West in this quarter of the globe, converting the Red Indians, as they also pressed eastward about the same time to India, China, and to Japan. But Montreal had to become a military and an industrial settlement too. All the early settlers, whatever interpretation they put on the Bible, had to carry the sword, as well as the Cross, with them. They had, in truth, scant semblance of right in their complaint that the Indians were always ready to turn and massacre them. Were they not expelling the Indians, who had done them no manner of harm, out of their own homes? The French, in these early days, explored and claimed possession of an immense territory in North America. We may trace it all along both sides of the gulf and the river of St. Lawrence, and westward to {103} the Great Lakes. Southward we may trace it along wide lands watered by the Ohio, and down the Mississippi until we come out at New Orleans. Mobile, at the river's mouth, was even earlier settled by the French. All this, from the Great Lakes southward, lay westward and inland of the English settlement along the coast. But the limits of the territories claimed were not very clearly drawn; at first it was only by a fort here and there, and not by any continuous settlement, that possession of the vast lands was claimed and partially made good by the white men. The upper Mississippi was explored before the end of the century, and some settlement had been made of the Canadian north-west. [Sidenote: Settlements in the East] Progress, as ever, was more slow in the East. It was in 1652 that the Dutch colonised the Cape of Good Hope. Amongst those Dutch colonists, and of the same reformed religion, were a number of the Huguenots from France. In 1661 the English colonised the Gold Coast, on the west of Africa, where the Portuguese had previously been in possession, and in the same year Portugal ceded to the English Crown what soon proved to be of the greatest importance to England in the East, the province of Bombay in India. So saying, we have to understand that the hold of any of the western nations on India was almost confined to the coasts and to the ports. It did not go far into the country.