GEORGE WASHINGTON

GRADED SUPPLEMENTARY READING SERIES

BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES FROM
AMERICAN HISTORY

FOR THE FIFTH AND SIXTH GRADES

REQUIRED BY THE SYLLABUS FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
OF THE NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

BY
EDNA HENRY LEE TURPIN

AUTHOR OF “CLASSIC FABLES,” “STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY,”
“FAMOUS PAINTERS,” ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK
CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.

COPYRIGHT, 1907,
BY
CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.

PREFACE

“Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in the world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here,” says Carlyle. “The history of the world is the biography of great men.”

What the historian-philosopher esteemed the truest form of history is undoubtedly the form which appeals earliest and most strongly to the child mind. This fact has been recognized by educators, and biographical stories in the lower grades are wisely made the foundation for more comprehensive work in advanced grades.

The following biographies of men and women prominent in the making of American history are intended as an introduction to a topical study of the history of the United States. These biographies are prepared to meet the requirements of the New York State schools; the author has followed the plan outlined in the State Syllabus. She has in every case consulted the most recent and authoritative biographies, and has endeavored to make the narrative truthful and vivid.

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

This book contains all the biographical matter required for the fifth and sixth grades in the Elementary Syllabus of the New York State Education Department, and follows faithfully the outlines given.

The style is clear, easy, and concise, common words and short sentences being used.

The aim is to bring out, so far as the brief space will allow, those biographical and dramatic elements which make the strongest appeal to the pupil.

While no attempt is made to present a continuous history of our country, these biographies show its development from the time of discovery and exploration through the days of colonization and settlement to the present period of invention and industrial supremacy.

CONTENTS

BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES FROM
AMERICAN HISTORY

FOR THE FIFTH AND SIXTH GRADES

Leif the Lucky

From the northwestern coast of Europe projects the rock-ribbed Scandinavian peninsula. The scenery is grand and picturesque, but the soil is sterile and the climate severe. In this bleak, beautiful country and on the adjacent islands of the Baltic Sea, there lived, a thousand years ago, the people called the Norsemen or Northmen.

Their houses were usually long wooden structures a hundred or two hundred feet in length. Sometimes these houses were divided into several rooms, but often the dwelling consisted of only one large hall or living-room. On the floor of stone or hard-trampled earth, was kindled a fire, the smoke from which found its way upward and out through the crevices of the high-pitched roof. On three sides of the room were built beds,—shelf-like structures of boards, with skins for bedding and blankets.

The Norsemen did not even attempt to wrest a living from the reluctant soil. At home their days were given to hunting and fishing, their evenings to feasting in the hall. While they sat at table, the scalds, as their poets were called, sang or recited tales of battles, conquests, voyages,—the daring deeds of the vikings or sea-robbers and the sea-kings of their race. Thus in hunting, fishing, and feasting passed the winter.

When summer unlocked the storm- and ice-bound harbors, the Norsemen put forth in their ships. Their long-ships, or ships of war, were long, narrow vessels; on each side were benches for rowers and over the sides hung the shining shields of the Norsemen. Hundreds of these little vessels pushed off boldly from the shores of Scandinavia every summer. The Norsemen knew nothing of the mariner’s compass, and they directed their course on the pathless seas by means of the stars. This was a dangerous undertaking, and in stormy, foggy weather, many a boat lost its bearings and went down with all on board.

Fleets of the long-boats, however, braved the rough seas and sought distant lands—the coasts of England, France, Spain, Italy, even of Greece and Africa. What was their object? Plunder and always plunder. The fierce, merciless sea-soldiers descended on a land suddenly, like a thunder-cloud from the blue summer sky. They laid it waste; then, with stores of gold and silver, household goods and provisions, they sailed back home. Year after year, century after century, the Norsemen made these summer raids and were a terror to all the western and southern coasts of Europe.

But in the course of time, the character of the Norse invasions changed. The men did not sail forth alone for summer raids. Instead, men, women, and children went together and wintered on the coasts which they plundered. Sometimes they remained summer and winter and made the stolen lands their own. They were so strong and fierce in battle that few people could withstand them.

They overran the coasts of England, and it seemed as if they would take possession of the land. But a brave, wise king, Alfred the Great, defeated them on land, and built boats, the beginning of the English navy, to defend the coasts. Thus the Norse people in England became subjects instead of masters.

France, however, did not have an Alfred the Great. In the ninth century Rolf, a bold Norseman, established himself on the fair coastland of France. In course of time, the people there were called Normans instead of Norsemen, and the land they had seized was known as Normandy. These Normans, like their Norse ancestors, were fond of battle and conquest. One of them, Duke William, went to England, took possession of the land, and made himself King William.

The Norsemen went west as well as south, and in the ninth century, they settled in Iceland. Thence they pushed on to Greenland, where they established a colony. Farther west than Greenland it is said that they went, to the continent of America, hundreds of years before Columbus was born.

Here is the story as the Sagas, or old Scandinavian tales, tell it.

In 985, Bjarni, a merchant and ship-master who was traveling from Iceland to Greenland, was driven out of his course by a storm and foggy weather. “They were borne before the wind for many days, they knew not whither.” When at last calm and sunshine came, they reached a low wooded shore, probably Cape Cod. Leaving this land on the left, Bjarni sailed northward, with a favoring wind. Two days later, he again came near land, low and wooded. This is supposed to have been Nova Scotia. Again Bjarni turned from the coast which he felt sure was not the land that he sought, “because they told me,” he said, “that there are great mountains of ice in Greenland.” Three days later, he reached a rocky, snow-covered shore. He coasted along this till he found that it was an island,—probably Newfoundland,—and then again he turned away. A storm from the south drove him on his course and in four days he reached Greenland.

He told the story of his wanderings on the western seas, but he did not attempt to revisit the lands he had found. At last the tale came to the ears of Leif Eriksen, “a man strong and of great stature, of dignified aspect, wise and moderate in all things.”

Leif bought Bjarni’s ship and in 999 sailed forth with about twenty-five men to find the new land. He reached the snow-covered island—Newfoundland—which he called Helluland, “land of broad stones,” and he went ashore to see its “frozen heights and bare flat rocks.” Next he visited the “low wooded land of white sandy shore”—Nova Scotia—which he called “Markland, land of woods.” At last he reached the third promontory—Cape Cod,—the first which Bjarni had beheld; there he landed and passed the winter. From the wild grapes, then as now plentiful on the coast of Massachusetts Bay, the Norsemen gave the land the name “Vinland,” land of wine. The next spring they returned to Greenland, rescuing on the way a crew of shipwrecked men. From this time Leif was called “Leif the Lucky.”

Two years later Leif said to his brother Thorvald, “Go brother, take my ship to Vinland.” Thorvald with thirty men spent the winter in the dwellings Leif had erected two years before; the next summer they explored the surrounding country and wintered again in “Leif’s booths.” In the summer of 1004, the Norsemen coasted along the shore exploring the country. At one time when they landed, they were attacked by natives, supposed to be Esquimaux, whom they called Skrælings. In the skirmish Thorvald received a fatal wound from an arrow. His followers returned to “Leif’s booths” and in the summer of 1005 went back to Greenland; they gave an enthusiastic description of Vinland, with its vines, wild corn, fish, and game.

A few years later, Thorfinn Karlsefne and his wife Gudrid with three ships and one hundred and sixty persons made a voyage to Vinland. Gudrid’s son Snorri, the ancestor of the famous Danish sculptor Thorwaldsen, is said to have been born in Vinland. At the end of three years, the party returned to Greenland. After the death of her husband, Gudrid made a pilgrimage to Rome, where she described to the pope the fair new land in the west, the Christian settlement in “Vinland the Good.”

From Greenland, we are told, hunters and fishermen made frequent voyages to Vinland. They established settlements there and carried on a fur trade with the Indians. But in course of time, these posts were destroyed by the Indians, and the Norse settlements in Greenland itself were destroyed by war and plague. The western voyages and the memory of them ceased. Only the Scalds, trained to repeat family histories and tales of war and conquest, remembered and related the story of Vinland. In the course of time, these sagas, or stories, were written down, and centuries later men learned about the Norse colony, or “western planting,” in the New World.

Marco Polo
A Famous Traveler

You do not need to be told that the world as known to us to-day is very different from the world as it was known—or misknown—to the people of the thirteenth century. Two great inventions broadened the horizon of Europe; these were the mariner’s compass and the printing press. The mariner’s compass made it possible for men to strike boldly across unknown seas instead of clinging to familiar shores; the printing press spread books abroad and conveyed the knowledge of the few to the masses.

To-day, the steamship and the railway unite countries and destroy distance. Even the parts of the world where these do not penetrate, own, to a greater or less extent, the power of the great nations of the world. A citizen of the United States can cross the deserts of Africa or penetrate the wilds of Asia and be protected by his nation’s flag. There is hardly a place so secluded that some hardy traveler has not visited it, describing and picturing the country, people, and customs so as to make them known to all the world.

Very different was the state of affairs in the thirteenth century. The European who started east had an unblazed trail before him. He had to make his way on foot or on horseback, by sail or row boats, through mountain passes, trackless forests, and vast deserts, and across streams and seas. On the land, he encountered robbers; on the waters, pirates. Everywhere were people with unknown customs and strange languages. The chances were that the adventurous traveler, instead of returning home, would leave his bones to whiten foreign sands.

Yet one traveler encountered and passed through all these dangers, returned safe home, and dictated an account of his travels,—a true story, as wonderful as the tales of the “Arabian Nights.” Perhaps some day you will read the story of Marco Polo’s travels.

Marco Polo began life with three advantages; he was born in the thirteenth century, he was a Venetian, and he was a Polo. Venice, in the Middle Ages, was one of the commercial centers of the world. The great oceans were as yet uncrossed; the Italian cities sent forth merchant-vessels which brought across the Mediterranean the goods conveyed overland by caravans from the East,—the spices, gold, and jewels of Asia. Among the Venetian families made wealthy by commerce—the merchant-princes, as they were called—was the Polo family. About the middle of the thirteenth century, there were three Polo brothers engaged in commerce.

Two of these brothers went to the East, first to the Crimea and thence to Cathay, as China was then called. They were probably the first European travelers who reached China. They went to Cambaluc, or Peking, where they were graciously received by the great emperor, Kublai Khan. He was the grandson of Jenghiz, who had made himself master of northern China. The son and grandson of Jenghiz extended his conquests, so that the kingdom of Kublai Khan embraced China, northern Asia, Persia, Armenia, and parts of Asia Minor and Russia. Under this powerful ruler, the East was not only bound together in one vast empire, it was open to Europeans as it had never been before and has never been since. Kublai Khan welcomed the Polo brothers to his court, and they spent there several years. At last they returned to Venice, where Nicolo had left his wife; his son Marco, born the year of his departure, was now a youth of about eighteen.

The Polo brothers remained in Venice two years and then returned to Cathay. With them went Marco Polo, a brave, intelligent youth. They passed through the country around the sources of the river Oxus and crossed the plateau of Pamir and the great desert of Gobi. Much of this country had never before been visited by Europeans, and we have no record of its being revisited until a few years ago when the Orient was again to some extent opened to the world.

The Polos were welcomed back by Kublai Khan, who was at his winter residence, Cambaluc, where “are to be seen in wonderful abundance the precious stones, the pearls, the silks, and the diverse perfumes of the East.” Marco mastered the four languages most in use at court. The Khan, seeing that he was both intelligent and discreet, sent him on public business to Kara Korum, Cochin-China, India, and other parts of the great empire. When he returned, he was able to give the Khan information stored in his memory and his note books not only about the business of which he had charge but also about the manners, customs, and peculiarities of the peoples he had visited. He became a great favorite with the Khan and was, we are told, made governor of the great city of Yang-Chow.

At the end of fifteen years, the Polos desired to revisit their home, and the Khan consented on condition that they would return to Cathay. Some idea of the difficulty of the return journey may be gathered from the fact that it took twenty-six months. We are told that their kindred did not recognize the long-absent merchants. They gave a grand feast in oriental style; at the end they donned costumes suiting their rank and ripped apart their travel-worn garments, displaying dazzling wealth of rubies, sapphires, and other gems therein concealed.

The Polos had been at home only about three years when there arose war between Genoa and Venice, which were commercial rivals. The hostile fleets met in battle and the Venetians were defeated. Among the seven thousand prisoners was Marco Polo, who was an officer on one of the Venetian galleys. He was put in prison in Genoa and there he remained about a year. One of his fellow-prisoners was Rusticiano of Pisa, an author. The Pisan was much interested in the wonderful adventures of Polo and wrote them down from dictation.

The book consists practically of two parts. The first part, or prologue as it is called, relates the circumstances of the two Polos’ first visit to the Khan’s court, their second voyage accompanied by Marco, and their return home by way of the Indian Seas and of Persia. Polo informed the Europeans, who thought that eastern Asia ended in swamps and fog and darkness, that there was open sea east of Asia and that he, his father, and his uncle had sailed from the southeast coast of Cathay, or China, to the Persian Gulf. The second part of Polo’s “Travels” describes the different states and provinces of Asia, and the court and rule of Kublai Khan. Little is told of the traveler himself, but we gather that he was a brave, shrewd, and prudent man.

After Marco Polo’s release from prison in 1299, he seems to have returned to Venice, married, and lived quietly in his native city until his death in 1324.

“The Book of Marco Polo,” as Rusticiano of Pisa called his work, was read with much interest and was translated into many languages. For many centuries it was the only European description of the far East, written by an eye-witness. Polo was accused of falsehood and exaggeration, but as people learned more about the lands he described, they found that, in the main, he was right; he was truthful and accurate in describing what he had seen, but he was sometimes misled by the tales of others to whom he listened. In the prologue, Rusticiano says that he describes things seen by “Messer Marco Polo, a wise and noble citizen of Venice.... Some things indeed there be therein which he beheld not; but these he heard from men of credit and veracity, and we shall set down things seen as seen, and things heard as heard only, so that no jot of falsehood may mar the truth of our book and that all who shall read it or hear it read may put full faith in the truth of all its contents.”

Marco Polo was the first European traveler to make his way across the whole length of Asia, naming and describing the kingdoms which he visited. He was the first to describe the Pamir plateau, “the roof of the world,” the highest level country on the globe, the deserts and flowery plains of Persia, the wealth and size of China, the manners and customs of its people, and the splendid court of its emperor, the great Kublai Khan. He was the first to describe Tibet, and to tell of Burmah, Cochin-China, Siam, Japan, Java, Sumatra, Ceylon, and India, not merely as names but as places he had seen and known. He gave an account of the secluded Christian empire of Abyssinia, of the tropical luxuriance of the far-off islands, of the negroes and ivory of Zanzibar, of vast and distant Madagascar, of Siberia and the Arctic shores with their dog-sledges, white bears, and reindeer. In brief, he described Asia from Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, to Ceylon, from the Adriatic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, and to him Europe owes its first geographical knowledge of Asia.

In the time of Marco Polo, the Mongolian Empire was probably the largest in the world. He informed Europeans that in the East, which they thought inhabited by savage and ignorant people, was a wealthy and civilized kingdom, swarming with inhabitants and dotted with huge cities. He described the palaces and pleasure grounds of Cambaluc, or Peking, somewhat as they are to-day. He told how “black stones” were dug out of the earth and burnt for fuel, because they “burn better and cost less” than wood,—whereat Polo marveled. He told about the emperor’s granaries for wheat, barley, millet, and rice, about the wool, silk, hemp, spices, sugar, gold, and salt of the country. At first it seems strange that Polo did not mention tea, for hundreds of years the national drink of the Chinese, but we must remember that he was associated with the Tartar ruling classes and so was to a great extent ignorant of the manners and customs of the subject natives.

Cipangu or Cipango—that is, Japan—was made known to Europeans by Polo. He described it as “an island in the high seas,” and said that the sea around it was studded with thousands of islands rich in spices and perfumes. Cipango was the only country attacked by Kublai Khan which was able to resist his power. Its people were civilized and it was rich in gold and in wonderful pearls, white and rose-colored. Polo says “rubies are found on this island and in no other country in the world but this.”

He described India,—the scanty garments of the people and their magnificent jewels. He gave an interesting account of the diamond mines of Golconda, and of the cotton plant—more valuable even than those rich mines—from which fiber is obtained for clothing. He visited and described the places from which are obtained ginger, pepper, cinnamon, camphor, and other gums and spices.

Seilan, or Ceylon, was another place visited by Polo. He described the pearl fisheries there, much as they are to-day.

Christopher Columbus
The Great Admiral

With the name and deeds of Christopher Columbus you are already familiar. You will be interested in a brief sketch of the main facts of his life; some day, it is hoped, you will read the story as told at length by our great American author, Washington Irving.

Careful research has not been able to ascertain the exact year of Christopher Columbus’s birth. It was sometime about the middle of the fifteenth century, probably 1445 or 1446. His father was a wool-comber who lived in a village near the great Italian city of Genoa. Genoa was a rich commercial city,—the rival of Venice, as you learned in the story of Marco Polo.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Probably Columbus often visited Genoa in boyhood; he early showed his inclination for a seafaring life and became a sailor when he was about fifteen. Seafaring then was very different from what it is now. People knew little of the world beyond Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. Sailors were beginning to use the mariner’s compass, but old habits were still strong, and they did not often venture far from land. This was not only because they feared that they would lose their way and be unable to return home. They thought that around the known land and sea circled the Sea of Darkness, full of raging monsters and dangerous whirlpools. For centuries some geographers had reasoned that the world was round, but they never went to see if this were true. The majority of people believed that the earth was flat like a floor. Probably that was what Columbus believed in his youth.

We have little record of his early years. “Wherever ship has sailed,” he wrote later, “there have I journeyed.”

When he was about twenty-five years old, he married and settled in Lisbon. There he supported himself and his family by making the maps and charts, so necessary to sailors. He seems to have spent his leisure reading books of geography and travels, studying old papers and charts, and talking with seamen. One of his favorite books was the story of the old Venetian traveler, Polo; as Columbus read about the vast and wealthy country of Cathay and the island of Cipango with its houses roofed with gold, he longed to visit them.

As he pondered the matter, he became convinced that these eastern lands could be reached by sailing west. Old geographers described the earth as a sphere. Columbus was convinced that this was true. It never occurred to him that any land unknown to him lay between Europe and Asia. He thought that the earth was much smaller than it really is and that Asia was much larger. He believed that the sea which Marco Polo described as east of Asia extended eastward to the shores of western Europe. He thought it was about twenty-five hundred or three thousand miles from Spain to China. This was a great mistake. But Columbus was much nearer the truth than most men of the day—who thought the world flat with an edge over which there was danger of falling. And, unlike the old geographers, Columbus resolved to sail westward to prove the truth of his theory.

There was living in Florence at this time a learned old man, a scholar and student, named Toscanelli, who had said he believed that India could be reached by sailing west. Columbus wrote to this scholar in 1474, telling of his intention to attempt the voyage. Toscanelli sent him a chart which unfortunately has been lost and wrote, “I praise your desire to navigate toward the west; the expedition you wish to undertake is not easy, but the route from the west coast of Europe to the Spice Indies is certain, if the tracks I have marked be followed.”

Three years later Columbus made a voyage to Iceland. It has been suggested that he went there because he had heard sailors’ tales of the news carried to Rome by Gudrid of “Vinland the Good”—the western land discovered by Leif the Lucky. It is said that in Iceland Columbus met a learned bishop with whom he conversed in Latin about Greenland and Vinland. But these northern lands were not the ones sought by Columbus. He wanted to reach the southern coast, to visit the Cathay and Cipango of Marco Polo.

Soon after his return from Iceland, it is said that Columbus applied to his native city, Genoa, to fit out an expedition for a voyage of discovery. Meeting refusal there and at Venice, he turned to Portugal. The king of Portugal was not averse to undertaking the expedition but was unwilling to give Columbus the rank and rewards he demanded in case of success. The king secretly sent out an expedition to follow the route indicated by Columbus. But the faint-hearted captain returned after a brief cruise, saying he had seen no signs of land.

Indignant at this bad faith, Columbus took his little son Diego and set out in 1484 to present his project to the Spanish sovereigns. His brother Bartolomeo had gone to plead his cause with the king of England. Columbus reached Spain at an unfavorable time. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were engaged in a war against the Moors, which occupied their time and emptied their treasury. However, the matter was laid before a council of scholars who decided that the plan was vain and impracticable.

Seven years Columbus attended the Spanish court, hoping against hope that a decision would be made in his favor. Weary and disappointed, he at last turned away, in 1491, to lay his project before Charles VIII., King of France.

Footsore and dejected, he stopped one evening with his son Diego at the convent of La Rabida to beg a night’s lodging. There he told the prior about the plan on which his heart was set,—his longing to add the rich domains which he was certain lay to the west, to the kingdom of Spain, his desire to win the great Khan and his subjects to the Christian faith and extend the power of the Church. This ambition appealed to the devout prior. At midnight he mounted his mule and rode to the camp to see the queen and persuade her to give Columbus an interview. He was successful and Columbus returned to plead his own cause with the king and queen. The king regarded the project coldly and reminded the queen that war had emptied the royal treasury.

“I undertake the enterprise for my own crown of Castile,” exclaimed Isabella, “and will pledge my jewels to raise the necessary funds.”

Columbus was granted the rank and title of admiral over all lands he might discover and was promised one-tenth of all gold, gems, spices, and other merchandise from these lands. Leaving his son Diego as page to the young Prince John, Columbus set to work to fit out the expedition. It was difficult to secure seamen to venture on the unknown ocean. At last the required number was secured; some were forced into service, some taken from jails, some won by bounties in advance and promises of rewards later.

On Friday, August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from the port of Palos, Spain, with three little vessels. The Santa Maria was a decked ship, ninety feet long, carrying sixty-six men; the Nina and the Pinta, smaller than the Santa Maria, were boat-like vessels, carrying each about twenty-five men. Columbus had a letter from the King of Spain to the great Khan whose realm, Cathay, he expected to reach.

You have read the story of that wonderful voyage to seek an Old World which ended in the finding of a New. You can in fancy follow the course of Columbus day after day—his struggles with his timorous, ignorant, greedy, turbulent, mutinous crew,—his iron will, and determination to “sail on and on.” Day after day he set his will and courage against their stubborn fears. Like children, the sailors rejoiced at every good sign—birds, reeds, and boughs floating on the waters; and were depressed by every evil omen—calms and contrary winds.

At last one night there was seen the flickering light of a torch, and the next morning revealed the fair shore of a wooded island. As we shut our eyes, we can almost see the Spaniards landing on that October morning. Columbus, richly dressed in scarlet, went ashore, fell upon his knees, kissed the earth, and gave thanks to God. Then, drawing his sword and unfurling the royal banner, he took possession of the land in the name of the king and queen of Spain.

Eyeing the strangers were the natives,—naked, with straight, black hair, and swarthy skins daubed with paint. Columbus, who thought he had reached India, called these people Indians, the name they retain to this day. The island, which he called San Salvador, was one of the Bahamas. In search of gold, Columbus cruised about, touching one island after another, Cuba, Haiti, and others of the West Indies. These he thought were the “thousands of islands rich in spices” which Marco Polo said dotted the sea around Cipango. Cuba, Columbus at first thought was Cipango itself, but afterwards he concluded that it was the mainland of India. Out of the timbers of the Santa Maria, which was wrecked, a fort was built on Haiti, and here thirty-nine sailors were left.

From Haiti, Columbus set sail for Spain, and he reached the port of Palos on the fifteenth of March, 1493. Now indeed, his good fortune was at its height. He was received with almost royal honors. He was bidden to sit in the presence of the king and queen—an unheard-of honor in that formal court—while he described his voyage and displayed the plants and birds and natives he had brought back. Nothing, so thought he and his sovereigns, remained but to take possession of the spices, gems, and gold described by Marco Polo.

Another expedition was planned. Instead of having to seek adventures and criminals to fit out a crew, he had but to choose among the gentlemen and nobles who contended for the privilege of accompanying him. A fleet of seventeen ships and fifteen hundred men was fitted out. With this Columbus sailed away from Cadiz, September 25, 1493. The good fortune for which he had had to wait so many weary years did not long abide with him, and ere this voyage was over it had taken its flight. The colony established on Haiti had by cruelty provoked the Indians and had been destroyed. On this second voyage new islands were discovered,—Jamaica, Porto Rico, and others,—a second colony was established, and one exploring expedition after another was sent out in search of gold, of which small quantities were found. The turbulent, disappointed adventurers quarreled with Columbus, and his enemies at home were active against him. He landed at Cadiz, June 11, 1496, and laid his case before his sovereigns.

He was restored to royal favor, but it was two years before he could get another expedition fitted out, and then, May 30, 1498, only six vessels set sail. This time Columbus followed a southernly course and reached the mainland of South America, which was visited about this time by Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who wrote an account of his voyage. Later, a German geographer spoke of it as “Americi terra,” land discovered by Americus, and so the land came to be called America.

Columbus at first thought that he had reached another island; afterwards he decided that this was the coast of Asia and that the Orinoco was a river in the Garden of Eden. Making his way to the Indies, Columbus found the colony at Santo Domingo in disorder but unwilling to submit to his authority. Each side appealed to Spain, and Bobadilla was sent out to investigate and settle the matter. He listened to but one side—that against Columbus. With harshness uncalled-for, had he been guilty of the charges brought against him, Columbus was sent to Spain, a prisoner, and in chains. The officers of the ship would have removed his fetters, but he proudly forbade, saying that they had been put upon him by the agent of the king and queen and so by their authority.

“I will wear them until my sovereigns order them to be taken off, and I will preserve them afterwards as relics and memorials of the reward of my services,” he said.

This he did. His son Fernando “saw them always hanging in his cabinet, and he requested that when he died they might be buried with him.” The sight, the thought, of the great admiral brought in chains from the lands he had discovered turned all hearts to him with indignant pity. The queen, it is said, was moved to tears. Rewards and satisfaction were promised Columbus, and Bobadilla was deposed.

Another voyage Columbus was to make,—his fourth and last,—in search of a strait or passage by which he might reach Portuguese Asia. On May 9, 1502, he set sail with four ships and one hundred and fifty men. It was a voyage of “horror, peril, sickness, and starvation.” Columbus sailed along the Gulf of Mexico, coming pitifully near lands as rich in gold as the eastern ones which he sought. He missed them and found only savage tribes with a few rings and chains of gold. The story of these months is a sad one of famine, hardship, disease, tempest, mutiny, and quarrels with the natives. It was told in after years by Columbus’s brave young son Fernando, who accompanied him on this voyage. At last the admiral turned homeward and reached Seville in the autumn of 1504. While he lay ill, soon after his return, he received the sad news of the death of his good friend, Queen Isabella.

In vain during the months and years which followed did the admiral strive to win justice from the king. Old and worn out, he had, as he said, “no place to repair to except an inn, and often with nothing to pay for sustenance.” He died, May 20, 1506, thinking to the last that the land which he had discovered was a part of the Old World. The voyages of the great admiral did not end with his life. His body was moved from one tomb to another in Spain, then was carried to the Cathedral in Santo Domingo and, in 1796, to the Cathedral of Havana.

Seven years after his death, king Ferdinand erected in his honor a marble tomb, bearing this inscription, “To Castile and Leon Colon gave a new world.” But the New World slipped from the grasp of the Spaniards, unable to hold the rich prize. Other nations of Europe claimed and sought to share it, but the brave and hardy English overcame one after another of their rivals and established here the colonies which grew into our mighty commonwealth. The land which Columbus discovered is a nation richer and greater than the Cathay of which he dreamed.

Ferdinand De Soto
The Discoverer of the Mississippi River

In Spain and all Europe, men were willing and eager to cross the western ocean to learn more about the lands Columbus had found. The early discoverers and explorers thought that these West Indian islands were the East Indies, off the coast of Asia. They wished to reach the mainland and get the gold, gems, spices, and silks which Polo had told them were to be found there. Wealth, even beyond their dreams, the Spaniards found. Seeking Cathay, they reached Mexico and Peru, rich in mines of gold and silver. Our famous American historian Prescott, tells the story of the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards under Cortez and the conquest of Peru by the Spaniards under Pizarro. Like a fairy tale is the history of how a handful of men entered the unknown lands and made themselves masters of their wonderful treasures. It is a sad story too, of the greed and cruelty of the conquering white men, of the suffering and ruin of the gentle natives.

Some of the Spaniards, turning a little to the north, reached land on Easter Sunday which they call Pascua Florida, flowery Easter. In honor of the day the Spaniards gave to this land of flowers the name Florida, which was applied to all the country north of Mexico. All the flowers of that fair land, were not so charming to Spanish eyes as one ounce of gold, and for this they roamed the country far and wide. It was not gold, however, which Ponce de Leon sought. His hair was turning white and he listened with eager credulity to tales of a fountain whose waters would give perpetual youth. Landing on the coast of Florida in 1513, he wandered hither and thither in a vain search for this longed-for fountain. Instead of finding it, he received his death wound in a fight with Indians.

A few years later, Narvaez was made governor of Florida, and he came with a force of three hundred men to conquer it. His troops made their way through trackless swamps and forests and among hostile Indian tribes, across the peninsula to the Gulf. Here they constructed rude vessels in which to go to Cuba or Mexico. Through shipwreck, starvation, and disease, the four hundred were reduced to four men who after nine years of hardships and wanderings reached a Spanish settlement in Mexico. There one of them, De Vaca, met and talked with a young Spanish captain, Ferdinand De Soto.

Ferdinand, or Hernando, De Soto belonged to a Spanish family that was both poor and noble. As a youth, he attracted the attention of a gentleman of wealth who took charge of him and educated him. It was not, however, the patron’s wish that De Soto should marry his daughter; when he found that this was the young folks’ plan, in order to separate them he took De Soto on an expedition to the Isthmus of Darien. There De Soto distinguished himself by his courage and his daring coolness.

In 1528 he left the service of his patron and went on a journey of exploration, in search of the passage supposed to connect the ocean west of Spain with that east of Asia. Columbus, Cortez, and others had searched for this water-way which, as you and I know, does not exist. De Soto explored more than seven hundred miles of the coast of Guatemala and Yucatan. As he found no passage between the two oceans, he decided that there was none and gave up the search.

In 1532, De Soto with a band of horsemen joined Francisco Pizarro, the leader of the army which invaded and conquered Peru. He was nominally under the command of Pizarro but was really the master of his brave band of three hundred volunteer horsemen. Some historians say that the brave De Soto did more to secure victory than did the cruel Pizarro. At all events, the higher glory belongs to the young cavalry-man; he displayed more humanity in his dealings with the natives than any other Spanish leader and he endeavored to prevent the murder of the captive Inca, or emperor, of Peru.

The wealth wrested from the conquered Peruvians enriched the Spanish invaders. De Soto, who had landed in America with “nothing else of his own save his sword and shield” became master of a fortune of “an hundred and four score thousand ducats.” He returned to Spain and married Isabella, his patron’s daughter, from whom he had been separated about fifteen years. But he was not content to rest at home. The age’s spirit of adventure and love of wandering was in his veins. Remembering De Vaca’s tales about Florida, he persuaded the emperor Charles V. to appoint him governor of Cuba and to grant him the region of Florida to explore and conquer at his own expense. Adventurers flocked to join him, hoping that in the unexplored land of Florida they would find treasures to equal or surpass those of Mexico and Peru.

De Soto’s wife went with him as far as Cuba, and there he bade her farewell—a final farewell, as events proved—and in May, 1539, he set sail with five vessels for Florida. He landed at Tampa Bay on the west coast. From the first he encountered hardship and opposition. Florida was occupied by Indian tribes naturally fiercer and more warlike than the Mexicans and Peruvians; they had met with cruelty and outrage, the outrage and cruelty of the Spaniards under De Leon and Narvaez. Almost everywhere De Soto found ready-made foes, expert with war club and bow and arrow. For nearly four years he and his men wandered from place to place, through morasses and forests, seeking gold and treasure but finding them not. Disappointed in his search he grew bitter and merciless. “He was much given to the sport of slaying Indians,” says one old historian.

The exact route that De Soto followed is in many places hard to determine. He wandered through Florida and Georgia, probably into South Carolina and Tennessee, and perhaps as far as North Carolina,—then he turned southward and approached Mobile Bay. On this southward march was carried the Indian chief Tuscaloosa. At Mauvila, or Mabila, near Mobile Bay, a desperate battle took place in October, 1540, between Tuscaloosa’s warriors and the Spaniards. The Spaniards bought victory with the loss of eighty men and forty horses, which could ill be spared. They lost not only forces but hope.

From that time De Soto’s wanderings seem to have been animated by a dogged resolution not to return without honor and treasure. He learned that his men planned, as soon as they reached the Bay of Pensacola, then less than a hundred miles away, to give up the expedition. Swiftly he resolved that they should not reach Pensacola. Instead of going toward the coast and the ships containing supplies, he set his face to the wilderness and marched northward. “He determined to send no news of himself until he should have discovered a rich country,” says an old annalist.

“He was an inflexible man and dry of word,” wrote one who knew him, “who, although he liked to know what the others all thought and had to say, after he once said a thing he did not like to be opposed; and as he ever acted as he thought best, all bent to his will.... There was none who would say a thing to him after it became known that he had made up his mind.”

Traveling to the northwest, in May, 1541, he reached “a deep and very furious” river, so wide that “a man standing on the farther shore could not be told whether he was a man or not.” This was the Mississippi, the Father of Waters. The Spaniards made boats and crossed the river and continued their wanderings on the other side, going northward nearly to the Missouri River. Month after month they sought gold; at last they turned southward from the vain search. On the homeward journey, De Soto was taken ill. He faced death as fearlessly as he had met every foe before. He bade farewell to his men, thanked them for their loyalty and faith to him, and advised them as to the choice of a leader to take his place.

The Spaniards did not wish the Indians, to whom they had represented themselves as immortal, to know that death had overtaken their great captain. Therefore, in the dead of night they sunk his body in the Father of Waters, near the junction of the Mississippi and Red Rivers. After wandering about for several months, they constructed frail vessels and trusted themselves to the stream. They reached the mouth of the river and made their way along the coast until the remnant left by disease and warfare arrived at a Spanish settlement in Mexico.

John Cabot
The Discoverer of the Continent of North America

By virtue of the discovery of Columbus, Spain claimed all the land beyond the western ocean. The other countries of Europe, however, refused to recognize its claim to any land except that actually discovered, explored, and possessed. Kings, nations, private individuals even, sent out expeditions to discover and settle lands in the New World, hoping to find treasure and to reach Cathay and Cipango. We are particularly interested in John Cabot, whose discoveries gave England its first claim to the New World.

John Cabot was not, like Columbus, a writer as well as a discoverer; we know little about his life, and the accounts of his discoveries are meager and contradictory. Cabot was born about 1450, so he was a few years younger than Columbus. Like him, he was by birth a native of Genoa. Cabot, however, moved to Venice and became an adopted son of that City of the Sea. He was a good navigator and went East on trading ventures. Having an inquiring turn of mind, when he bought cargoes of spices he tried to learn something about the countries from which they came.

Like most master-navigators of the time, Cabot was a maker of maps and charts. He also believed that the world is round; he thought that Cathay and Cipango and “the spice lands” could be reached by sailing west. He tried in vain to secure the aid of Portugal or of Spain in fitting out an expedition to undertake the westward voyage. Columbus was one of many who were beginning to believe that the world was a sphere; he was bolder and more persistent than most of them, and had the good fortune to prove the truth of his theory.

About 1490 Cabot went to England “to follow the trade of merchandises” and to seek aid in his exploring projects. In 1496 he secured the countenance of Henry VII. of England, who granted John Cabot and his sons, Sebastian, Lewis, and Sanctius permission “for the discovery of new and unknown lands,” “upon their own proper cost and charges.” In return for his countenance the king was to receive one-fifth of all profits. Much uncertainty surrounds Cabot’s first voyage. It is now thought that his son Sebastian did not accompany him, as was long believed to be the case. Some say that Cabot had two ships, some say he had five, but an Italian acquaintance writing at the time says that he made his discovery with only “one little ship of Bristol and eighteen men.”

Cabot set sail from Bristol in May and returned in August. He sailed northwest, and it is supposed that the land which he reached was Labrador. From the time the Norsemen left “Vinland the Good,” Cabot was the first European to touch the mainland of North America. He sailed some distance along the coast of what he thought was “the land of the great Khan.” He saw no inhabitants, but observed that the sea swarmed with fish, and on his return he suggested that England should send fishermen thither instead of depending on the fisheries of Iceland. He noted, too, that “the tides are slack and do not flow as they do here,” that is, in England.

A few days after Cabot’s return, a Venetian who was in England wrote his family an account of the voyage. “His name is Zuan Cabot,” he said, “and he is styled the great Admiral. Vast honor is paid to him; he dresses in silk and the English run after him like mad people.” The Venetian went on to say that Cabot “planted on his New-found land” the flags of England and Venice.

The king was so pleased with Cabot’s first voyage of discovery that it was promised he should have fitted out for a second voyage a fleet of ten ships and to man it he was to have “all prisoners except traitors.” Some merchants of Bristol aided in fitting out the expedition. With these ten ships, Cabot wished to go on westward to the east, hoping to reach Cipango, “where he thinks all the spices of the world and also all the precious stones originate.”

From the time that this second expedition was planned we lose sight of John Cabot. Whether he returned safe or died on the voyage, we do not know. The English did not then attach enough importance to the western world to make records of Cabot’s voyages. They were disappointed at not finding gold and gems nor a direct passage to the East. To England in the early sixteenth century the new-found land was valuable only as a “cod fish coast.”

Sebastian Cabot, the son of the “great Admiral,” was, like his father, a chart-maker and navigator. He is said to have accompanied his father on one or both of his voyages, but there is no proof that he went on either.

The great object of Sebastian Cabot’s ambition was the discovery of a direct route to Asia. He undertook, under authority of the king of Spain, a westward expedition to reach the Pacific. On this voyage he discovered a great river which he named La Plata. Afterwards he returned to England and received from Edward VI. a pension for his services as Great Pilot. In 1553, he took part in the expedition to find a northeast passage to Asia; later, in search of a northwest passage, he sailed along the coast of America as far south, it is said, as Chesapeake Bay.

Sir Francis Drake
A Famous English Adventurer

The first expeditions which came to the New World were bent on discovery, exploration, conquest, and plunder. It was many years before any attempts at settlement were made. The Spaniards, as you know, kept a southernly course and reached the West Indies and the adjacent coasts of North and South America. They reached Mexico and Peru, and made themselves masters of silver, gold, and other treasures.

It never occurred to them that the natives had any rights to be regarded. The only right that they recognized was that of the strongest. Against their war horses and coats of mail and firearms, what were the reed spears and arrows of the natives? The Indians fell before the Spaniards like grain before the scythe.

To the conquered natives, life was a worse fate than death. With brutal cruelty they were driven to labor in the mines for their taskmasters. Ship after ship crossed the ocean, bearing to Spain the treasures taken from these mines, or stolen from the homes and temples of the living and the tombs of the dead.

But the Spaniards were not suffered to possess nor convey in peace their ill-gotten gains. The other nations of Europe took advantage of every pretext to spoil the spoiler. England was foremost in these attacks on Spain. The two countries were not at open war, but they were on unfriendly terms. The expeditions against Spain were undertaken by bold seamen who took as much delight in the damage inflicted on Spain as in the booty gained. They were not openly authorized by the English queen, but it was understood that they would be overlooked and that Elizabeth was not averse to receiving a share of the booty.

Among the freebooters most feared and hated by the Spaniards was Sir Francis Drake. This famous English seamen was born about 1540, in Devonshire, England. He was one of the twelve sons of a poor naval chaplain, and it is said that he was educated at the expense of Sir John Hawkins, a famous naval officer who was his kinsman. At the age of eighteen, Drake had become master of a ship that traded between England and France and Holland. This vessel he sold, “the narrow seas not being large enough for his aspiring mind,” and invested all his savings in Hawkins’s expedition to Mexico. This fleet was defeated by the Spaniards, and Drake, who behaved gallantly in action, lost his all. He “vowed the Spaniards should pay him with interest,” and shortly afterwards he made good his word.

In 1572 with three small ships, he attacked and plundered several Spanish settlements on the Isthmus of Panama and brought away as much silver, gold, and jewels, as he could carry. During this expedition, accompanied by eighteen Englishmen and thirty Indians, he made a journey across the Isthmus. From the top of a tree, he beheld the waters of the Pacific, and expressed his resolve to “sail once in an English ship on that sea.” After his return to England, he served four years in Ireland, but he did not forget either the western ocean or his resolve. Secretly encouraged by Queen Elizabeth, he undertook an expedition “to discomfort the Spanish as far as possible.”

A few days before Christmas in 1577, he set sail from Plymouth, intending to pass through the Straits of Magellan and make the circuit of the globe. Drake’s fleet consisted of five small vessels and a crew of a hundred and sixty-six men. In the end, two of these vessels were left on the coast of Brazil. As Drake passed the western coast of America he stopped to attack the Spanish settlements. We are told that his men “being weary, contented themselves with as many bars and wedges of gold as they could carry, burying above fifteen tons of silver in the sand and under old trees.”

In August, 1578, Drake entered the Straits of Magellan. Adverse currents and storms separated the three vessels and only the Golden Hind, originally called the Pelican, passed through to continue the course. Along the coasts of Chili and Peru the Englishmen sailed, plundering till they were weary of spoils. From one ship they got “a prodigious quantity of gold, silver, and jewels,”—“thirteen chests of coin, eighty pounds of gold, twenty-six tons of silver, besides jewels and plate.” The writers of the time who give an exact list of the captured treasures passed lightly over the natural objects and wonders of the New World. “They saw many strange birds, beasts, fishes, fruits, trees, and plants too tedious to mention,” says one.

Drake coasted along the western shore of America, trying to discover a passage to the Atlantic. He landed and claimed the country, which he called New Albion, for Queen Elizabeth and England. Turning from the severe cold of the northern seas, he sailed across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, stopping at Java and other islands. Resuming his voyage, he doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed along the coast of Africa.

In November, 1579, he re-entered the harbor of Plymouth, having made the circuit of the globe in two years and ten months. He was the first commander to take his ship around the world; Magellan, who had undertaken the same voyage, died on the route. Drake, “the master thief of the unknown world,” at once became a popular hero. He presented to the queen “great stores of silver, gold, and gems,” and received from her the honor of knighthood.

A few years later, war was openly declared between England and Spain. Drake was sent with a fleet to attack the Spanish colonies in America; he captured and plundered several settlements in the West Indies and in Florida, and burned the fort of St. Augustine. Sailing on north to Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke, he brought away the disheartened colonists. It is said that he carried back to England the potato and the tobacco, two plants contributed by the New World to the Old.

Drake reached England in 1586, and the next year he led a fleet to inflict injury on the great Spanish fleet, proudly called the Invincible Armada, which was being collected to invade England. He entered the harbor of Cadiz and burned about a hundred ships. This he called “singeing the beard of the king of Spain.” The Armada, delayed for a year by this mischance, was refitted and sailed to attack England. It is said that when the news of its approach was brought to Plymouth the commanders of the English fleet were playing bowls. Drake, who served as vice-admiral under Lord Howard, insisted on finishing the game, saying, “There is plenty of time to win the game and thrash the Spaniards, too!” The great Armada was defeated by the brave little English fleet, aided by tempests and contrary winds.

In 1589 Drake made an expedition to Portugal and a few years later he and Sir John Hawkins were sent with a fleet to attack the West Indies. He and his old commander could not agree on the plan of action, and their expedition was unsuccessful. Hawkins died at Porto Rico. A few weeks later, Drake died, “his death being supposed to be hastened by his unsuccessfulness in his voyage; his great spirit always accustomed to victory and success, not being able to bear the least check of fortune.”

Sir Walter Raleigh
The Father of American Colonization

You are not to suppose that the English claimed nothing of the New World except what they could plunder from Spain. They were, on the whole, willing to respect the rights of Spain to the West Indies and to the adjacent parts of the continent which Spaniards had discovered and settled.

More and more the English thought that it would be a good thing to have colonies in the New World to hold the land which they claimed by virtue of Cabot’s discoveries. Reasons for “western planting,” or establishing colonies in America, were given by Hakluyt, an Englishman of the sixteenth century. Among its advantages, he said, were these,—(1) the soil yields products needed for England, (2) the passage was so easy “it may be made twice in the year,” (3) “this enterprise may stay the Spanish king from flowing over all the face of that waste firm of America,” (4) it may enlarge the glory of God and “provide safe and sure place” for religious refugees, (5) poor men and those of evil life may there begin anew, (6) wandering beggars “may there be unladen.”

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

The “Father of American Colonization” was an English gentleman, a soldier, courtier, and author, Sir Walter Raleigh. He was born in 1552 in Devonshire, a fair coastland, the home of Drake and many other bold seamen. In Raleigh’s home were several children, an own brother and three half-brothers, the children of his mother by a former marriage. One of these half-brothers, thirteen years his senior, was Humphrey Gilbert who grew to be a brave and enterprising gentleman.

Walter Raleigh seems to have had little schooling in his youth. He chose war as his profession and spent several years fighting in France and the Netherlands. Meanwhile his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, obtained from Queen Elizabeth a grant of land for “planting and inhabiting certain northern parts of America which extended beyond the twenty-fifth degree of north latitude.” Raleigh returned to England and sailed with Gilbert in 1579 to Newfoundland; storms and perhaps an encounter with the Spanish forced them to return without landing.

Raleigh spent two years in Ireland, fighting to suppress the risings there, then returned to England and became a favorite at court. There is a pretty story of the way in which he was first brought to Queen Elizabeth’s notice and favor. It is said that one day the queen was walking with her attendants along the London streets, then rough and unpaved. She came to a mudhole, and hesitated for fear of soiling her shoes. Among the bystanders was Raleigh, a handsome, graceful, gentleman-soldier. He took off his new velvet mantle and spread it upon the ground so that the queen might pass dry-shod.

However he first won the queen’s notice, he had by 1583 become such a favorite that she was not willing for him to join Sir Humphrey Gilbert on a second expedition to Newfoundland. He contributed a large share of the expenses of this expedition, which was even more ill-fated than the former one. Sir Humphrey, it is true, reached Newfoundland and took possession of it, but on the return voyage the fleet was overtaken by storm, and two vessels, in one of which was Sir Humphrey, were lost.

These disasters did not destroy Sir Walter’s interest in discoveries. He got the queen to transfer to him the grant made to his half-brother, giving him for six years the privilege of sending out expeditions “to discover such remote barbarous lands as were not actually possessed by any Christian people,” and to take possession of them in the name of the queen.

Several expeditions were sent out under this grant, or patent, as it was called. The first, in 1584, consisted of two vessels under Captains Philip Amidas and Arthur Barlow. They reached the coast of North Carolina and cast anchor on the island of Roanoke, which they claimed in the queen’s name and for Sir Walter’s use. The name Virginia was given to this land in honor of Elizabeth, the virgin queen. No settlement was made at that time but the next year seven vessels under Sir Richard Grenville were sent out with about a hundred colonists. They entered Chesapeake Bay and James River and explored the country. Homesickness and hardships discouraged these colonists, and when Sir Francis Drake came to the settlement, after his expedition against the Spaniards in the West Indies, they embarked with him and returned to England. A few days after their departure, reinforcements and supplies sent by Raleigh reached the deserted colony.

About this time tobacco, introduced into England by Lane, Hawkins, or Drake, was brought into use by Sir Walter Raleigh. Tytler says, “There is a well-known tradition that Sir Walter first began to smoke it privately in his study, and his servant coming in as he was intent upon his book, seeing the smoke issuing from his mouth, threw all the liquor in his face by way of extinguishing the fire; and running down stairs alarmed the family with piercing cries that his master, before they could get up, would be burnt to ashes.”

In 1587 another colony of two hundred and fifty men under John White was sent by Sir Walter Raleigh. That summer a child was born to Eleanor Dare, John White’s daughter; this girl, the first English child born in America, received the name of Virginia Dare.

Fears of the Spanish invasion which threatened England kept Sir Walter for several years from sending aid to the colony. When at last ships reached Roanoke Island the colonists and all signs of them had disappeared; on a tree was found carved the word “Croatoan,” but what this meant no one ever knew.

Raleigh now gave up his patent to a company in London, from which he was to receive one-fifth of gold and silver found in the lands discovered. He gave up his colonizing plans in order to fight the Spaniards. The queen, however, would not consent to his going, as he wished, on the English expedition to seize the Spanish treasure-fleet. His place was taken by Sir Richard Grenville, the story of whose gallant death is told in Lord Tennyson’s ballad, “The Revenge.”

Later, Raleigh sent out an expedition to the interior of South America; he believed that in Guiana was situated El Dorado, a fabled land of gold and treasure. He himself on a later voyage went four hundred miles up the Orinoco River and brought back some gold and the first mahogany wood seen in England. He wrote an account of his “Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana.”

In 1603 James I. succeeded Elizabeth on the English throne, and from that time Raleigh was in disfavor. He was accused of treason; on the unproved charge he was condemned to death and was kept in prison about thirteen years with the sentence hanging over him. During this time he devoted himself to study and wrote his noble “History of the World.”

He was released in 1616 to lead an expedition to the Orinoco. There he had a skirmish with the Spaniards and brought back no treasure to appease the king for this attack on the enemy with which James was trying to keep on friendly terms. The old charge of treason was revived, and Sir Walter was beheaded in 1618, really as a sacrifice to gain the good will of Spain. “We have not such another head to be cut off,” said a bystander at the execution.

Captain John Smith

“Let him not boast who puts his armor on

As he who puts it off, the battle done,”

says an American poet. To the credit of John Smith—soldier, leader, reformer, discoverer, author—be it remembered that he never “talked big” till he had “acted big,”—that his deeds ever went before his words.

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

He was the first Englishman who wrote a book in the United States. His “True Relation of Virginia” was written in the intervals between tree-cutting, house-building, exploration, and adventure, and sent by the vessel which returned to England in June, 1608. Much doubt has been cast—Fiske and other historians assert that it has been unjustly cast—on Smith’s statements. In details—dates and figures—we may believe that the soldier-author was not always accurate. Had he misrepresented facts, or misstated essentials, however, we may be sure he would have been promptly and eagerly contradicted by the “gentlemen of rank” who were actors and eye-witnesses with him, and who never missed an opportunity to vent their jealous hate on plain John Smith who outshone them all.

John Smith was born in Lincolnshire, England, about 1580. As a child he longed for a life of adventure, and when he was thirteen he sold his school-books and planned to go to sea; however, he thought better of the matter and remained at home two years longer with his mother. After her death he went to the Continent and became a soldier. He served in France and in Holland and then drifted East to fight against the Turks. There, he tells us, he had wonderful adventures. During a siege he fought three Turkish soldiers, one after another, and killed them all. Later, he was taken prisoner and sold as a slave, but escaped. He made his way home, through Russia, Austria, Spain, and Morocco. When he reached England in 1605, he found an expedition being planned to settle the New World and he resolved to join it.

The first English expeditions to make settlements in America were sent out under the authority of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, and other individuals. Later on, the difficult and expensive work of colonization was undertaken by companies. These had regular trading agents and workmen, and expected rich profits from trade with the colonies. The colonies in the New World were encouraged by the sovereign, also, who regarded them as a check on the power of Spain to the south and on that of France to the north.

A band of about a hundred men sent out by the London Company, left England in December, 1606, in three little vessels, the Discovery, the Good Speed, and the Susan Constant. The party was led by Christopher Newport who had served under Raleigh and had himself captured Spanish treasure-ships. After a roundabout voyage by the West Indies, further delayed by contrary winds, in the spring of 1607 the colonists entered a noble bay. “The low shores were covered with flowers of divers colors; the goodly trees were in full foliage, and all nature seemed kind and benignant.”

The Englishmen called the capes on either side of the bay Cape Henry and Cape Charles, in honor of the king’s two sons; the river up which they sailed and the settlement they founded were named for King James. The landing at Jamestown was made May 13, 1607.

The band was ill fitted for the work before it. In it there were only a few workmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons, and many “gentlemen”—men “that never did know what a day’s work was,” and that came for adventure or in search of gold. There had been, it seems, jealous disputes on the way out, and John Smith had been put under arrest. After they landed, the settlers opened the sealed instructions given when they left England and found that Smith was appointed one of the directors of the colony; at first he was not allowed to take his place, but in course of time he became not only a director, but president, of the colony.

Some of the colonists busied themselves those spring days planting gardens as in England, and planting also cotton and orange trees, we are told. Others looked around for gold and set out to discover the Pacific Ocean, which they thought was near at hand. Unfortunately a malarial site had been chosen for the colony, and in the hot, wet summer, the men, unaccustomed to the climate, fell sick.

Their ill-health was increased by bad water and lack of food. By September half of the hundred colonists had died of famine and fever: there were not enough able-bodied men to bury the dead in decent fashion; the bodies were “trailed out of their cabins like dogs to be buried.” Fortunately the Indians did not choose this time for an attack; instead, they brought corn and game to trade for beads, bells, and other trinkets.

The Indians of this section were Algonquins, like those later encountered in Massachusetts, but these were stronger and more hostile. They attacked the white men, “creeping from the hills like bears, with their bows in their mouths.” They were repulsed, but for many years there was the fear and danger of them for the colonists.

The Jamestown colony, like many of the other early ones, was managed by a “common-store system.” All food and supplies raised or bought were put into a common store-house and dealt out in equal portions. All articles collected for export were put into a common store and sent back to England. There was no reward for individual effort, and many of the colonists shirked work or labored in a half-hearted fashion.

There was one man who was always ready to do his part and do it well. This was John Smith. He helped cut trees, and build cabins, and erect a log palisade around the settlement. He was liked and feared by the Indians from whom he secured corn needed by the colonists. He was a sober and upright man and endeavored to establish law and order in the colony. In order to check the use of bad language, he had account kept of the oaths uttered by each man and at night for each one a can of cold water was poured down his sleeve. Strict as he was, he was always just and reasonable; he set the example of working hard, and never required of others more than he was willing to perform himself.

His chief relaxation was an adventurous journey in boat or afoot through the country, of which he gave a glowing description. “Here are mountains, hills, plains,” he said, “and rivers and brooks all running most pleasantly into a fair bay, compassed but for the mouth, with fruitful and delightsome land.... The vesture of the earth in most places doth manifestly prove the nature of the soil to be lusty and very rich.”

On one of the expeditions, in December, 1607, into Powhatan’s country he and the men with him were captured. He was carried to the chief Powhatan—an old man who was “well beaten with many cold and stormy winters,” said Captain Smith. Captain Smith tells us that he was released at the request of the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas, just as he was about to be killed. This story has been doubted. Nothing is said about it in the “True Relation” sent from Virginia in 1608. But this book was brought out by the directors of the Company. It was not to their interest to publish an incident which showed that the settlers had the hostility of the great Indian chief. The Company wished the colony to be thought successful and prosperous so as to induce men to go out. Later, settlers found it impossible to inform their friends at home of their sufferings.

In 1608 came more colonists, including some women and children. In this year Captain Smith set out in an open boat and explored Chesapeake Bay, of which he made a map that remained the authoritative one for over a hundred years. Smith returned to Jamestown in September, and was elected president of the colony which was in sore straits, needing a firm and able man at its head. “You must obey this now for a law,” he said, “He that will not work shall not eat.” Under this rule disorder was suppressed and idlers were forced to labor. Smith’s prudence and wisdom saved the colony from ruin.

In 1609 five hundred new colonists came out, commanded by men hostile to Smith. He seems to have been in frequent conflict with them, and finally he returned to England to defend himself against their charges and to have treatment for a painful wound. After his departure, took place the terrible “Starving Time.” The colonists refused to work, they were attacked by the Indians, and laid waste by disease. By famine, fever, and war, the colonists in a few months were reduced in numbers from five hundred to sixty. They embarked to leave the scene of misery, but met a ship containing food and supplies and turned back. Thus near failure came the colony which laid the foundation of English civilization, and religious and civil liberty in America. After a time the common-store system was abolished and each man was given land to cultivate for himself; then “three men did more than thirty before.” In 1612 John Rolfe began the cultivation of tobacco and this became the currency of the colony, the source of its wealth and prosperity.

Captain Smith never revisited the Jamestown colony. In 1614 he came as “Admiral of New England” to explore North Virginia, as the northern part of America was called, and made a map of the country which he called New England. The next year Smith set out with the intention of planting a colony in New England. But he was taken prisoner by the French, and finally made his way back to England. There he spent quietly the sixteen years remaining to him. He wrote in 1616 a “Description of New England;” in 1624 he contributed a description of Virginia to a “General History of Virginia,” which was compiled at the request of the London Company. At the time of his death, in 1631, he was busy writing a “History of the Sea.”

Pocahontas
An Indian Princess

The white men who came to America naturally felt much interest in the new race of people which they called Indians. These were divided into tribes, differing in dialects, habits, and customs, but resembling one another in many respects. They lived, for the most part, in tents, called wigwams, made of skins or bushes. Their garments were usually made of the skins of buffaloes, deer, and other animals; they wore, also, beautiful mantels of feathers, strings of pearl, and ornaments of copper, silver, and gold. Their food was the game and fish obtained by the skill of the men, and the maize and beans raised in the fields tilled by the women and children. Their tools and weapons were made of sharp stones and of sticks hardened in the fire; the use of iron was unknown.

Powhatan was the chief of the strong and warlike tribes of Indians which the English colonists found dwelling on the banks of the River James. Powhatan had many children, one of whom, a daughter, called Pocahontas, was about twelve years old when the English settled in Jamestown. Captain Smith says that when he was a prisoner in one of her father’s wigwams she visited and made friends with him. When he was sentenced to death, he tells us that she interceded for him and that his life was spared at her request. According to Indian custom, the enemy whose life was thus granted became a son of the tribe; and Captain Smith lived for awhile with Powhatan’s tribe. In the course of time he was allowed to return to his countrymen at Jamestown.

There were few farmers among the English settlers and they had to learn to adapt their methods to the crops and climate of the new land. Their crops were scanty at first and they often suffered for food. In times of need, the Indian maiden, Pocahontas, more than once came to their relief, bringing food. She went, too, at night to warn the people of an intended Indian attack. No wonder the English called her “the dear and blessed Pocahontas.”

Powhatan seems to have been from the first suspicious of the white men; as time passed he came more and more to dislike and fear them. He had allowed them to settle on his land, thinking that they wanted it, Indian-fashion, for a season of hunting and fishing. But year after year passed and the white men remained in possession. Many died and some returned to England, but for every one that died or went away ten came. Powhatan would have liked to drive them away, but the Indians, with bows and war clubs, were no match for the white men, with guns and swords. Powhatan resolved to get guns and swords and make them fight against the white men. In one way and another, he got possession of many weapons,—some were bought with corn, some were stolen, some were taken from prisoners.

The matter became so serious that Captain Argall devised a plan to get back the weapons and also some prisoners taken by Powhatan. At this time, 1614, Pocahontas was visiting some friends who lived near the Potomac River. Captain Argall persuaded an Indian named Japazaws, and his wife, to entice Pocahontas on board his vessel. The Indian woman pretended that she wished to go on board to see the ship and her husband told her she could not go alone. To gratify her, Pocahontas agreed to accompany her. Captain Argall “secretly well rewarded Japazaws with a small copper kettle” and some other articles, which we are told he valued so highly that “doubtless he would have betrayed his own father for them.”

Pocahontas was carried to Jamestown, and messages were sent to her father that “Powhatan’s delight and darling” would be held prisoner until the English men and weapons were surrendered. “This news was unwelcome and troublesome unto him partly for the love he bore to his daughter and partly for the love he bore to our men, his prisoners ... and those swords and firearms of ours,” says an old historian. After three months delay, Powhatan sent seven men and some guns and offered these and a store of corn for his daughter’s release; the English, however, refused to release Pocahontas till all that they required was done.

Month after month passed. It was now eight years since Pocahontas, the child, had first seen English faces. She was a woman grown—gentle, generous, and noble of nature. John Rolfe, “a gentleman of approved behavior and honest carriage,” loved the Indian maiden and his love was returned. Pocahontas was baptized and given the Christian name of Rebecca. Then she and Rolfe were married in the church at Jamestown, April 5, 1614. “Ever since then,” says the historian Hamor, “we have had friendly commerce and trade, not only with Powhatan, but also with all his subjects round about us.”

About two years after Pocahontas and Rolfe were married they went to England, carrying with them their little son. John Smith wrote a letter to the queen telling how Pocahontas had saved his life and the colony and bespeaking for her the queen’s favor. She was received at court like a princess. “She did not only accustom herself to civility,” says a writer of the time, “but carried herself as the daughter of a king.” The Indian princess never returned to her native land. On the eve of her departure, she was taken ill and died in England, leaving one little son.

Miles Standish
A Pilgrim Leader

Early in the seventeenth century, James I. was king of England. He was a very self-willed man and was unwilling for his subjects to differ from him in religious or political matters. Naturally, all men were not willing to accept his opinions. Some were so unwilling to be dictated to by the king that they preferred to leave their homes in England and go where they could worship according to their own preferences. Some of these men, called Separatists because they had separated themselves from the established church of England, went in 1607 to Holland.

There they had full liberty in religious matters, but after a time they became dissatisfied.

The Dutch people were not strict enough in the observance of Sunday to please them, and their children were learning Dutch language and customs and would grow up to be Dutch men and women instead of English. These Separatists loved their native land and wanted their children to grow up English, but with their own religious views. Moreover, fighting between Spain and Holland was beginning again after ten years of peace and the Englishmen did not wish to become involved in this war.

So they resolved to go to the New World and establish a settlement there. They discussed many places before they decided where to go. They thought of Guiana which Raleigh had described as being fertile of soil and mild of climate, but they remembered his fights with the Spaniards and wished to avoid so troublesome a neighbor. There was the same objection to Florida, where a French colony had been destroyed by the Spaniards. They did not care to go to the English settlement at Jamestown, where the people were devoted to the Established Church of England and observed its forms even more strictly than people in England. They did not wish to go to the far north, for some Englishmen had already tried to settle in Maine and had come home with pitiful tales of their suffering during the severe winters. The Pilgrims, as these English religionists began to be called, from traveling about so much, at last decided to settle between Jamestown and Maine, about the coast of what is now New Jersey. They obtained a charter from the “North Virginia Company,” the Plymouth branch of the Virginia Company, which controlled from 41 to 45 degrees, giving them permission to settle in the southern part of North Virginia.

One hundred and two Pilgrims sailed in the Mayflower from Plymouth, England, in September, 1620. One of the men on board the Mayflower was Miles Standish, who was to be the soldier-savior of the northern English colony as John Smith was of the southern one.

Miles Standish was born about 1584 in England; he is said to have been the heir of a noble English family who was deprived of his rights. He entered the army and was sent by Queen Elizabeth to help the Dutch in their war against Spain. He was probably about nineteen or twenty then, and he seems to have remained in Holland after peace was made, and there he met the Pilgrims. His portraits represent him as a small man clad in leathern jacket and high boots, wearing a cartridge belt across his shoulder. He did not adopt the Pilgrims’ faith or ever become a member of their church, but he was a brave and faithful comrade.

The voyage was a long and stormy one. During it one member of the party died and was consigned to an ocean grave. Two months after leaving England, land was sighted, November 20, 1620. This land was a point marked Cape James on Captain Smith’s map; the name Cape Cod was given it later on account of the quantity of codfish caught there by Gosnold’s men in the expedition of 1602. Cape Cod was farther north than the Pilgrims had intended to go, and they sailed southward but were turned back by “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” and unfavorable winds.

The men met in the cabin of the Mayflower to discuss the situation. The shore they were approaching was not the land granted by their charter and therefore its laws did not apply there. They decided to establish their colony on the coast and they signed an agreement to obey such laws as they should make for their guidance. John Carver was chosen governor.

The Pilgrims made several trips ashore to get wood and water and to explore the country. Captain Standish led his party of sixteen soldiers, in warlike array, armed with muskets and swords; they had no need to use their weapons, as the only Indians they saw fled at their approach. The chief event of the expedition was finding some corn in a mound; they carried it to the ship and later, when they were informed to whom it belonged, they paid the owners for it.

Other expeditions were made along the coast and up the streams in a shallop, or small boat. Often the spray froze on their clothes and “made them many times like coats of iron.”

While the Pilgrims tarried on the coast a child was born, son of William White and they called him Peregrine from a Latin word meaning “pilgrim.”

After exploring the country for several weeks, the Pilgrims determined to settle at a place called on Captain Smith’s map Plymouth, which was the name of the city from which they had sailed. On December 21, 1620, the men landed on the great boulder known as Plymouth Rock. Their first work was to build a “Common House”; January 31, 1621, this was completed and the women and children landed. The Pilgrims were not molested by Indians, but cold and famine were enemies that almost destroyed them. During the winter most of the colonists were ill and more than half of the hundred died; of eighteen women, only four survived the winter. One of those who died was Captain Standish’s wife.

At one time only seven men—one of whom was Captain Standish—were able to work. These seven, says Bradford their historian, tended the sick, cooked, washed, and did all the work indoors and outdoors. Rude houses were built of logs, with thatched roofs and windows of oiled paper. A church was erected which had cannon on top of it, so that at need it might serve as a fort.

To keep the Indians from suspecting their weakness, the Pilgrims leveled the graves and in the spring planted corn over them. On the whole, the Indians were friendly. One day an Indian approached the settlement and “saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome.’” This was Samoset, “a tall straight man, the hair of his head black, long behind and short before and no beard. He was naked except for a strip of leather about his waist, which had a fringe a span long or more. He had a bow and two arrows, the one bended the other not.” Samoset had learned broken English from fishermen who came to the coast of Maine. With him came later Squanto, the only survivor of the tribe which had lived near Plymouth and which had been destroyed by plague. Squanto showed the English how to plant corn and to enrich the soil with fish. Another of the visitors was Massasoit, an Indian chief, who made a “treaty of friendship” which was kept fifty years.

In April the Mayflower returned to England, but despite the hardships and sufferings of that terrible winter, not one of the Pilgrims went back. They were busy making cabins, cultivating gardens and fields, getting fish and game for food, building up a home in the wilderness. They traded with the Indians for beaver skins, collected sassafras, and sent furs and lumber back to England, laboring to repay the money borrowed to defray their expenses. At first and for several years the Pilgrims, like the Jamestown settlers, labored together; they prospered more after the land was divided and each man worked for himself.

They had a prosperous season and good crops and in the fall they celebrated their harvest and the end of their first year in the new land by a feast,—the first Thanksgiving. Fish and wild fowl and game were cooked in the big fireplaces or on wood fires out of doors. Massasoit came with about ninety men, bringing five deer as his contribution to the feast. There was a military drill and a shooting match, and three days were spent in merry-making. Year after year the Pilgrims observed this festival, and it came at last to be a national holiday.

The Narragansett Indians were unfriendly and the Pilgrims had to be on their guard against them. At one time Canonicus, their chief, sent the settlers a rattlesnake skin filled with arrows as a declaration of war; it was sent back filled with powder and balls, in token that the white men were ready to defend themselves. A strong fence, or palisade, was built around the settlement. In many ways the Pilgrims lived like soldiers on duty. Sunday morning at beat of drum, people marched to church. Each man had his weapon near in case of Indian attack.

More than once Indians tried to kill Miles Standish, the brave and prudent little captain. One gigantic Indian, Pecksuot, ridiculed him because he was small; in a fight soon after Pecksuot was killed. “I see you are big enough to lay him on the ground,” said one of the Indians.

About 1623 Captain Standish married a second time, his wife being an English woman, the sister of his first wife. In “The Courtship of Miles Standish” Longfellow tells a romance—for so far as we know it had no foundation in fact—about the fiery little Captain’s unsuccessful wooing by proxy of a maiden named Priscilla Mullins. The poem gives a vivid picture of Captain Standish and of life in the New England colony.

In 1625 Captain Standish made a voyage to England on business for the colony, but he returned in a few months. He subdued the English settlers at Merrymount who were selling arms to the Indians, and were living idle, drunken lives.

In eight years the Plymouth colony had grown so that Elder Brewster, John Alden, and Miles Standish went one summer to Duxbury on the north side of the bay; Standish made his home there on a high hill called Captain’s Hill. His sword and musket were now laid aside and he was busy plowing and tending his farm, settling sites for mills, practicing his skill in medicine, and serving the public welfare in peaceful ways. The brave, honorable, helpful man died October 3, 1656, and was buried at his home on Captain’s Hill. For forty years he had been the leading spirit in every undertaking requiring courage and military skill.

“For Standish no work was too difficult or dangerous, none too humble or disagreeable. As captain and magistrate, as engineer and explorer, as interpreter and merchant, as a tender nurse in pestilence, a physician at all times, and as the Cincinnatus of his colony, he showed a wonderful versatility of talent and the highest nobility of character.”

John Winthrop
A Puritan Governor

After the death of King James, his son Charles became king. Like his father, he was bent on having his own way; as often happens, his stubbornness made those opposed to him more stubborn. The people refused to submit to his dictation, and many of those who differed from the king in matters of religion and politics came to America, where a new England was being built up. From 1628 to 1640 there were more emigrants from England to America than came during the whole of the century which followed.

In 1628 a company of men secured from the Council of New England a patent to a tract of land in Massachusetts between the Merrimac and Charles Rivers and extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean which was thought to be near the Hudson River. John Endicott was sent out that year with a small colony which settled at Salem, Massachusetts. He was a self-willed, blunt man and tried to regulate the affairs of the colony according to his ideas. He made laws against wearing wigs, for instance, and required women to wear veils to church.

GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP

The first winter was a hard one for the colonists and they were “forced to lengthen out their own food with acorns.” Like the Pilgrims, however, the Puritans, whose religious belief was similar to that of the Pilgrims, held fast their resolution and endured hardship rather than return to old England where they were not free to worship according to their own faith.

In March, 1629, a company of prominent and wealthy Puritans secured a charter from the king, giving them the right to make for their colony such laws as they pleased provided they were not contrary to the laws of England. Under this charter six ships came, bringing men, women, children, cattle, arms, and tools, to establish a Puritan commonwealth. One of the six ships was the Mayflower which had brought over the Pilgrims nine years before. The six-weeks voyage seemed “short and speedy” in those days, and the Puritans landed on a June day when the land was fair with summer. How unlike the wintry landing of the Pilgrims! In one year the Salem colony outnumbered the Plymouth colony which had been established nearly ten years.

The Puritans had obtained a charter from the king, but the question was would they be able to keep it? The king was as ready to break as to make a promise, and the Puritan leaders feared that he would call for and withdraw the much-prized charter. How could they keep it safe? At last they devised a plan. It was not stipulated where the Company should meet, so they resolved to move its headquarters and carry the charter to the New World. The Puritans took good care not to let the king know of this plan. The members who did not wish to leave England resigned, and in their places were elected men who were willing to emigrate to secure civil and religious privileges.

The king was much displeased when he learned that the Massachusetts Company and its charter had gone across the ocean, but just then nothing was done about the matter. Later on, an unsuccessful attempt was made to get the charter from the people.

The governor elected by the Massachusetts company was John Winthrop, one of the noblest men who aided in the making of New England. Winthrop was a gentleman by birth, gracious, gentle, and charitable in private life, intense—and sometimes intolerant—in his religious views. When he joined the “great emigration” of 1630, he was forty-one years of age, having been born the very year that the Spanish Armada was destroyed. With eight hundred men and the precious charter, Winthrop sailed to the New World. A few days were spent at Salem, and then it was decided to make a settlement at Charlestown. But the site proved unfortunate. There was much sickness the first summer, caused, it was thought, by impure drinking water.

Not far from the little settlement was what was called Shawmut peninsula; here lived a Mr. Blackstone who had come from England to lead a hermit’s life. He pitied the sufferings of his neighbors and countrymen, and invited them to come to Shawmut where the air and water were excellent. They came and found the situation so favorable that they bought land from Mr. Blackstone; in September they laid there the foundations of a city which they called Boston for the English city of Boston from which many of them came. Shawmut peninsula was called Trimountain Peninsula from its three hills.

Like the settlers at Plymouth, the Salem colonists were often in want of food during the first years. Until they could cultivate farms and raise crops, food had to be brought from England, for there was no farmers and no tradespeople in the New World from whom it could be obtained. The loss or delay of a ship bearing supplies meant want and suffering for the colonists. On one occasion, expected supplies failed to come to the Puritans and a fast day was appointed to pray for relief. As Governor Winthrop was dividing his last handful of meal with a needy neighbor, a ship laden with food entered the harbor. The devout people went to church to give thanks and changed the appointed fast to a feast.

Not all the people who had come to Massachusetts were willing to endure the hardships of the new life. About a hundred went back to England, but Governor Winthrop, with the more unselfish and zealous Puritans, remained.

Governor Winthrop endeavored to set the people an example of a sober and upright life. He became convinced that the drinking of healths at meals according to the English custom led to intemperance. He restrained it at his own table and thus became the leader of temperance reform in the New World.

One winter day he was informed that a poor man who lived near him was taking fuel from his woodpile. “Go call that man to me,” he said, “I’ll warrant I’ll cure him of stealing.” When the man came he said, “Friend, it is a severe winter and I doubt you are but meanly provided with wood; wherefore I would have you supply yourself at my woodpile till this cold season be over.” He then asked his friends whether he had not cured this man of stealing his wood.

Winthrop’s charity, however, did not extend to matters of religion. He wished to have those of unlike religious views “well whipt.” The Puritans had come to America to establish a colony which should be ruled according to their own views and faith. They did not tolerate in it men who differed from them in belief. “Let such go elsewhere,” they thought; “there is room enough.”

The Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Company encouraged colonists of their own faith to emigrate. By 1634 four thousand had come and about twenty villages had been founded on or near the bay. Houses, churches, and shops were built; farms were tilled; fur, lumber, and salt fish were sent to England and manufactured goods were brought back.

The laws of the Massachusetts colony were very strict. People were taxed to support the church, and only men who were church members were allowed to vote or to hold office as magistrates. Everyone was required to attend church services. If any one was absent without good reason the “tithing man” was sent after him. In church men sat on one side and women on the other; there was a man to keep order and he had a long stick with which to tap people who slept or children who fidgeted during the service which lasted two, or three, or even four hours. Children were whipped and grown people were fined if they talked in church.

A young clergyman of Salem, Roger Williams, of whom you will hear more later, thought that these laws were too strict. He thought people ought to enjoy civil and religious liberty, but Governor Winthrop advised him to leave the colony as no one with such views was wanted there.

Governor Winthrop spent much of his fortune in helping the colony he had founded and had the joy of seeing it grow and prosper. He died March 26, 1649.

In 1692 the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies were united under the name of Massachusetts, and thus was founded the colony which in time became the state of Massachusetts.

Roger Williams
An Advocate of Religious Liberty

You have learned that the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonists came to America to found colonies governed according to their own views. This was because they were convinced these views were right, not because they believed that every man should be free to worship as he pleased. Liberty of faith and worship, they thought, would destroy all law and order.

Roger Williams, however, believed in civil freedom and religious liberty. He was a clever young Welshman who had been educated as a clergyman and had adopted Baptist views. He and his wife came from England to America in 1631. For a while he was pastor of a church in Boston, but his views were so different from those of his congregation that he did not stay there long. He went to Salem, then to Plymouth, and then back to Salem. He had much influence and won many people to his views. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans began to dislike him and to fear his influence; there were long debates and discussions as to what should be done about him. They objected to both his political and his religious beliefs.

Roger Williams thought that the laws of a country should prevent and punish crime and should not direct religious matters; these, he urged, should be left to men’s own consciences. He said that every man should be free to believe what he chose, and that it was wrong to tax people to support a certain church or to compel them to attend it. He said that every man ought to be allowed to vote, and that for magistrates sensible, upright men ought to be chosen without regard to their church membership. These things were contrary to the belief of the Massachusetts Bay colony and to its practices.

Williams said, moreover, that the king of England had no right to grant lands in America to any one; these belonged to the Indians and should be secured from them. This assertion was regarded as a defiance of the king’s authority. Finally it was resolved to send Williams away from the colony, and in January, 1636, the General Court ordered him to come to Boston to get on a ship that was about to sail to England. Williams knew well that return to England meant imprisonment or punishment for his views. Instead of going to Boston, he left his home in Salem one bleak, snowy day and took refuge in the forest. From his first coming to the colony he had made friends with the Indians. Now he made his way to the wigwam of Massasoit, where he spent the winter, trying to teach the savages the truths of the Christian religion. For weeks he was “sorely tost in a bitter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.”

He then settled on Seekonk River and planted corn, thinking that he was beyond the bounds of the Plymouth colony. But he was still within its limits; in the spring Governor Winthrop informed him that he would be let alone if he would “steer his course” to Narragansett Bay.

With a few companions who had adopted his views, Williams crossed the bay in an Indian canoe, made a covenant of peace with the natives, and established a settlement which he called Providence. This colony became a place of refuge for people oppressed on account of their religious views. “I desired it might be a shelter for persons distressed for conscience,” said Williams. It was to be free to “Baptists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks,” he said, “to all men of all nations and countries.”

Among the people who took refuge there was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. She was a woman preacher, claiming to have the spirit of prophecy, who had been driven out from the Massachusetts colony. After some peaceful years in Rhode Island, she moved westward to a settlement of her own. Here she, her children, and servants were murdered by Indians.

Roger Williams refused to persecute Quakers who were very unpopular in all the other colonies. The religious liberty enjoyed in this colony seems to us to-day, when it is the general custom, entirely right and reasonable, but it seemed very strange and unreasonable to people at that time. Among the people of different religious views who took refuge in Rhode Island, there was a great deal of arguing and quarreling. It was said “any man who had lost his religion would be sure to find it again at some village in Rhode Island.”

In 1643, Williams went to England and secured a charter for his colony. It was called “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” and it is to be remembered as the first colony which by its laws secured entire religious toleration. The Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies so disapproved of the principles on which it was founded that they would not unite with it in joint action. But the Rhode Island colony was a great safeguard and protection to them. It was the influence and friendship of Roger Williams which kept the fierce Narragansetts from taking up arms against the white men at a time when it would have been dangerous and perhaps fatal to the struggling young colonies.

The exact date of Roger Williams’ death is uncertain. He is said to have lived to the age of eighty-four, devoting himself to the interests of his colony, which he lived to see prosperous and flourishing.

Henry Hudson

As time passed, people became convinced that the land which Columbus had reached was not the shore of Asia as they had at first thought. For more than a hundred years, however, they thought that it was only a narrow body of land and that a passage, or many passages, would be found connecting the Atlantic with the ocean to the west and opening a direct route to India. It was not strange that they held this theory. The early explorers had reached the land at its narrowest part and beheld from the Isthmus of Panama the great western ocean. They did not know that the unexplored land broadened into great continents to the north and south.

As years passed, people became more and more anxious to find a short passage to India. The Turks controlled and blocked the overland passage to Asia. The ocean route by way of Africa was long and roundabout; for the Dutch this had also the disadvantage of making it necessary for their ships to pass and repass their enemy Spain and their trade-rival Portugal. The Dutch had, by long and desperate fighting, freed themselves from Spanish control and they had become the great sea-traders of the world.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century they had about three thousand vessels on the seas—more than all the rest of Europe combined. Most of these were under control of the Dutch East India Company, the largest and richest trading association in the world. They traveled the long ocean route south of Africa and brought back tea, coffee, spices, silks, and dye-woods from Asia. If only they could find a direct way to Asia how their profits would be increased! Early in the seventeenth century they heard of a sailor in England who had been to seek this direct route and they engaged him to make a voyage for them. This sailor was Henry Hudson.

When and where he was born and what were the events of his early life, we do not know. He was an Englishman by birth, a brave, energetic man by nature, a navigator by profession. We first hear of him in 1607, four days before he started on a voyage for some London merchants, to seek a northeast passage to India. He had a small vessel with only ten men, besides himself and his little son John who accompanied him on all his voyages. Hudson left London in April, 1607. He sailed along the coast of Greenland and was at last turned back by the ice barrier between Greenland and Spitzbergen. He made two interesting observations in these unknown seas—first, the changing color of the sea near Spitzbergen,—green, blue, dark, transparent,—second, the great number of whales which afterwards were the source of a profitable industry. Unable to carry out his purpose, he returned to England after an absence of four and a half months.

In April of the next year, 1608, the London merchants sent him out again to seek the northeast passage. He reached Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla and vainly endeavored to find a passage through the ice; in August he returned from his unsuccessful voyage. The London merchants now gave up the scheme—at least for the time.

But the Dutch heard of Hudson and asked him to make a voyage for them. He agreed to undertake for the Dutch East India Company a third voyage in search of a northeast passage to India. He set out in April, 1609, with two vessels, the Half Moon and the Good Hope, and a crew of about twenty men, some Dutch, some English. As before he sailed to the northeast, and as before his passage was blocked by ice. The Good Hope returned to Amsterdam, it is supposed, after a mutiny near Nova Zembla.

But Hudson and the Half Moon did not return. Having for the third time failed to find the northeast passage he sought, he resolved to look for one to the northwest. This was probably suggested to him by a letter and maps which his friend Captain John Smith had sent him. Smith expressed the opinion that north of the English colony, Virginia, there was a sea which led into the Western Ocean. Sailing past Greenland, Newfoundland, and Cape Cod, Hudson reached the coast of Virginia, and entered the Delaware River.

Turning northward he kept near the shore till he observed an opening in the land, New York Bay, which he entered. This bay had been entered before. Verrazano, an Italian sailor in command of a French ship, had sailed in and out of it. French vessels had afterwards traded there, but had made no settlements.

Into this bay emptied a river which Hudson thought might connect the eastern and the western ocean; up this river he sailed about a hundred and fifty miles, as far as the present site of Albany; then he turned back, being convinced that the stream did not afford the passage he sought. He spent a month exploring this river, to which his name was given. The land was “pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees.” It was, he said, “good ground for corn and other garden herbs, with great store of goodly oaks.” The natives, he said, were a “sensible and warlike people.” He carried on trade with the Indians who brought tobacco, maize, beans, grapes, pumpkins, and skins, to exchange for knives, beads, and trinkets. There arose disputes and in a fight one white man and several Indians were killed.

On Hudson’s way back to Holland, he stopped in England to leave some English sailors; there he was detained, being ordered by the English government to “stay and serve his own country.” His charts and records were delivered to the Dutch who laid claim to the country he had found, calling the Delaware the “South River,” and the Hudson the “Great North River,” and the country between “New Netherlands.”

In April, 1610, Hudson sailed on his fourth and last voyage, to seek for English merchants the northwest passage. His little vessel the Discovery entered the strait and bay which bear his name, and he spent three months exploring the coast. In November the vessel was frozen in and the crew spent the winter on the northern sea, suffering from scarcity of food as well as from the severe climate. When summer came, Hudson wished to continue his search. He believed that men should, to use his own words, resolve “To achieve what they have undertaken, or else to give reason wherefore it will not be.”

His crew wished to return home and mutinied against him. One midsummer day, they seized him, his son, and seven loyal seamen, and set them adrift in a boat. The little craft floated off on the summer sea and nothing more was ever heard of it or of a soul on board. An old Dutch legend says that Hudson and his men came safe to shore and made their home in the fair land he had discovered. Years later, when thunder rumbled in the heights along the Hudson River, the old Dutch folks would shake their heads and say, “Hendrik Hudson and his crew are playing ninepins.”

Peter Minuit

A Dutch West India Company was organized on the same plan as the rich and powerful Dutch East India Company. The western company was to trade on the coast of Africa and of America from Newfoundland to Magellan. For convenience in this trade, forts and posts were established where agents were stationed to carry on trade and collect furs. A fort and trading-post was established on Manhattan Island. There was gradually built up a village; this became a town and finally grew to be a city. At first it was called New Amsterdam; now it is the wealthy and populous city of New York.

The first directors who were sent to New Amsterdam by the Dutch Company lacked either ability or character to govern the settlement well. At last, however, the Company found the right man for the place. This was Peter Minuit. He was not a Dutchman. He was French by descent and German by birth; his early manhood had been spent in Germany.

He was appointed director of the council of New Amsterdam and came to Manhattan in May, 1626. His ship brought seeds, plants, and tools, for he realized that on agriculture as well as on commerce depended the success of the colony. He wished to establish it on a foundation of justice. His first act was to summon the Indian chiefs of the neighborhood and to buy from them the island of Manhattan. Gay-colored cloth, beads, knives, and hatchets were displayed, and for goods to the value of twenty-four dollars the Dutch bought the island of Manhattan and bought also the good will of the Iroquois. Thus the settlement was spared, for the most part, the horrors of Indian warfare which wasted most of the other colonies. Before Penn came to America, the Dutch leader, Minuit, treated the Indians in fair and humane fashion. We are not to think that the Indians were defrauded by the small sum paid for Manhattan. To them it was a mere hands-breadth of their vast possessions, a place to hunt deer and turkey and build wigwams and till cornfields.

Minuit tried to establish friendly relations with the English colonies north of him and sent courteous letters and presents of sugar and Dutch cheese to Governor Bradford of Plymouth.

Minuit looked after the welfare of the colony and also after the interests of the Company. A flourishing fur trade was carried on with the Indians; a large vessel was built and sent to Holland loaded with furs—beaver, otter, mink, and bear—and with oak and hickory timber. Furs were the money of this settlement, as tobacco was of Virginia, and they were used in the payment of salaries and debts. The Indian money, wampum, was also used in the commerce of the colonies, six pieces of wampum being equal to one stiver, a small Dutch coin worth about two cents. Bouweries, or farms, occupied the meadows along East River; grain was grown, and sheep, cattle, and hogs were raised. The thrifty Dutch people lived in comfort and plenty.

The colony prospered under Minuit’s management, but his rule came to an end on account of trouble with the “patroons.” These patroons were large land-owners along the Hudson. In order to get the colony settled, the Dutch Company granted land fronting sixteen miles on the river and extending back to the Atlantic or to the Pacific to persons who would establish settlements of at least fifty persons within four years. These patroons had almost absolute power over the settlers on their land; the only restrictions on their privileges and trade were that they were forbidden to make cloth, in order to protect Dutch manufacturers, or to trade in furs, which was the especial privilege of the Company.

The patroons, however, encroached on the Company’s fur trade, and Peter Minuit excited their enmity by endeavoring to protect the rights of the Company which he represented. On the other hand, the Company thought that he did not check and control the patroons as he should. Between the two he was recalled. He returned to Holland in the spring of 1632, having really established the colony of New Amsterdam which he governed for six years.

Failing to get his wrongs redressed by the Dutch West India Company, Minuit offered his services to Sweden to establish a colony in the New World. This plan had already been suggested by William Usselinx, a Dutch merchant who had projected the Dutch West India Company in 1621. Minuit carried out the plan. He and his friends in Holland bore half the expense of fitting out an expedition to found a Swedish-Dutch Company.

Owing to Minuit’s illness, the vessels did not sail till late in 1637. They reached the shores of the Delaware in March, 1638, and took possession of the west bank of the river. Minuit had little regard for the claims of territory made by nations whose wandering ships had touched the coast and sailed away again. In his opinion the land belonged to those who purchased it from the Indian inhabitants and settled there and cultivated the soil. As at Manhattan, he met the Indian chiefs and formed a treaty never broken by either party. The Indians of Delaware, like those farther north, belonged to the great Iroquois Confederacy or Five Nations.

Minuit took possession of the country in the name of the young queen of Sweden and built a fort called Christina in her honor. He cultivated friendly relations with the English at Jamestown and with the Dutch trading-posts on the east bank of the Delaware. A thriving fur trade was established with the friendly Indians and soon the Dutch West India Company complained that their trade was greatly injured by Minuit’s colony. The governor of New Netherlands wrote a letter of protest against the Swedes occupying this land, but during the three years that Minuit remained in charge the Dutch confined their protests to words.

After doing his utmost to establish the colony in peace, strength, and safety, Minuit left it on a trading expedition. He sailed to the West Indies to barter for tobacco to carry back to Old Sweden. While he was guest on a Dutch vessel in the harbor a violent hurricane came up, the ship was driven to sea and was never heard of more. Thus perished the first governor of New Sweden, the real founder of New Amsterdam.

Peter Stuyvesant
The Last Dutch Governor of New York

Van Twiller succeeded Minuit as governor of the New Netherlands. He proved incompetent and was replaced by Kieft, who by cruelty and injustice provoked the Indians to war. Kieft so mismanaged affairs that in three years the population of the New Netherlands was reduced from three thousand to one thousand.

In 1647 Peter Stuyvesant was appointed governor. He was the son of a Dutch clergyman, but, being fond of fighting and adventure, he had chosen war as his profession. He took part in several of the battles by which the Dutch gained mastery over the Spaniards at sea. At one time he undertook to conquer the Spanish island of St. Martin and lost a leg in the fight. He was called “Old Silver Leg,” because his lost limb had been replaced by a wooden stump, ornamented with bands of silver. He was also called “Headstrong Peter,” a title which he well deserved.

PETER STUYVESANT

The Dutch West India Company thought that this brave, fearless soldier would be the very man to control their troublesome colony on the Hudson. So he was appointed and came to the colony in May, 1647, with a fleet of four vessels. He told the people, “I shall be in my government as a father over his children”—a very severe and stern parent he proved.

A strong man was needed to save the colony from ruin. Enemies threatened it on all sides.

In the first place, there were the Indians whom Kieft had provoked to war. Stuyvesant stopped the sale of intoxicating liquors to them; while stern, he was so just and honest and fearless that he won their respect and they made and kept peace with him.

In the second place, the encroachments of the New Englanders were a constant source of annoyance. The Dutch claimed all the land between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers by right of Hudson’s discoveries, and valued it as a field for fur trade. “The land is too good to stand idle,” said the English, and occupied it with their farms and villages. The Dutch protested and asserted their claims, but in vain. The English farmers continued to occupy the land, and more and more came in conflict with the Dutch.

Stuyvesant decided that a fixed line—even one which yielded some territory claimed by the Dutch—was better than an unfixed one constantly advanced by the English. In 1650, therefore, he made an agreement, surrendering the land already held by the English—which the Dutch could not have regained—and establishing a fixed line beyond which the English agreed not to advance. Stuyvesant acted wisely in the matter, but the West India Company was dissatisfied, thinking that he ought not to have surrendered the Dutch claims.

In 1652 New Amsterdam was granted a charter as a city. It had then about three hundred houses and fifteen hundred inhabitants. The city was to have a council, but, instead of allowing the people to elect the members, Stuyvesant appointed them and he presided at all meetings of importance. The sturdy Dutchman was resolved that his will should be the law of the colony. The people assembled in convention and asked, among other things, that they might appoint local officers. Stuyvesant ordered them to disperse, informing them “his authority was from the West India Company and from God and not from ignorant subjects.”

In the course of time there arose trouble between the Dutch colonists and the Swedes who had settled along the Delaware on land claimed by the Dutch. Finally, a Swedish captain took possession of a Dutch fort. Stuyvesant, with a force of six or seven hundred men and seventeen ships, set forth to uphold his country’s rights. He went to the Delaware, or South River, retook the forts, and compelled the Swedes to swear allegiance to the Netherlands. A Dutch garrison was put in charge of the fort and thus ended Swedish rule on the Delaware.

While absent on this expedition, Stuyvesant received evil tidings from Manhattan. An Indian woman had been killed by a Dutchman for stealing peaches from his garden. To revenge this injury, the Indians during the absence of the fighting men on the Delaware attacked and burned the settlement, killed some of the hated whites, and carried off others as prisoners. Stuyvesant made ready to march against the Indians, but did not do so as they requested terms of peace and returned their prisoners. Later, the Indians made another attack and Stuyvesant promptly punished them by force of arms.

Under the just, firm rule of the despotic, high-tempered governor, the colony of New Netherlands flourished. Farms were cleared and tended, villages were formed, trade flourished, and immigration increased. But the end of Dutch rule on the Hudson was at hand. In 1664 Charles II., king of England, granted to his brother James, Duke of York, the entire territory claimed and occupied by the Dutch, which he asserted belonged to England. England and Holland were then at peace, but the Duke of York did not hesitate to bring on war. He fitted out four war-ships with four hundred and fifty soldiers and sent them to America under command of Colonel Nicolls. The Dutch were informed that the vessels were going to the colonies in New England. Instead, they sailed to New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant had neither powder nor provisions for a siege, and his soldiers wished to accept English terms. Nicolls informed the council that none of the people’s rights would be interfered with—only the flag and the governor would be changed. Brave sturdy old Stuyvesant tore up the letter offering these terms and wished to fight for the rights of the Company he represented. But the council, soldiers, and citizens would not support him, and he had to yield.

“I had rather be carried to my grave,” he said, as he ordered the surrender.

He went to Holland to prove that he had done his best to uphold the Company’s rights. Having done this, he returned to his home in the New World. He led a quiet, comfortable life in his fine old country home—in what is now the business heart of New York City,—and in the course of time, he and Governor Nicolls became great friends.

The Dutch resented the English seizure of their colony and declared war against England. When peace was made, it was agreed that each nation should keep what it had won. Holland had won the most victories and so gained most territory by this agreement; but the city of New Amsterdam and the colony of New Netherlands—both of which were called New York in honor of their new ruler—remained in English hands. The Dutch inhabitants were secured in their rights and privileges, according to Colonel Nicolls’ promise, and they went on their sober, hard-working way. From them the English, in time, borrowed many Dutch customs and festivals,—such as that of having Easter eggs and of celebrating Christmas with the visit of St. Nicholas or Santa Claus.

Samuel de Champlain
The Father of New France

For years the Portuguese and the Spanish shared between them the trading-posts and commerce of the world. Portugal controlled the ocean route to Asia, and Spain by virtue of her early discoveries and explorations laid claim to the whole of the New World. But as time passed this state of affairs was changed. In the Old World, the Dutch became the successful rivals of the Portuguese; in the New, Spain had to contend with France, England, Holland, and Sweden, all of which were seeking a share of the prize.

For a long time France was the chief rival with which Spain had to reckon. Verrazano, a Florentine sailor, was sent from France in command of four vessels to seek the longed-for westward route to Cathay. Left at last with one ship, he reached in 1524 the coast of North Carolina, “a new land never before seen of any man, ancient or modern,”—for in the opinion of the Europeans the natives counted not at all. Verrazano sailed along the coast, into the Bay of New York and out again, and along the coast of New England to Newfoundland. Provisions giving out, he returned to France and gave the first description of the coast of the United States.

In the wake of Verrazano, followed other Frenchmen. One of these was Jacques Cartier. In 1534 he came to the coast of Newfoundland and sailed up the St. Lawrence River, hoping to find through it an outlet to Cathay. On a second voyage, he entered and named the Bay of St. Lawrence and ascended the great river as far as Montreal. A third voyage he made in 1541, for the purpose of establishing a colony. But a severe winter and much sickness and suffering discouraged the colonists, and the next year they left New France for Old.

Years passed. Civil and religious wars laid France waste, and many earnest men began to look to the New World for an asylum from the Old. A band of French Protestants led by John Ribaut left their native shores to make their home in America. Instead of sailing northward, they landed in 1562 on the shores of Florida, which was the territory of Catholic Spain. The colony was attacked by the Spaniards under Menendez, and men, women, and children were killed. This terrible slaughter was avenged by the French under De Gourges, but the tide of French colonization was turned from the southern coast.

Five years after this massacre, there was born Samuel de Champlain, who won the title of the “Father of New France.” His father was a French ship captain; he himself was trained in the art of navigation and became a captain in the royal navy. “Navigation is the art which has powerfully attracted me ever since my boyhood and has led me to expose myself almost all my life to the impetuous bufferings of the sea,” he said.

Chaplain served awhile in the army; when peace came his adventurous spirit led him to the West Indies. This was Spanish territory and the Frenchman went thither at the risk of his life. He spent two years in America. To him it seemed, as it had seemed to some Spanish and Portuguese officials, that it would be a good plan to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. Champlain wrote, “If the four leagues of land which there are from Panama to the (Chagres) river were cut through, one might pass from the south sea to the ocean on the other side and thus shorten the route by more than fifteen hundred leagues; and from Panama to the Strait of Magellan would be an island and from Panama to the New-found lands would be another island, so that the whole of America would be in two islands.”

Always on his voyages Champlain kept a diary and made maps of the lands he visited. When he returned to France, he gave the king a minute account of the colonies and treasure of Spain. It was shame to France, he thought, that on the New World, discovered more than a century before, only their enemies had a foothold.

A French nobleman who was planning to found a colony in America decided that this enterprising young sailor-soldier would be the man to lead the undertaking. Champlain entered into the plan with enthusiasm. In 1603 he set out to reconnoiter the new land, following the route of Cartier. He sailed up the St. Lawrence River, to the present site of Montreal. During the next four years he made five voyages to the New World, exploring the coast from New England northward. He led a band of colonists who after a winter of hardship and sickness returned in 1607 to France. But Champlain was not discouraged. He was resolved to extend the power of France and of the Catholic religion in the new land, to penetrate the unknown wilds, and to seek a route to the East. He was appointed Lieutenant-governor of the French colony, an office which he held until his death, and came to America in 1608 to establish a settlement on the St. Lawrence River. In July the colonists landed and erected a store-house, the beginning of the city of Quebec.

Five discontented men in the party formed a plot to kill Champlain and turn the fortress over to the Spaniards. One of the men, however, betrayed the plot; the conspirators were arrested, the ringleader was hanged, and the others were sent prisoners to France. The winter of 1609 found the French colony one of three in the New World. At Jamestown, in Virginia, were the English; at St. Augustine, in Florida, were the Spaniards; and far to the north at Quebec in Canada, were the French. No one could then guess which nation would finally become supreme, though the chances seemed in favor of the Spaniards.

The first winter at Quebec was one of hardship and sickness, and when spring opened only eight of the twenty-eight Frenchmen were alive. In 1609 Champlain, ever ready for adventure, accompanied some Algonquins and other Indians on an expedition against their enemies the Iroquois, the Five Nations. He wished to see “a large lake, filled with beautiful islands, and with a fine country surrounding it” of which he had been told. He reached the beautiful lake, which now bears his name; on its banks his firearms turned the battle against the Iroquois and begun the long warfare in which the French were opposed to this great confederation of tribes. The very day that Champlain brought on his nation the enmity of this deadly foe, a little Dutch vessel, the Half Moon, was anchored on the New England coast. A few weeks later it entered the Hudson River,—bearing a crew of English and Dutch—the two peoples who were to be allies of the foe which the Frenchmen made that day and to turn the tide of battle against France.

From 1609 till his death, the time of Champlain was divided between New and Old France. Exploring, fighting, establishing trading-posts, he was busy building up the young colony and developing its resources. In 1620 his young wife, whom he had married ten years before when she was a mere child, came for the first time to Quebec. After four years of hardship, she returned to France and did not again revisit the New World.

The French colony grew and prospered. It was on friendly terms with its Indian neighbors with whom it carried on a flourishing fur trade. Furs were the currency and wealth of the French colony, as of the Dutch colony on Manhattan. The French exported every year to France from fifteen to twenty thousand skins; the Dutch at Manhattan thought business good when they shipped four thousand.

In 1628 the French colony was reduced to sore straits from scarcity of food. This was increased by the English capture of the ships bringing supplies. Winter passed and with spring the suffering increased. “We ate our peas by count,” says Champlain. His heart was wrung by the sufferings of the people, especially of the women and children. “Nevertheless,” he says, “I was patient, having always good courage,—and can say with truth that I aided every one to the utmost that was in my power.” In this extremity in 1629 Quebec was attacked by English war-ships and was forced to surrender.

Champlain was detained awhile as prisoner in England. Afterwards New France was by treaty restored to France and Champlain returned to Quebec where he died Christmas Day, 1635. “Of the pioneers of the North American forests his name stands foremost on the lists,” says Parkman.

Robert de la Salle
The Explorer of the Mississippi River

The Spanish adventurer, De Soto, in his march westward in 1541, was the first white man who reached the Mississippi River. Year after year passed and the Spaniards did not occupy the land along its shores. Instead, they settled the islands and shores to the south and sought silver and gold in Mexico and Peru. While the Spaniards were occupying southern regions, the French were taking possession of northern lands, penetrating inland along the St. Lawrence River.

The French traders and missionaries who went westward heard stories of a mighty river not far distant, which flowed to the sea. In the spring of 1673 two Frenchmen set out in birch canoes to find and explore this river, hoping thus to reach the Pacific Ocean. These Frenchmen were Louis Joliet, an explorer in search of the passage to the Pacific, and Father Marquette, a priest familiar with Indian dialects, who wished to reach the savages of the wilderness. Joliet and Marquette went up the St. Lawrence and through the Great Lakes. They were guided by two Indian boys to the Wisconsin River down which they floated in their canoes. After several days the explorers landed at a settlement of the friendly Indian tribe, the Illinois. The peace pipe was smoked and a banquet was served of Indian meal made into mush, boiled fish, baked dog, and buffalo meat. Again embarking, the adventurers sailed on till they reached the place where the Missouri empties into the Mississippi.

The Indian guides informed them that they could ascend the river and going westward reach a prairie across which their canoes could be carried; then they could embark on a river which flowed southwest into a lake; from this issued a river which flowed into the western sea. The Frenchmen did not follow the course thus pointed out and it was many years before the truth of the statement was verified. But if you look on a map you see the Missouri can be ascended to the Platte River, the source of which is near the Colorado River which flows into the Gulf of California.

The Frenchmen sailed down the Mississippi as far as the mouth of the Arkansas River. They were convinced that the stream entered the Gulf of Mexico and they did not care to encounter the hostile Spaniards or the warlike Indian tribes which they were told dwelt on the banks of the lower Mississippi. So they turned back, going up the Illinois River and passing the marshy prairie which is now the site of the great city of Chicago. After a journey of more than twenty-five hundred miles, they reached in September the mission at Green Bay.

Robert de la Salle, a gentleman of Normandy, was in Canada when Marquette and Joliet returned from their voyage. He was much interested in their discoveries and he determined to go from the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi. He wished to take possession of the land in the name of the king of France to whom it was considered that the whole valley of the great river belonged by virtue of the discoveries of Marquette and Joliet; he wished also to establish military and trading posts along the lakes and the river; he hoped that he would find a passage to the Pacific Ocean. The king gave his consent and aid to the plan.

La Salle established a fort on Lake Ontario. Not far from Niagara Falls, he built a vessel which he called the Griffin. This sailed through Lakes Erie and Huron and Michigan and then was sent back richly laden with furs. Unfortunately, it was wrecked on the return voyage with all on board. In the winter of 1680, La Salle returned to the fort on Lake Ontario to get supplies. In August, 1680, La Salle’s party, consisting of twenty-three Frenchmen and thirty-one Indians, set out in birch canoes to explore the Mississippi. Delayed by storms and tempests and Indian wars, the voyagers did not reach the mouth of the Chicago River until January, 1682. The canoes were dragged on sledges down the frozen Chicago River. When they reached the Mississippi, they were detained by the masses of ice on its waters.

As soon as possible the Frenchmen embarked and sailed down the river, stopping to get corn and information from Indian tribes on their way and to give religious instruction. They slept in the wigwams of the savages and won their hearts by just and kind treatment.

They sailed down the mighty river till they came in sight of the open sea. On the ninth of April, 1682, La Salle in the name of King Louis of France took possession of the land which he called Louisiana. The French flag was raised over the valley of the Mississippi—a territory three times as large as France. The return voyage was made in safety, though it was delayed by hostile Indians, want of food and the illness of La Salle. He did not reach Quebec till the autumn of 1683.