e the French had laid the foundation of Quebec and New
France in the great valley, while Poutrincourt was struggling vainly to
make a new home for himself and family by the side of the river of Port
Royal.

[1] Now known as Douchet Island; no relics remain of the French
occupation.

[2] Champlain says the river was named after a little fish caught
there, _de grandeur d'un esplan_.

{67}

VI.

SAMUEL CHAMPLAIN IN THE VALLEY OF THE ST. LAWRENCE.

(1608-1635.)

When Samuel Champlain entered the St. Lawrence River for the second
time, in 1608, after his three years' explorations in Acadia, and laid
the foundation of the present city of Quebec, the only Europeans on the
Atlantic coast of America were a few Spaniards at St. Augustine, and a
few Englishmen at Jamestown. The first attempt of the English, under
the inspiration of the great Raleigh, to establish a colony in the fine
country to the north of Spanish Florida, then known as Virginia, is
only remembered for the mystery which must always surround the fate of
Virginia Dare and the little band of colonists who were left on the
island of Roanoke. Adventurous Englishmen, Gosnold, Pring, and
Weymouth, had even explored the coast of the present United States as
far as the Kennebec before the voyages of Champlain and Poutrincourt,
and the first is said to have given the name of Cape {68} Cod to the
point named Malebarre by the French. It was not, however, until 1607
that Captain Newport, representing the great company of Virginia, to
whom King James II. gave a charter covering the territory of an empire,
brought the first permanent English colony of one hundred persons up
the James River in Chesapeake Bay.

[Illustration: Champlain.]

From this time forward France and England became rivals in America. In
the first years of the seventeenth century were laid the foundations
not only of the Old Dominion of Virginia, which was in later times to
form so important a state among the American commonwealths, but also of
the New Dominion whose history may be said to commence on the shores of
Port Royal. But Acadia was not destined to be the great colony of
France--the centre of her imperial aspirations in America. The story
of the French in Acadia, from the days of De Monts and Poutrincourt,
until the beginning of the eighteenth century when it became an English
possession, is at most only a series of relatively unimportant episodes
in the history of that s