se showed themselves very friendly," he says, "and in such wise
were we assured one of another, that we very familiarly began to
traffic for whatever they had, till they had nothing but their naked
bodies, for they gave us all whatsoever they had." These Indians
belonged undoubtedly to some branch of the Algonquin family occupying
all this region.

Cartier did not scruple to take advantage of their simplicity. At
Gaspe he set up a cross with the royal arms, the fleur-de-lys, carved
on it, and a legend meaning, "Long live the King of France!" He meant
this as a symbol of taking possession of the country for his master.
Yet, when the Indian chief asked him what this meant, he answered that
it was only a landmark for vessels that might come that way. Then he
lured some of the natives on board and succeeded in securing two young
men to be taken to France. This villainy accomplished, he sailed for
home in great glee, not doubting that the wide estuary whose mouth he
had entered was the opening of the long-sought passage to Cathay. In
France {56} his report excited wild enthusiasm. The way to the Indies
was open! France had found and France would control it!

Natural enough was this joyful feeling. The only water-route to the
East then in use was that around the Cape of Good Hope, and it
belonged, according to the absurd grant of Pope Alexander the Sixth, to
Portugal alone. Spain had opened another around the Horn, but kept the
fact carefully concealed. In short, the selfish policy of Spain and
Portugal was to shut all other nations out of trading with the regions
which they claimed as theirs; and these tyrants of the southern seas
were not slow in enforcing their claims. Spain, too, had ample means
at her disposal. She was the mightiest power in the world, and her
dominion on the ocean there was none to dispute. At that time Drake
and Hawkins and those other great English seamen who broke her
sea-power had not appeared. This condition of affairs compelled the
northern nations, the English, French, and Dutch, to seek a route
through high latitudes to the fabled wealth of the Indies. It led to
those innumerable attempts to find a northeast or a northwest passage
of which we have read elsewhere. (See, in "The World's Discoverers,"
{57} accounts of Frobisher, Davis, Barentz, and Hudson, and of
Nordenskjold, their triumphant successor.)

Now, Francis the First, the French monarch, a jealous rival of the
Spanis