cept in enforcing the mandates of
arbitrary power and the withering maxim that the labor of the colonist
was due, not to himself, but to his masters. It remains to trace briefly
the results of such conditions.

The before-mentioned scheme of Remonville for settling the Mississippi
country had no result. In the next year the gallant Le Moyne
d'Iberville--who has been called the Cid, or, more fitly, the Jean Bart,
of Canada--offered to carry out the schemes of La Salle and plant a
colony in Louisiana.[289] One thing had become clear,--France must act
at once, or lose the Mississippi. Already there was a movement in London
to seize upon it, under a grant to two noblemen. Iberville's offer was
accepted; he was ordered to build a fort at the mouth of the great
river, and leave a garrison to hold it.[290] He sailed with two
frigates, the "Badine" and the "Marin," and towards the end of January,
1699, reached Pensacola. Here he found two Spanish ships, which would
not let him enter the harbor. Spain, no less than England, was bent on
making good her claim to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and the
two ships had come from Vera Cruz on this errand. Three hundred men had
been landed, and a stockade fort was already built. Iberville left the
Spaniards undisturbed and unchallenged, and felt his way westward along
the coasts of Alabama and Mississippi, exploring and sounding as he
went. At the beginning of March his boats were caught in a strong muddy
current of fresh water, and he saw that he had reached the object of his
search, the "fatal river" of the unfortunate La Salle. He entered it,
encamped, on the night of the third, twelve leagues above its mouth,
climbed a solitary tree, and could see nothing but broad flats of bushes
and canebrakes.[291]

Still pushing upward against the current, he reached in eleven days a
village of the Bayagoula Indians, where he found the chief attired in a
blue capote, which was probably put on in honor of the white strangers,
and which, as the wearer declared, had been given him by Henri de Tonty,
on his descent of the Mississippi in search of La Salle, thirteen years
before. Young Le Moyne de Bienville, who accompanied his brother
Iberville in a canoe, brought him, some time after, a letter from Tonty
which the writer had left in the hands of another chief, to be
delivered to La Salle in case of his arrival, and which Bienville had
bought for a hatchet. Iberville welcomed it as convinci