ng proof that the
river he had entered was in truth the Mississippi.[292] After pushing up
the stream till the twenty-fourth, he returned to the ships by way of
lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain.

Iberville now repaired to the harbor of Biloxi, on the coast of the
present State of Mississippi. Here he built a small stockade fort, where
he left eighty men, under the Sieur de Sauvolle, to hold the country for
Louis XIV.; and this done, he sailed for France. Thus the first
foundations of Louisiana were laid in Mississippi.

Bienville, whom his brother had left at Biloxi as second in command, was
sent by Sauvolle on an exploring expedition up the Mississippi with five
men in two canoes. At the bend of the river now called English
Turn,--_Tour a l'Anglais_,--below the site of New Orleans, he found an
English corvette of ten guns, having, as passengers, a number of French
Protestant families taken on board from the Carolinas, with the
intention of settling on the Mississippi. The commander, Captain Louis
Bank, declared that his vessel was one of three sent from London by a
company formed jointly of Englishmen and Huguenot refugees for the
purpose of founding a colony.[293] Though not quite sure that they were
upon the Mississippi, they were on their way up the stream to join a
party of Englishmen said to be among the Chickasaws, with whom they were
trading for Indian slaves. Bienville assured Bank that he was not upon
the Mississippi, but on another river belonging to King Louis, who had a
strong fort there and several settlements. "The too-credulous
Englishman," says a French writer, "believed these inventions and turned
back."[294] First, however, a French engineer in the service of Bank
contrived to have an interview with Bienville, and gave him a petition
to the King of France, signed by four hundred Huguenots who had taken
refuge in the Carolinas after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The
petitioners begged that they might have leave to settle in Louisiana,
with liberty of conscience, under the French Crown. In due time they
got their answer. The King replied, through the minister, Ponchartrain,
that he had not expelled heretics from France in order that they should
set up a republic in America.[295] Thus, by the bigotry that had been
the bane of Canada and of France herself, Louis XIV. threw away the
opportunity of establishing a firm and healthy colony at the mouth of
the Mississippi.

So threatening was the dan