istian
burial and repose in consecrated ground were denied to the remains of
the self-murderer. There is positive evidence, too, in a codicil to
the will of Menendez, dated at Santander on the fifteenth of September,
1574, that he was on that day seriously ill, though, as the instrument
declares, "of sound mind." There is reason, then, to believe that this
pious cut-throat died a natural death, crowned with honors, and soothed
by the consolations of his religion.

It was he who crushed French Protestantism in America. To plant
religious freedom on this western soil was not the mission of France. It
was for her to rear in northern forests the banner of absolutism and of
Rome; while among the rocks of Massachusetts England and Calvin fronted
her in dogged opposition, long before the ice-crusted pines of Plymouth
had listened to the rugged psalmody of the Puritan, the solitudes of
Western New York and the stern wilderness of Lake Huron were trodden by
the iron heel of the soldier and the sandalled foot of the Franciscan
friar. France was the true pioneer of the Great West. They who bore the
fleur-de-lis were always in the van, patient, daring, indomitable.
And foremost on this bright roll of forest chivalry stands the
half-forgotten name of Samuel de Champlain.

Part 2

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN AND HIS ASSOCIATES;

WITH A VIEW OF EARLIER FRENCH ADVENTURE IN AMERICA, AND THE LEGENDS OF
THE NORTHERN COASTS.

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN.

CHAPTER I.

1488-1543.

EARLY FRENCH ADVENTURE IN NORTH AMERICA.

When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France
on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized.
While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot
with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and
a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and
gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first
learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.

A French writer, however, advances a more ambitious claim. In the
year 1488, four years before the first voyage of Columbus, America, he
maintains, was found by Frenchmen. Cousin, a navigator of Dieppe, being
at sea off the African coast, was forced westward, it is said, by winds
and currents to within sight of an unknown shore, where he presently
descried the mouth of a great river. On board his ship was one Pinzon,
whose conduct became so