shed maidens, marked the track of the tornado. There was little
room for schemes of foreign enterprise. Yet, far aloof from siege and
battle, the fishermen of the western ports still plied their craft
on the Banks of Newfoundland. Humanity, morality, decency, might be
forgotten, but codfish must still be had for the use of the faithful in
Lent and on fast days. Still the wandering Esquimaux saw the Norman and
Breton sails hovering around some lonely headland, or anchored in fleets
in the harbor of St. John; and still, through salt spray and driving
mist, the fishermen dragged up the riches of the sea.

In January and February, 1545, about two vessels a day sailed from
French ports for Newfoundland. In 1565, Pedro Menendez complains that
the French "rule despotically" in those parts. In 1578, there were a
hundred and fifty French fishing-vessels there, besides two hundred of
other nations, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Added to these were
twenty or thirty Biscayan whalers. In 1607, there was an old French
fisherman at Canseau who had voyaged to these seas for forty-two
successive years.

But if the wilderness of ocean had its treasures, so too had the
wilderness of woods. It needed but a few knives, beads, and trinkets,
and the Indians would throng to the shore burdened with the spoils of
their winter hunting. Fishermen threw up their old vocation for the more
lucrative trade in bear-skins and beaver-skins. They built rude huts
along the shores of Anticosti, where, at that day, the bison, it is
said, could be seen wallowing in the sands. They outraged the Indians;
they quarrelled with each other; and this infancy of the Canadian
fur-trade showed rich promise of the disorders which marked its riper
growth. Others, meanwhile, were ranging the gulf in search of walrus
tusks; and, the year after the battle of Ivry, St. Malo sent out a fleet
of small craft in quest of this new prize.

In all the western seaports, merchants and adventurers turned their eyes
towards America; not, like the Spaniards, seeking treasures of
silver and gold, but the more modest gains of codfish and train-oil,
beaver-skins and marine ivory. St. Malo was conspicuous above them all.
The rugged Bretons loved the perils of the sea, and saw with a jealous
eye every attempt to shackle their activity on this its favorite field.
When in 1588 Jacques Noel and Estienue Chaton--the former a nephew of
Cartier and the latter pretending to be so--gained a mo