When the French Were Here
Champlain Quadricentennial
Samuel de Champlain, A Life
Imperial Background
Since the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, western Europeans had searched for a sea route to India and the Far East. Centuries of overland trade with Asia were cut off unless European merchants were willing to pay steep tolls to pass through the Middle East.
In the 1400’s, Portugal sent explorers around Africa. Portugal also gained control of Brazil. Spain turned Christopher Columbus’s four expeditions to the Caribbean into a claim on most of Latin America and what’s now the southern and western U.S.
By the early 1600’s, the Dutch, Swedes, English and French were all competing for control of the fur trade with the Indians. As early as 1534, the French navigator Jacques Cartier was commissioned by King Francis I to search for gold in present-day Canada. He gave gifts to the Indians and established friendly relations with the Iroquois. He brought back the first corn ever seen in France. The Iroquois chief let Cartier take two of his sons to France.
On a second voyage, Cartier named and navigated the Saint Lawrence as far as the mountain he named Montreal. On a final voyage, he built a stockade at present-day Quebec and searched unsuccessfully for gold. Cartier abandoned the future site of Quebec when the Iroquois killed several Frenchmen. Only French fishing vessels visited the maritime coast during the next sixty years.
