The Story of Mankind [124]
her vast American and Indian and African colonies.
The series of naval wars between England and Holland in
the seventeenth century does not interest us here. It ended as
all such encounters between hopelessly ill-matched powers will
end. But the warfare between England and France (her other
rival) is of greater importance to us, for while the superior
British fleet in the end defeated the French navy, a great deal
of the preliminary fighting was done on our own American
continent. In this vast country, both France and England
claimed everything which had been discovered and a lot more
which the eye of no white man had ever seen. In 1497 Cabot
had landed in the northern part of America and twenty-seven
years later, Giovanni Verrazano had visited these coasts. Cabot
had flown the English flag. Verrazano had sailed under the
French flag. Hence both England and France proclaimed
themselves the owners of the entire continent.
During the seventeenth century, some ten small English
colonies had been founded between Maine and the Carolinas.
They were usually a haven of refuge for some particular sect
of English dissenters, such as the Puritans, who in the year
1620 went to New England, or the Quakers, who settled in
Pennsylvania in 1681. They were small frontier communities,
nestling close to the shores of the ocean, where people had
gathered to make a new home and begin life among happier
surroundings, far away from royal supervision and interference.
The French colonies, on the other hand, always remained
a possession of the crown. No Huguenots or Protestants were
allowed in these colonies for fear that they might contaminate
the Indians with their dangerous Protestant doctrines and
would perhaps interfere with the missionary work of the Jesuit
fathers. The English colonies, therefore, had been founded
upon a much healthier basis than their French neighbours and
rivals. They were an expression of the commercial energy of
the English middle classes, while the French settlements were
inhabited by people who had crossed the ocean as servants of the
king and who expected to return to Paris at the first possible chance.
Politically, however, the position of the English colonies
was far from satisfactory. The French had discovered the
mouth of the Saint Lawrence in the sixteenth century. From
the region of the Great Lakes they had worked their way southward,
had descended the Mississippi and had built several fortifications
along the Gulf of Mexico. After a century of exploration,
a line of sixty French forts cut off the English settlements
along the Atlantic seaboard from the interior.
The English land grants, made to the different colonial
companies had given them ``all land from sea to sea.'' This
sounded well on paper, but in practice, British territory
ended where the line of French fortifications began. To break
through this barrier was possible but it took both men and
money and caused a series of horrible border wars in which
both sides murdered their white neighbours, with the help of the
Indian tribes.
As long as the Stuarts had ruled England there had been
no danger of war with France. The Stuarts needed the Bourbons
in their attempt to establish an autocratic form of government
and to break the power of Parliament. But in 1689 the
last of the Stuarts had disappeared from British soil and Dutch
William, the great enemy of Louis XIV succeeded him. From
that time on, until the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France and
England fought for the possession of India and North America.
During these wars, as I have said before, the English navies
invariably beat the French. Cut off from her colonies, France
lost most of her possessions, and when peace was declared, the
entire North American continent had fallen into British hands
and the great work of exploration of Cartier, Champlain, La
Salle, Marquette and a score