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world, to found states which should reflect the glories of
France.
They were interested in the beauties of the country, in its people,
and in its fauna. The large intellectual interests of the pioneers of
Canada are in strong contrast to the narrow, incurious Puritan mind.
Thoreau describes Governor Winthrop's surmises about the great
lake and the hideous swamps about it where the Connecticut and
the Potomac took their rise, and his recording among the memo-
rable events the expedition of Darbey Field (an Irishman, which
accounts for his enterprise), who went to the top of the White Hill,
from whence he saw eastward "what he judged to be the great
lake which the Canada River comes out of;" and Thoreau compares
these wild conjectures with the adventures and discoveries of Cham-
plain, of which "we have a minute and faithful account, giving facts
and dates as well as charts and soundings, all scientific and French-
manlike, with scarcely one fable or traveller's story."
One French expedition, and that of the earliest, was even
supplied
with an official artist, whose adventure merits some notice, as he was
the first professional painter of the New World. In 1565 that pic-
turesque moral character, Sir John Hawkins, had for the second time
captured a cargo of negroes on the African coast and transported
and sold them into slavery in the Spanish West Indies, all to his
great profit, though to the scandal of the more conservative of his
countrymen. Scandal, not because the sacking of negro villages
was considered in any way reprehensible, but Spain claimed and was
generally allowed a monopoly of commerce with the Western con-
tinent, and Sir John had been infringing on her preserves to the
extent of attacking the towns and forcing them to permit him to
trade. On his way home, after disposing of his live stock, he put
in at the mouth of the St. John's River in Florida for water, and
found there a French colony in great distress. It was the far-
sighted Admiral Coligny who, at the beginning of the Huguenot
troubles in France, had furthered the idea of planting a Protestant
state in the New World. One futile attempt had been made in
Brazil. The Florida one was undertaken a few years later, under
the leadership of Jean Ribaut, who had returned to France, leaving
his lieutenant, Laudonniere, in command; and his party, who were
most unfitted for the role of colonists, being mostly soldiers,
young
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