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 mutinous that, on his return to Dieppe, Cousin
made complaint to the magistracy, who thereupon dismissed the offender
from the maritime service of the town. Pinzon went to Spain, became
known to Columbus, told him the discovery, and joined him on his voyage
of 1492.
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