>From the state he expected little; from himself, everything. He
had no great sense of unity with neighboring colonists under the
same crown. Only when he realized some peril to his interests,
some menace which would master him if he did not fight, was he
stirred to warlike energy. French leaders, on the other hand,
were thinking of world politics. The voyage of Verrazano, the
Italian sailor who had been sent out by Francis I of France in
1524, and who had sailed along a great stretch of the Atlantic
coast, was deemed by Frenchmen a sufficient title to the whole of
North America. They flouted England's claim based upon the
voyages of the Cabots nearly thirty years earlier. Spain, indeed,
might claim Florida, but the English had no real right to any
footing in the New World. As late as in 1720, when the fortunes
of France were already on the wane in the New World, Father Bobe,
a priest of the Congregation of Missions, presented to the French
court a document which sets forth in uncompromising terms the
rights of France to all the land between the thirtieth and the
fiftieth parallels of latitude.
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