More perhaps by accident than by design had the French been the
first to settle on the St. Lawrence. Fishing vessels had hovered
round the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence for years before,
in 1535, the French sailor, Jacques Cartier, advanced up the
river as far as the foot of the torrential rapids where now
stands the city of Montreal. Cartier was seeking a route to the
Far East. He half believed that this impressive waterway drained
the plains of China and that around the next bend he might find
the busy life of an oriental city. The time came when it was
known that a great sea lay between America and Asia and the
mystery of the pathway to this sea long fascinated the pioneers
of the St. Lawrence. Canada was a colony, a trading-post, a
mission, the favorite field of Jesuit activity, but it was also
the land which offered by way of the St. Lawrence a route leading
illimitably westward to the Far East.
One other route rivaled the St. Lawrence in promise, and that was
the Mississippi. The two rivers are essentially different in
their approaches and in type.
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