that the three chief causes of early warfare were
Christianity, herrings, and cloves. There is much golden
truth in that nugget. For if one could take from human
history all the strife that has been due either to bigotry
or to commercial avarice, a fair portion of the bloodstreaks
would be washed from its pages. For the time being, at
any rate, France had so much fighting at home that she
was unable, like her Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and
English neighbours, to gain strategic points for future
fighting abroad. Those were days when, if a people would
possess the gates of their enemies, it behoved them to
begin early. France made a late start, and she was forced
to take, in consequence, what other nations had shown no
eagerness to seize.

It was Samuel Champlain, a seaman of Brouage, who first
secured for France and for Frenchmen a sure foothold in
North America, and thus became the herald of Bourbon
imperialism. After a youth spent at sea, Champlain engaged
for some years in the armed conflicts with the Huguenots;
then he returned to his old marine life once more. He
sailed to the Spanish main and elsewhere, thereby gaining
skill as a navigator and ambition to be an explorer of
new coasts. In 1603 came an opportunity to join an
expedition to the St Lawrence, and from this time to the
end of his days the Brouage mariner gave his whole interest
and energies to the work of planting an outpost of empire
in the New World. Champlain was scarcely thirty-six when
he made his first voyage to Canada; he died at Quebec on
Christmas Day, 1635. His service to the king and nation