Esquimaux saw the Norman and Breton sails hovering around some lonely
headland or anchored in fleets in the harbor of St. John, and still
through salt spray and driving mist, the fishermen dragged up the riches
of the sea." For "codfish must still be had for Lent and fast-days."
Another authority pictures the Breton babies of this period playing with
trinkets made of walrus tusks, and the Norman maidens decked in furs
brought by their brothers from the shores of Anticosti and Labrador.

Meanwhile in Brouage on the Bay of Biscay a boy is born whose spirit,
nourished of the tales of the new world, is to make a permanent colony
where Cartier had found and left a wilderness, and is to write his name
foremost on the "bright roll of forest chivalry"--Samuel Champlain.

Once the sea, I am told, touched the massive walls of Brouage. There are
still to be seen, several feet below the surface, rings to which mariners
and fishermen moored their boats--they who used to come to Brouage for
salt with which to cure their fish, they whose stories of the Newfoundland
cod-banks stirred in the boy Champlain the desire for discovery beyond
their fogs. The boys in the school of Hiers-Brouage a mile away--in the
Mairie where I went to consult the parish records--seemed to know hardly
more of that land which the Brouage boy of three centuries before had
lifted out of the fogs by his lifelong heroic adventures than did the boy
Champlain, which makes me feel that till all French children know of, and
all American children remember Brouage, the story of France in America
needs to be retold. The St. Lawrence Valley has not forgotten, but I could
not learn that a citizen of the Mississippi Valley had made recent
pilgrimage to this spot. [Footnote: For an interesting account of Brouage
to-day, see "Acadiensis," 4:226.]

In the year of Champlain's birth the frightful colonial tragedy in Florida