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1492-1589 - French Colonies of the House of Valois

Norman and Breton navigators gleaned, so to speak, on the tracks of the Spaniards and Portuguese and tried to take up the threads of their old commercial relations with Africa, and to open new ones with both Indies. Such expeditions were full of peril, for the haughty rulers of the western and eastern seas treated as pirates those competitors who ventured into their domains. In 1529 two ships from Dieppe, under the command of Jean Parmentier, made a voyage to Madagascar and Sumatra.

During this time attempts which had more lasting results were directed to the north of America, towards the countries whither the Spaniards had not turned their steps. The first display of French enterprise directed toward the new world was by the fishermen, not by the government, of France. The Cabots had reported immense shoals of codfish on the banks of Newfoundland. In a few years afterward the hardy fishermen of Brittany and Normandy, attracted by the promise of a rich harvest, crossed the ocean to these new fishing-grounds.

Captain John Denis [Denys] of Honfleur had touched at Brazil as early as 1504, before the Portuguese, who discovered it in 1500, had founded any settlement there. In 1506 Denis of Honfleur visited the island of Newfoundland which was then taken for a portion of the continent. In 1508 Aubert, a native of Dieppe, followed him there with a vessel fitted out by Jean Ango, the father of the illustrious shipowner of the same name; the Bretons for their part discovered and named the island of Cape Breton, and the annual codfishery was founded on those coasts.

Verrazano, a Florentine sailor in the French service, went out in 1524, and traced the coast northward from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to some point in New England. He probably entered the Hudson River and the harbor of Newport. He, like others, was seeking a passage to India, but concluded that none such existed. Then, in 1534, Jacques Cartier (zhitk cartya') sailed to America and entered and named the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He landed and took possession of the country in the name of the King of France. The next year he sailed up the St. Lawrence River as far as an Indian village named Hochelaga. This he named Montreal (Royal Mountain) from the lofty hill behind it. He called the whole country New France.

The religious wars of France gave rise to the next attempt to found a colony, a colonisation project which tended to bring France into antagonism with Spain. In 1562, Admiral Coligny, the great Protestant leader, sent out a body of Huguenot (French Protestant) colonists under Jean Ribault, who sailed to Florida, entered the St. John's River, and then went north to a harbor which he named Port Royal. This effort failed. He had made an effort to establish a colony in Brazil as early as 1555; and in 1562 and again in 1564 Charles IX had given him permission to found colonies in Florida; but all of these colonies failed.

In 1540 Roberval, a Picard gentilhomme, was appointed viceroy of Canada by Francis I [r. 1515-1547], and set out with a squadron of five ships which Cartier commanded under his orders; the colony was installed at Cape Breton. The severity of the climate, so different from the magnificent regions conquered by the Spaniards, the insufficiency of supplies, the improvidence and negligence of the royal government were the cause of the failure at the close of a few years of this first attempt at colonisation, which was not renewed till the reign of Henry IV; but the sailors of Normandy, Brittany, and La Rochelle continued the codfishery and the fur trade with the peoples of Canada.

In 1603, the first Bourbon king, Henry IV [r. 1589-1610] gave to a Huguenot nobleman named De Monts the right to plant a colony in Acadia, the region which was finally named by the English New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Of the European nations that were serious competitors for supremacy in India, France was the last to enter the arena of conflict. Henry IV, about the time when the English and Dutch were making their first voyages, tried to foster companies for eastern exploration; but France was too exhausted by the long agony of the Wars of Religion to respond with any effect to his appeals.

France had accomplished very little along the lines of colonial development. France had really not considered very seriously the opportunity of carrying on colonial projects in the new continents. Furthermore, internal troubles, religious wars, and unfriendly foreign relations all tended to prevent the kings of the House of Valois, the predecessors of the first Bourbon king, Henry IV [r. 1589-1610] from sending any expeditions of importance outside of the vicinity of France and Italy. Other nations grew stronger on the seas and in colonial enterprises. Spain and Portugal rose for nearly a century, but declined about the time of the Armada in 1588. And then came the age when England and Holland gained rapidly on the sea.1 England took from France the cloth industry in the Hundred Years' War, and built up her state on a strong protective basis. The Hanseatic league decayed and in its place rose Holland. Colonies in America, Africa, and Asia resulted from the growth in sea power of these nations, and the latter acquired wealth in consequence.