One wonders--if to little purpose--what would have been the consequence if
De Monts, whom Champlain accompanied to America in 1604, had planted his
little colony at some place farther south in his continental grant made by
Henry IV, stretching, as it did, all the way from what is now Philadelphia
to the St. Lawrence--if, for example, he had anchored off the Island of
Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years before Hudson came up
the harbor in the _Half Moon_, had settled there instead of on the sterile
island of Ste. Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand, the
sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the commissioners to fix the
boundaries between the United States and Canada discovered in 1793--nearly
two centuries later--the foundations of the "Habitation de l'isle Ste.
Croix" that the French had built in the gloom of the cedars. Or if, when
the scurvy-stricken colony left that barren site, they had followed
Champlain to the mouth of the Charles, la riviere du Guast--the site of
Cambridge or Boston--or even to the Bay St.
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