THE CODFISH FRONTIER 265 



of the great St. Lawrence River to found the beginnings of 

 their inland empire. The English were coming in at Plymouth 

 and Boston and Salem along the coasts of New England handy 

 to the lasting wealth of the New World — cod. Between fur 

 and cod the French very shortly had the wrong end of the 

 stick. Meanwhile they made a settlement in the valley of 

 Acadia in Nova Scotia, the same place whose people, later 

 transported as English prisoners, were resettled in the bayous 

 around New Orleans as "Cajuns." But the business on land 

 did not prosper as did that of the sea. 



The persuasion of a vessel full of cod was more eloquent 

 than the romantic exhortations of men like Lescarbot, who 

 pleaded with his king for companies of settlers, or Nicolas 

 Denys, who tried to prove the north a temperate land by show- 

 ing that Acadia in latitude at least was in the same weather 

 belt as the Midi of France. Both men left out the one explana- 

 tion they could not know of— the great Atlantic current system 

 that brought warm winds and waters to western Europe and 

 left the maritime provinces at the mercy of the fogs and cold 

 waters of the Labrador Current. It is true that Lescarbot was 

 one of the first to note the beginning of the Ocean River in 

 the Caribbean, but he did not connect it with the offshore 

 currents of the Grand Banks. Men were loth to winter on the 

 northeast coasts; only at sea was there enough quick wealth to 

 warrant the hardships involved. And there at last the rivalries 

 and contentions of the European homelands reached out into 

 the community of the Banks, even as men like Captain John 

 Smith, Admiral of New England, was writing some of the best 

 early real-estate promotion for Massachusetts: ''Who can 

 desire," he said, "more content that hath small means than to 

 plant and tread that ground he hath purchased by hazard of 

 his life? What so truly suits with honor and honesty, as the 

 discovery of things unknown, erecting townes, peopling coun- 

 tries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teach- 



