day the keel of her small boat grated on the beach of 

 St. Croix Island, this continent has never been without 

 a population of those races which have made the history 

 of the principal part of America, — the French and the 

 English. We celebrate today not only an event of great 

 human interest, but one of the momentous circumstances 

 of history, the actual first step of North America from 

 barbarism over the threshold of civilization, and the first 

 stage in the expansion of two of the most virile races 

 of Europe into the wonderful New World. 



Note by Editor. — De Monts had left his lu ell-equipped 

 and furnished larger vessel in safe moorings at St. 

 Mary's Bay, upon the Nova Scotia coast — opposite 

 Mount Desert Island, at the eastern entrance to the 

 Bay of Fundy — ivhile he and Chafuplain searched out, 

 in the little barque of a few tons described, a site upon 

 the unhnoivn shore beyond for their first colony. 



Acadia at the End of the Seventeenth Century 



Francis Parkman 

 Amid domestic strife, the war of France with Eng- 

 land and the Iroquois went on. Each division of the war 

 was distinct from the rest, and each had a character of its 

 own. As the contest for the West was wholly with New 

 York and her Iroquois allies, so the contest for Acadia 

 was wholly with the ''Bostonnais," or people of New 

 England. 



Acadia, as the French at this time understood the 

 name, included Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the 

 greater part of Maine. The river Kennebec, which they 

 looked on as the true dividing line between their posses- 

 sions and New England, they regarded with the most 

 watchful jealousy. Its headwaters approached those of 

 the Canadian river Chaudiere, the mouth of which is 

 near Quebec; and by ascending the former stream and 



9^ 



