New France
Meanwhile, in 1535, Jacques Cartier , on a voyage paid for by the French crown, made his way down the St Lawrence, also hoping to find Asia. Instead he stumbled upon the Iroquois, first at Stadacona, on the site of Quebec City, and later at Hochelaga, today's Montreal. At both places the Frenchman had a friendly reception, but the Iroquois attitude changed after Cartier seized one of their sachems and took him to France. For a time the Iroquois were a barrier to further exploration up the St Lawrence, but subsequently they abandoned their riverside villages (possibly as a result of an epidemic brought about by contact with Europeans and their diseases), enabling French traders to move up the river buying furs , an enterprise pioneered by seasonal fishermen. The development of this trade aroused the interest of the French king, who in 1603 commissioned Samuel de Champlain to chart the St Lawrence. Two years later Champlain founded Port Royal in today's Nova Scotia, which became the capital of Acadie (Acadia), a colony whose agricultural preoccupations were soon far removed from the main thrust of French colonialism along the St Lawrence. It was here, on a subsequent expedition in 1608, that Champlain established the settlement of Quebec City at the heart of New France , and, to stimulate the fur trade, allied the French with those tribes he identified as likely to be his principal suppliers. In practice this meant siding with the Huron against the Five Nations, a decision that intensified their traditional hostility. Furthermore, the fur trade destroyed the balance of power between the tribes: first one and then another would receive, in return for their pelts, the latest type of musket as well as iron axes and knives, forcing enemies back to the fur trade to redress the military balance. One terrible consequence of such European intervention was the extermination of the Huron people in 1648 by the Five Nations, armed by the Dutch merchants of the Hudson River. As pandemonium reigned among the native peoples, the pattern of life in New France was becoming well established. On the farmlands of the St Lawrence a New World feudalism was practised by the land-owning seigneurs and their habitant tenants, while the fur territories - entered at Montreal - were extended deep into the interior. Many of the fur traders adopted native dress, learnt aboriginal languages, and took wives from the tribes through which they passed, spawning the mixed-race people known as the Metis . The furs they brought back to Montreal were shipped downriver to Quebec City whence they were shipped to France. But the white population in the French colony remained relatively small - there were only 18,000 New French in 1713. In the context of a growing British presence, this represented a dangerous weakness.
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