the harbor of Pensacola—D'Iberville landed on Dauphine Island, near Mobile, and soon after discovered the River Pascagoula and the tribes of the Biloxi. Leaving most of the colonists in huts on Ship Island, D'Iberville, in company with his brother, Bienville, and about fifty men, took two barges and set out to find the entrance to the Mississippi. Guided by the muddy waters, on the 2d of March, they discovered the mouth of the great river, which they ascended as high as Red River, and received from some Indians the letter which Tonti had written to La Salle, in 1684. Turning again down the river, D'Iberville left the main stream, and passing through the Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, made his way back by a shorter passage, to the place where the main body of the colonists were waiting his movements. At the head of the Bay of Biloxi, on the sandy and desolate shore, and under the burning sun of that region, a fort was erected in May. D'Iberville returned to France, leaving his brothers Sauvolle and Bienville in command.
Such was the beginning of the colony, and though it was plainly impossible to look for prosperity there, still it was an important movement in advancing the purposes of the French in America. "Already a line of communication existed between Quebec and the Gulf of Mexico. The boundless southern region—made a part of the French empire by lilies carved on forest trees, or crosses erected on bluffs, and occupied by French missionaries and forest rangers—was annexed to the command of the governor of Biloxi."[1]
England, ever wakeful in her jealousy of France, determined to assert a claim to the region thus occupied; and an expedition under Coxe, a London physician, who had purchased the old patent of Carolana, set out for the mouth of the Mississippi. In September, 1699, as Bienville was exploring the forks below New Orleans, he met an English ship of sixteen guns; with the ready wit of genius he persuaded the English commander that the region where he then was, was already occupied and settled by the French, and thus got rid of a very troublesome visitor. The point where this occurred in the river is still known as the England Turn.
D'Iberville returned early in December, 1699, and various and important projects were entrusted to him to carry out; but especially was he to seek for, and to find, gold. In company with his brother, he ascended the Mississippi, and visited various tribes of Indians; but all inquiry and search for gold was in vain: the aged Tonti, with a few companions from the banks of the Illinois, joined D'Iberville in this expedition, and they ascended the Mississippi, some three or four hundred miles. Bilious fevers carried off numbers, the amiable Sauvolle among the earliest; and when D'Iberville returned again from France, to which he had gone for provisions and soldiers, he found only a hundred and fifty alive. D'Iberville was
- ↑ Bancroft's "History of the United States," vol. iii., p. 202.
