FOR NEARLY TWO HUNDRED YEARS after Co-
lumbus, most Europeans who came to found colonies in
America ended up rotten with scurvy or dead of starvation:
only by slow degrees did men learn to wrest a living from the
land itself. Down to Penn Philadelphia ( 1682), nearly every
colony in North America presents the same doleful tale.

New France was no exception to the rule. In 1535, Cartier
starved at Stadacona. In the fifteen-sixties, French Huguenots
starved in Florida. In 1605, Champlain's Frenchmen starved
and died of scurvy on the Ste. Croix river, and in 1608-1609
at Quebec, his men once again were starving or dying. About
the same time in the much more genial climate of Virginia,
few Englishmen came through the winter. It was not until
they had been on the St. Lawrence for thirty or forty years
that the French passed beyond immediate danger of starvation.

The men who starved and died while getting Europe trans-
planted to America were just as intelligent as we are, just as
brave, and probably a good deal hardier. Why then all the
misfortune? Every schoolboy will stand ready with an answer,
and the sum of the answers will be--lack of the technical pro-
gress we have made since those days. Among the Pilgrims who
settled at Plymouth in 1620, some there were who had brought
with them a scarce and novel commodity--soap. When the
accounts were reckoned up at the end of the first winter, it
was asserted that mortality had been much greater among those
who had washed with soap than those who had gone dirty in
the good old-fashioned way. Soap, nevertheless, was to become
one of the main pillars of our North American civilization.

The French at Quebec had no excessive prejudice in favour
of soap. By our fastidious standards, their cleanliness left much
to be desired, but they were more particular than the Indians.
The accounts they left behind them are full of the disgust they

-10-