Arrival.

The French arrived in the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most early explorers were Huguenot traders and fur trappers, French Protestants who had left France to escape religious persecution. Before 1650 the population of New France, the area of eastern Canada, included only a few hundred settlers. In 1663, however, the French king Louis XIV declared New France a royal province, and immigration increased.

Early French Forts.

Upon their arrival in North America, French explorers built forts, most of which were fairly simple structures built to geometric plans. Two of the earliest were erected in the sixteenth century in the southeastern United States. Charlesfort or Fort Charles, near present-day Beaufort, South Carolina, marked the short-lived French settlement founded by the Huguenot Jean Ribault. Theodor de Bry memorialized the fort in a 1591 engraving. French Huguenots established a similar fort, Fort Caroline, in...