Excerpt from Journal of a Voyage to North America, 1923, Vol. 1 of 2 French commandants. By 1718, however, posts had been built on Lake Superior and at the foot of Green Bay, and from these vantage points it was proposed to make fur ther attempts to solve the mystery of the West and to open a way to the westward sea. In France new forces were coming to the fore, and an era of great expectations and wild speculation was being initiated under the leadership of the regent, Philippe Duc d'orleans. America was the land of boundless resources, the fortune of every one in the kingdom from scullion to courtier was to be made by investing in the stock of the Company of the West, founded especially to exploit cen tral North America; the name Mississippi was on the lips of noble and peasant, implying boundless fertility and endless wealth. True, the Mississippi Bubble, as it was called after it burst, was located in Louisiana at the mouth of the mighty stream. Nevertheless the entire val ley was expected to contribute to its glory and the limits of the valley were yet to be defined. The regent deter mined to send out a secret mission to ascertain the pros pects of western exploration by way of the upper Great Lakes and the upper reaches Of the great river. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.