Note 135 — APPENDIX
Reading edition
See vol. i, p. 266. Colbert’s East India Company and scheme of opening the commerce of China and Japan was simultaneous with his West India Company, and his attempts to strengthen and build up the establishments of the French in the Carribee Islands and in Canada. La Salle, who immortalized himself as the discoverer of the Upper Mississippi, and as first having traced that river to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico, came originally to Canada with a view to the discovery of an overland western passage to China and Japan. See Hildreth’s “History of the United States,” vol. ii, p. 113. The Japan enterprise, however, proved a failure, and the letter given above never actually reached Japan.