steamer ties up at St. John at ' ‘ what is locally known as Indian- town.

The St. John may fairly be termed an Imperial River, for at different times in the past it has ” annexed ” large portions of other great rivers, and turned their waters into her own. Both the Restigouche and Miramichi Rivers lost heavily in this way. The length of the river is nearly 450 miles, and no better trip could be planned anywhere than one up to the head waters of this great waterway.

The city of St. John was formerly called Parr Town, but was finally named from the great stream whose mouth it guards. De Monts and Champlain discovered and named the St. John River in the year 1604, or some seventy years after Jacques Cartier's explora- tion of the St. Lawrence. That arm of the Atlantic in front of St. John, and known as the Bay of Fundy, was originally named La Baye Francoise by De Monts. On Dochet’s Island in Passama- quoddy Bay the exploration party under De Monts passed a severe winter. The following summer they left the neighborhood and founded a colony at Port Royal in a protected basin on the south shore of the Bay of Fundy. Nearly thirty years later a fort was built near’the mouth of the St. John River by Charles La Tour, a man who had much to do with the development of the then French province of Acadia, and whose wife Frances earned undying fame by her noble defense of the St. John Fort while La Tour was absent in Boston.

“Of all the gallant Frenchmen whose names and deeds endure In old Acadian annals, the greatest was Latour.

He built a potent fortress beside that harbor deep,

Thro' which the broad and strong St. John flows with a mighty sweep.