ap energy sources.
In the 16th century, McNaught said this vast expanse was populated by only about 200,000 Indians and a few thousand Eskimos (19). The primary aim of the French in Canada in the 16th and 17th centuries was not settlement, but the development of the fur trade and their commercial and naval rivalry with the English in the North Atlantic. The result was very slow growth in the European population, from 2000 in 1663, when Canada became a colony, New France, to 16,417 in 1706 and about 50,000 in 1760, (Innis 12). The American colonies were twenty times larger.
The small French communities in the fishing villages of the Eastern coast and in the St. Lawrence Valley struggled to survive against the cold, disease, Indian attacks, uncertainty of supply, fierce competition for the fur trade from the Dutch in the Mohawk Valley and the English in Hudson Bay. According to Innis, "the colony, dependent on the fur trade and military support, had little agricultural, industrial or commercial development to sustain
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