of Pemaquid (1696), 14 August). He then sailed east to Placentia, the French capital of Newfoundland, and began the Avalon Peninsula Campaign on 1 November. On this expedition he captured St. John's and ruined most of the English fishing villages. During four months of raids, Iberville was responsible for the destruction of 36 settlements. The Newfoundland campaign was one of the cruelest and most destructive of Iberville's career. Before he could consolidate his hold on Newfoundland, he was diverted north to capture York Factory for a second time during the summer of 1697. Soon after his departure, the English arrived in Newfoundland with 2,000 troops and restored their position. Hostilities ended with the Treaty of Ryswick in September 1697. Exploring Louisiana In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle was the first European to travel from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. The French began dreaming of building a great empire by linking the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi basins, thereby bottling up the English on the Atlantic coast. This presented diplomatic problems; the Gulf coast was claimed, though not occupied, by Spain. Pontchartrain, the minister for naval affairs and colonies, gave d'Iberville the task of locating the mouth of the Mississippi River, which La Salle had failed to find on his last expedition, and building a fort which would block the river to other nations. D'Iberville left Brest with four ships in October 1698. He sailed along the Florida coast, past the base the Spanish were building at Pensacola. In March 1699, he entered the Birdfoot Delta. It was only after meeting some Indians who remembered La Salle that he was sure that this was the Mississippi. Having achieved his first aim and finding no good sites in the delta, he built a temporary fort Fort Maurepas at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, left a garrison of 81 men, and returned to France. On his second voyage, he reached Biloxi in January 1700. He built a second "Fort Maurepas" 40 miles up the Mississippi River. On his return journey, he is said to have stopped at New York City and sold 9,000 furs that coureurs des bois had given him, in preference to hauling them back to Montreal. (This story illustrates the benefits of the future New Orleans area as a port, the size of the French presence on the Mississippi at this early date, and