The first recorded arrival of Europeans was in 1497 by the Italian-born John Cabot, who led an English expedition to the shore of a "new found land" (Newfoundland) and claimed the area in the name of Henry II of England.

In 1534, the French, under Jacques Cartier, claimed the Gaspé Peninsula and discovered the Saint Lawrence river the following year.

By 1604, the first permanent French colony, Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia), had been founded. Four years later, Samuel de Champlain established the town of Québec.

 With the discovery of the Great Lakes, missionaries and fur traders arrived, and an enormous French territory was established. Between 1608 and 1756, about 10,000 French settlers arrived in Canada. In 1663, New France became a royal province of the French crown.

The movement of exploration, discovery, commercial exploitation, and missionary activity which had begun with the coming of Champlain was extended by such men as Jacques Marquette, reaching its climax in the last three decades of the seventeenth century.

At that time, the French empire and trade stretched north to the shores of Hudson Bay, west to the head of the Great Lakes, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, a British enterprise, the Hudson's Bay Company, founded in 1670, began to compete for the fur trade.

The European wars between England and France were paralleled in North America by a series of French and Indian wars. The imperial contest ended after British troops, commanded by James Wolfe, defeated Marquis Louis Joseph de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, bringing the fall of Québec in 1759. The French army surrendered at Montreal in 1760, and the Treaty of Paris in 1763 established British rule over what had been New France.

The Québec Act of 1774 instituted the separateness of French-speaking Canada that has become a distinctive feature of the country. It also secured the loyalty of the French clergy and aristocracy to the British crown during the American Revolution. Some 40,000 Loyalists from the colonies fled in revolt northward to eastern Canada.

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