The exploits of Thomas Welch and his fellow traders might have passed unnoted outside of Carolina but for developments in the larger world which gave to Carolinian expansion a special significance in the unfolding of the Anglo-French conflict for the North American continent. In 1697 came the Peace of Ryswick and a short breathing space in the wars of Louis XIV. Although the Grand Monarch himself was chiefly concerned with European issues, his ministers, and especially Ponchartrain, minister of marine, gave thought once more to America and the completion of La Salle's great plan, stirred to action by reports of English projects and enterprises in the West. Since 1690, when La Salle's brother, the abbe Jean Cavelier, had urged new efforts,1 advocates of French expansion had showered alarmist memoirs upon the ministry. La Salle had stressed the value of a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi as a curb to Spain, and as a point of attack upon the Spanish mine-country.2 But in these later memorials, significantly, it was English encroachment that was pictured, no doubt with exaggeration, but also with prophetic insight, as the great peril. 'If the English,' declared Cavelier, 'once render themselves masters of the Colbert [Mississippi], for which they are working with all of their power ... they will also gain the Illinois, the Ottawa, and all the nations with whom the French of New France carryon trade.'