Formally known as
Sieur D'Iberville by his circles in France and abroad,
Pierre le Moyne was a French-Canadian explorer, naval officer, and founder of the
Lousiana province. He was born in
Montreal, Canada, and served 10 years in the
French navy. During the period between 1686 and 1697 he raided English
fur trading posts along the
Hudson Bay in an attempt to drive out the English and win
Canada for the French. In 1698, Iberville set out from France to establish a
colony near the mouth of the
Mississippi River. Previous attempts at such a feat had ended in failure; most notably the try by
La Salle in 1684.
The expedition led by Iberville arrived in Mobile Bay in 1699, and Sieur set out with a party of small boats to take in a better impression of the coast. They sailed west along the seaboard, and then entered the mouth of a large river. Iberville was not sure if the river was indeed his Mississippi. Then, he reached a small Indian villiage where he was shown a letter of confirmation left some 13 years earlier by Henri de Tonti, an Italian explorer who had sailor down the river in 1682.
The settlement got underway later in 1699 on a plot of land at Biloxi Bay, and was later named, appropriately, Biloxi, Mississippi. Iberville later helped establish a colony that is now Mobile, Alabama.