In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded a trading post at Fort Pontchartrain, which later became the city of Detroit.

CNN: Thursday,

The bodies of the two young Frenchmen, Antoine de Leocour and Vincent Delory, were found on Saturday - a day after the operation on the Niger-Mali border.

BBC: Niger seizes suspects in French hostage 'killings'

The same vast ocean eventually brought Europeans to this glittering archipelago, among them the English navigator James Cook and the French adventurer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who arrived in the late 1760s.

BBC: Getting in the Tahitian spirit