ce, a native of the
little village of Saintonge in the grape district of Charente, made
valuable contributions. He accompanied Roberval to Canada, and
afterwards made voyages to the Saguenay, and appears to have explored
the Gulf and the coasts of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and even Maine as
far as the Penobscot, where he believed was the city of Norumbega.

After the death of Francis there came dark days for France, whose
people were torn asunder by civil war and religious strife. With the
return of peace in France the Marquis de la Roche received a commission
from Henry the Fourth, as lieutenant-general of the King, to colonise
Canada, but his ill-fated expedition of 1597 never got beyond the
dangerous sandbanks of Sable Island. French fur-traders had now found
their way to Anticosti and even Tadousac, at the mouth of the Saguenay,
where the Indians were wont to assemble in large numbers from the great
fur-region to which that melancholy river and its tributary lakes and
rivers give access, but these traders like the fishermen made no
attempt to settle the country.

From a very early date in the sixteenth century bold sailors from the
west country of Devon were fishing in the Gulf and eventually made the
safe and commodious port of St. John's, in Newfoundland, their
headquarters. Some adventurous Englishmen even made a search for the
land of Norumbega, and probably reached the bay of Penobscot. Near the
close of the century, Frobisher attempted to open up {48} the secrets
of the Arctic seas and find that passage to the north which remained
closed to venturesome explorers until Sir Robert McClure, in 1850,
successfully passed the icebergs and ice-floes that barred his way from
Bering Sea to Davis Strait. In the reign of the great Elizabeth, when
Englishmen were at last showing that ability for maritime enterprise
which was eventually to develop such remarkable results, Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, the founder of
Virginia, the Old Dominion, took possession of Newfoundland with much
ceremony in the harbour of St. John's, and erected a pillar on which
were inscribed the Queen's arms. Gilbert had none of the qualities of
a coloniser, and on his voyage back to England he was lost at sea, and
it was left to the men of Devon and the West coast in later times to
make a permanent settlement on the great island of the Gulf.

The first years of the seventeenth century were propitious for