perts at their very
doors. The Basques kept a station at Tadoussac, and whales were seen
at Quebec. But, instead of hiring Basques to teach them, {59} the
French in Canada petitioned the king for a subsidy with which to hire
the Basques to do the whaling for them. Of course the difference
between the two forms of government counts for a good deal--and it is
not at all likely that any paternal French ruler, on either side of the
Atlantic, ever wished to encourage a sea-roving spirit in Canada. But
the difference in natural and acquired aptitude counts for more.

The first Canadian shipbuilding was the result of dire necessity.
Pont-Grave put together a couple of very small vessels in 1606 at Port
Royal so that he might cruise about till he met some French craft
homeward bound. Shipbuilding as an industry arose long after this.
The _Galiote_, a brigantine of sorts, was built by the Sovereign
Council and launched at Quebec in 1663. But it was the intendant Talon
who began the work in proper fashion. In 1665, immediately after his
arrival, he sent men 'timber-cruising' in every likely direction.
Their reports were most encouraging. Suitable timber was plentiful
along the waterways, and the cost was no more than that of cutting and
rafting it down to the dockyards. Talon reported home to Colbert. But
official correspondence was too slow. At his {60} own cost he at once
built a vessel of a hundred and twenty tons. She was on the most
approved lines, and thus served as a model for others. A French
Canadian built an imitation of her the following year. Talon vainly
tried to persuade this enterprising man to form a company and build a
ship of four hundred tons for the trade with the West Indies. Three
smaller vessels, however, successfully made the round trip from Quebec
to the West Indies, on to France, and back again, in 1670. In 1671
Colbert laid aside for Talon a relatively large sum for official
shipbuilding and for the export of Canadian wood to France. The next
year Talon had a five-hundred-tonner on the stocks, while preparations
were being made for an eight-hundred-tonner, which would have been a
'mammoth' merchant vessel in contemporary France. Before he left
Canada he had the satisfaction of reporting that three hundred and
fifty hands, out of a total population of only seven thousand souls,
were engaged in the shipyards.[2] But there were very few at sea.

The first vessel to sail the Great Lakes