d in a single day for
insubordination, and the whipping post became the emblem of an authority
that trembled in the balance. Roberval, in troth, was not thinking of
the colony. He was thinking of those minerals which the Indians said
were at the head waters of the Saguenay. Leaving thirty women at the
fort, he ascended the Saguenay with seventy men in spring and explored as
far as Lake St. John, where the village of Roberval commemorates his
feat; but he found no minerals and lost eight men running rapids. When
Cartier came out in 1543, Roberval took the remaining colonists home, a
profoundly embittered man. Legend has it that he either perished on a
second voyage in 1549, or was assassinated in Paris.

So falls the curtain on the first attempt to colonize Canada.

{23}

CHAPTER II

FROM 1600 TO 1607

English voyages to North America--Sir Humphrey Gilbert--Henry
Hudson--Champlain's first voyage--Founding of Ste. Croix--The colonists
in Acadia

The second attempt to plant a French colony in the New World was more
disastrous than the first.

Though my Lord Roberval fails, the French fishing vessels continue to
bound over the billows of the Atlantic to the New World. By 1578 there
are a hundred and fifty French fishing vessels off Newfoundland alone.
The fishing folk engage in barter. Cartier's heirs ask for a monopoly of
the fur trade in Canada, but the grant is so furiously opposed by the
merchants of the coast towns that it is revoked until the Marquis de la
Roche, who had been a page at the French court, again obtains monopoly,
with many high-sounding titles as Governor, and the added obligation that
he must colonize the new land. What with wars and court intrigue, it is
1598 before the Governor of Canada is ready to sail. Of his two hundred
people taken from jails, all but sixty have obtained their freedom by
paying a ransom. With these sixty La Roche follows the fishing fleet out
to the Grand Banks, then rounds southwestward for milder clime, where he
may winter his people.

Straight across the ship's course lies the famous sand bank, the
graveyard of the Atlantic,--what the old navigators called "the dreadful
isle,"--Sable Island. The sea lies placid as glass between the crescent
horns of the long, low reefs,--thirty miles from horn to horn, with never
a tree to break the swale of the grass waist-high.

The marquis lands his sixty colonists to fish for supplies, while he goes
on with t