Cartier's defection, the incident was oil to fire with Roberval.  Sailors
were ordered to lower the rowboat.  One would fain believe that the
tyrannical Viceroy offered the high-spirited girl at least the choice of
giving up her lover.  She was thrust into the rowboat with a faithful old
Norman nurse.  Four guns and a small supply of provisions were tossed to
the boat.  The sailors were then commanded to row ashore and abandon her
on Isle of Demons.  The soldier lover leaped over decks and swam through
the surf to share her fate.

Isle of Demons, with its wailing tides and surf-beaten reefs, is a
desolate enough spot in modern days when superstitions do not add to its
terrors.  The wind pipes down from The Labrador in fairest weather with
weird voices as of wailing ghosts, and in winter the shores of Belle Isle
never cease to echo to the hollow booming of the pounding surf.

Out of driftwood the castaways constructed a hut.  Fish were in plenty,
wild fowl offered easy mark, and in springtime the ice floes brought down
the seal herds.  There was no lack of food, but rescue seemed forever
impossible; for no fishing craft would approach the demon-haunted isle.
A year passed, two years,--a child was born.  The soldier lover died of
heartbreak and despondency.  The child wasted away.  The old nurse, too,
was buried.  Marguerite was left alone to fend for herself and hope
against hope that some of the passing sails would heed her signals.  No
wonder at the end of the third year she began to hear shrieking laughter
in the lonely cries of tide and wind, and to imagine that she saw
fiendish arms snatching through the spume of storm drift.

{21} Towards the fall of 1545, one calm day when spray for the once did
not hide the island, some fishermen in the straits noticed the smoke of a
huge bonfire ascending from Isle Demons.  Was it a trick of the fiends to
lure men to wreck, or some sailors like themselves signaling distress?

The boat drew fearfully near and nearer.  A creature in the strange
attire of skins from wild beasts ran down the rocks, signaling
frantically.  It was a woman.  Terrified and trembling, the sailors
plucked up courage to land.  Then for the first time Marguerite
Roberval's spirit gave way.  She could not speak; she seemed almost
bereft of reason.  It was only after the fishermen had nourished her back
to semblance of womanhood that they drew from her the story.  On
returning to France, Marguerite Roberval entered a convent.  It was there
an old court friend of her chateau days sought her out and heard the tale
from her own lips.

[Illustration: THE "DAUPHIN MAP" OF CANADA, _CIRCA_ 1543, SHOWING
CARTIER'S DISCOVERIES]

{22} A colony begun under such ill omen was not likely to prosper.
Roberval had proceeded to Cape Rouge, where he landed in July, and before
winter had a respectable fort constructed.  Fifty of his colonists died
of scurvy.  As many as six were hanged 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.