de Monts (who had
succeeded the dead Amyard de Chastes as head of a chartered
fur-trading association) in a fresh expedition to North America,
together with a hundred and twenty artisans and several noblemen.
They were to occupy the lands of "Cadie" (Acadia, Nova Scotia),
Canada, and other places in New France. De Monts thought Tadoussac and
Quebec too cold in wintertime, and preferred the sunnier east coast
regions. He aimed indeed at colonizing what is now New England.

On the way to Nova Scotia, the expedition was nearly wrecked on Sable
Island, about one hundred and twenty miles south of Cape Breton
Island, and noticed there the large red cattle run wild from the bulls
and cows landed on Sable Island by the Portuguese some sixty years
earlier. (The Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
deserved well of humanity for the generous way in which they left
cattle, goats, pigs, and rabbits to run wild on desert islands and
serve as provender for shipwrecked mariners like Robinson Crusoe.)
Champlain also speaks of the "fine large black foxes" which he and
other voyagers noticed on Sable Island. How they came there is a
mystery, unless the island had once been part of the mainland.

This same Sable Island had been the scene of an extraordinary
experiment at the end of the previous century. In 1598 the Marquis de
la Roche, given a commission to colonize New France, sailed in a small
ship for North America with sixty convicts from French prisons as
colonists. He landed them on Sable Island, and went away to look for
some good site for his colony. But then a storm arose, and his little
ship was literally blown back to France. The convicts, abandoned thus,
built themselves shelters out of the driftwood of wrecks; killed and
ate the cattle and caught fish. They made themselves warm clothes out
of the skins of the seals which frequented the island coast in
thousands. But these convicts quarrelled and fought among themselves
so fiercely that when at last a ship from Normandy came to take them
away, there were only twelve left--twelve shaggy men with long tangled
hair and beards; and, a legend says, in addition a Franciscan monk
who had been landed on the island with them as a kind of missionary or
chaplain, and who had been so heartbroken at their bloody quarrels and
horrible deeds that when the Norman ship arrived to take the castaways
back to France, the Franciscan refused to go with them, believing
himself to be