had its beginning.

The first chapters of the story were gloomy and disheartening beyond
description. The dreadful scurvy and the cruel cold scourged the
newcomers. Party after party perished {102} miserably. The story of
one of these is singularly romantic. When Sable Island[1] was reached,
its leader, the Marquis de la Roche, landed forty ragamuffins, while he
sailed on with the best men of his crew to examine the coast and choose
a site for the capital of his promising domain.

Alas! he never returned. A gale swept his little craft out to sea and
drove him back to France.

When he landed, the sun of his prosperity had set. Creditors swooped
down upon him, political enemies rose in troops, and the
"Lieutenant-General of Canada and the adjacent countries" was clapped
in jail like a common malefactor. Meanwhile what of the forty
promising colonists on Sable Island? They dropped for years out of
human knowledge as completely as Henry Hudson when dastardly mutineers
set him adrift in an open boat in the bay which bears his name,[2] or
Narvaez and his brilliant expedition whose fate was a mystery until the
appearance of four survivors, eight years afterward.[3]

{103}

Five years went by, and twelve uncouth creatures stood before Henry the
Fourth, clad in shaggy skins, and with long, unkempt beards. They were
the remnant of La Roche's jailbirds. He had at last gained a hearing
from the King, and a vessel had been sent to Sable Island to bring home
the survivors of his party. What a story they told! When months
passed, and La Roche came not, they thought they were left to their
fate. They built huts of the timbers of a wreck which lay on the
beach--for there was not a tree on the island--and so faced the dreary
winter. With trapping foxes, spearing seals, and hunting wild cattle,
descendants of some which a certain Baron de Lery had left eight years
before, they managed to eke out existence, not without quarrels and
murders among themselves. At last the remnant was taken off by the
vessel which Henry sent for them.

Shaggy and uncouth as they looked, they had a small fortune in the furs
which they had accumulated. This wealth had not escaped the notice of
the thrifty skipper who brought them home, and he had robbed them. But
the King not only compelled the dishonest sea-captain to disgorge his
plunder, but aided {104} its owners with a pension in setting up in the
fur-trade.

Such dismal experience