lar colony it was of which the shipwrecked party found themselves
now to be members. The _St. Christophe_ had left Rochelle three weeks
before with four small consorts conveying five hundred soldiers to help
the struggling colony on the St. Lawrence. The squadron had become
separated, however, and the governor was pursuing his way alone in the
hope of picking up the others in the river. Aboard he had a company of
the regiment of Quercy, the staff of his own household, Saint Vallier,
the new Bishop of Canada, with several of his attendants, three Recollet
friars, and five Jesuits bound for the fatal Iroquois mission,
half-a-dozen ladies on their way out to join their husbands, two
Ursuline nuns, ten or twelve gallants whom love of adventure and the
hope of bettering their fortunes had drawn across the seas, and lastly
some twenty peasant maidens of Anjou who were secure of finding husbands
waiting for them upon the beach, if only for the sake of the sheets, the
pot, the tin plates and the kettle which the king would provide for each
of his humble wards.

To add a handful of New England Independents, a Puritan of Boston, and
three Huguenots to such a gathering, was indeed to bring fire-brand and
powder-barrel together. And yet all aboard were so busy with their own
concerns that the castaways were left very much to themselves. Thirty
of the soldiers were down with fever and scurvy, and both priests and
nuns were fully taken up in nursing them. Denonville, the governor, a
pious-minded dragoon, walked the deck all day reading the Psalms of
David, and sat up half the night with maps and charts laid out before
him, planning out the destruction of the Iroquois who were ravaging his
dominions. The gallants and the ladies flirted, the maidens of Anjou
made eyes at the soldiers of Quercy, and the bishop Saint Vallier read
his offices and lectured his clergy. Ephraim Savage used to stand all
day glaring at the good man as he paced the deck with his red-edged
missal in his hand, and muttering about the "abomination of desolation,"
but his little ways were put down to his exposure upon the iceberg, and
to the fixed idea in the French mind that men of the Anglo-Saxon stock
are not to be held accountable for their actions.

There was peace between England and France at present, though feeling
ran high between Canada and New York, the French believing, and with
some justice, that the English colonists were whooping on the demo