ing to trade.

The thieving habits of the Cape Cod Indians led to a fight between them
and the French in which one Frenchman was killed, and Champlain narrowly
escaped death through the explosion of his own musket. At Cape Cod De
Monts turned back. Five of the six weeks allotted to the voyage were
over, and lack of food made it impossible to enter Long Island Sound.
Hence 'Sieur de Monts determined to return to the Island of St Croix in
order to find a place more favourable for our settlement, as we had not
been able to do on any of the coasts which he had explored during this
voyage.'

We now approach the picturesque episode of Port Royal. De Monts,
having regained St Croix at the beginning of August, lost no time in
transporting his people to the other side of the Bay of Fundy.
The consideration which weighed most with him in establishing his
headquarters was that of trade. Whatever his own preferences, he could
not forget that his partners in France expected a return on their
investment. Had he been in a position to found an agricultural colony,
the maize fields he had seen to the south-west might have proved
attractive. But he depended largely upon trade, and, as Champlain points
out, the savages of Massachusetts had nothing to sell. Hence it was
unwise to go too far from the peltries of the St Lawrence. To find a
climate less severe than that of Canada, without losing touch with the
fur trade, was De Monts' problem. No one could dream of wintering again
at St Croix, and in the absence of trade possibilities to the south
there seemed but one alternative--Port Royal.

In his notice of De Monts' cruise along the Bay of Fundy in June
1604, Champlain says: 'Continuing two leagues farther on in the same
direction, we entered one of the finest harbours I had seen all along
these coasts, in which two thousand vessels might lie in security. The
entrance is 800 paces broad; then you enter a harbour two leagues
long and one broad, which I have named Port Royal.' Here Champlain is
describing Annapolis Basin, which clearly made a deep impression upon
the minds of the first Europeans who saw it. Most of all did it appeal
to the imagination of Poutrincourt, who had come to Acadia for the
purpose of discovering a spot where he could found his own colony. At
sight of Port Royal he had at once asked De Monts for the grant, and
on receiving it had returned to France, at the end of August 1604, to
recruit colonists. Thus he had esc