jealousy may have had some share in leading him to forsake the
enterprise for which he had endured and risked so much. On his
homeward voyage he put into the harbor of St. John, in Newfoundland.
There he met Roberval with three ships and 200 men. Their meeting
seems to have been friendly, but Cartier, instead of obeying
Roberval's orders and returning with him to Canada, quietly weighed
anchor in the night and sailed away to France.

With this inglorious departure ends the career of the first great
French colonizer. Robervai resumed his voyage and landed above Quebec.
There he built a single abode for the whole colony on the model of a
college or monastery, with a common hail and kitchen. Of the doings of
the settlers we have but scanty accounts, but we learn enough to see
that the colony was ill-planned from the outset, and that either
Roberval was unfit for command or singularly unfortunate in his
subjects. The supplies were soon found to be inadequate, and scurvy
set in, the colonists became disorderly, and Roberval ruled them with
a rod of iron. Trifling offenses were punished with fearful severity;
men and women were flogged, and if we may believe one account, the
punishment of death was inflicted with no sparing hand. How long the
colony lingered on is unknown. Roberval himself returned to France
only, it is said, to die a violent death in the streets of Paris.
There is nothing to tell us whether his colonists returned with him or
whether, like White's unhappy followers, they were left to fall
victims to the horrors of the wilderness. Whatever was their fate, no
attempt was made to restore the colony, and the St. Lawrence was left
for more than fifty years to the savages and wild beasts.

[1] From Doyle's "_English Colonies in America_." By permission of
the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Jacques Cartier was born at St.