could be taken if more eligible candidates were not
forthcoming. The sixty unfortunates landed by La Roche
on Sable Island in 1598 were all convicts or sturdy
vagrants. Five years later only eleven were left alive.

For the story of Champlain it is not necessary to touch
upon the relations of the French government with traders
at a date earlier than 1599. Immediately following the
failure of La Roche's second expedition, Pierre Chauvin
of Honfleur secured a monopoly which covered the Laurentian
fur trade for ten years. The condition was that he should
convey to Canada fifty colonists a year throughout the
full period of his grant. So far from carrying out this
agreement either in spirit or letter, he shirked it
without compunction. After three years the monopoly was
withdrawn, less on the ground that he had failed to fulfil
his contract than from an outcry on the part of merchants
who desired their share of the trade. To adjudicate
between Chauvin and his rivals in St Malo and Rouen a
commission was appointed at the close of 1602. Its members
were De Chastes, governor of Dieppe, and the Sieur de la
Cour, first president of the Parlement of Normandy. On
their recommendation the terms of the monopoly were so
modified as to admit to a share in the privilege certain
leading merchants of Rouen and St Malo, who, however,
must pay their due share in the expenses of colonizing.
Before the ships sailed in 1603 Chauvin had died, and De
Chastes at once took his place as the central figure in
the group of those to whom a new monopoly had just been
conceded.