a trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand
miles between. Their work did not figure very heavily in
the colony's annual balance-sheet of progress with its
statistics of acreage newly cleared, homes built and
harvests stowed safely away. But according to their own
ideals of service they valiantly served the king, and
they furnish the historian of the old regime with an
interesting and unusual group of men. Neither New England
nor the New Netherlands possessed this type within their
borders, and this is one reason why the pages of their
history lack the contrast of light and shade which marks
from start to finish the annals of New France.

When the Carignans stepped ashore at Quebec in 1665 one
of their officers was Olivier Morel de la Durantaye, a
captain in the regiment of Campelle, but attached to the
Carignan-Salieres for its Canadian expedition. In the
first expedition against the Mohawks he commanded the
advance guard, and he was one of the small band who spent
the terrible winter of 1666-67 at Fort Ste Anne near the
head of Lake Champlain, subsisting on salt pork and a
scant supply of mouldy flour. Several casks of reputedly
good brandy, as Dollier de Casson records, had been sent
to the fort, but to the chagrin of the diminutive garrison
they turned out to contain salt water, the sailors having
drunk the contents and refilled the casks on their way
out from France. Warlike operations continued to engross
Durantaye's attentions for a year or two longer, but when
this work was finished he returned with some of his
brother officers to France, while others remained in the