elaborate reports, giving interesting and detailed accounts of the mode of
life among the aborigines, and of the character and products of the
country.

The entire want of success in all these attempts, and the absorbing and
wasting civil wars in France, paralyzed the zeal and put to rest all
aspirations for colonial adventure for more than half a century.

But in 1598, when peace again began to dawn upon the nation, the spirit of
colonization revived, and the Marquis de la Roche, a nobleman of Brittany,
obtained a royal commission with extraordinary and exclusive powers of
government and trade, identical with those granted to Roberval nearly sixty
years before. Having fitted out a vessel and placed on board forty convicts
gathered out of the prisons of France, he embarked for the northern coasts
of America. The first land he made was Sable Island, a most forlorn
sand-heap rising out of the Atlantic Ocean, some thirty leagues southeast
of Cape Breton. Here he left these wretched criminals to be the strength
and hope, the bone and sinew of the little kingdom which, in his fancy, he
pictured to himself rising under his fostering care in the New World. While
reconnoitring the mainland, probably some part of Nova Scotia, for the
purpose of selecting a suitable location for his intended settlement, a
furious gale swept him from the coast, and, either from necessity or
inclination, he returned to France, leaving his hopeful colonists to a fate
hardly surpassed by that of Selkirk himself, and at the same time
dismissing the bright visions that had so long haunted his mind, of
personal aggrandizement at the head of a colonial establishment.

The next year, 1599, Sieur de Saint Chauvin, of Normandy, a captain in the
royal marine, at the suggestion of Pont Grave, of Saint Malo, an
experienced fur-trader, to whom we have already referred, and who had made