vessel at St. Mary's with the colonists was ordered to join them, and
immediately active measures were taken for laying out gardens, erecting
dwellings and storehouses, and all the necessary preparations for the
coming winter. Champlain was commissioned to design and lay out the town,
if so it could be called.

When the work was somewhat advanced, he was sent in a barque of five or six
tons, manned with nine sailors, to search for a mine of pure copper, which
an Indian named Messamoueet had assured them he could point out to them on
the coast towards the river St. John. Some twenty-five miles from the river
St. Croix, they found a mine yielding eighteen per cent, as estimated by
the miner; but they did not discover any pure copper, as they had hoped.

On the last day of August, 1604, the vessel which had brought out the
colony, together with that which had been taken from Rossignol, took their
departure for the shores of France. In it sailed Poutrincourt, Ralleau the
secretary of De Monts, and Captain Rossignol.

From the moment of his arrival on the coast of America, Champlain employed
his leisure hours in making sketches and drawings of the most important
rivers, harbors, and Indian settlements which they had visited.

While the little colony at De Monts's Island was active in getting its
appointments arranged and settled, De Monts wisely determined, though he
could not accompany it himself, nevertheless to send out an expedition
during the mild days of autumn, to explore the region still further to the
south, then called by the Indians Norumbegue. Greatly to the satisfaction
of Champlain, he was personally charged, with this important expedition. He
set out on the 2d of September, in a barque of seventeen or eighteen tons,
with twelve sailors and two Indian guides. The inevitable fogs of that