This same Sable Island had been the scene of an extraordinary experiment at the end of the previous century.  In 1598 the Marquis de la Roche, given a commission to colonize New France, sailed in a small ship for North America with sixty convicts from French prisons as colonists.  He landed them on Sable Island, and went away to look for some good site for his colony.  But then a storm arose, and his little ship was literally blown back to France.  The convicts, abandoned thus, built themselves shelters out of the driftwood of wrecks; killed and ate the cattle and caught fish.  They made themselves warm clothes out of the skins of the seals which frequented the island coast in thousands.  But these convicts quarrelled and fought among themselves so fiercely that when at last a ship from Normandy came to take them away, there were only twelve left—­twelve shaggy men with long tangled hair and beards; and, a legend says, in addition a Franciscan monk who had been landed on the island with them as a kind of missionary or chaplain, and who had been so heartbroken at their bloody quarrels and horrible deeds that when the Norman ship arrived to take the castaways back to France, the Franciscan refused to go with them, believing himself to be dying and wishing to end his life undisturbed.  So he was left behind.  But after the ship had sailed away he slowly mended, grew well and strong, and cultivated eagerly his little garden.  For food he ate the whelks, mussels, and oysters that were so abundant on the shore.  Occasionally ships (then as now) were wrecked on Sable Island in stormy weather, and the good monk ministered to the mariners who reached the shore.  Also he was visited, ever and again, by the Breton fishing boats, which brought him supplies of necessaries and the bread and wine for celebrating Mass.  Long after his death his spirit was thought to haunt the desolate island.

Champlain and his companions passed on from Sable Island to the south-east coast of Nova Scotia, noticing as they landed here and there the abundance of rabbits[10] and sea birds, especially the Great Auk, of which they killed numbers with sticks, cormorants (whose fishy eggs they ate with enjoyment), puffins, guillemots, gulls, terns, scissorbills, divers, ospreys, buzzards, and falcons; and no doubt the typical American white-tailed sea eagles, ravens, ducks, geese, curlews, herons, and cranes.  Here and there they found the shore “completely covered with sea wolves”—­seals, of course, probably the common seal and the grey seal.  Of these they captured as many as they wanted, for the seals, like most of the birds, were quite unafraid of man.

[Footnote 10:  There are no real rabbits in America.  This was probably the Polar Hare (Lepus timidus glacialis), or the common small varying hare (L. americanus).]

They then explored the Bay of Fundy, and, after zig-zagging about, decided to fix on the harbour of St. John’s (New Brunswick) as the site for their colony.  The future capital of New France, therefore, was begun on La Sainte Croix (Dochet) Island, near the mouth of the wonderful tidal estuary of the Uigudi (Ouygoudy) River.