aux Coudres where he saw “an incalculable number of huge turtles.”  He admired its great and fair trees, now gone, alas, and gave the island its name—­“the Isle of Hazel Nuts”—­which we still use.  For long years after Cartier, Malbaie remained a resort of its native savages only.  Perhaps an occasional trader came to give these primitive people, in exchange for their valuable furs, European commodities, generally of little worth.  In time the Europeans learned the great value of this trade and of the land which offered it.  So France determined to colonize Canada and in 1608, when Champlain founded a tiny colony at Quebec, the most Christian King had announced a resolution to hold the country.  Ere long Malbaie was to have a European owner.

[Illustration:  Cap A L’AIGLE from the west shore of Murray bay

“A great headland sloping down to the river in bold curves.”]

As Champlain went up from Tadousac to make his settlement of Quebec he noted Malbaie as sufficiently spacious.  But its many rocks, he thought, made it unnavigable, except for the canoes of the Indians, whose light craft of bark can surmount all kinds of difficulties.  Perhaps Champlain is a little severe on Malbaie which, when one knows how, is navigable enough for coasting schooners, but his observations are natural for a passing traveller.  In the years after Quebec was founded no more can be said of Malbaie than that it was on the route from Tadousac to Quebec and must have been visited by many a vessel passing up to New France’s small capital on the edge of the wilderness.  In the summer of 1629 the occasional savages who haunted Malbaie might have seen an unwonted spectacle.  Three English ships, under Lewis Kirke, had passed up the river and to him, Champlain, with a half-starved force of only sixteen men, had been obliged to surrender Quebec.  Kirke was taking his captives down to Tadousac when, opposite Malbaie, he met a French ship coming to the rescue.  A tremendous cannonade followed, the first those ancient hills had heard.  It ended in disaster to France, and Kirke sailed on to Tadousac with the French ship as a prize.

When peace came France began more seriously the task of settling Canada.  Though inevitably Malbaie would soon be colonized, it was still very difficult of access.  A wide stretch of mountain and forest separated it from Quebec; not for nearly two hundred years after Champlain’s time was a road built across this barrier.  Moreover France’s first years of rule in Canada are marked by conspicuous failure in colonizing work.  The trading Company—­the Company of New France or of “One Hundred Associates”—­to which the country was handed over in 1633, thought of the fur trade, of fisheries, of profits—­of anything rather than settlement, and never lived up to its promises to bring in colonists.  It made huge grants of land with a very light heart.  In 1653 a grant was made of the seigniory of Malbaie to Jean Bourdon, Surveyor-General of the Colony.  But Bourdon seems not to have thought it worth while to make any attempt to settle his seigniory and, apparently for lack of settlement, the grant lapsed.  Even the Company of New France treasured some idea that would-be land owners in a colony had duties to perform.