Mgr. de Laval succeeded beyond his hopes; cordially received by King Louis XIV, he obtained the recall of Governor d’Avaugour.  But this purpose was not the only one which he had made the goal of his ambition; he had in view another, much more important for the welfare of the colony.  Fourteen years before, the Iroquois had exterminated the Hurons, and since this period the colonists had not enjoyed a single hour of calm; the devotion of Dollard and of his sixteen heroic comrades had narrowly saved them from a horrible danger.  The worthy prelate obtained from the king a sufficiently large assignment of troops to deliver the colony at last from its most dangerous enemies.  “We expect next year,” he wrote to the sovereign pontiff, “twelve hundred soldiers, with whom, by God’s help, we shall try to overcome the fierce Iroquois.  The Marquis de Tracy will come to Canada in order to see for himself the measures which are necessary to make of New France a strong and prosperous colony.”

M. Dubois d’Avaugour was recalled, and yet he rendered before his departure a distinguished service to the colony.  “The St. Lawrence,” he wrote in a memorial to the monarch, “is the key to a country which may become the greatest state in the world.  There should be sent to this colony three thousand soldiers, to be discharged after three years of service; they could make Quebec an impregnable fortress, subdue the Iroquois, build redoubtable forts on the banks of the Hudson, where the Dutch have only a wretched wooden hut, and in short, open for New France a road to the sea by this river.”  It was mainly this report which induced the sovereign to take back Canada from the hands of the Company of the Cent-Associes, who were incapable of colonizing it, and to reintegrate it in the royal domain.

Must we think with M. de la Colombiere,[2] with M. de Latour and with Cardinal Taschereau, that the Sovereign Council was the work of Mgr. de Laval?  We have some justification in believing it when we remember that the king arrived at this important decision while the energetic Laval was present at his court.  However it may be, on April 24th, 1663, the Company of New France abandoned the colony to the royal government, which immediately created in Canada three courts of justice and above them the Sovereign Council as a court of appeal.

The Bishop of Petraea sailed in 1663 for North America with the new governor, M. de Mezy, who owed to him his appointment.  His other fellow-passengers were M. Gaudais-Dupont, who came to take possession of the country in the name of the king, two priests, MM.  Maizerets and Hugues Pommier, Father Rafeix, of the Society of Jesus, and three ecclesiastics.  The passage was stormy and lasted four months.  To-day, when we leave Havre and disembark a week later at New York, after having enjoyed all the refinements of luxury and comfort invented by an advanced but materialistic civilization, we can with difficulty imagine the discomforts, hardships and privations of four long months on a stormy sea.  Scurvy, that fatal consequence of famine and exhaustion, soon broke out among the passengers, and many died of it.  The bishop, himself stricken by the disease, did not cease, nevertheless, to lavish his care upon the unfortunates who were attacked by the infection; he even attended them at the hospital after they had landed.