In building and causing ships to be built the intendant had in view the extension of the colony’s trade.  One of his schemes was to establish regular commercial intercourse between Canada, the West Indies, and France.  The ships of La Rochelle, Dieppe, and Havre, after unloading at Quebec, would carry Canadian products to the French West Indies, where they would load cargoes of sugar for France.  The intendant, always ready to show the way, entered into partnership with a merchant and shipped to the West Indies salmon, eels, salt and dried cod, peas, staves, fish-oil, planks, and small masts much needed in the islands.  The establishment of commercial relations between Canada and the West Indies was an event of no small moment.  During the following years this trade proved important.  In 1670 three ships built at Quebec were sent to the islands with cargoes of fish, oil, peas, planks, barley, and flour.  In 1672 two ships made the same voyage; and in 1681 Talon’s successor, the intendant Duchesneau, wrote to the minister that every year since his arrival two vessels at least (in one year four) had left Quebec for the West Indies with Canadian products.

The intendant was a busy man.  The scope of his activity included the discovery and development of mines.  There had been reports of finding lead at Gaspe, and the West India Company had made an unsuccessful search there.  At Baie Saint-Paul below Quebec iron ore was discovered, and it was thought that copper and silver also would be found at the same place.  In 1667 Father Allouez returned from the upper Ottawa, bringing fragments of copper which he had detached from stones on the shores of Lake Huron.  Engineers sent by the intendant reported favourably of the coal-mines in Cape Breton; the specimens tested were deemed to be of very good quality.  In this connection may be mentioned a mysterious allusion in Talon’s correspondence to the existence of coal where none is now to be found.  In 1667 he wrote to Colbert that a coal-mine had been discovered at the foot of the Quebec rock.  ‘This coal,’ he said, ’is good enough for the forge.  If the test is satisfactory, I shall see that our vessels take loads of it to serve as ballast.  It would be a great help in our naval construction; we could then do without the English coal.’  Next year the intendant wrote again:  ’The coal-mine opened at Quebec, which originated in the cellar of a lower-town resident and is continued through the cape under the Chateau Saint-Louis, could not be worked, I fear, without imperilling the stability of the chateau.  However, I shall try to follow another direction; for, notwithstanding the excellent mine at Cape Breton, it would be a capital thing for the ships landing at Quebec to find coal here.’  Is there actually a coal-mine at Quebec hidden in the depth of the rock which bears now on its summit Dufferin Terrace and the Chateau Frontenac?  We have before us Talon’s official report.  He asserts positively that coal was found there—­coal which was tested, which burned well in the forge.  What has become of the mine, and where is that coal?  Nobody at the present day has ever heard of a coal-mine at Quebec, and the story seems incredible.  But Talon’s letter is explicit.  No satisfactory explanation has yet been suggested, and we confess inability to offer one here.