The men remaining at the intended settlement, quickly consumed the little provision left, and "the winter coming on soon taught them the difference between France and Tadoussac,--it was the court of king Petault, where every man commanded."[12] Indolence and carelessness, with sickness, soon did their work, and they were reduced to the necessity of giving themselves up to the Indian tribes around, who received them kindly. Many died, and all suffered extremely.
[12] _Ibid._, _Voyages en Nouvelle France_, etc.
Chauvin, in 1600, prepared another expedition, which from the same causes was as fruitless as the first. He fitted out a third on a larger scale, but was not able to carry out his new plans, being attacked by a malady "which sent him to the other world."[13]
[13] Desmarquets, in his _Mémoires Chronologiques pour servir à l'Histoire de la Ville de Dieppe_, says that Chauvin, on arriving at Tadoussac the second time, found only the corpses of the sixteen men whom he had left there. When he again returned to France he left twenty more men, but death preventing his intended third voyage, those twenty died of hunger, like the sixteen first.
We have now arrived at the period of Champlain's first connection with Canadian discovery and colonization. The difficulties, dangers--not to say horrors--of the previous expeditions were enough to deter any but the most confident and resolute from attempting such an apparently hopeless task; but the hour and the man were come, and from the date of Chauvin's death a new era was to arise for Canada, and French colonization in North America was at last--to be.
Samuel Champlain, descended from a noble family of Saintonge, was born at Brouage,[14] a place formerly of some importance in that province, now an obscure town of the department of the Charente Inférieure. Of the date of his birth and of his earlier career there is no account extant; from the events of the last thirty-five or thirty-six years of his life we may, however, form a correct judgment of his attainments, which, in navigation, in military matters, and in general knowledge, were evidently of no common order. That he had early distinguished himself is also clear, and that his services were appreciated we may gather from the high favour with which he was regarded by the king, and from the friendship and constant protection with which he was honoured by one of the best and bravest, as well as most intelligent and devoted followers of Henry IV,--the Sieur Aymar de Chastes, governor of the town and château of Dieppe, who commanded the fleet appointed to cruize on the coast of Brittany during the latter years of the war with the League and the Spaniards,[15] and under whose orders Champlain had served. On Champlain's return from the voyage to the West Indies, of which the narrative is now for the first time published, he learned that Chauvin was dead, and that his friend, Mons. de Chastes, undeterred by the previous failures and disasters, had resolved to undertake the establishment of a colony in Canada, and even to proceed thither and devote the remainder of his well-spent life to the prosecution of the enterprise. The cause and manner of Champlain's embarking in the undertaking cannot be better narrated than in his own words.