De Monts left France on the 9th March, 1604, taking Champlain with him as a confidential adviser. A short visit to Nova Scotia was succeeded by a cruise in the Bay of Fundy, dividing that Peninsula from the mainland; and after much hesitation, a small island near the mouth of the St. Croix, a river of New Brunswick, was chosen as the site for the first settlement. It turned out an unlucky selection, and as soon as the first winter was over, De Monts and Champlain went down the coast to try and find a more favorable situation. The harbors of Maine were visited one after another, and in any one of them a delightful refuge for the little band of Frenchmen might have been found but for the hostility of the Indians, who, since the time of Thevet, had learned to suspect the sincerity of the white man. Finally the colony was removed to a port of Nova Scotia now known as Annapolis, but then called Port Royal, where it feebly struggled for existence, first under De Monts, and then under his successor, Pourtrincourt, until 1610, when some new life was infused into it by the arrival of certain Jesuit missionaries, who, at the instance of the Marquise de Guercheville, to whom De Monts had resigned his claim to Acadia, proposed making the little colony the nucleus of a church in the wilderness, into which the natives were to be gradually enticed. The success of the first missionaries was sufficient to induce others to follow their example; and, in 1613, an earnest Frenchman named La Saussaye arrived at Port Royal, with two more Jesuit priests and thirty-eight men, with whom, having obtained a guide, he started to sail up the Penobscot, intending to plant a second church at the Indian village of Kadesquit, now Bangor. Illustration: MOUNT DESERT ISLE. A dense fog prevented the mouth of the river being perceived; and, when it cleared away, La Saussaye found himself opposite the beautiful island of Grand Manan, already visited by Champlain, and called by him Mont Desert, with the mighty rock now known as Great Head standing out against the forest-clad buttresses of the Green and Newport Mountains. So beautiful did Grand Manan appear to the French visitors, and so wide a missionary field seemed opened to them on it and the neighboring islands, that La Saussaye determined to remain there, and having set up a cross as an emblem of his peaceful intentions, he set his men to work to build and plant. But, alas! Grand Manan was within the limits of the New World already ceded to the English, and before the first crops sown by the French had had time to germinate, Captain Argall――the same who had carried off Pocahontas――sailing up the coast on one of his exploring expeditions from Virginia, heard of the infant settlement, and bore down upon it, bent on its destruction. The French, dreaming of no evil, were, some on land, others, to the number of ten, on board their vessel, at anchor off Bar Harbor.