Although discovery and colonization were so long abandoned still the
banks of Newfoundland and the mouth of the St. Lawrence were frequented
yearly by hardy Normans and Bretons as before, for the cod and whale
fishery there.[21] Trading with the natives in peltry became insensibly
mingled with the occupation of fisherman and Tadoussac grew to be a
public market for this sort of commerce and exchange. There we would
have found many good friends of Jacques Cartier, among them Capt. Marc
Jalobert, his brother-in-law, who visited Hochelaga in 1535 and Etienne
Noël, his nephew, also a sturdy captain under Cartier in his third
voyage. There, too, would have been Jacques Noël, his great-nephew,
who reports in a letter of 1557 that he had gone on his uncle's
traces up the St. Lawrence as far as the Great Sault. This visit to
Hochelaga makes us interested in him, the more so, as it was this Noël,
associated with Sieur de la Jaunaye-Chaton and the nephew of Jacques
Cartier, who in 1558 applied to Henry III for a charter similar to that
granted by Francis I to their uncle, appealing for this favour on the
ground that their uncle had spent, from his own pocket in the service
of the king in the voyage of 1541, a sum in excess of that which he had
received from the king, and had been allowed no recompense; nor had
indeed his heirs. Warned by the failures and the expenses of the past
the King demurred. Cartier's nephew then compromised. They offered to
renew their uncle's design and to form a French colony in Canada to
Christianize the savages, all at their own expense, provided that the
king would grant them the sole privilege for twelve years of trading
with the inhabitants, principally in peltry and that he would forbid
interference of rivals with them in this privilege and in the
exploitation of a mine discovered by them. To this the King consented
by a favour of January 14, 1588. This monopoly, the first of its kind,
was soon revoked at the instance of jealous rival traders of St. Malo
who obtained a revocation of the charter on the 5th of May following
for they considered that the good things coming from Jacques Cartier's
discoveries were to be shared in by all of St. Malo, since they
belonged to all and not to his nephews alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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