For several years the trade in furs was conducted as usual, with occasional changes both in the Company in France and in local management. These, however, were of no very essential importance, and the details must be passed by in this brief narrative. The ceaseless struggle for large dividends and small expenditures on the part of the company of merchants did not permit any considerable enlargement of the colony, or any improvements which did not promise immediate returns. Repairs upon the buildings and a new fort constructed on the brow of the precipice in the rear of the settlement were carried forward tardily and grudgingly.[382] As a mere trading-post it had undoubtedly been successful. The average number of beaver skins annually purchased of the Indians and transported to France was probably not far from fifteen or twenty thousand, and it sometimes reached twenty-two thousand. The annual dividend of forty per cent on the investment, as intimated by Champlain, must have been highly satisfactory to the Company. The settlement maintained the character of a trading-post, but hardly that of a colonial plantation. After the lapse of nearly twenty years, the average number of colonists did not exceed much more than fifty. This progress was not satisfactory to Champlain, to the Viceroy, or to the Council of State. In 1627 a change became inevitable. Cardinal de Richelieu had become grand master and chief of the navigation and commerce of France. He saw the importance of rendering this colony worthy of the fame and greatness of the nation under whose authority it had been planted. Acting with characteristic promptness and decision, he dissolved the old Company and instituted a new one, denominated _La Compagnie de la Nouvelle France_, consisting of a hundred or more members, and commonly known as the Company of the Hundred Associates. The constitution of this society possessed several important features, which seemed to assure the solid growth of the colony. Richelieu was its constituted head. Its authority was to extend over the whole territory of New France and Florida. Its capital was three hundred thousand livres. It proposed to send to Canada in 1628 from two hundred to three hundred artisans of all classes, and within the space of fifteen years to transport four thousand colonists to New France. These were to be wholly supported by the Company for three years, and after that they were to have assigned to them as much land as was needed for cultivation. The settlers were to be natives of France and exclusively of the Catholic faith, and no Huguenot was to be allowed to enter the country. The Company was to have exclusive control of trade, and all goods manufactured in New France were to be free of imposts on exportation. Such were the more general and prominent features of the association. In the spring of 1628 the Company, thus organized, despatched four armed vessels to convoy a fleet of eighteen