M. Diron d’Artaguette, who had been appointed _commissaire-ordonnateur_,[44] with orders to examine into the conduct of the officers of the colony and to report upon the condition of its affairs, arrived in Mobile in February, 1708. An attempt had apparently been made to organize Louisiana on the same system as prevailed in the other colonies. Artaguette made his investigation, and returned to France in 1711. During his brief stay the monotony of the record had been varied by the raid of an English privateer upon Dauphin (formerly Massacre) Island, where a settlement had been made in 1707 and fortified in 1709. The peripatetic capital had been driven, by the manifest unfitness of the situation, from Biloxi to a point on the Mobile River, from which it was now compelled by floods to move to higher lands eight leagues from the mouth of the river. No variation was rung upon the chronic complaint of scarcity of provisions. The frequent changes in the position of headquarters, lack of faith in the permanence of the establishment, and the severe attacks of fever endured each year by many of the settlers, discouraged those who might otherwise have given their attention to agriculture. To meet this difficulty, Bienville proposed to send Indians to the islands, there to be exchanged for negroes. If his plan had met with approval, perhaps he might have made the colony self-supporting, and thus have avoided in 1710 the scandal of subsisting his men by scattering them among the very savages whom he wished to sell into slavery. It is not to be wondered at that the growth of the colony under these circumstances was very slow. In 1701 the number of inhabitants was stated at one hundred and fifty. In 1708 La Salle reported the population as composed of a garrison of one hundred and twenty-two persons, including priests, workmen, and boys; seventy-seven inhabitants, men, women, and children; and eighty Indian slaves. In 1712 there were four hundred persons, including twenty negroes. Some of the colonists had accumulated a little property, and Bienville reported that he was obliged to watch them lest they should go away.