"It was two years and five months from her landing on the island, when, far out at sea, the crew of a small fishing-craft saw a column of smoke curling upward from the haunted shore. Was it a device of the fiends to lure them to their ruin? They thought so, and kept aloof. But misgiving seized them. They warily drew near, and descried a female figure in wild attire waving signals from the strand. Thus, at length, was Marguerite rescued, and restored to her native France, where, a few years later, the cosmographer Thevet met her at Natron, in Perigord, and heard the tale of wonder from her own lips."[3] [Illustration: Francois Xavier de Laval, First Bishop of Quebec.] [Footnote 3: Parkman's _Pioneers of France_, p. 203.] Meanwhile, Roberval sailed on up the St. Lawrence, and established himself at Cap Rouge, in the deserted forts of Charlesburg-Royal built by Cartier. But the inexperience and imprudence of the haughty Viceroy soon put his establishment in sore straits. Ignorance of physical conditions and disregard of natural laws of health had always been the chief cause of suffering among these transatlantic exiles, and Roberval now added a lamentable want of perception and solicitude. Unlike Cartier, the inexorable Viceroy did not recognise his colonists as companions in privation, but ruled them with a rod of iron. The pillory, the whipping-post, and the scaffold were distressing features in his system. Then came winter, famine, and the scurvy. Fifty of the settlers died, and by spring even the headstrong Roberval was ready to forsake his enterprise. His departure ends the earliest period of French adventure in America. [Illustration: CAP ROUGE] Thenceforth, for more than half a century, France writhed in civil war, and spared no vessel to explore the great river of Canada. For all these years New France was left to its aboriginal inhabitants and to fate. CHAPTER II THE ERA OF CHAMPLAIN The name of Champlain must ever stand before all others in the history of Quebec. He was the founder of the city, and for more than a quarter of a century he was its very life. If repeated disappointment and misfortune could have brought this great empire-builder to despair; if obstacles apparently impossible to overcome could have turned the hero from his purpose, Quebec would not be to-day the oldest city in the western hemisphere. As it was, his character gave the keynote not only to the great fortress-capital, but to the whole history of New France. He was an embodiment at once of the religious zeal and of the mediæval spirit of romance which carried the Bourbon lilies into the trackless wilderness of North America, at a time when English colonisation contented itself with a narrow strip on the Atlantic seaboard.