Prior to this episode the affairs of New France had reached a turning point. In 1627 Samuel de Champlain’s difficulties became acute. That year the Iroquois, his irreconcilable enemies, renewed their bloody savagery in the interior, while along the coast the English were closing off the very entrance to the valley of the St. Lawrence with their plantations and trading posts and their increased shipping. Although Champlain’s company had a good season in furs, collecting 22,000 that summer which could be sold in France at ten francs each, the expense of operation had made the outlook none too bright relatively for the shareholders who expected huge returns. Besides the salaries of the Viceroy in France and of Champlain as his lieutenant governing the colony, interpreters now cost as much as a thousand francs a season and sailors six hundred, while factors and other servants came correspondingly high. And there were other increased expenses that bid fair to cut deep into profits. As a result the directors of the company made things difficult for their governor on the St. Lawrence. They particularly balked at his urgent request for extra funds to strengthen the fortifications of Quebec, even though only a wooden palisade and a few small cannon protected the French trading post. Champlain, with characteristic fortitude, made the best of his difficulties. But he was most uneasy about the English at his doorway. And well he might be! As early as 1620 Sir George Calvert, English Baron of Baltimore, had adventured a plantation in Newfoundland. Three years later King James granted him quasi-regal proprietorship of the southeastern peninsula of that island between Trinity and Placentia Bays. In 1627 he came out with his family, built a fine house at Ferryland, and showed every intention of establishing a great fur trading and fishing colony in the form of a British dominion at this strategic gateway to New France. Still more alarming were the activities of a Scotsman, Sir William Alexander, who had been stirred by accounts of the founding of New Spain, New France, New Netherland and New England to attempt the founding of a New Scotland. In 1621, with complete disregard for French claims, the English king had granted to him all the vast peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of St. Lawrence! Today that would be Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and part of Quebec Province. This princely domain was to be divided into feudal-type Scotch baronies complete with a hierarchy of hereditary titles. Alexander’s attempts to establish permanent trading posts in New Scotland, or Nova Scotia, were failures until 1628. That year seventy-two of his colonists managed to set up for business at Poutrincourt’s old quarters at Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy. There they found themselves to be the near neighbors of a young French fur trader at Cape Sable named Charles de la Tour who was under the impression that the country belonged to him.