The colonial policy of Henri IV. (1589-1610) was more progressive and enlightened than that of his immediate predecessors on the throne of France. But he had not yet learned what succeeding generations were to discover to their cost,--that criminals and paupers do not make good colonists. In 1598 the familiar error was repeated, when the Marquis de la Roche took out a company of forty jail-birds, liberated for the purpose, and landed them on the dreary, storm-washed Isle of Sable, off the Nova Scotia coast, where, eighty years earlier (1518), the Baron de Léry had made a vain attempt to start a colony. La Roche, beggared on his return home, was unable to succor his colonists, who on their inhospitable sands lived more like beasts than men. Five years later the twelve skin-clad survivors were picked up by a chance vessel and taken back to France, to tell a tale of almost matchless horror. Sidenotes: Champlain's first voyage. De Monts' colony. Quebec established. It was an age of licensed commercial monopolies, as well as of other economic experiments. In the year 1600 Chauvin obtained the exclusive right to prosecute the fur-trade in the New Land to the west, and united with him a St. Malo merchant, Pontgravé. They made two lucrative voyages, but established no settlement. Samuel de Champlain, in Pontgravé's company, went out in 1603, ascending the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal. Later (this same year) De Monts, a Calvinist, was given the viceroyalty and the fur-trade monopoly of Acadia,--between the fortieth and sixtieth degrees of latitude,--and religious freedom was granted there for Huguenots, though the Indians were to be instructed in the Romish faith. De Monts and his strangely assorted party of vagabonds and gentlemen first settled on an island, near the present boundary between Maine and New Brunswick, in the fall of 1604, but the following spring moved to Port Royal,--now Annapolis, Nova Scotia. This, the first French agricultural colony yet planted in America, suffered disaster after disaster; but although Port Royal was abandoned in 1607, the germ of colonization lived. In 1608, Champlain--who had, four years before, while in the employ of De Monts, explored the coast as far south as Cape Cod--set up a permanent French post upon the gloomy cliff at Quebec. Soon the Jesuits came; and by the time the "Mayflower" had reached New England, New France was established beyond a doubt, and French influence was penetrating inland. Wandering savages from the Upper Lakes, nearly a thousand miles in the interior, had at last seen the white man and begun to feel his power. 14. English Exploration (1498-1584). Sidenote: English interests at Newfoundland.