They had set sail from America on August 1, 1665, Carterett bearing a full report of conditions in the American plantations. When off Spain, their boat had been sighted, pursued, captured and boarded by a Dutch privateer—_The Caper_. For two hours, hull to hull, rail to rail, hand to hand, they had fought, the men behind the guns at the portholes of one ship looking into the smoke-grimed faces of the men behind the guns on the other ship till a roaring broadside from _The Caper_ tore the entrails out of Carterett’s ship. Carterett just had time to fling his secret dispatches overboard when a bayonet was leveled at his breast and he surrendered his sword a captive. Likewise did two French companions. Taken on board _The Caper_, all three were severely questioned—especially the Frenchmen. Why were they with Carterett? Where were they going? Where had they come from? Could they not be persuaded to go to Holland with their extraordinary story. One—Medard Chouart de Groseillers—was a middle-aged man, heavily bearded, swarthy, weather-worn from a life in the wilderness. The other—his brother-in-law—Pierre Esprit Radisson, was not yet thirty years of age. He was clean-shaved, thin, lithe, nervous with the restlessness of bottled-up energies, with a dash in his manners that was a cut between the courtier and the wilderness runner. These were the two men of whom such famous stories had been told these ten years back—the most renowned and far traveled wood-runners that New France had yet produced. It was they, who had brought 600,000 beaver skins to Quebec on a single trip from the North. How they had been robbed by the governor of New France and driven from Quebec to Cape Breton, where, out of jealousy, they were set upon and mobbed, escaping only with the clothes on their backs to Port Royal, Nova Scotia—was known to all men. In vain, they had appealed to France for justice. The robber governor was all powerful at the French court and the two explorers—penniless nobodies pitting their power against the influence of wealth and nobility—were dismissed from the court as a joke. They had been promised a vessel to make farther explorations in the North, but when they came to Isle Percé, south of Anticosti, to await the vessel, a Jesuit was sent to them with word that the promise had been a put-off to rid the court of troublesome suitors—in a word, a perfidious joke. There had followed the flight to Cape Breton, the setting to work of secret influence against them, the mob, the attempted murder, the flight to Port Royal, Nova Scotia. Port Royal was at this time under English rule, and an English captain, Zachariah Gillam, offered his ship for their trip North, but when up opposite Hudson Straits, the captain had been terrified by the ice and lost heart. He turned back. The season was wasted. The two Frenchmen had then clubbed their dwindling fortunes together and had engaged two vessels on their own