Of the French explorers we need to recall but one, Samuel de Champlain, "young, ardent, yet ripe in experience, a skilled seaman and a practiced soldier," who had been leading a strenuous life in the West Indies. In 1603 he made a voyage to the St. Lawrence River. In 1604 he helped to make a settlement on the St. Croix River, where he remained until the next year. When a badly needed relief ship came in 1605, he explored the New England coast down around Cape Cod. In 1608 Champlain built a trading-post where Quebec now stands, and in 1616 there were two real home-builders there, a farmer named Louis Hebert and Champlain himself. In 1626 the population numbered 105, all told. It is not unlikely that the French ship, from which the Pilgrims obtained enough cheap goods to fill their shallop, in their second voyage to the Maine coast, had been wrecked while on a voyage to Quebec. The seafaring merchants of New England inevitably took much interest in the development of this colony from a rival nation. Still more interesting, though in a different way, were the settlements of the West Indies. The Spaniards had introduced the sugar-cane and negro slavery, an economic combination of the greatest importance to the commerce of the world; for while the Spaniards maintained, as far as possible, a monopoly of their own trade, both slavery and sugar-planting spread all over the islands. Moreover, Spanish exclusiveness was to lead to adventures on the part of some New Englanders. In 1605 the crew of an English ship took possession of Barbados. On February 17, 1625, an English ship "landed forty English and seven or eight negroes" on the island, and thus began building a colony that was of the utmost importance to New England traders in later years. In 1676 the export of sugar "was capable of employing 400 sail of vessels, averaging 150 tons." In the meantime (1619), a Dutch privateer had come to Jamestown, Virginia, where "twenty Africans were disembarked," and sold to planters who were to use negro slaves, for many years thereafter, with profit, in the production of tobacco. And slaves, sugar, and tobacco were among the first articles of merchandise to bring profit to the New England ship-owners. Most interesting of all, however, were the centres of population established upon the New England coast. The English fishermen who came to the coast after the arrival of the Pilgrims, occasionally landed men to remain through the winter in order to trade for furs and procure a supply of provisions--venison, wild fowl, etc.--for the use of the crews of the ships that were to return in the spring.