No proposition could have been more agreeable to Champlain than this, and he expressed himself quite ready for the enterprise, provided De Chastes would secure the consent of the king, to whom he was under very great obligations. De Chastes readily obtained the desired permission, coupled, however, with an order from the king to Champlain to bring back to him a faithful report of the voyage. Leaving Paris, Champlain hastened to Honfleur, armed with a letter of instructions from M. de Gesures, the secretary of the king, to Pont Gravé, directing him to receive Champlain and afford him every facility for seeing and exploring the country which they were about to visit. They sailed for the shores of the New World on the 15th of March, 1603. The reader should here observe that anterior to this date no colonial settlement had been made on the northern coasts of America. These regions had, however, been frequented by European fishermen at a very early period, certainly within the decade after its discovery by John Cabot in 1497. But the Basques, Bretons, and Normans, [29] who visited these coasts, were intent upon their employment, and consequently brought home only meagre information of the country from whose shores they yearly bore away rich cargoes of fish. The first voyage made by the French for the purpose of discovery in our northern waters of which we have any authentic record was by Jacques Cartier in 1534, and another was made for the same purpose by this distinguished navigator in 1535. In the former, he coasted along the shores of Newfoundland, entered and gave its present name to the Bay of Chaleur, and at Gaspé took formal possession of the country in the name of the king. In the second, he ascended the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, then an Indian village known by the aborigines as Hochelaga, situated on an island at the base of an eminence which they named _Mont-Royal_, from which the present commercial metropolis of the Dominion derives its name. After a winter of great suffering, which they passed on the St. Charles, near Quebec, and the death of many of his company, Cartier returned to France early in the summer of 1536. In 1541, he made a third voyage, under the patronage of François de la Roque, Lord de Roberval, a nobleman of Picardy. He sailed up the St. Lawrence, anchoring probably at the mouth of the river Cap Rouge, about four leagues above Quebec, where he built a fort which he named _Charlesbourg-Royal_. Here he passed another dreary and disheartening winter, and returned to France in the spring of 1542. His patron, De Roberval, who had failed to fulfil his intention to accompany him the preceding year, met him at St. John, Newfoundland. In vain Roberval urged and commanded him to retrace his course; but the resolute old navigator had too recent an experience and saw too clearly the inevitable obstacles to success in their undertaking to be diverted from his purpose. Roberval