proceeded up the Saint Lawrence, apparently to the fort just abandoned by Cartier, which he repaired and occupied the next winter, naming it _Roy-Francois_; [30] but the disasters which followed, the sickness and death of many of his company, soon forced him, likewise, to abandon the enterprise and return to France. Of these voyages, Cartier, or rather his pilot-general, has left full and elaborate reports, giving interesting and detailed accounts of the mode of life among the aborigines, and of the character and products of the country. The entire want of success in all these attempts, and the absorbing and wasting civil wars in France, paralyzed the zeal and put to rest all aspirations for colonial adventure for more than half a century. But in 1598, when peace again began to dawn upon the nation, the spirit of colonization revived, and the Marquis de la Roche, a nobleman of Brittany, obtained a royal commission with extraordinary and exclusive powers of government and trade, identical with those granted to Roberval nearly sixty years before. Having fitted out a vessel and placed on board forty convicts gathered out of the prisons of France, he embarked for the northern coasts of America. The first land he made was Sable Island, a most forlorn sand-heap rising out of the Atlantic Ocean, some thirty leagues southeast of Cape Breton. Here he left these wretched criminals to be the strength and hope, the bone and sinew of the little kingdom which, in his fancy, he pictured to himself rising under his fostering care in the New World. While reconnoitring the mainland, probably some part of Nova Scotia, for the purpose of selecting a suitable location for his intended settlement, a furious gale swept him from the coast, and, either from necessity or inclination, he returned to France, leaving his hopeful colonists to a fate hardly surpassed by that of Selkirk himself, and at the same time dismissing the bright visions that had so long haunted his mind, of personal aggrandizement at the head of a colonial establishment.