On the 8th of August, the exploring party reached St. Croix. During their absence, Pont Gravé had arrived from France with additional men and provisions for the colony. As no satisfactory site had been found by De Monts in his recent tour along the coast, it was determined to remove the colony temporarily to Port Royal, situated within the bay now known as Annapolis Basin. The buildings at St. Croix, with the exception of the store-house, were taken down and transported to the bay. Champlain and Pont Gravé were sent forward to select a place for the settlement, which was fixed on the north side of the basin, directly opposite to Goat Island, near or upon the present site of Lower Granville. the situation was protected from the piercing and dreaded winds of the northwest by a lofty range of hills, [50] while it was elevated and commanded a charming view of the placid bay in front. The dwellings which they erected were arranged in the form of a quadrangle with an open court in the centre, as at St. Croix, while gardens and pleasure-grounds were laid out by Champlain in the immediate vicinity. When the work of the new settlement was well advanced, De Monts, having appointed Pont Gravé as his lieutenant, departed for France, where he hoped to obtain additional privileges from the government in his enterprise of planting a colony in the New World. Champlain preferred to remain, with the purpose of executing more fully his office as geographer to the king, by making discoveries on the Atlantic coast still further to the south. From the beginning, the patentee had cherished the desire of discovering valuable mines somewhere on his domains, whose wealth, as well as that of the fur-trade, might defray some part of the heavy expenses involved in his colonial enterprise. While several investigations for this purpose had proved abortive, it was hoped that greater success would be attained by searches along the upper part of the Bay of Fundy. Before the approach of winter, therefore, Champlain and the miner, Master Jaques, a Sclavonian, made a tour to St. John, where they obtained the services of the Indian chief, Secondon, to accompany them and point out the place where copper ore had been discovered at the Bay of Mines. The search, thorough as was practicable under the circumstances, was, in the main, unsuccessful; the few specimens which they found were meagre and insignificant.