In April 1604, two large and well-equipped ships sailed from Le Havre. The Sieur de Monts himself was aboard, and once again Pontgrave was in charge of navigation. There were also several noblemen and investors who had decided to participate personally in this first voyage; there were several Calvinist ministers, and there were at least two Roman Catholic priests who were to provide for the spiritual needs of the colony. And there was the official recorder and geographer of the expedition, Samuel de Champlain, now about 37 years old. Also aboard was a motley assembly of people, the first of the stipulated annual 100 settlers, most of whom had been recruited in the now-familiar way – from the prisons and from among the vagrants and vagabonds of the country.
It proved to be a long and tumultuous voyage. The convicts aboard were moody and unruly; the Catholic priests and the Huguenot ministers were so bitterly hostile that they bickered and brawled with each other throughout the voyage. Things eventually got so antagonistic that it actually came to fistfights between the clergymen. One dismayed Franciscan friar wrote that, after they had reached their destination, a priest and a minister just happened to die at the same time; the crews decided to bury both of them in the same grave to see if they would finally lie peaceably together. Everyone was greatly relieved when the ships finally reached the Bay of Fundy, and without much discussion it was decided to begin settlement on an island in the mouth of the St. Croix River on the coast of New Brunswick.
At the beginning of the 17th century no one had any explanation for the drastic difference in climate between Acadia and interior Canada. On his first voyage to America, Christopher Columbus had noted the curious and swift body of warm water, light blue, with huge amounts of seaweed along its edges, through which his ships had struggled before reaching the West Indies. Ponce de Leon, too, had been caught in these fast-moving waters at the tip of Florida, and it was clear to all the early navigators that the ocean in this part of the world behaved in strange ways. But it was many more years before the existence of the Gulf Stream was discovered, that the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico poured out into the Atlantic, flowed swiftly up the eastern coast of North America, and then, making a broad circular turn, flowed down past the British Isles and the Bay of Biscay until it washed the shores of the Madeiras, the Azores, and the Canaries, bringing a pleasant climate wherever it went. All that men like de Monts and Champlain knew was that for some strange reason Acadia had a much milder climate than the rest of Canada, and they planned to take advantage of it. In LaCadie, they hoped, the French settlements could live in comfort all year round, while the other Frenchmen went up the St. Lawrence River to get as much profit as possible out of the fur trade without having to worry about the bitter Canadian winters.
Their choice for a settlement quickly proved to be a disastrous one. Against all expectations and predictions, their first winter on the coast of LaCadie proved so severe that the reluctant French pioneers suffered terribly. The weather turned so cold that “cider and wine froze in the casks, and were served out by the pound.” It was all but impossible to keep warm in the inadequately prepared settlement, and soon the supplies ran low as well because so much of the food froze inside the unheated houses, only to spoil once it defrosted again. The inevitable scurvy appeared and claimed 35 lives before warmer spring breezes replaced the icy blasts of winter. The emaciated survivors finally managed to struggle aboard one of the ships to begin the search for a more suitable location. Their choice finally fell on the splendid harbor across the Bay of Fundy, on the coast of Nova Scotia, a place they called Port Royal – the town now known as Annapolis Royal.
The company spent two more winters at Port Royal, and Champlain’s journals make it clear that conditions were considerably easier there, with plenty of fresh fish and a variety of game available. With the apparent success of the colony, de Monts returned to France in the spring of 1606 to purchase more supplies and to recruit a number of artisans for the settlement. At the port of St. Malo, however, he made the mistake of paying some of his new recruits a portion of their wages in advance; while waiting for the ships to sail, these men went on a wild and boisterous drinking spree, scandalizing the somber and religious citizens of the town. Though they were quickly gathered up and pushed aboard the ships heading out to sea, de Monts had no choice but to remain behind and try to pacify the outraged people.
But it was already too late for any public relations efforts. De Monts’ privileges and monopoly in the New World had never been popular to begin with; the protests of the free traders had meanwhile been joined by Parisian hat makers, who complained about the much higher prices now demanded for beaver skins, and this latest incident at St. Malo provided merely a convenient excuse. Within a few more months the charter was revoked, the monopoly discontinued, and the settlement at Port Royal ordered to be abandoned. Another French outpost in North America had come to an end.
Acadia, however, continued, as most of the inhabitants stayed on in Canada; soon little French-style farms sprang up all over the countryside and began to thrive. Acadians became known as a hardy and indomitable population in this rugged corner of the New World for more than half a century – until, that is, an English conquest turned them into just one more tragic chapter in American history and in the process created an entirely new type of people, known as the Cajuns.