Barely has the topsail dipped over the watery sky before breakers begin to thunder on the sand reefs. Air and earth lash to fury. Sails are torn from the ship of the marquis. His masts go overboard, and the vessel is driven, helpless as a chip in a maelstrom, clear back to the ports of France. Here double misfortune awaits La Roche. His old patrons of the court are no longer powerful. He is thrown in prison by a rival baron.
In vain the colonists strain tired eyes for a sail at sea. Days become weeks, weeks months, summer autumn; and no boat came back. As winter gales assailed the sea, sending the sand drifting like spray, the convicts built themselves huts out of driftwood, and scooped beds for themselves in the earth like rabbit burrows. Of food there was plenty. The people had their fishing lines; and the stock, left by the Baron de Lery long ago, had multiplied and now overran the island. Wild fowl, too, teemed on the inland lake; and foxes, which must have drifted ashore on the ice float of spring, ran wild through the sedge.
Like Robinson Crusoe cast on a desert isle, the desperate people fought their fate. Traps were set for the foxes, snares for the birds, and scouts kept tramping from end to end of the island for sight of a sail. Racked with despair and anxiety, these outcasts of civilization soon fell to bitter quarreling. Traps were found rifled. Dead men lay beside the looted traps; and, doubtless, not a few men lost their lives in spring when the ice floes drifted down with the seal herds, and the men gave mad chase from ice pan to ice pan for seal pelts to make clothing. Spring wore to summer. The graves on the sand banks increased. For a second winter the dreary snowfall wrapped the island in a mantle white as death sheet. Then came the same weary monotony,—the frenzied seal hunt over the blood-stained floes; the long summer days with the drone of the tide on the sand banks; the men mad with hope at sight of a sail peak over the far wave tops, only to be plunged in despair as the fisher boat passed too far for signal; the fading of the grasses to russet in the sad autumn light; then snowfall again—and despair.
Five years passed before La Roche could aid his people; and the pilot who went to their rescue won himself immortal contempt by robbing the castaways of their furs. Word of the rescue came to the ears of the court. Royalty commanded the refugees brought before the throne. Only twelve had survived, and these marched before the royal presence clothed in the skins of seals, hair unkempt, beards to mid-waist, "like river gods of yore," says the old record. The King was so touched that he commanded fifty crowns given to each man and the stolen furs restored. La Roche died of chagrin.
While France is trying to colonize Canada, England has not forgotten that John Cabot first coasted these northern shores and erected the English flag.
QUEEN ELIZABETH
About the time that Marguerite Roberval was left alone on Isle Demons, two boys—half-brothers—were playing on the sands of the English Channel, sailing toy boats and listening to sailor yarns of loot on the Spanish Main. One was Humphrey Gilbert; the other, Walter Raleigh. These two were destined to lead England's first colonies to America.
Martin Frobisher had already poked the prows of English ships into the icy straits of Greenland waters, seeking way to China. He had come out with a fleet of fifteen sails and one hundred mariners in 1578 to found colonies, but was led away by the lure of "fool's gold." Loading his vessels with worthless rocks which he believed contained gold enough "to suffice all the gold gluttons of the world," he sailed back to England without leaving the trace of a colony. Francis Drake, the very same year, had for the first time plowed an English furrow around the seas of the world, chasing Spanish treasure boats up the west coast of South America and loading his own vessel with loot to the water line. Afraid to go back the way he had come, round South America, where all the Spanish frigates lay in wait to catch him, Drake pushed on up the west coast as far as California, and landing, took possession of what he called "New Albion" for Queen Elizabeth. But still no colony had been planted for England.