Tdawson] BREST ON THE QUEBEC LABRADOR 2S 



and passed into the Gulf. But Champlain in nil his voyages never 

 sailed by that route. It was only when the Canadians began to establish 

 fisheries along the coast that Laljrador again appears in the records. 



We must pass over the first grant — that of the seigniory of Mingan 

 made to François Bissot in 1661 — only remarking that no indication 

 of any place called Brest appeared in the voluminous records of the 

 long protracted lawsuit of the Labrador Company and the Province of 

 Quebec, decided finally by the Privy Council within the last twenty 

 years; although the whole locality was included in that grant. Had 

 there been a to\\ai there it would have been known at Quebec and 

 excepted from the grant. Jean Bourdon in 1657 went up the Labrador 

 coast as far as lat. 55°, and Jolliet some twenty-five years later explored 

 it; but neither mention any to^vTi or settlement. At last we come to 

 the hero of ]\Ir. Eobertson's legend — the "Count de Courtemanche," 

 " Son-in-law of King Henry TV," whose grant ruined the flourishing 

 to-RTi of Brest about 1630 — the scene of the exploits of the Sieur 

 du Dongeon and the adventures of the Sieur de Combes. The facts 

 concerning him are of record in the public archives of Canada. 



Augustin Legardeur, Seigneur de Courtemanche, was born in 

 Canada in 1663 and was grandson of Eéné Legardeur de Tilly, an emi- 

 grant from Normandy. He married in 1688 Marguerite Vaudry, who 

 died, and he married, secondly, in 1697, the widow of Pierre Gratien 

 Martel de Brouage.^ Her maiden name was Charlotte Charest. She 

 ^'as the daughter of Charest, a tanner, at Point Levis, who had married 

 into the Bissot family. It is scarcely necessary to say that none of 

 these people were in the remotest degree connected by marriage with 

 Henry IV of France, although that sensible monarch issued a general 

 permission to persons of noble birth to enter into trade in Canada with- 

 out derogating from their status. Bissot caught seals at Mingan, 

 Charest tanned leather at Point Levis, and Martel traded at Quebec — 

 all sieurs, with landed titles and the aristocratic particule de — respect- 

 able and most important people in Canada, but not '" noble " in tlie 

 usual sense of the word. 



Legardeur de Courtemanche was a lieutennnt in the troops of the 

 Marine and had spent all the early part of his life in the west in the 

 Indian wars where he acquired a considerable reputation as a leader. 

 His marriage into the Bissot family drew him to the east and fixed his 

 later career on the Labrador coast, along which stretched the enormous 

 seigniory granted in 1661 to Bissot de la Eivière. In 1702, five years 

 after his second marriage, he obtained a grant of fishing and trading 

 rights from the Kegashka river to the Kesaskaskiou — the native name 



' This name is spelled in various ways — often it is Berhouage. 



