248 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
eighty years ago” with him, from which it seems fair to draw the 
inference that his knowledge of the De Lery venture was extremely 
vague. Lescarbot seems, however, to have firmly believed in the 
reality of the event, for in his revision of 1612 he rewrote the reference 
to it and transposed it to a position in the main text in the midst of the 
tale of the De la Roche venture of 1598. It then read as follows:— 
* * * “quelques vaches qui y furent portées il y a environ quatre- 
vingts ans, au temps du Roy François I par le Sieur Baron de Leri, 
& de saint Just, Vicomte de Gueu, lequel ayant le courage porté à choses 
hautes, desiroit s’establir par-dela, & y donner commencement à une 
habitation de François; mais la longueur du voyage l’ayant trop long 
temps tenu sur la mer, il fut contraint de décharger là son bestial, 
vaches & pourceaux, faute d’eaux douces & de paturages. 
* * %* “Some cows that were brought there about eighty years 
ago in the time of King Francis I, by the Sieur Baron de Leri et de St. 
Just, viscount of Gueu, who, having his spirit moved to great deeds, 
desired to establish himself beyond there and give beginning to a 
settlement of French; but, the length of the voyage having held him 
too long upon the sea, he was forced to unload there his live stock, 
cattle and swine, for lack of sweet water and fodder.”’ 
The way to the identification of the Baron de Lery must lie neces- 
sarily through his territorial title, since that is all there is in the form 
of personal description. Ordinarily the holder of a French territorial 
title can be traced easily. He who seeks the Sieur Baron de Lery, 
however, may find himself completely baffled. There were, indeed, 
two seigniories of Lery—one in Champagne and one in Normandy— 
but neither one seems to have given the title of baron to its possessor. 
Mr. Harrisse investigated the pedigrees of those who held these sei- 
eniories, but found nothing to reward his efforts.! These seigneurs seem 
to have been obscure men against whom there rests not the slightest 
suspicion of dabbling with transatlantic schemes. The person whom 
Lescarbot had in mind must certainly have been some one of such rank 
and resources as would make a colonizing venture at least thinkable 
in connection with him, and he must have been possessed of some ter- 
ritorial or official title more or less resembling that ascribed by Lescarbot 
to his colonizer. Such a person actually did exist at the particular 
time to which Lescarbot refers, and was a prominent official in Nor- 
mandy, the province from which came many of the earlier French 
voyagers to the New World. 
1 Harrisse, Jean et Sébastien Cabot, p. 296. 
