22 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



women determined to come to the new world and establish 

 a colony to engage in agriculture. The French government, 

 during its two hundred years of dominion over this country, 

 went on the theorj^ that the country belonged to the natives ; 

 that French subjects must not occupy the soil or engage in 

 manufacturing ; they must be content to fly the flag of France, 

 trade in beaver skins and convert the soids of the savages to 

 the ( liristian religion ; so that this little party had to be 

 secret about their movements, for if the authorities should 

 know their purpose, they would be arrested and their ship 

 confiscated. 



They managed to fit out the ship with cattle and sheep, we 

 know, and perhaps horses and hogs, and crossed the Atlantic 

 with their families and all that they thought they needed to 

 build a home for themselves and their children. They landed 

 near what is now the dividing line between Maine and !New 

 Brunswick. Nothing is known of their fate ; whether they 

 returned to France, whether some disease destroyed them, or 

 what became of them, no one knows, — they disappeared. 



A hundred years after, a missionary, coming to Canada via 

 the St. Lawrence to work among the Indians on the Great 

 Lakes, was driven out of his course by the storms ; and the 

 sailors believed that they had a Jonah on board, and quietly 

 gave the priest a few supplies, including a firearm, and put 

 him ashore to die, as they supposed. The winds went down 

 and they sailed merrily away to Quebec. 



The priest had no notion of dying, but proceeded to in- 

 vestigate his surroundings. He soon found evidences of 

 former inhabitants of his own race, and on the first day of 

 his stay he shot and killed a bull that appeared upon the 

 scene. This was upon the mainland. He soon discovered 

 that the islands were covered with sheep, and he expressed the 

 idea that they got there upon floating ice and by that means 

 spread up and down the coast; that they lived and multi- 

 plied there on account of the difliculty that their enemies 

 encountered in getting to them. He learned that the cattle 

 and sheep had sprung from the colony at that point a hun- 

 dred years before. This he gathered from things that he 



