Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/684

674 H. P. Biggar and in the same year three other towns met with a similar fate.' The riches collected were no doubt great, for the poor colonists complained that the French now seemed to look upon those islands as all their own." It is notices of this sort which make us deplore the absence of such full accounts of these expeditions as Hakluyt has preserved for us of the doings of Hawkins and Drake. Had there then existed in France some one willing to make a journey, not of two hundred miles, but even of ten, " onely to learne the whole trueth from the onely man then alive that was in this (or that) discoverie," ^ France's record before the tribunal of historj' for achievements in America during the latter half of the sixteenth century would be far more brilliant than it is. The accounts even of such voyages as those of Cartier and Roberval to the St. Lawrence in 1541 and 1542 are known to us only through Hakluyt, for the single French- man who shortly afterwards did try to make a collection of early French voyages to America could then find absolutely nothing about them in that language. This man, who represents in France the position occupied by Hakluyt in the history of English geography, was Marc Lescarbot of Vervins. It was however only chance which took Lescarbot to America and only the inducement of his friends caused him to write about his voyage. When engaged in this, it occurred to him that " since loose papers are soon lost," it would be well " to add in a brief form to the account of the voyage of de Monts and de Poutrincourt, that which had been written about the earlier French discoveries."* Instead however of interviewing the living survivors of such expeditions as that to Florida or to Sable Island, he con- tented himself with merely reading at the King's Library anything he found in print on those subjects. He seems to have once met a connection of Roberval's but the oral information vouchsafed by this namesake of the first viceroy of Canada is of little or no im- portance. ° Although on the other hand he has the advantage 1 CoUc. de Doc. Ined. de Ind., first series, XII. 49-S2 ; second series, VI. 360-427 and p. 436. ^ Ibid., second series, VI. 437, " Que tienen los franceses por tan propinquas y por suyas estas yslas y Tierra Firme mas que a Francia," etc. 3 Hakluyt, op. eit.. III. 131, "As hee [Thomas Buts] told me Richard Hakluyt of O-tford himselfe, to whom I rode 200 miles onely to learne the whole trueth of this voy- age [to Newfoundland] from his own mouth, as being the onely man now alive that was in this discoverie." <M. Lescarbot, Histoire de la Xouvelle France, Paris, 1866, I. 4-5, " Etd'autant que tant de Memoires disperses se perdent facilement. . . . Ainsi m'a semble a propos de joindre brievement, et comme par epitome a la description des derniers voyages faits par les Sieurs de Monts et de Poutrincourt . . . ce que noz Franpois ont laisse par ecrit des decouvertes qu'ils ont dSs long temps fait es parties Occidentales," etc. 5 Ibid., edition of 1609, p. 433.