Accordingly Champlain examined the whole coast round the Bay of Fundy, and down to Cape Cod, and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

But in this region, already visited in past times by French, Spanish, and English ships, they found the natives treacherous and hostile.

An unprovoked attack was made on the French after they landed, and several of the seamen were killed with arrows.
[Footnote 18: Jean de Biencourt, the Sieur de Poutrincourt and Baron de Saint-Just, were his full titles.] On the 24th of May, 1607, a small barque of six or seven tons burden (fancy crossing the wide Atlantic from Brittany to Nova Scotia in a ship of that size at the present day!) arrived outside Port Royal from France, with an abrupt notification that De Monts' ten years' monopoly and charter were _cancelled_ by Henry IV, and that all the colony was to be withdrawn and brought back to France.

Henry IV took this action simply because De Monts attempted to make his monopoly a real one,[19] and stop the ships of fur traders who were trading with the Amerindians of Cape Breton without his licence.

These fur traders of Normandy then complained bitterly that because De Monts was a Protestant he was allowed not only to have this monopoly, but to endanger the spiritual welfare of the savages by spreading his false doctrines! So King Henry IV, volatile and capricious, like most of the French kings, cancelled a charter which had led to such heroic and remarkable results.
[Footnote 19: You will observe that neither the French nor the English sovereigns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went to much personal expense over the creation of colonies.