Probably this islet had a whirlpool communicating with a cavern into which fishermen were sucked by the current.] In April, 1604, Champlain accompanied the Sieur de Monts (who had succeeded the dead Amyard de Chastes as head of a chartered fur-trading association) in a fresh expedition to North America, together with a hundred and twenty artisans and several noblemen.
They were to occupy the lands of "Cadie" (Acadia, Nova Scotia), Canada, and other places in New France.

De Monts thought Tadoussac and Quebec too cold in wintertime, and preferred the sunnier east coast regions.

He aimed indeed at colonizing what is now New England.
On the way to Nova Scotia, the expedition was nearly wrecked on Sable Island, about one hundred and twenty miles south of Cape Breton Island, and noticed there the large red cattle run wild from the bulls and cows landed on Sable Island by the Portuguese some sixty years earlier.

(The Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries deserved well of humanity for the generous way in which they left cattle, goats, pigs, and rabbits to run wild on desert islands and serve as provender for shipwrecked mariners like Robinson Crusoe.) Champlain also speaks of the "fine large black foxes" which he and other voyagers noticed on Sable Island.

How they came there is a mystery, unless the island had once been part of the mainland.
This same Sable Island had been the scene of an extraordinary experiment at the end of the previous century.