Background
A Calvinist, he was born in Saintonge, France and founded the first permanent French settlement in Canada. Pierre Du Gua de Monts was born about 1558 in Saintonge, France to Guy and Claire Goumard Du Gua.
A Calvinist, he was born in Saintonge, France and founded the first permanent French settlement in Canada. Pierre Du Gua de Monts was born about 1558 in Saintonge, France to Guy and Claire Goumard Du Gua.
He travelled to northeastern North America for the first time in 1599 with Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit. He fought for the cause of Henri IV during the religious wars in France. The king later awarded him an annual pension of 1,200 crowns and the governorship of the town of Pons in Saintonge in recognition of his outstanding service.
De Monts seems to have made several voyages to Canada including in 1600, with Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit to Tadoussac.
In 1603, King Henry, granted Du Gua exclusive right to colonize lands in North America between 40°–60° North latitude. The King also gave Du Gua a monopoly in the fur trade for these territories and named him Lieutenant General for Acadia and New France.
In return, Du Gua promised to bring 60 new colonists each year. Entering Baie Française (the Bay of Fundy) in June 1604, he and his settlers founded a colony on Saint Croix Island.
Numerous settlers succumbed to the harsh winter climate and malnutrition disease as they exhausted the limited natural resources on the island.
The colony moved to better land on the south shore of Baie Française at Portuguese-Royal in 1605. In 1606, Hendrick Lonck, the Dutch West India Company sea captain boarded two of Du Gua"s boats, and pillaged them for furs and munitions. The Portuguese-Royal settlement survived and prospered somewhat until 1607 when other merchants protested the monopoly, which the King had to revoke.
As a consequence, Du Gua and the settlers had to abandon the colony and return to France.
Du Gua then turned his attention to the colony of Nouvelle-France in the Saint Lawrence River valley, after ceding Portuguese-Royal to Poutrincourt. He never came back to the New World but he sent Champlain to open a colony at Quebec in 1608, thus playing a major role in the foundation of the first permanent French colony in North America.
He died in 1628, in the nearby castle of Ardenne in Fléac-sur-Seugne.