Photographed on 13 June 2003
Date of first settlement
♦ 1565 St. Augustine, Florida
♦ 1605 Port Royal, Nova Scotia
♦ pre-1607
Advocate, Nova Scotia
♦ 1607 Jamestown, Virginia
♦ 1608 Quebec City, Quebec
♦ 1620 Plymouth, Massachusetts
Port Royal, 1605, is counted as the second oldest
permanent (continuously-occupied) European settlement
on the North American continent after St. Augustine,
Florida, which was settled by Spain in 1565.
GPS location: 44°42'43"N 65°36'32"W
Google map
Photographed on 13 June 2003
Photographed on 13 June 2003
Photographed on 13 June 2003
Photographed on 13 June 2003
Port Royal 400th anniversary commemorative stamp, 2005
Photographed on 13 June 2003
Photographed on 13 June 2003
Roads are shown as they were in 1978. Except for Highway 101, the
layout of the roads in 2010 has not changed much from that shown here.
...Then as the season [summer 1604] waned the vessels, which linked them to the world they had left, unfurled their sails and set out for France. Seventy-nine men remained at St. Croix, among them De Monts and Champlain. In the vast solitude of forest they settled down for the winter, [1604-05] which was destined to be full of horrors. By spring thirty-five of the company had died of scurvy and twenty more were at the point of death. Evidently St. Croix was not a good place for a colony. The soil was sandy and there was no fresh water. So, in June [1605], after the arrival of a vessel bringing supplies from France, De Monts and Champlain set out to explore the coasts in search of a better site. But, finding none which they deemed suitable, they decided to tempt fortune at Poutrincourt's domain of Port Royal. Thither, then, in August the colonists moved, carrying their implements and stores across the Bay of Fundy, and landing on the north side of the Annapolis Basin, opposite Goat Island, where the village of Lower Granville now stands.
The colony thus formed at Port Royal in the summer of 1605 – the first agricultural settlement of Europeans on soil which is now Canadian [emphasis added] – had a broken existence of eight years. Owing to intrigues at the French court, De Monts lost his charter in 1607 and the colony was temporarily abandoned; but it was re-established in 1610 by Poutrincourt and his son Charles de Biencourt.
The episode of Port Royal, one of the most lively in Canadian history, introduces to us some striking characters. Besides the leaders in the enterprise, already mentioned – De Monts, Champlain, Poutrincourt, and Biencourt – we meet here Lescarbot, [Footnote: Lescarbot was the historian of the colony. His History of New France, reprinted by the Champlain Society (Toronto, 1911), with an English translation, notes, and appendices by W.L. Grant, is a delightful and instructive work.] lawyer, merry philosopher, historian, and farmer; likewise, Louis Hebert, planting vines and sowing wheat – the same Louis Hebert who afterwards became the first tiller of the soil at Quebec. Here, also, is Membertou, sagamore of the Micmacs, "a man of a hundred summers" and "the most formidable savage within the memory of man."
Hither, too, in 1611, came the Jesuits Biard and Masse, the first of the black-robed followers of Loyola to set foot in New France. But the colony was to perish in an event which foreshadowed the struggle in America between France and England. In 1613 the English Captain Argall from new-founded Virginia sailed up the coasts of Acadia looking for Frenchmen. The Jesuits had just begun on Mount Desert Island the mission of St. Sauveur. This Argall raided and destroyed. He then went on and ravaged Port Royal. And its occupants, young Biencourt and a handful of companions, were forced to take to a wandering life among the Indians...
— Source: FullBooks.com
The Acadian Exiles, part 1 by Arthur G. Doughty, Toronto, 1916
Chronicles of Canada, in thirty-two volumes
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
Sir Arthur G. DoughtyLibrary and Archives Canada
The Acadian Exiles, by Arthur G. DoughtyProject Gutenberg
Links to Relevant Websites
Rebuilding the Port Royal Habitation 1938 - 1940
The Port Royal Habitation:
Port-Royal National Historic Site of Canada Parks Canada
Port Royal, Nova Scotia Wikipedia
Habitation at Port-Royal Wikipedia
Port-Royal National Historic Site of Canada Wikimedia Commons
The Port Royal Habitation: A 'Politically Correct' Reconstruction?
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Scotch Fort 1629-1632 monument Port Royal
Poutrincourt's 1607 Mill monument LeQuille
Bloody Creek 1757 monument Bloody Creek
Fort Anne bronze cannon Annapolis Royal
1849 Nova Scotia Pony Express Monument Victoria Beach
Rawding Captains monument Clementsport
Annapolis Iron Mining Company monument Clementsport
Fort Point monument LaHave
Clementsport war memorial
Clementsvale war memorial Clementsvale
Bear River war memorial Bear River
Smiths Cove war memorial Smiths Cove
Bridgetown war memorial Bridgetown
Arthur Kennedy tombstone LeQuille
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