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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60167 Hard Early French settlement north of Florida (1604)

Read the following passage.

A. In November 1603, King Henri IV of France gave Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, a monopoly on the fur trade in the lands between the 40th and 46th parallels. In return, Dugua was expected to settle the land and convert its First Peoples to Christianity. He recruited 120 noblemen, artisans and soldiers and chartered five ships, which left France in the spring of 1604. Dugua and many of his men were Huguenots, so the company carried both a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister, as well as a surgeon and a miner. Samuel Champlain sailed with them as an explorer and mapmaker.

B. At the end of June the expedition entered Passamaquoddy Bay and settled on a small island where rivers meet the bay. Dugua named it Isle Sainte Croix, and the men valued it for its herring and bass and because it looked easy to defend. They first guarded a nearby islet with a barricade and a cannon, then put up a storehouse, a kitchen, a chapel and several dwellings. Wheat was sown on the mainland because the island's soil was too sandy for crops. The Passamaquoddy offered furs in exchange for hatchets, knives and glass beads, and for many of them this was a first direct meeting with Europeans.

C. The winter of 1604 to 1605 came early and was unusually severe. Ice floated down the river and cut the 79 men who stayed off from fresh water, firewood and game on the mainland. Their cider froze and was handed out by the pound, and they lived on salted meat and vegetables. Without fresh fruit, the men fell ill with scurvy, and 35 of them died. In March, Passamaquoddy hunters finally reached the island with game, and by May the survivors were largely well again. In August 1605, Dugua moved the whole settlement to Port Royal, in present-day Nova Scotia.

D. The National Park Service calls the choice of the island a mistake, because its exposed position made the winter far harder. It also credits the later success at Port Royal in part to the experience the settlers had gained, and it links the two sites to the start of a continuous French presence in North America. In 1604, no other Europeans lived north of the Spanish colony at Saint Augustine in Florida. Science has since tested the written record. When the graves were reopened in 2003, forensic experts found signs of scurvy and a skull cut open by the expedition's surgeon, just as Champlain had described in his memoirs.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
Grain for the camp had to be grown away from where the men lived.

- 2.
One drink became so hard in the cold that it was shared out by weight.

- 3.
The leader shared his religious faith with many of the men he took along.

- 4.
Champlain was the person who persuaded Dugua to leave the island after the first winter.

- 5.
Twenty-first century study of the dead backed up an account written by one of the travellers.

- 6.
The Passamaquoddy wanted the newcomers' blades mainly to make hunting easier in winter.

- 7.
The island was judged a poor pick because it left the men open to the worst of the cold.

- 8.
The trading rights came with a duty to bring people to live in the region.

- 9.
Far fewer men died during the first winter at Port Royal than on the island.

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