The honour of being the colony’s first seigneur belongs to Louis Hebert, and it was a curious chain of events that brought him to the role of a yeoman in the St Lawrence valley.  Like most of these pilgrim fathers of Canada, Hebert has left to posterity little or no information concerning his early life and his experience as tiller of virgin soil.  That is a pity; for he had an interesting and varied career from first to last.  What he did and what he saw others do during these troublous years would make a readable chronicle of adventure, perseverance, and ultimate achievement.  As it is, we must merely glean what we can from stray allusions to him in the general narratives of early colonial life.  These tell us not a tithe of what we should like to know; but even such shreds of information are precious, for Hebert was Canada’s first patron of husbandry.  He connected his name with no brilliant exploit either of war or of peace; he had his share of adventure, but no more than a hundred others in his day; the greater portion of his adult years were passed with a spade in his hands.  But he embodies a type, and a worthy type it is.

Most of Canada’s early settlers came from Normandy, but Louis Hebert was a native of Paris, born in about 1575.  He had an apothecary’s shop there, but apparently was not making a very marked success of his business when in 1604. he fell in with Biencourt de Poutrincourt, and was enlisted as a member of that voyageur’s first expedition to Acadia.  It was in these days the custom of ships to carry an apothecary or dispenser of health-giving herbs.  His functions ran the whole gamut of medical practice from copious blood-letting to the dosing of sailors with concoctions of mysterious make.  Not improbably Hebert set out with no intention to remain in America; but he found Port Royal to his liking, and there the historian Lescarbot soon found him not only ’sowing corn and planting vines,’ but apparently ’taking great pleasure in the cultivation of the soil.’  All this in a colony which comprised five persons, namely, two Jesuit fathers and their servant, Hebert, and one other.

With serious dangers all about, and lack of support at home, Port Royal could make no headway, and in 1613 Hebert made his way back to France.  The apothecary’s shop was re-opened, and the daily customers were no doubt regaled with stories of life among the wild aborigines of the west.  But not for long.  There was a trait of restlessness that would not down, and in 1616 the little shop again put up its shutters.  Hebert had joined Champlain in the Brouage navigator’s first voyage to the St Lawrence.  This time the apothecary burned his bridges behind him, for he took his family along, and with them all his worldly effects.  The family consisted of his wife, two daughters, and a young son.  The trading company which was backing Champlain’s enterprise promised that Hebert and his family should be paid a cash bonus and should receive, in addition