The Refugees by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — Read

A singular colony it was of which the shipwrecked party found themselves / now to be members. The _St. Christophe_ had left Rochelle three weeks / before with four small consorts conveying five hundred soldiers to help / the struggling colony on the St. Lawrence. The squadron had become / separated, however, and the governor was pursuing his way alone in the / hope of picking up the others in the river. Aboard he had a company of / the regiment of Quercy, the staff of his own household, Saint Vallier, / the new Bishop of Canada, with several of his attendants, three Recollet / friars, and five Jesuits bound for the fatal Iroquois mission, / half-a-dozen ladies on their way out to join their husbands, two / Ursuline nuns, ten or twelve gallants whom love of adventure and the / hope of bettering their fortunes had drawn across the seas, and lastly / some twenty peasant maidens of Anjou who were secure of finding husbands / waiting for them upon the beach, if only for the sake of the sheets, the / pot, the tin plates and the kettle which the king would provide for each / of his humble wards.

To add a handful of New England Independents, a Puritan of Boston, and / three Huguenots to such a gathering, was indeed to bring fire-brand and / powder-barrel together. And yet all aboard were so busy with their own / concerns that the castaways were left very much to themselves. Thirty / of the soldiers were down with fever and scurvy, and both priests and / nuns were fully taken up in nursing them. Denonville, the governor, a / pious-minded dragoon, walked the deck all day reading the Psalms of / David, and sat up half the night with maps and charts laid out before / him, planning out the destruction of the Iroquois who were ravaging his / dominions. The gallants and the ladies flirted, the maidens of Anjou / made eyes at the soldiers of Quercy, and the bishop Saint Vallier read / his offices and lectured his clergy. Ephraim Savage used to stand all / day glaring at the good man as he paced the deck with his red-edged / missal in his hand, and muttering about the "abomination of desolation," / but his little ways were put down to his exposure upon the iceberg, and / to the fixed idea in the French mind that men of the Anglo-Saxon stock / are not to be held accountable for their actions.