Note 250 — Chapter II

An episode in the voyage of Roberval, not alluded to by Hakluyt, is preserved in Thevet’s Cosmographie universelle, Paris, 1575. Thevet drew his accounts of New France partly from the navigators and partly from his imagination, deliberately inventing facts where he deemed it necessary, being upon the whole a mendacious character. Nevertheless he was well acquainted with Roberval and Cartier, and is said to have lived six months with the latter at St. Malo. [The Northmen in Maine, by Dr. De Costa, p. 63, and Biographie universelle, 1826-1827, vol. xxv.; also, vol. xlix. on Villegagnon.] This episode covers the case of Roberval’s niece, who in 1541 went on the voyage with him, becoming the victim of a young man who followed her from France. As punishment, she was put ashore with her old nurse on an island called the Isle of Demons, which figures prominently in the map found in the Ptolemy of Ruscelli, her lover being allowed to join them. On this island both of her companions died. After more than two years she was rescued by a fishing-vessel, and carried to France. Her story was first told in the Heptameron of Marguerite, published at Paris in 1559, forming number lxvii: “Extrême amour et austérité de femme en terre étrange.” Thevet, in his Cosmographie (ii. 1019), recasts the story, and says that he had the account from the princess herself, who, in a little village of Périgord, met the young woman, who had sought an asylum there from the wrath of her uncle Roberval. In his Grand insulaire, a manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Harrisse, Notes, p. 278), which antedates his Cosmographie, Thevet also has a version of the story. In the latter work it is given in connection with the fabulous account of a Nestorian bishop. It is illustrated by a picture of the woman on the Isle of Demons shooting wild beasts.