Portrait of the Seigneur of Beauport

The first seigneur in New France, Robert Giffard, fits well historian Marcel Trudel's definition of the seigneurs as "promoters of colonization." He was born at Auteuil, in the old French province of Perche, about 1589. He established himself in the Quebec region from 1620 or 1622. He had followed several occupations in his native country, but it was as a ship's surgeon that he made his first crossing of the Atlantic, doing so as one of the followers of Guillaume de Caen, Esquire General (royal superintendent) of the fleet of New France.

A few years later, he is mentioned as proprietor of a log cabin he had built at a place he called La Canardière (today Limoilou.) On the twenty-fourth of March, 1627, just a few weeks before the founding of the Company of One Hundred Associates, he was called to Paris by Guillaume de Caen. There, before the king's attorney general, he gave the following description of a country he solemnly swore he knew at first hand,

... for that I have been there and sojourned there for five or six years continuously, and have seen and do know that the St. Lawrence river can yield fifteen thousand beavers ...