He established a colony near the present site of Quebec — some accounts place it near Cap-Rouge, just upstream from where Quebec City now stands — and called it France-Roy.

The colony had several hundred colonists, considerable supplies, and the authority of the French crown behind it.

It was a failure.

The accounts of Roberval’s colonial governance describe a man who maintained discipline through brutal means — hangings, whippings, and the kind of authoritarian control that could not sustain the cooperation of a colonial community trying to establish itself in an unfamiliar and demanding environment.

The colonists suffered from disease, from cold, from the failure of the agricultural enterprise in soil and climate they did not understand.