It is worth being specific about the distinction between what can be established with reasonable confidence and what remains uncertain or disputed.

What appears well-established:

Marguerite de la Rocque was a French noblewoman who traveled on Roberval’s 1542 expedition to New France.

She was left on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of St.

Lawrence or its approaches, along with at least two other people — a young man who had been her companion and her nurse Damienne.

She survived on the island for an extended period — typically estimated as somewhere between two and a half and three years.

The people who were with her when she was abandoned did not survive.