Charles Poncet de Brétigny

[2] Poncet de Brétigny led a group of colonists to Cayenne for the company, also called the Compagnie du Cap au nord.

He disembarked on Cayenne Island on 4 March 1644, and collected the remains of the first settlers, men who had adopted the customs and language of the local Galibi people.

[4] The three hundred men he had brought were, apart from a few officers, vagabonds and fortune hunters rather than artisans and farmers.

He had eight soldiers broken for the most frivolous reasons, and another received the strap for having picked up a sprig of pepper.

The next day he found himself surrounded by a large number of Indians who shot and killed him with arrows.

In November of that year the Company of Rouen sent forty men to the colony under the sieur Laforét.

[6] In September 1652 the twelve seigneurs of the Compagnie de la France équinoxiale landed 800 men at the tip of the Pointe du Mahury, where they found 25 survivors from the previous expedition.