These efforts were made under the terms of a trading monopoly granted by King Henry IV of France in 1603 to Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, and resulted in the establishment of Port-Royal in Acadia (present-day Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia).

Champlain, who championed the colonization efforts, worked tirelessly to make sure the French colonies survived amid political and corporate changes of power.

[1] The company was closely controlled by Richelieu and was given sweeping authority over trade and colonization in all of New France, a territory that encompassed all of Acadia, Canada, Newfoundland, and French Louisiana.

[4] The company's first fleet of colonization and supply left France in April 1628 under the cloud of war, and over the objections of some of its directors.

In fact, King Charles I of England had issued letters of marque authorizing the seizure of French shipping and even the taking and destruction of her colonies.

David Kirke and his brothers, in possession of one of these commissions, sailed up the Saint Lawrence in heavily armed merchant ships, burned a French farm, and demanded that Champlain surrender Quebec.

Discontent with settlers in Quebec over the company's total control of the fur trade caused numerous problems, which led to control over the colony shifting for a time to the Canadian-based Compagnie des Habitants, and matters worsened during the 1650s when war with the Iroquois severely hampered the fur trade and threatened continued colonization.

The situation changed when King Louis XIV finally came of age, ending the long and chaotic Regency during his minority, and in 1663 one of his first major acts as a reigning monarch was to dissolve both the Company of One Hundred Associates and the Company of Habitants, shifting the fur trading rights of North America to the French West India Company, taking direct control of New France as a Province of the Realm, and subsequently deploying the Carignan-Salières Regiment to Canada in 1665 (the first European Regular unit deployed to the Western Hemisphere) to deal with the Dutch and English-backed Iroquois menace once and for all, actions which substantially increased the stability and development of the Colony of Canada in the following decades.