La Rochelle is the European harbor through which Charles Duquet converts experience in New France into new commercial plans. Its merchants, ships, and buyers give him access to routes extending from colonial forests to China and Australia; it is also where his ambitions shift from the volatile fur trade toward timber, and where he begins to build a family through adoption. The city serves less as a settled home than as a recurring hinge in his movements between New France and Europe.

Port and Commercial Crossroads

La Rochelle’s maritime economy is changing when Duquet returns. The fishermen and mariners on the wharf have found Newfoundland work increasingly dangerous and difficult as English, New England, Spanish, and Dutch competitors push into the region. La Rochelle’s boats increasingly fish the offshore Grand Banks instead, where the catch is larger and the grounds closer to home. This local change places Duquet’s trading ventures within a wider contest over routes and markets, rather than presenting the port as a passive outlet for colonial goods.

The city also gives Duquet access to merchants who can turn unfamiliar materials into marketable commodities. Years after first meeting him, cabinet-wood merchant Claude Citron receives Duquet’s sample boxes of scented cedar and balsam, along with pieces of figured maple. Duquet explains that most of his stock is bound for China; Citron examines the samples and buys two boxes. That transaction is small beside the far-reaching plans Duquet entertains, but it demonstrates how he tests overseas demand through specific European contacts before committing a larger cargo.

From Fur to Timber

Duquet’s timber ambition grows out of his view of the fur trade’s instability. After seasons in which beaver pelts arrive in such quantity that French warehouses fill, he recognizes the opposite danger as well: animals and markets can both fail unpredictably. He wants lasting wealth and a family name that can be passed to his sons, not merely another short-lived windfall. He therefore imagines the forest as a resource that Europe lacks and that New France can supply with timber for ships, houses, and fuel.

The plan is to keep earning from furs while preparing to move into wood. Duquet sees English colonists to the south prospering by cutting pine for naval masts and wonders whether French traders can pursue a comparable business. He sketches the proposal to the Trépagny brothers and invites them to remain his partners when he makes the transition, but they respond cautiously rather than sharing his enthusiasm. La Rochelle is the European point from which this projected change can be tested: its merchants can assess wood, and its ships can carry it toward markets far beyond New France.

A Gateway to Overseas Trade

Duquet’s interest in China sharpens in La Rochelle through a wool merchant’s account of a cousin’s voyage from Hoorn to Guangzhou, known to the English as Canton. The reported venture had gone badly: the Chinese buyers already had horses from the north, so the ship’s cargo found no market. Duquet treats the story not as a reason to abandon overseas commerce but as a warning about judging demand, and immediately considers making his way to Amsterdam or Hoorn, where he believes merchants have greater business experience.

Finding a ship is difficult. Captains are suspicious of foreigners and repeatedly mistake Duquet for a French spy, since overseas contacts and trade routes are vulnerable to espionage. He tries to establish his bona fides by describing New France’s forests and fur trade and showing a marten skin as proof of his identity. At the Rock and Shoal, a sailors’ tavern, he approaches Captain Outger Verdwijnen, follows him into the street, and persuades him to listen by presenting himself as a fur merchant who can pay for passage and supply Schiedam gin. Verdwijnen eventually takes him aboard the Steenarend, an armed, three-masted frigate built to carry more than a hundred men. The encounter makes plain that access to trade depends not only on goods and plans but also on trust, payment, and the willingness of a captain to take risks.

Duquet’s later movements continue to link La Rochelle with an expanding circuit of goods. During a voyage, Verdwijnen exchanges ceramics and silks in India for food, spices, and Patna opium intended for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. Duquet observes the route and considers whether a three-cornered trading scheme could serve a lumber merchant. His attention remains on timber, even as the voyage exposes him to other commodities and competing commercial calculations.

Returns, Family, and Continuing Routes

On a later return to La Rochelle, Duquet arrives aboard the Hendrik, which carries fragrant woods, roots, and furs. The ship’s captain, Gabriel Deyon, tells him that his father has been lost with his ship and crew in the Strait of Magellan. Duquet replies with pious uncertainty, though the narration indicates that he knows more than he says. The episode places his return to the port alongside the risks that underwrite long-distance trade: vessels and crews may disappear, and business plans proceed through routes that cannot be made safe merely by calculation.

While awaiting Verdwijnen’s ship, Duquet brings two boxes of specialty woods to Citron’s shop. He sells two boxes, then encounters Forgeron on the staircase of his inn, renewing an older connection from New France. The city thus brings together the commercial and personal strands of Duquet’s life: a buyer for his forest products, a former associate, and the maritime connections needed for further travel.

La Rochelle also becomes part of Duquet’s plan to enlarge his family. After adopting Jan and Nicolaus in Amsterdam and later having a son with Cornelia, he wonders why he should stop at three sons. In La Rochelle, he decides to select a poor, promising boy from the streets, someone whose circumstances recall his own childhood, and take him to New France to learn about its forests. He finds Bernard, an eleven-year-old whom he brings to the colony, and writes to Cornelia and Piet Roos about his intention to bring the boy to Amsterdam for schooling and introduction to his family. The choice extends the same ambition that drives Duquet’s timber plans: to make a durable legacy, though the boy’s place in that design is also shaped by Duquet’s own authority over the opportunities offered to him.

Significance in the Novel

La Rochelle operates as a recurring commercial threshold rather than a destination in itself. Its changing fishing economy, its specialist buyers, and its access to ships show how colonial resources enter European markets and how those markets connect to routes reaching Asia and the Pacific. The port also gives Duquet a setting in which to recast himself: from a fur trader confronting surplus and scarcity into a would-be timber magnate, and from a man wishing for heirs into a man selecting sons and seeking to shape their futures.

The city’s episodes form a chain of encounters rather than one continuous business transaction. A merchant’s story about a failed cargo prompts Duquet to pursue a voyage; a captain’s distrust has to be overcome through persuasion and goods; a wood buyer confirms there is a market for selected samples; and a return to the harbor accompanies the recruitment of Bernard. Through these separate dealings, La Rochelle makes visible the novel’s wider pattern: wealth and family are built through movement, exchange, and control of resources, while the forests that inspire Duquet’s plans are increasingly treated as commodities to be routed outward.