Pierre Dugua de Mons was a French merchant, explorer and colonizer. A Calvinist, he was born in the Château de Mons, in Royan, Saintonge and founded the first permanent French settlement in Canada. He was Lieutenant General of New France from 1603 to 1610. He travelled to northeastern North America for the first time in 1599 with Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit.

Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit was a French naval and military captain and a lieutenant of New France who built at Tadoussac, in present-day Quebec, the oldest and strongest surviving French settlement in the Americas.