CALAIS – They were ambassadors of their nation, and on Saturday students from Dijon, France, danced and sang their way into the hearts of area residents from both sides of the international border.

The ninth-grade teens also were in search of the American connection to their history, St. Croix Island, where their French ancestors first settled nearly 400 years ago.

Officials from Calais and St. Stephen, New Brunswick, welcomed the 25 students from the Saint-Joseph Sainte-Ursule Junior High School in Dijon.

Speaking in French, Calais Mayor Judy Alexander told the group she hoped their stay would create “many fine memories for you in the years to come.”

The 14-year-olds are on a three-week American immersion exchange that will take them to East Coast cities including New York and Washington, D.C., as well as New Orleans.

For the past four years, the group has been studying English and American life as well as the historical relationship between France and the United States.

The group visited St. Croix Island, where in 1604 their ancestors established a settlement that predates Jamestown, Va., and Plymouth, Mass. The island lies just south of the city’s downtown, in the village of Red Beach.

“This is important because it is the location of the first French colony and it is important for these students to know because nobody else has ever told them that,” said Sheila Dale, a teacher and the tour organizer.

“They’ve never studied it in any kind of French class, it is not mentioned in any history book,” she said. “They talk about New France, but New France became Quebec.”

Saturday morning, as cold and fog engulfed them, the students stood on the shore of the St. Croix River and looked at the tiny island where French explorers Sieur de Monts and Samuel de Champlain, along with 79 men, settled.

The teens stuck their hands in the icy river and exclaimed how cold it felt.

Meg Scheid, park ranger for the National Park Service, and Nathalie Gagnon, project director of the Northern New Brunswick Field Unit of Parks Canada in Moncton, quietly talked about the history of the island.

Scheid urged them to close their eyes and imagine how cold it must have been for their ancestors. For security reasons, she said, they built their settlement on the island, but a long cold winter isolated the islanders.

“A fatal shortage of firewood and water compromised the lives of those men,” Scheid said. “They could not get off the island because there were dangerous piles of ice that mounded up on the edge of the island.”

Gagnon told them the story of a Huguenot minister and a Catholic priest who accompanied the men.

“Apparently on the island they kept arguing all of the time. The story goes that when they died … they were buried face to face in the same grave so they could keep arguing in the afterlife,” Gagnon said with a laugh.

In the spring, the remaining men abandoned the settlement and moved to Port Royal, Nova Scotia, where they built a permanent settlement.

Some of the students, speaking in French with Gagnon translating, said they were moved. “Having the story told to us and seeing the island is a great event because we manage to live it as we see it,” said student Julien Fontaine.

Student Emile Cotelle agreed that it was important “just to know it exists and relates to us.”

The teens then returned to Calais High School where they performed a variety of French and Acadian music and even an American square dance.

They ended the program by waving American flags, and the youngsters received a standing ovation.