Cartier's later voyages.
Allefonsce.
The later voyages of Cartier, in 1541 and 1543, revealed nothing more of general geographical interest. Indeed, the hope of a western passage in this direction had been abandoned in effect after Cartier's second voyage, although the pilot Allefonsce, who accompanied a later expedition, had been detailed to explore the Labrador coast to that end, and had been turned back by ice. After this he seems to have gone south into a great bay, under 42°, the end of which he did not reach. This may have been the large expanse partly shut in by Cape Sable (Nova Scotia) and Cape Cod, now called in the coast survey charts the Gulf of Maine; or perhaps it may conform, taking into account his registered latitude, to the inner bight of it called Massachusetts Bay. At all events, Allefonsce believed himself on coasts contiguous to Tartary, through which he had hopes to find access to the more hospitable orient (occident) farther south. He apparently had something of the same notion regarding the westerly stretch of water which he found below Cape Cod, extending he knew not where, along the inclosure of the present Long Island Sound.
In the years both before and after the middle of the century, French vessels were on this coast in considerable numbers for purposes of trade or for protecting French interests, but we know nothing of any accessions to geographical knowledge which they made.
RUSCELLI, 1544.
Allefonsce speaks of the Saguenay as widening, when he went up, till it seemed to be an arm of the sea, and "I think the same," he adds, "runs into the Sea of Cathay;" and so he draws it on one of his maps,—an idea made more general in the map of Homem in 1558, where the St. Lawrence really becomes a channel, locked by islands, bordering an Arctic Sea. Ramusio, in 1553, has inferred from such reports as he could get of Cartier's explorations, that his track had lain in channels bounded by islands, and a similar view had already been expressed in a portolano of 1536, preserved in the Bodleian, which Kohl associates with Homem or Agnese. The oceanic expansion of the Saguenay is preserved as late as the Molineaux map of 1600.
River of Norumbega.
It is to the work of Allefonsce that we probably owe another confusion of this northern cartography in the sixteenth century. What we now know as Penobscot Bay and River was called by him the River of Norumbega, and he seems to have given some ground for believing that this river connected the waters of the Atlantic with the great river of Canada, just as we find it later shown upon Gastaldi's map in Ramusio, by Ruscelli in 1561, by Martines in 1578, by Lok in 1582, and by Jacques de Vaulx in 1584.