French Pathfinders in North America

by William Henry Johnson

Jacques Cartier was a daring mariner, belonging to that bold Breton race whose fishermen had for many years frequented the Newfoundland Banks for codfish. In 1534 he sailed to push his exploration farther than had as yet been attempted. His inspiration was the old dream of all the early navigators, the hope of finding a highway to China. Needless to say, he did not find it, but he found something well worth the finding—Canada.

Sailing through the Straits of Belle Isle, he saw an inland sea opening before him. Passing Anticosti Island, he landed on the shore of a fine bay. It was the month of July, and it chanced to be an oppressive day. "The country is hotter than the country of Spain," he wrote in his journal. Therefore he gave the bay its name, the Bay of Chaleur (heat). The beauty and fertility of the country, the abundance of berries, and "the many goodly meadows, full of grass, and lakes wherein great pleanty of salmons be," made a great impression on him.

On the shore were more than three hundred men, women, and children. "These showed themselves very friendly," he says, "and in such wise were we assured one of another, that we very familiarly began to traffic for whatever they had, till they had nothing but their naked bodies, for they gave us all whatsoever they had." These Indians belonged undoubtedly to some branch of the Algonquin family occupying all this region.

Cartier did not scruple to take advantage of their simplicity. At Gaspé he set up a cross with the royal arms, the fleur-de-lys, carved on it, and a legend meaning, "Long live the King of France!" He meant this as a symbol of taking possession of the country for his master. Yet, when the Indian chief asked him what this meant, he answered that it was only a landmark for vessels that might come that way. Then he lured some of the natives on board and succeeded in securing two young men to be taken to France. This villainy accomplished, he sailed for home in great glee, not doubting that the wide estuary whose mouth he had entered was the opening of the long-sought passage to Cathay. In France his report excited wild enthusiasm. The way to the Indies was open! France had found and France would control it!

Natural enough was this joyful feeling. The only water-route to the East then in use was that around the Cape of Good Hope, and it belonged, according to the absurd grant of Pope Alexander the Sixth, to Portugal alone. Spain had opened another around the Horn, but kept the fact carefully concealed. In short, the selfish policy of Spain and Portugal was to shut all other nations out of trading with the regions which they claimed as theirs; and these tyrants of the southern seas were not slow in enforcing their claims. Spain, too, had ample means at her disposal. She was the mightiest power in the world, and her dominion on the ocean there was none to dispute. At that time Drake and Hawkins and those other great English seamen who broke her sea-power had not appeared. This condition of affairs compelled the northern nations, the English, French, and Dutch, to seek a route through high latitudes to the fabled wealth of the Indies. It led to those innumerable attempts to find a northeast or a northwest passage of which we have read elsewhere. (See, in "The World's Discoverers," accounts of Frobisher, Davis, Barentz, and Hudson, and of Nordenskjold, their triumphant successor.)

Now, Francis the First, the French monarch, a jealous rival of the Spanish sovereign, was determined to get a share of the New World. He had already, in 1524, sent out Verrazano to seek a passage to the East (See a sketch of this very interesting voyage in "The World's Discoverers"), and now he was eager to back Cartier with men and money.

Accordingly, the next year we find the explorer back at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, this time with three vessels and with a number of gentlemen who had embarked in the enterprise, believing that they were on their way to reap a splendid harvest in the Indies, like that of the Spanish cavaliers who sailed with the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. Entering, on St. Lawrence's day, the Gulf which he had discovered in the previous year, he named it the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The river emptying into it he called Hochelaga, from the Indian name of the adjacent country. Then, guided by the two young natives whom he had kidnapped the year before, whose home, though they had been seized near its mouth, was high up the river, he sailed up the wide stream, convinced that he was approaching China.

In due time Stadaconé was reached, near the site of Quebec, and Cartier visited the chief, Donnaconna, in his village. The two young Indians who acted as guides and interpreters had been filling the ears of their countrymen with marvelous tales of France. Especially, they had "made great brags," Cartier says, about his cannon; and Donnaconna begged him to fire some of them. Cartier, quite willing to give the savages a sense of his wonderful resources, ordered twelve guns fired in quick succession. At the roar of the cannon, he says, "they were greatly astonished and amazed; for they thought that Heaven had fallen upon them, and put themselves to flight, howling and crying and shrieking as if hell had broken loose."

Leaving his two larger vessels safely anchored within the mouth of the St. Charles River, Cartier set out with the smallest and two open boats, to ascend the St. Lawrence. At Hochelaga he found a great throng of Indians on the shore, wild with delight, dancing and singing. They loaded the strangers with gifts of fish and maize. At night the dark woods, far and near, were illumined with the blaze of great fires around which the savages capered with joy.

The next day Cartier and his party were conducted to the great Indian town. Passing through cornfields laden with ripening grain, they came to a high circular palisade consisting of three rows of tree-trunks, the outer and the inner inclining toward each other and supported by an upright row between them. Along the top were "places to run along and ladders to get up, all full of stones for the defence of it." In short, it was a very complete fortification, of the kind that the Hurons and the Iroquois always built.