Canada. John George Bourinot
he also coasted from Florida to Cape Breton. Much disappointment was felt that neither Verrazano nor Gomez had found a passage through the straits which were then, and for a long time afterwards, supposed to lie somewhere in the northern regions of America and to lead to China and India. Francis was not able to send Verrazano on another voyage, to take formal possession of the new lands, as he was engaged in that conflict with Charles which led to his defeat at the battle of Pavia and his being made subsequently a prisoner. Spain appears to have attached no importance to the discovery by Gomez, since it did not promise mines of gold and silver, and happily for the cause of civilisation and progress, she continued to confine herself to the countries of the South, though her fishermen annually ventured, in common with those of other nations, to the banks of Newfoundland. However, from the time of Verrazano we find on the old maps the names of Francisca and Nova Gallia as a recognition of the claim of France to important discoveries in North America. It is also from the Florentine's voyage that we may date the discovery of that mysterious region called Norumbega, where the fancy of sailors and adventurers eventually placed a noble city whose houses were raised on pillars of crystal and silver, and decorated with precious stones. These travellers' tales and sailors' yarns probably originated in the current belief that somewhere in those new lands, just discovered, there would be found an El Dorado. The same brilliant illusion that led Ralegh to the South made credulous mariners believe in a Norumbega in the forests of Acadia. The name clung for many years to a country embraced within the present limits of New England, and sometimes included Nova Scotia. Its rich capital was believed to exist somewhere on the beautiful Penobscot River, in the present State of Maine. A memorial of the same name still lingers in the little harbours of Norumbec, or Lorambeque, or Loran, on the southeastern coast of Cape Breton. Enthusiastic advocates of the Norse discovery and settlement have confidently seen in Norumbega, the Indian utterance of Norbega, the ancient form of Norway to which Vinland was subject, and this belief has been even emphasised on a stone pillar which stands on some ruins unearthed close to the Charles River in Massachusetts. Si non é vero è ben trovato. All this serves to amuse, though it cannot convince, the critical student of those shadowy times. With the progress of discovery the city of Norumbega was found as baseless as the fables of the golden city on the banks of the Orinoco, and of the fountain of youth among the forests and everglades of Florida.
III.
A BRETON SAILOR DISCOVERS CANADA
AND ITS GREAT RIVER.
(1534–36.)
In the fourth decade of the sixteenth century we find ourselves in the domain of precise history. The narratives of the voyages of Jacques Cartier of St. Malo, that famous port of Brittany which has given so many sailors to the world, are on the whole sufficiently definite, even at this distance of three centuries and a half, to enable us to follow his routes, and recognise the greater number of the places in the gulf and river which he revealed to the old world. The same enterprising king who had sent Verrazano to the west in 1524, commissioned the Breton sailor to find a short passage to Cathay and give a new dominion to France.
At the time of the departure of Cartier in 1534 for the "new-found isle" of Cabot, the world had made considerable advances in geographical knowledge. South America was now ascertained to be a separate continent, and the great Portuguese Magellan had passed through the straits, which ever since have borne his name, and found his way across the Pacific to the spice islands of Asia. As respects North America beyond the Gulf of Mexico and the country to the North, dense ignorance still prevailed, and though a coast line had been followed from Florida to Cape Breton by Cabot, Gomez, and Verrazano, it was believed either to belong to a part of Asia or to be a mere prolongation of Greenland. If one belief prevailed more than another it was in the existence of a great sea, called on the maps "the sea of Verrazano," in what is now the upper basin of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes of the west, and which was only separated from the Atlantic by a narrow strip of land. Now that it was clear that no short passage to India and China could be found through the Gulf of Mexico, and that South America was a continental region, the attention of hopeful geographers and of enterprising sailors and adventurers was directed to the north, especially as Spain was relatively indifferent to enterprise in that region. No doubt the French King thought that Cartier would find his way to the sea of Verrazano, beyond which were probably the lands visited by Marco Polo, that enterprising merchant of Venice, whose stories of adventure in India and China read like stories of the Arabian Nights.
Jacques Cartier
Jacques Cartier made three voyages to the continent of America between 1534 and 1542, and probably another in 1543. The first voyage, which took place in 1534 and lasted from April until September, was confined to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which he explored with some thoroughness after passing through the strait of Belle Isle, then called the Gulf of Castles (Chasteaux). The coast of Labrador he described with perfect accuracy as extremely forbidding, covered with rocks and moss and "as very likely the land given by God to Cain." In one of the harbours of the Labrador coast he found a fishing vessel from La Rochelle, the famous Protestant town of France, on its way to the port of Brest, then and for some time after a place of call for the fishermen who were already thronging the Gulf, where walrus, whales, and cod were so abundant. A good deal of time has been expended by historical writers on the itinerary of this voyage, the record of which is somewhat puzzling at times when we come to fix Cartier's names of places on a modern map. Confining ourselves to those localities of which there is no doubt, we know he visited and named the isle of Brion in honour of Admiral Philip de Chabot, Seigneur de Brion, who was a friend and companion of Francis, and had received from him authority to send out Cartier's expedition. The Breton saw the great sand-dunes, and red cliffs of the Magdalens rising from the sea like so many cones. It was one of these islands he probably called Alezay, though there are writers who recognise in his description a headland of Prince Edward Island, but it is not certain that he visited or named any of the bays or lagoons of that island which lies so snugly ensconced in the Gulf. We recognise the bay of Miramichi (St. Lunaire) and the still more beautiful scenery of the much larger bay of Chaleur (Heat) which he so named because he entered it on a very hot July day. There he had pleasant interviews with the natives, who danced and gave other demonstrations of joy when they received some presents in exchange for the food they brought to the strangers. These people were probably either Micmacs or Etchemins, one of the branches of the Algonquin nation who inhabited a large portion of the Northern continent. Cartier was enchanted with the natural beauties of "as fine a country as one would wish to see and live in, level and smooth, warmer than Spain, where there is abundance of wheat, which has an ear like that of rye, and again like oats, peas growing as thickly and as large as if they had been cultivated, red and white barberries, strawberries, red and white roses, and other flowers of a delightful and sweet perfume, meadows of rich grasses, and rivers full of salmon"—a perfectly true description of the beautiful country watered by the Restigouche and Metapedia rivers. Cartier also visited the picturesque bay of Gaspé, where the scenery is grand but the trees smaller and the land less fertile than in the neighbourhood of Chaleur and its rivers. On a point at the entrance of the harbour of Gaspé—an Indian name having probably reference to a split rock, which has long been a curiosity of the coast—Cartier raised a cross, thirty feet in height, on the middle of which there was a shield or escutcheon with three fleurs-de-lis, and the inscription, Vive le Roy de France. Cartier then returned to France by way of the strait of Belle Isle, without having seen the great river to whose mouth he had been so close when he stood on the hills of Gaspé or