THE STORY OF CANADA.

I.

INTRODUCTION.

THE CANADIAN DOMINION FROM OCEAN TO OCEAN.

The view from the spacious terrace on the verge of the cliffs of Quebec, the ancient capital of Canada, cannot fail to impress the imagination of the statesman or student versed in the history of the American continent, as well as delight the eye of the lover of the picturesque. Below the heights, to whose rocks and buildings cling so many memories of the past, flows the St. Lawrence, the great river of Canada, bearing to the Atlantic the waters of the numerous lakes and streams of the valley which was first discovered and explored by France, and in which her statesmen saw the elements of empire. We see the tinned roofs, spires and crosses of quaint churches, hospitals and convents, narrow streets winding among the rocks, black-robed priests and sombre nuns, habitans in homespun from the neighbouring villages, modest gambrel-roofed houses of the past crowded almost out of sight by obtrusive lofty structures of the present, the massive buildings of the famous seminary and university which bear the name of Laval, the first great bishop of that Church which has always dominated French Canada. Not far from the edge of the terrace stands a monument on which are inscribed the names of Montcalm and Wolfe, enemies in life but united in death and fame. Directly below is the market which recalls the name of Champlain, the founder of Quebec, and his first Canadian home at the margin of the river. On the same historic ground we see the high-peaked roof and antique spire of the curious old church, Notre-Dame des Victoires, which was first built to commemorate the repulse of an English fleet two centuries ago. Away beyond, to the left, we catch a glimpse of the meadows and cottages of the beautiful Isle of Orleans, and directly across the river are the rocky hills covered with the buildings of the town, which recalls the services of Lévis, whose fame as a soldier is hardly overshadowed by that of Montcalm. The Union-jack floats on the tall staff of the citadel which crowns the summit of Cape Diamond, but English voices are lost amid those of a people who still speak the language of France.

As we recall the story of these heights, we can see passing before us a picturesque procession: Sailors from the home of maritime enterprise on the Breton and Biscayan coasts, Indian warriors in their paint and savage finery, gentlemen-adventurers and pioneers, rovers of the forest and river, statesmen and soldiers of high ambition, gentle and cultured women who gave up their lives to alleviate suffering and teach the young, missionaries devoted to a faith for which many have died. In the famous old castle of Saint Louis,[1] long since levelled to the ground—whose foundations are beneath a part of this very terrace—statesmen feasted and dreamt of a French Empire in North America. Then the French dominion passed away with the fall of Quebec, and the old English colonies were at last relieved from that pressure which had confined them so long to the Atlantic coast, and enabled to become free commonwealths with great possibilities of development before them. Yet, while England lost so much in America by the War of Independence, there still remained to her a vast northern territory, stretching far to the east and west from Quebec, and containing all the rudiments of national life—

"The raw materials of a State,
Its muscle and its mind."

A century later than that Treaty of Paris which was signed in the palace of Versailles, and ceded Canada finally to England, the statesmen of the provinces of this northern territory, which was still a British possession,—statesmen of French as well as English Canada—assembled in an old building of this same city, so rich in memories of old France, and took the first steps towards the establishment of that Dominion, which, since then, has reached the Pacific shores.

It is the story of this Canadian Dominion, of its founders, explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and statesmen, that I shall attempt to relate briefly in the following pages, from the day the Breton sailor ascended the St. Lawrence to Hochelaga until the formation of the confederation, which united the people of two distinct nationalities and extends over so wide a region—so far beyond the Acadia and Canada which France once called her own. But that the story may be more intelligible from the beginning, it is necessary to give a bird's-eye view of the country, whose history is contemporaneous with that of the United States, and whose territorial area from Cape Breton to Vancouver—the sentinel islands of the Atlantic and Pacific approaches—is hardly inferior to that of the federal republic.

Although the population of Canada at present does not exceed nine millions of souls, the country has, within a few years, made great strides in the path of national development, and fairly takes a place of considerable importance among those nations whose stories have been already told; whose history goes back to centuries when the Laurentian Hills, those rocks of primeval times, looked down on an unbroken wilderness of forest and stretches of silent river. If we treat the subject from a strictly historical point of view, the confederation of provinces and territories comprised within the Dominion may be most conveniently grouped into several distinct divisions. Geographers divide the whole country lying between the two oceans into three well-defined regions: 1. The Eastern, extending from the Atlantic to the head of Lake Superior. 2. The Central, stretching across the prairies and plains to the base of the Rocky Mountains. 3. The Western, comprising that sea of mountains which at last unites with the waters of the Pacific. For the purposes of this narrative, however, the Eastern and largest division—also the oldest historically—must be separated into two distinct divisions, known as Acadia and Canada in the early annals of America.

The first division of the Eastern region now comprises the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, which, formerly, with a large portion of the State of Maine, were best known as Acadie,[2] a memorial of the Indian occupation before the French régime. These provinces are indented by noble harbours and bays, and many deep rivers connect the sea-board with the interior. They form the western and southern boundaries of that great gulf or eastern portal of Canada, which maritime adventurers explored from the earliest period of which we have any record. Ridges of the Appalachian range stretch from New England to the east of these Acadian provinces, giving picturesque features to a generally undulating surface, and find their boldest expression in the northern region of the island of Cape Breton. The peninsula of Nova Scotia is connected with the neighbouring province of New Brunswick by a narrow isthmus, on one side of which the great tides of the Bay of Fundy tumultuously beat, and is separated by a very romantic strait from the island of Cape Breton. Both this isthmus and island, we shall see in the course of this narrative, played important parts in the struggle between France and England for dominion in America. This Acadian division possesses large tracts of fertile lands, and valuable mines of coal and other minerals. In the richest district of the peninsula of Nova Scotia were the thatch-roofed villages of those Acadian farmers whose sad story has been told in matchless verse by a New England poet, and whose language can still be heard throughout the land they loved, and to which some of them returned after years of exile. The inexhaustible fisheries of the Gulf, whose waters wash their shores, centuries ago attracted fleets of adventurous sailors from the Atlantic coast of Europe, and led to the discovery of Canada and the St. Lawrence. It was with the view of protecting these fisheries, and guarding the great entrance to New France, that the French raised on the southeastern shores of Cape Breton the fortress of Louisbourg, the ruins of which now alone remain to tell of their ambition and enterprise.

Leaving Acadia, we come to the provinces which are watered by the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, extending from the Gulf to the head of Lake Superior, and finding their northern limits in the waters of Hudson's Bay. The name of Canada appears to be also a memorial of the Indian nations that once occupied the region between the Ottawa and Saguenay rivers. This name, meaning a large village or town in one of the dialects of the Huron-Iroquois tongue, was applied, in the first half of the sixteenth century, to a district in the neighbourhood of the Indian town of Stadacona, which stood on the site of the present city of Quebec. In the days of French occupation the name was more generally used than New France, and sometimes extended to the country now comprised in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, or, in other words, to the whole region from the Gulf to the head of Lake Superior. Finally, it was adopted as the most appropriate designation for the new Dominion that made a step toward national life in 1867.

The most important feature of this historic country is the remarkable natural highway which has given form and life to the growing nation by its side—a river famous in the history of exploration and war—a river which has never-failing reservoirs in those great lakes which occupy a basin larger than Great Britain—a river noted for its long stretch of navigable waters, its many rapids, and its unequalled Falls of Niagara, around all of which man's enterprise and skill have constructed a system of canals to give the west a continuous navigation from Lake Superior to the ocean for over two thousand miles. The Laurentian Hills—"the nucleus of the North American continent"—reach from inhospitable, rock-bound Labrador to the north of the St. Lawrence, extend up the Ottawa valley, and pass eventually to the northwest of Lakes Huron and Superior, as far as the "Divide" between the St. Lawrence valley and Hudson's Bay, but display their boldest forms on the north shore of the river below Quebec, where the names of Capes Eternity and Trinity have been so aptly given to those noble precipices which tower above the gloomy waters of the Saguenay, and have a history which "dates back to the very dawn of geographical time, and is of hoar antiquity in comparison with that of such youthful ranges as the Andes and the Alps." [3]

From Gaspe, the southeastern promontory at the entrance of the Gulf, the younger rocks of the Appalachian range, constituting the breast-bone of the continent, and culminating at the north in the White Mountains, describe a great curve southwesterly to the valley of the Hudson; and it is between the ridge-like elevations of this range and the older Laurentian Hills that we find the valley of the St. Lawrence, in which lie the provinces of Quebec and Ontario.

The province of Quebec is famous in the song and story of Canada; indeed, for a hundred and fifty years, it was Canada itself. More than a million and a quarter of people, speaking the language and professing the religion of their forefathers, continue to occupy the country which extends from the Gulf to the Ottawa, and have made themselves a power in the intellectual and political life of Canada. Everywhere do we meet names that recall the ancient régime—French kings and princes, statesmen, soldiers, sailors, explorers, and adventurers, compete in the national nomenclature with priests and saints. This country possesses large tracts of arable land, especially in the country stretching from the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, and watered by the Richelieu, that noted highway in Canadian history. Even yet, at the head-waters of its many rivers, it has abundance of timber to attract the lumberman.

The province of Ontario was formerly known as Upper or Western Canada, but at the time of the union it received its present name because it largely lies by the side of the lake which the Hurons and more famous Iroquois called "great." It extends from the river of the Ottawas—the first route of the French adventurers to the western lakes as far as the northwesterly limit of Lake Superior, and is the most populous and prosperous province of the Dominion on account of its wealth of agricultural land, and the energy of its population. Its history is chiefly interesting for the illustrations it affords of Englishmen's successful enterprise in a new country. The origin of the province must be sought in the history of those "United Empire Loyalists," who left the old colonies during and after the War of Independence and founded new homes by the St. Lawrence and great lakes, as well as in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where, as in the West, their descendants have had much influence in moulding institutions and developing enterprise.

In the days when Ontario and Quebec were a wilderness, except on the borders of the St. Lawrence from Montreal to the Quebec district, the fur-trade of the forests that stretched away beyond the Laurentides, was not only a source of gain to the trading companies and merchants of Acadia and Canada, but was the sole occupation of many adventurers whose lives were full of elements which assume a picturesque aspect at this distance of time. It was the fur-trade that mainly led to the discovery of the great West and to the opening up of the Mississippi valley. But always by the side of the fur-trader and explorer we see the Recollet or Jesuit missionary pressing forward with the cross in his hands and offering his life that the savage might learn the lessons of his Faith.

As soon as the Mississippi was discovered, and found navigable to the Gulf of Mexico, French Canadian statesmen recognised the vantage-ground that the command of the St. Lawrence valley gave them in their dreams of conquest. Controlling the Richelieu, Lake Champlain, and the approaches to the Hudson River, as well as the western lakes and rivers which gave easy access to the Mississippi, France planned her bold scheme of confining the old English colonies between the Appalachian range of mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, and finally dominating the whole continent.

So far we have been passing through a country where the lakes and rivers of a great natural basin or valley carry their tribute of waters to the Eastern Atlantic; but now, when we leave Lake Superior and the country known as Old Canada, we find ourselves on the northwestern height of land and overlooking another region whose great rivers—notably the Saskatchewan, Nelson, Mackenzie, Peace, Athabasca, and Yukon—drain immense areas and find their way after many circuitous wanderings to Arctic seas.

The Central region of Canada, long known as Rupert's Land and the Northwestern Territory, gradually ascends from the Winnipeg system of lakes, lying to the northwest of Lake Superior, as far as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and comprises those plains and prairies which have been opened up to civilisation within two decades of years, and offer large possibilities of power and wealth in the future development of the New Dominion. It is a region remarkable for its long rivers, in places shallow and rapid, and extremely erratic in their courses through the plains.

Geologists tell us that at some remote period these great central plains, now so rich in alluvial deposits, composed the bed of a sea which extended from the Arctic region and the ancient Laurentian belt as far as the Gulf of Mexico and made, in reality, of the continent, an Atlantis—that mysterious island of the Greeks. The history of the northwest is the history of Indians hunting the buffalo and fur-bearing animals in a country for many years under the control of companies holding royal charters of exclusive trade and jealously guarding their game preserves from the encroachments of settlement and attendant civilisation. French Canadians were the first to travel over the wide expanse of plain and reach the foothills of the Rockies a century and a half ago, and we can still see in this country the Métis or half-breed descendants of the French Canadian hunters and trappers who went there in the days when trading companies were supreme, and married Indian women. A cordon of villages, towns, and farms now stretches from the city of Winnipeg, built on the site of the old headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, as far as the Rocky Mountains. Fields of golden grain brighten the prairies, where the tracks of herds of buffalo, once so numerous but now extinct, still deeply indent the surface of the rich soil, and lead to some creek or stream, on whose banks grows the aspen or willow or poplar of a relatively treeless land, until we reach the more picturesque and well-wooded and undulating country through which the North Saskatchewan flows. As we travel over the wide expanse of plain, only bounded by the deep blue of the distant horizon, we become almost bewildered by the beauty and variety of the flora, which flourish on the rich soil; crocuses, roses, bluebells, convolvuli, anemones, asters, sunflowers, and other flowers too numerous to mention, follow each other in rapid succession from May till September, and mingle with

"The billowy bays of grass ever rolling in shadow and sunshine."

Ascending the foothills that rise from the plains to the Rocky Mountains we come to the Western region, known as British Columbia, comprising within a width varying from four to six hundred miles at the widest part, several ranges of great mountains which lie, roughly speaking, parallel to each other, and give sublimity and variety to the most remarkable scenery of North America. These mountains are an extension of the Cordilleran range, which forms the backbone of the Pacific coast, and in Mexico rises to great volcanic ridges, of which the loftiest are Popocatepétl and Iztaccíhuatl. Plateaus and valleys of rich, gravelly soil lie within these stately ranges.

Here we find the highest mountains of Canada, some varying from ten to fifteen thousand feet, and assuming a grandeur which we never see in the far more ancient Laurentides, which, in the course of ages, have been ground down by the forces of nature to their relatively diminutive size. Within the recesses of these stupendous ranges there are rich stores of gold and silver, while coal exists most abundantly on Vancouver [Transcriber's note: Island?].

The Fraser, Columbia, and other rivers of this region run with great swiftness among the cañons and gorges of the mountains, and find their way at last to the Pacific. In the Rockies, properly so called, we see stupendous masses of bare, rugged rock, crowned with snow and ice, and assuming all the grand and curious forms which nature loves to take in her most striking upheavals. Never can one forget the picturesque beauty and impressive grandeur of the Selkirk range, and the ride by the side of the broad, rapid Fraser, over trestle-work, around curves, and through tunnels, with the forest-clad mountains ever rising as far as the eye can reach, with glimpses of precipices and cañons, of cataracts and cascades that tumble down from the glaciers or snow-clad peaks, and resemble so many drifts of snow amid the green foliage that grows on the lowest slopes. The Fraser River valley, writes an observer, "is one so singularly formed, that it would seem that some superhuman sword had at a single stroke cut through a labyrinth of mountains for three hundred miles, down deep into the bowels of the land." [4] Further along the Fraser the Cascade Mountains lift their rugged heads, and the river "flows at the bottom of a vast tangle cut by nature through the heart of the mountains." The glaciers fully equal in magnitude and grandeur those of Switzerland. On the coast and in the rich valleys stand the giant pines and cedars, compared with which the trees of the Eastern division seem mere saplings. The coast is very mountainous and broken into innumerable inlets and islands, all of them heavily timbered to the water's edge. The history of this region offers little of picturesque interest except what may be found in the adventures of daring sailors of various nationalities on the Pacific coast, or in the story of the descent of the Fraser by the Scotch fur-trader who first followed it to the sea, and gave it the name which it still justly bears.

The history of the Western and Central regions of the Dominion is given briefly towards the end of this narrative, as it forms a national sequence or supplement to that of the Eastern divisions, Acadia and Canada, where France first established her dominion, and the foundations were laid for the present Canadian confederation. It is the story of the great Eastern country that I must now tell in the following pages.

[1] The first terrace, named after Lord Durham, was built on the foundations of the castle. In recent years the platform has been extended and renamed Dufferin, in honour of a popular governor-general.

[2] Akade means a place or district in the language of the Micmacs or Souriquois, the most important Indian tribe in the Eastern provinces, and is always united with another word, signifying some natural characteristic of the locality. For instance, the well-known river in Nova Scotia, Shubenacadie (Segebun-akade), the place where the ground-nut or Indian potato grows. [Transcriber's note: In the original book, "Akade" and "Segebun-akade" contain Unicode characters. In "Akade" the lower-case "a" is "a-breve", in "Segebun" the vowels are "e-breve" and "u-breve", and in "akade" the first "a" is "a-macron" and the second is "a-breve".]

[3] Sir J. W. Dawson, Salient Points in the Science of the Earth, p. 99.

[4] H. H. Bancroft, British Columbia, p. 38.

II.

THE DAWN OF DISCOVERY IN CANADA.

(1497-1525.)

On one of the noble avenues of the modern part of the city of Boston, so famous in the political and intellectual life of America, stands a monument of bronze which some Scandinavian and historical enthusiasts have raised to the memory of Leif, son of Eric the Red, who, in the first year of the eleventh century, sailed from Greenland where his father, an Icelandic jarl or earl, had founded a settlement. This statue represents the sturdy, well-proportioned figure of a Norse sailor just discovering the new lands with which the Sagas or poetic chronicles of the North connect his name. At the foot of the pedestal the artist has placed the dragon's head which always stood on the prow of the Norsemen's ships, and pictures of which can still be seen on the famous Norman tapestry at Bayeux.

The Icelandic Sagas possess a basis of historical truth, and there is reason to believe that Leif Ericson discovered three countries. The first land he made after leaving Greenland he named Helluland on account of its slaty rocks. Then he came to a flat country with white beaches of sand, which he called Markland because it was so well wooded.

After a sail of some days the Northmen arrived on a coast where they found vines laden with grapes, and very appropriately named Vinland. The exact situation of Vinland and the other countries visited by Leif Ericson and other Norsemen, who followed in later voyages and are believed to have founded settlements in the land of vines, has been always a subject of perplexity, since we have only the vague Sagas to guide us. It may be fairly assumed, however, that the rocky land was the coast of Labrador; the low-lying forest-clad shores which Ericson called Markland was possibly the southeastern part of Cape Breton or the southern coast of Nova Scotia; Vinland was very likely somewhere in New England. Be that as it may, the world gained nothing from these misty discoveries—if, indeed, we may so call the results of the voyages of ten centuries ago. No such memorials of the Icelandic pioneers have yet been found in America as they have left behind them in Greenland. The old ivy-covered round tower at Newport in Rhode Island is no longer claimed as a relic of the Norse settlers of Vinland, since it has been proved beyond doubt to be nothing more than a very substantial stone windmill of quite recent times, while the writing on the once equally famous rock, found last century at Dighton, by the side of a New England river, is now generally admitted to be nothing more than a memorial of one of the Indian tribes who have inhabited the country since the voyages of the Norsemen.

Leaving this domain of legend, we come to the last years of the fifteenth century, when Columbus landed on the islands now often known as the Antilles—a memorial of that mysterious Antillia, or Isle of the Seven Cities, which was long supposed to exist in the mid-Atlantic, and found a place in all the maps before, and even some time after, the voyages of the illustrious Genoese. A part of the veil was at last lifted from that mysterious western ocean—that Sea of Darkness, which had perplexed philosophers, geographers, and sailors, from the days of Aristotle, Plato, Strabo, and Ptolemy. As in the case of Scandinavia, several countries have endeavoured to establish a claim for the priority of discovery in America. Some sailors of that Biscayan coast, which has given so many bold pilots and mariners to the world of adventure and exploration—that Basque country to which belonged Juan de la Cosa, the pilot who accompanied Columbus in his voyages—may have found their way to the North Atlantic coast in search of cod or whales at a very early time; and it is certainly an argument for such a claim that John Cabot is said in 1497 to have heard the Indians of northeastern America speak of Baccalaos, or Basque for cod—a name afterwards applied for a century and longer to the islands and countries around the Gulf. It is certainly not improbable that the Normans, Bretons, or Basques, whose lives from times immemorial have been passed on the sea, should have been driven by the winds or by some accident to the shores of Newfoundland or Labrador or even Cape Breton, but such theories are not based upon sufficiently authentic data to bring them under the consideration of the serious historian.

It is unfortunate that the records of history should be so wanting in definite and accurate details, when we come to the voyages of John Cabot, a great navigator, who was probably a Genoese by birth and a Venetian by citizenship. Five years after the first discovery by Columbus, John Cabot sailed to unknown seas and lands in the Northwest in the ship Matthew of Bristol, with full authority from the King of England, Henry the Seventh, to take possession in his name of all countries he might discover. On his return from a successful voyage, during which he certainly landed on the coast of British North America, and first discovered the continent of North America, he became the hero of the hour and received from Henry, a very economical sovereign, a largess of ten pounds as a reward to "hym that founde the new ile." In the following year both he and his son Sebastian, then a very young man, who probably also accompanied his father in the voyage of 1497, sailed again for the new lands which were believed to be somewhere on the road to Cipango and the countries of gold and spice and silk. We have no exact record of this voyage, and do not even know whether John Cabot himself returned alive; for, from the day of his sailing in 1498, he disappears from the scene and his son Sebastian not only becomes henceforth a prominent figure in the maritime history of the period, but has been given by his admirers even the place which his father alone fairly won as the leader in the two voyages on which England has based her claim of priority of discovery on the Atlantic coast of North America. The weight of authority so far points to a headland of Cape Breton as the prima tierra vista, or the landfall which John Cabot probably made on a June day, the four hundredth anniversary of which arrived in 1897, though the claims of a point on the wild Labrador coast and of Bonavista, an eastern headland of Newfoundland, have also some earnest advocates. It is, however, generally admitted that the Cabots, in the second voyage, sailed past the shores of Nova Scotia and of the United States as far south as Spanish Florida. History here, at all events, has tangible, and in some respects irrefutable, evidence on which to dwell, since we have before us a celebrated map, which has come down from the first year of the sixteenth century, and is known beyond doubt to have been drawn with all the authority that is due to so famous a navigator as Juan de la Cosa, the Basque pilot. On this map we see delineated for the first time the coast apparently of a continental region extending from the peninsula of Florida as far as the present Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is described in Spanish as mar descubierta por los Ingleses (sea discovered by the English), on one headland of which there is a Cavo de Ynglaterra, or English Cape. Whether this sea is the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the headland is Cape Race, the south-eastern extremity of Newfoundland, or the equally well-known point which the Bretons named on the southeastern coast of Cape Breton, are among the questions which enter into the domain of speculation and imagination. Juan de la Cosa, however, is conclusive evidence in favour of the English claim to the first discovery of Northern countries, whose greatness and prosperity have already exceeded the conceptions which the Spanish conquerors formed when they won possession of those rich Southern lands which so long acknowledged the dominion of Spain.

But Cabot's voyages led to no immediate practical results. The Bristol ships brought back no rich cargoes of gold or silver or spices, to tell England that she had won a passage to the Indies and Cathay. The idea, however, that a short passage would be discovered to those rich regions was to linger for nearly two centuries in the minds of maritime adventurers and geographers.

If we study the names of the headlands, bays, and other natural features of the islands and countries which inclose the Gulf of St. Lawrence we find many memorials of the early Portuguese and French voyagers. In the beginning of the sixteenth century Gaspar Cortereal made several voyages to the northeastern shores of Newfoundland and Labrador, and brought back with him a number of natives whose sturdy frames gave European spectators the idea that they would make good labourers; and it was this erroneous conception, it is generally thought, gave its present name to the rocky, forbidding region which the Norse voyagers had probably called Helluland five hundred years before. Both Gaspar Cortereal and his brother Miguel disappeared from history somewhere in the waters of Hudson's Bay or Labrador; but they were followed by other adventurous sailors who have left mementos of their nationality on such places as Cape Raso (Race), Boa Ventura (Bonaventure), Conception, Tangier, Porto Novo, Carbonear (Carboneiro), all of which and other names appear on the earliest maps of the north-eastern waters of North America.

Some enterprising sailors of Brittany first gave a name to that Cape which lies to the northeast of the historic port of Louisbourg. These hardy sailors were certainly on the coast of the island as early as 1504, and Cape Breton is consequently the earliest French name on record in America. Some claim is made for the Basques—that primeval people, whose origin is lost in the mists of tradition—because there is a Cape Breton on the Biscayan coast of France, but the evidence in support of the Bretons' claim is by far the strongest. For very many years the name of Bretons' land was attached on maps to a continental region, which included the present Nova Scotia, and it was well into the middle of the sixteenth century, after the voyages of Jacques Cartier and Jehan Alfonce, before we find the island itself make its appearance in its proper place and form.

It was a native of the beautiful city of Florence, in the days of Francis the First, who gave to France some claim to territory in North America. Giovanni da Verrazano, a well-known corsair, in 1524, received a commission from that brilliant and dissipated king, Francis the First, who had become jealous of the enormous pretensions of Spain and Portugal in the new world, and had on one occasion sent word to his great rival, Charles the Fifth, that he was not aware that "our first father Adam had made the Spanish and Portuguese kings his sole heirs to the earth." Verrazano's voyage is supposed on good authority to have embraced the whole North American coast from Cape Fear in North Carolina as far as the island of Cape Breton. About the same time Spain sent an expedition to the northeastern coasts of America under the direction of Estevan Gomez, a Portuguese pilot, and it is probable that 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 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 passed around the shores of desolate Anticosti.

Cartier brought back with him two sons of the Indian chief of a tribe he saw at Gaspé, who seem to have belonged to the Huron-Iroquois nation he met at Stadacona, now Quebec, when he made the second voyage which I have to describe. The accounts he gave of the country on the Gulf appear to have been sufficiently encouraging to keep up the interest of the King and the Admiral of France in the scheme of discovery which they had planned. In this second voyage of 1535-36, the most memorable of all he made to American waters, he had the assistance of a little fleet of three vessels, the Grande Hermine, the Petite Hermine, and the Emérillon, of which the first had a burden of one hundred and twenty tons—quite a large ship compared with the two little vessels of sixty tons each that were given him for his first venture. This fleet, which gave Canada to France for two centuries and a quarter, reached Newfoundland during the early part of July, passed through the strait of Belle Isle, and on the 10th of August, came to a little bay or harbour on the northern shore of the present province of Quebec, but then known as Labrador, to which he gave the name of St. Laurent, in honour of the saint whose festival happened to fall on the day of his arrival. This bay is now generally believed to be the port of Sainte Geneviève, and the name which Cartier gave it was gradually transferred in the course of a century to the whole gulf as well as to the river itself which the Breton sailor was the first to place definitely on the maps of those days of scanty geographical knowledge. Cartier led his vessels through the passage between the northern shores of Canada and the island of Anticosti, which he called Assomption, although it has long since resumed its old name, which has been gradually changed from the original Natiscotic to Naticousti, and finally to Anticosti. When the adventurers came near the neighbourhood of Trinity River on the north side of the Gulf, the two Gaspé Indians who were on board Cartier's vessel, the Grande Hermine, told them that they were now at the entrance of the kingdom of Saguenay where red copper was to be found, and that away beyond flowed the great river of Hochelaga and Canada. This Saguenay kingdom extended on the north side of the river as far as the neighbourhood of the present well-known Isle aux Coudres; then came the kingdom of Canada, stretching as far as the island of Montreal, where the King of Hochelaga exercised dominion over a number of tribes in the adjacent country.

Cartier passed the gloomy portals of the Saguenay, and stopped for a day or two at Isle aux Coudres (Coudrières) over fifty miles below Quebec, where mass was celebrated for the first time on the river of Canada, and which he named on account of the hazel-nuts he found "as large and better tasting than those of France, though a little harder." Cartier then followed the north shore, with its lofty, well-wooded mountains stretching away to the northward, and came at last to an anchorage not far from Stadacona, somewhere between the present Isle of Orleans and the mainland. Here he had an interview with the natives, who showed every confidence in the strangers when they found that the two Gaspé Indians, Taignoagny and Domagaya, were their companions. As soon as they were satisfied of this fact—and here we have a proof that these two Indians must have belonged to the same nation—"they showed their joy, danced, and performed various antics." Subsequently the lord of Donnacona, whose Indian title was Agouahana, came with twelve canoes and "made a speech according to the fashion, contorting the body and limbs in a remarkable way—a ceremony of joy and welcome." After looking about for a safe harbour, Cartier chose the mouth of the present St. Charles River, which he named the River of the Holy Cross (Sainte Croix) in honour of the day when he arrived. The fleet was anchored not far from the Indian village of Stadacona, and soon after its arrival one of the chiefs received the Frenchmen with a speech of welcome, "while the women danced and sang without ceasing, standing in the water up to their knees."

Moored in a safe haven, the French had abundant opportunity to make themselves acquainted with the surrounding country and its people. They visited the island close by, and were delighted with "its beautiful trees, the same as in France," and with the great quantities of vines "such as we had never before seen." Cartier called this attractive spot the Island of Bacchus, but changed the name subsequently to the Isle of Orleans, in honour of one of the royal sons of France. Cartier was equally charmed with the varied scenery and the fruitful soil of the country around Stadacona.

It was now the middle of September, and Cartier determined, since his men had fully recovered from the fatigues of the voyage, to proceed up the river as far as Hochelaga, of which he was constantly hearing accounts from the Indians. When they heard of this intention, Donnacona and other chiefs used their best efforts to dissuade him by inventing stories of the dangers of the navigation. The two Gaspé Indians lent themselves to the plans of the chief of Stadacona. Three Indians were dressed as devils, "with faces painted as black as coal, with horns as long as the arm, and covered with the skins of black and white dogs." These devils were declared to be emissaries of the Indian God at Hochelaga, called Cudragny, who warned the French that "there was so much snow and ice that all would die." The Gaspé Indians, who had so long an acquaintance with the religious customs and superstitions of the French, endeavoured to influence them by appeals to "Jesus" and "Jesus Maria." Cartier, however, only laughed at the tricks of the Indians, and told them that "their God Cudragny was a mere fool, and that Jesus would preserve them from all danger if they should believe in Him." The French at last started on the ascent of the river in the Emérillon and two large boats, but neither Taignoagny nor Domagaya could be induced to accompany the expedition to Hochelaga.

Cartier and his men reached the neighbourhood of Hochelaga, the Indian town on the island of Montreal, in about a fortnight's time. The appearance of the country bordering on the river between Stadacona and Hochelaga pleased the French on account of the springs of excellent water, the beautiful trees, and vines heavily laden with grapes, and the quantities of wild fowl that rose from every bay or creek as the voyagers passed by. At one place called Achelay, "a strait with a stony and dangerous current, full of rocks,"—probably the Richelieu Rapids[1] above Point au Platon—a number of Indians came on board the Emérillon, warned Cartier of the perils of the river, and the chief made him a present of two children, one of whom, a little girl of seven or eight years, he accepted and promised to take every care of. Somewhere on Lake St. Peter they found the water very shallow and decided to leave the Emérillon and proceed in the boats to Hochelaga, where they arrived on the second of October, and were met by more than "a thousand savages who gathered about them, men, women, and children, and received us as well as a parent does a child, showing great joy." After a display of friendly feeling on the part of the natives and their visitors, and the exchange of presents between them, Cartier returned to his boat in the stream. "All that night," says the narrative, "the savages remained on the shore near our boats, keeping up fires, dancing, crying out 'Aguaze,' which is their word for welcome and joy." The king or chief of this Indian domain was also called Agouahana, and was a member of the Huron-Iroquois stock.