Читать книгу Canada - John George Bourinot - Страница 15

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.