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Table of Contents

Jacques Cartier's Discovery of the St. Lawrence. The Empty Continent. The Norsemen. John Cabot's Voyages. The Newfoundland Fisheries. Cartier's Voyage of Reconnaissance (1534). Discovery of the St. Lawrence (1535). Cartier at Hochelaga. The Winter at Stadacona.

More than a hundred years went by between the discoveries of Columbus and Cabot and the first permanent settlements of North America in Quebec, Virginia, and New England. Tropical America fell an easy prey to the arms, the enterprise, and the rapacity of Europe. The feeble natives of the Caribbean had no answer even to the clumsy firearms and the awkward ships of the sixteenth century; the half-civilized Aztecs and Peruvians little better. Force opened the way; gain and the lure of adventure furnished the motive, religious zeal the cloak of justification. None who went to America meant to stay there.

With North America it was different. For centuries after the discovery of the North American coast nature jealously guarded the access to the vast resources of the interior. On the north a great barrier of ice blocked all approach. The Elizabethan explorers, interested not in America but in what might lie behind it, strove against this barrier in vain. On the south, along the Gulf of Mexico, the tropical heat, the fevers of coastal swamps, the tangled delta, and the shifting channels of the Mississippi long held all intruders at bay. The western side of North America remained thus utterly unknown and beyond reach. The passage around the bottom of South America, achieved by Magellan and by Drake, was impossibly far and impossibly dangerous. Even after Núñez Balboa had seen the unlimited Pacific, during his famous silence on his peak of Darien,[1] the route over the jungles and mountains of Panama was barely more than a war trail for buccaneers and plunderers, too arduous for the path of peace.

Only on one side was the coast of the continent of easy access. The incomparable series of inlets, bays, and river mouths which indent the Atlantic coast from the Bay of Fundy to the sands of Carolina offer everywhere easy landings and ample shelter. But it was only the coastal margin which was thus accessible. The mountain rock and forest of the Adirondacks and the Appalachians still blocked the interior. In a few places access might be effected by the valleys of the rivers. But only in one place was there a wide-open break in this barred coast. Right in its center the sheltered waters round what is now New York led into the broad placid stream of the Hudson that carried ships under sail 150 miles inland and showed them, when ship navigation ended, the open valley of the Mohawk, an easy pathway into inland America. For over a century the coastal voyages of explorers (Corte-Real, Verrazano, Gómez) passed this opening by. They too were looking for something else. The "stern and rockbound coast," the forest torn by the wind, the lurking savages meant nothing to men whose eyes expected at each new cape and corner to see the crowded seaports and the sunlit cities of the Orient, and whose ears ever listened for the bells in the pagodas of Cathay.[2]

It is a humiliating thought for us to realize that these early discoverers saw North America and didn't want it. A few attempts on it were made. Ponce de León, searching, as old men ever do, for the Fountain of Youth, looked for it, as old men still do, in Florida. De Soto and others, looking for gold and the "Seven Cities of Cibola," struggled as far as the Mississippi. Raleigh even attempted a real settlement. Henry Hudson, after sailing his ship against the ice of Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya, with the same pagoda bells in his ears, turned right about westward and left his name forever on the great fresh-water river and the great salt sea which he discovered. Of the two the great sea seemed at the time vastly the more important. Then came the Pilgrims looking for the wilderness and finding it.

Thus slept North America. It was indeed an empty continent; empty and silent. Except perhaps on the British Columbian coast its aborigines were so few that all was solitude. Here and there a few thousand Indians might cluster, as in the wigwam lodges of the Hurons below the Georgian Bay, or the Onondagas beside Oneida Lake, or the group which Jacques Cartier was to find at Hochelaga. But such open spots were rare in the unbroken forest which then covered all eastern Canada, New England, and the shores of the Great Lakes. A voyager making his way along the rivers that pierced the forest or along the streams where the forest trees met over his head, might pass days and days—indeed expected to do so—without sight or sound or evidence of human life. Our Canadian west was one vast solitude over which passed at intervals great droves of buffalo, attacked by nomad savages, without as yet the European horses that later gave them mastery. Nearly four hundred years after Columbus the famous English soldier and writer, Captain Butler,[3] could still speak of the inconceivable solitude of the West. "You may travel," he wrote, "five hundred miles in a straight line without meeting a human being." Thus slept America; thus waited the best of it for man's use—the riches of the Ohio valley, the alluvial soil of the prairies, the garden valleys of British Columbia; its very uses slept with it, still unusable. What were rock oil and hard coal to people who traded in little shipfuls of spices, sandalwood, and nutmeg, thinking pepper priceless? Today the kitchen holds unheeded all their little treasures. Even gold: all the gold and silver of Mexico and South America was as nothing beside what was hidden in the fastnesses of the silent continent. All that came to Europe in a hundred years of the days of Cortez and Pizarro was nowhere beside what later came from California in twenty years and out of Canada in the last ten.

It is necessary to lay stress on this unused aspect of our continent, and especially of Canada. It has served to turn the course of our history aside, false values blocking the true direction. We cannot understand the history of Montreal without it. This failure to appreciate the latent wealth of the North is not a mere curious relation of the romance of the past, of the irony of history. It counts now. It explains the common failure to understand that Canada is today still relatively empty—12,000,000 people instead of ten times as many. The material changes of machine civilization (we dare no longer call it progress) have shifted all physical values. What now is a little pot of pepper, or even a rajah's emerald, as beside water power, minerals, coal, rock oil? Man now can live sheltered from the cold, serving iced drinks where Indians froze. Civilization moves north, steadily as a star drifts across the sky. Unless we take full account of these broad features, this shifting frame of human history, we cannot estimate the oncoming future of North America.

All this we have said of the Hudson River access to the continent. But above the Bay of Fundy a greater and easier one, the entry of the St. Lawrence, lay concealed, to be revealed for one brief moment by Jacques Cartier in 1535, lost then for sixty-eight years till Samuel de Champlain rediscovered it forever. If it were not for the northern ice, this entry indeed to the very heart of the continent would surpass all others to an incomparable degree. It leads by water, so to speak, to everywhere. But the "if" is large enough to blot out all the rest of the clause. Indeed in past history, in sailing-ship days, this factor governed all. We do not realize how few people ever came that way before the steamship revolutionized it after 1809. A hundred years after Cartier there were only sixty-five French people in Quebec and none (over the winter) in Montreal. At the close of the seventeenth century New France had only about 12,000 French inhabitants. The population of the British Atlantic seaboard was nearly a quarter of a million. The chief glory of the St. Lawrence was as yet in what it was going to be rather than what it was. It still is.

Cartier's discovery came about thus. The northeastern coast of North America had long been dimly known to Europe—known and disregarded. The Norsemen had been established in Greenland for over four hundred years. As a result their ships were at times driven by bad weather, or tempted by good weather, along the shores of the mainland of America. Here they found a coast of rock and slate that they called Hulluland and a seaside forest land that they named Markland. They even went south to the warm temperature of a fertile district called Vinland, all of which places are now a puzzle to the historian. But the Norsemen had enough of them. As soon as random voyages led to an attempt at real settlement in Vinland (Thorfinn Karlsefni, A.D. 1007), the Norsemen came in contact with the American savages, the treacherous ambush, the war by night and cruelty by day that were to be the curse of North America.[4] These tangled woods, these stealthy, whispering waters became, in old classical sense, a "horror" to the Norsemen. They drove their ships back again, back to the bright emptiness of Greenland, its green meadows and its glistening ice, all adrip in the sunshine—God's country, brave and open, where men were men. They never came to Vinland again, except in short voyages to snatch away timber. They knew quite enough about North America. They too didn't want it.

Neither did John Cabot, who did not live to know that he had been there. He came back to his parsimonious patron, Henry VII, with brave talk of the "new Isle" that he had discovered. He reported that he had reached the country of the Great Khan; that it was seven hundred leagues beyond Ireland. He offered to go again and sail farther south to reach Cipango, which was nearer the equator, and to bring back spices. This first voyage of Cabot and his sons had been, like the later journeys of the Pickwick Club, conducted "upon their own proper costs and charges." But the King now, evidently deeply moved, gave Cabot £10 for having "found the new Isle." He commissioned him at once to make a new voyage by this happy route to Cipango for spices, with a promise of £20 a year for life and of a fleet of ten ships and three hundred sailors for 1498.

There was great excitement in Cabot's home town of Bristol from which he had sailed over this new route. We read how the sailors followed him around. Sailors and merchants foresaw a great trade in spices between Bristol and Cipango. But we know now, thanks to painstaking scholarship, where Cabot had been on his famous first voyage. Sailing from Bristol May 2, 1497, he had landed, fifty-two days out, on Cape Breton Island, claimed it and named it Cape Discovery, sailed north, saw and named Cape Ray on Newfoundland, the near-by islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon (rediscovered by the world in 1942), passed the bold headland of Cape Race (he called it England's Cape), and thence home to drop anchor in Bristol on August 6, 1497, with Asia in his pocket.

Such was Cabot's first voyage. Like so many American voyages of discovery, from Columbus' first error onward, it was utterly futile in its intended purpose, immeasurable in its unplanned results. For Cipango take the Grand Banks; from their codfish trace Cartier, and from Cartier the St. Lawrence, Montreal, and the vision of the future. Meantime preparations went forward for the second Cipango voyage. The King was as good as his word, or as nearly good as kings then were. Cabot got two ships and three hundred men with letters patent (February 3, 1498) wide enough to reach Asia. A few small trading vessels joined fortunes with him. He set out in May 1498 on a voyage in defiance of geography, dreary with cold and hardship, broken with mutiny, and utterly fruitless. Cabot pushed up the east coast of Greenland till the sheer futility of it led him to the west coast, thence across the Straits to Baffin land (latitude 66° north), then south past Newfoundland, and then along the everlasting coast of forest and rock and empty sand, looking for what was not there. Somewhere off the coast of Maryland (latitude 38°), with stores low and hope dead, Cabot turned for England. He reached Bristol late that autumn to die—why not?—soon afterward. His son Sebastian had a later career, but as far as North America was concerned, the Cabots ended with 1498.

Not so the "new Isle." Cabot's sailors brought home to Bristol and from there to all western Europe the news of the marvelous codfisheries off the "new Isle." Till then the English codfishing fleets went out, mostly from London and the east ports, but also from Bristol, to fish off the coast of Iceland. But the fishing was limited and restricted by the regulations of Danish sovereignty. These new fisheries, free and open, literally "beat all." There is a famous letter in which an Italian diplomat wrote home: "Cabot's sailors, practically all English and from Bristol . . . affirm that the sea is swarming with fish which can be taken with baskets let down with a stone."[5]

For once sailors' tales of wonder held true. The North Atlantic Ocean, at the full depth of its sunken bed between America and Europe, is five miles deep. But all around the northeastern coast of North America from Cape Cod to Labrador there projects an outlying "continental shelf," only "recently" submerged. Here are great "banks," like Georges Bank east of Nantucket and the Grand Bank southeast of Newfoundland. The line that marks a depth of only six hundred feet runs all round this continental shelf. The area of the whole submarine plateau is computed at 500,000 square miles. There are great stretches on the Banks where the depth is only from 180 to 420 feet. Here, as a French writer has said, "the land is infinitely silent, but the sea harbors every form of life." The temperature, the ocean bed with an infinity of small fish, and salt cold water combine to make an ideal environment (for a codfish). Here close to the surface, upheld by the salt of the icy water, float the infinite quantities of "plankton," the microscopic life of ponds and seas. On this feed the larvae of the codfish. Later the fry descend to live on shell stuff, then come again up to live, voraciously, on everything afloat. A codfish is mature at three years, lives easily beyond five, weighs from three to four pounds inshore and about twenty-five to thirty-five on the Banks. They vary greatly. The record reaches over two hundred pounds, a six-foot length. Small varieties are mature at three years, large ones at five. A sizable cod when it spawns leaves 3,000,000 eggs a year floating among the plankton. Each egg only asks a chance to leave 3,000,000 more. Malthusian despondency is staggered at the prospect. But at least it makes our history easier to understand, our future easier to secure.

That is what Cabot's sailors saw when they lifted in the cod in basketfuls. That was the news that sent all Brittany and Normandy to the Banks. Bretons, Normans, and Basques, even the Portuguese, came before the English themselves; the latter still clung with insular conservatism to their Iceland fishing. Later, after Cartier's time, they came in a flock.

All through the fifteen hundreds the fishermen came in increasing numbers to the Newfoundland Banks. But they came and went like a flock of sea birds in unrecorded voyages in the summer season of the spawning of the codfish. They drove home with the strong west winds of the equinox in a voyage of about a month. Later sailing ships have run across in two weeks. History took but little count of the fishing fleet, though we read that Henry VIII once sent out ships of the new Royal Navy to shepherd them safely into the Channel. History was too busy with the new splendors of the monarchies of the Renaissance and with the Italian wars. Only today patient scholarship traces out the record from seaport entries.

The cartographers of the day gathered up the rough charts of the fishing pilots and made out of them the maps and globes that have been preserved. These show the coast and islands recognizable from the Bay of Fundy to Labrador. But the Gulf of St. Lawrence is marked as a huge inlet closed in on the west, beyond the Strait of Belle Isle, and marked the Great Bay. The fishing boats did not push far into the gulf since the fishing is less good as the water gets less salty.

There must have been much information handed round in the seaports about the strong currents that came down and much suspicion that the Great Bay led somewhere. After all, the ground was as familiar to them as Saint-Malo itself. Lescarbot, the later companion of Champlain, tells of knowing one old man who had made forty-two round trips (eighty-four voyages). We still retain some of the place names given by the fishermen before history began—the Cape of the Bretons, the Harbour of St. John.

This was the situation that led Francis I of France into North American exploration. Francis was one of the glittering kings of the new monarchy, as who should say, the "opposite number" of our Henry VIII and the Spanish Charles V. He threw himself eagerly into the glory of war and the invasion of Italy till his defeat at Pavia left him a prisoner with "all lost but honor." Set free with his honor—by trading off Burgundy—he threw himself into the current of the Renaissance, a patron of the glory of Paris in art and letters. Then for a brief moment—a break in the clouds—into North American adventure, and then finally into the crowning glory of the persecution of the peasant heretics of Vaudois (the Waldenses). The brief American episodes of his reign were found in the voyage of Giovanni Verrazano, commissioned by King Francis before his Italian disaster, and by Jacques Cartier's discovery of Canada.

Verrazano's voyage and his later fate have left only a twilight record. He sailed across the Atlantic until he struck land, skirted northward, looking always for something better, landed here and there but nowhere north of the present New Hampshire, then up along the fishing coast to the frozen seas, then out and home. The voyage was fruitless, leaving nothing but the name New France, lost and found again, and needless as a French claim when Cartier's voyages superseded it.

These voyages were another matter. Cartier was a pilot of Saint-Malo, a man in middle life, courageous and devout and of a vision that looked beyond sea fishery to the apostles' higher calling. He had already made a voyage to South America, perhaps had been to the Banks. We do not know whether the King's admiral, Chabot, heard of Cartier and summoned him or whether Cartier made proposals to the admiral. At all events he was given a royal commission for a voyage of discovery.

Cartier seemed to know well enough where he was going—straight through the Belle Isle Strait and on. The fact that after he passed the Strait he met, without surprise, "a tall ship out of Rochelle" shows how familiar already was the outer coast.[6] He passed along the stern and forbidding north shore of the Gulf. He decided that this must be the land that God gave Cain. This was not a joke. It was, after the fashion of the day, a pious confirmation of the truth of Scripture. But Cartier's attempt to get past Anticosti Island by the north channel, against wind and current, proved hopeless.

The art of "tacking," sailing in zigzags against the wind, was unknown, or perhaps previously known and lost, in the Middle Ages. One recalls the contrary winds which held Richard II in Ireland and lost a throne. Tacking, even when introduced, for centuries made little progress. The clumsy, tubby ships, all superstructure and square-backed to the wind, were ill fitted for it. Even Lord Nelson's ships of war could do little by way of beating up. The beautiful clipper ship, streamlined as we should say, the fore-and-aft rig of the deep-draught yacht, making almost four points into the wind, these triumphs of sail came only as the swan's song of a vanishing epoch. Sail only came into its own when its own was over.

But Cartier at least knew, from the very obstacles encountered, that he had found a great river, a waterway to the interior. He sailed all round the Gulf, which he named with its river in honor of St. Lawrence. He noted the appealing misery of the harmless savages he saw, left them a great cross set up on Gaspé to hold them till he should come again. He noted in passing the fertility, the sanded shores, and the beautiful forests of our Prince Edward Island. Cartier mistook it for the mainland, but he knew at least that this was not part of the land given to Cain and would do for the King of France. The voyage was only a reconnaissance, but it promised much. As living witness Cartier carried back two Indians with him to France.

Cartier's second voyage (1535-36) was the famous voyage from which dates the true discovery of the St. Lawrence, of the indefinite region called Canada, and the discovery of the Indian settlement of Hochelaga. From the commanding elevation of Mount Royal, Cartier was able to divine the course of the inland waters and to speculate on the wealth and wonder of the "Kingdom of Saguenay" which was supposed to lie beyond. All that Vasco da Gama found at Calicut Cartier thought he had found in this vast emptiness.

This great voyage of 1535-36, the discovery of Hochelaga, and the tragic winter at Stadacona that followed it have been so often narrated in full detail that it is needless here to attempt more than a summary.

King Francis gave to Cartier three ships—the Grand Ermine of one hundred and twenty tons, the Petite Ermine of sixty, and the Emérillon, called also in the English books the Merlin, or the Sparrow Hawk. The ship's company were men of heart and courage as the sequel proved. It has been stated, and denied, that there were criminals among them. The practice of the time would have sanctioned this. For Cartier's later and fruitless voyage his commission gave him the right to take sixty criminals from jail, and the commission to his associate and superior, Sieur de Roberval, allowed him to open the jails and help himself. But if the men who stood by Cartier in the tragic winter that was to come at Stadacona were criminals, then we need more of them in Canada. It is disputed also—scholars will be scholars—whether Cartier carried priests with him. Probably not; that roll of honor begins later.

Till its close in the tragic winter just mentioned this same voyage of Cartier that discovered Hochelaga was like the voyage of a dream—easy and successful beyond belief. It is true that the passage out (May 19, 1535, Saint-Malo—Belle Isle, July 26) was prolonged and tempestuous and that much time was wasted in fruitless detours around Anticosti. But the ships sailed up the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Saguenay on September 1, and from then on all was wonder. Here was the Saguenay itself, a river of profound depth issuing from between tall mountains of almost bare rock. There were great fish about its mouth, "which no man," said Cartier, "had ever seen before or heard of." Indian canoes danced in the foam. The Indians came aboard; they spoke in their own tongue to Cartier's Indians brought back with him from France. The Indians explained to Cartier where he was—namely, that this river of Saguenay led to the "Kingdom of Saguenay," a fabulous land of wealth and wonder of which Cartier was to hear more and more. Straight up the main river was the "land and province of Canada," and beyond that, some distance inland, was Hochelaga.

Here enters into the world's record the word Canada, ever since unexplained. In the Huron-Iroquois language Canada means a settlement of lodges. Later on Cartier, or one of his associates, made out a vocabulary which said, "They call a town (une ville) Canada." But somehow the word seemed to mean either a town or the whole region; just like the double usage in England by which a man living in a town takes an occasional run up to town (London). Such fanciful derivations as Aca-nada, "nothing there," are merely history's earliest jokes on our unappreciated country, like Cartier's "land of Cain" and Voltaire's "acres of snow."

With a fair wind Cartier's ships moved up the river west, in an enchanted autumn scene of forests hung with grapevines, of islands all cluttered with hazelnuts (Isle aux Coudres), and one so heavy with its grapes that they named it after Bacchus. Later royal geographers made it the Island of Orleans.

Cartier anchored in the north channel off this pleasant island. And here there came to them the Indian Chief Donnacona, the "Lord of Canada," with twelve canoes of his people, with every demonstration of welcome and of friendship. The welcome doubled when it turned out that this was the very home of Cartier's two Indian guides and when they told of the wonder of France and the kindness there received. Astonishment and delight knew no bounds.

Cartier moved his ships up from the island to what was later called the Basin of Quebec, where the St. Lawrence narrows to the smallest width of its course. Here was the high promontory of Cape Diamond, the incoming stream of the St. Charles, in the background the blue Laurentian hills, and all around the colors of the Canadian autumn. Here Cartier laid up his two larger ships to winter in what he called the Ste. Croix River, now the St. Charles. There followed Indian receptions, dances, and, above all, the long harangues that followed the feasts, tedious, says a Canadian historian, "in the Huron-Iroquois language," and adds as an afterthought, "or in any other." We realize with something like awe that we see here the origins of the lunch-club talks of the United States and Canada, now spreading around the world, the Indian's vengeance on his conquerors.

The Indians tried to dissuade Cartier from going farther up the river. There were spirits, angry gods, they said, at Hochelaga. But on these Cartier took his chance. Taking his Emérillon and two ships' boats, he embarked on another wonderland journey of thirteen days from Stadacona to Hochelaga in the full glory of autumn. Here, in his mid-journey, the St. Lawrence expands into Lake St. Peter, a stretch of twenty miles. Above it the water was low. Cartier left his Emérillon and went forward with his boats only. At last in the dusk of an October evening the boats were halted by the swift St. Marys current where an island (St. Helens) partly closes the river. Here he came to land. He had arrived. He was now, though he didn't know it, inside the present limits of the city of Montreal. But he knew that he was somewhere, for a great concourse of Indians, more than a thousand, he said, came flocking joyously to the shore.

The scenes that followed, Cartier's reception by the Indians, the night of bonfires and singing, the presents given and received, the visit next day to the great stockaded fort of Hochelaga, the bringing of the sick and the infirm for Cartier's touch, the reading of the Gospel of St. John to the Indians, reverent as in God's presence, the ascent of the mountain and the vision from its summit as of a kingdom to come—these are embalmed pages of Canadian history. They are almost sacred in the atmosphere they breathe of piety and mutual faith. No picture in all North American history is more inspiring. At least Montreal began well.

The pages of Cartier's narrative have here been so often quoted that they are part of our history. But no account of the discovery of Hochelaga is complete without at least a citation of certain passages in regard to the great stockade itself and the scene enacted within its precincts.

There are some fifty houses in this village, each about fifty or more paces in length and twelve or fifteen in width, built completely of wood and covered in and boarded up with large pieces of the bark and rind of trees, as broad as a table, which are well and cunningly lashed after their manner. And inside these houses are many rooms and chambers, and in the middle is a large space without a floor, where they light their fire and live together in common. Afterward the men retire to the above-mentioned quarters with their wives and children. And furthermore there are lofts in the upper part of their houses, where they store the corn of which they make their bread.

Our captain, seeing the misery and devotion of this poor people, recited the Gospel of St. John, that is to say, In the beginning was the word, touching everyone that was diseased, praying to God that it would please Him to open the hearts of the poor people and to make them know His Holy Word and that they might receive baptism and Christendom. That done, he took a service book in his hand and with a loud voice read all the passion of Christ, word by word, that all the standers-by might hear him. All which while this poor people kept silence and were marvelously attentive, looking up to heaven and imitating us in gestures.

Early on the morning after their arrival, on a bright October day, Cartier and his companions were led by the Indians up the slope from the river to Hochelaga at the foot of the mountain. The distance through the woods—from the foot of the new Harbour Bridge to the University Club on Mansfield Street, which was (and perhaps is) the central hearth of Hochelaga—was about two miles. But the way was lengthened and enlivened by a pause to light a fire and make speeches.

They came thus to the famous stockade itself, described with a perplexity of detail that is the despair of the historian in histories and school books.

Yet there is a certain mystery about Cartier's Hochelaga which history has all too little investigated. There is no doubt that such a place as Hochelaga existed. The various remains that have been excavated from under the soil indicate that its site was somewhere near the Hochelaga Memorial Stone set up in 1925 at the foot of the grounds of McGill University. The writer of this book had the honor of making over this stone the speech of dedication. He spoke in glowing terms of the vanished Hochelaga. He pictured its fifty great wooden lodges, each a hundred and fifty feet long, the vast stockade thirty feet high that enclosed it, its galleries, its ladders, and the huge open square among its lodges in which uncounted thousands of Indians listened to Jacques Cartier read from the Gospel of St. John.

But he had at the time grave doubts, such as many others must have entertained, whether Hochelaga could have really been a place of the huge dimensions indicated and yet have left so little trace; whether Jacques Cartier could have enacted a scene of such intense devotion and interest and yet, on his subsequent journey past Montreal inland to the Grand Sault, have gone past Hochelaga without a visit, without a word, without a thought, apparently, as to how his Indians were making out with St. John.

Equally amazing seems the silence of Champlain in 1603. The history books all tell us that when Champlain came Hochelaga had vanished. But Champlain doesn't tell us this. He never mentions the place.

The extraordinary prestige of Cartier's discovery of the river and of the wonderful site of the island with the Royal Mountain, the peculiar reverence that attaches to his having thus first brought Christianity to the savages throw a sort of veil of sanctity over the whole episode. Doubt seems to savor of irreverence. Yet it is worth while, perhaps, to look into the facts indicated by the meager and uncertain record and to try to distinguish what is undoubted truth from what is error, or even, to some extent, deception.

We may accept the general conclusion that Hochelaga was somewhere near the spot indicated by the stone. Other localities have been assigned to it. Half a century ago the late Dr. S. Dawson, an eminent scholar and a high authority, placed Hochelaga beside the Windsor Hotel, at that time Montreal's latest pride and more interested, perhaps, in the sheltering Hochelaga than since the royal visit of 1939. A French-Canadian scholar, also, once gave grounds for placing Hochelaga out near Ahuntsic on the other side of the mountain. But the strongest evidence indicates it as beside, indeed as in the curve of, the little Burnside Brook that once ran down from the sunken hollow in the McGill grounds. The University Club on Mansfield Street represents, as it were, the central hearth of Hochelaga.

But when we turn from the question of the site to the question of size that is quite another matter. The existence of Hochelaga, as a huge fortified stockade with vast wooden houses, rests on one document, the narrative of Cartier's voyage of 1535 (Relation Originale). Cartier's narrative was not printed in French for a long time; nor was his own handwritten copy ever found. But various manuscript copies were made of Cartier's manuscript and of his similar story of his first voyage in 1534, in which he found and named the river St. Lawrence but couldn't get up it (Bref Recit). An Italian collector of travels (Gian Battista Ramusio) had a translation of the narratives made into Italian and published in a collection (Naviazioni e Viaggi) in 1556. McGill University has in its library one of the few extant copies of this book. In it appears the famous picture of Hochelaga as a huge round wooden erection that has been in every schoolbook ever since and remains one of the crossword puzzles of history. It was evidently the product of an Italian illustrator utterly ignorant of the reality and working in a frenzy of either imagination or despair. He has his busy Indians working away with saws on board lumber. His Hochelaga is big enough to reach from the mountain to the river.

But this translated account of Cartier was all that the world had. The famous Elizabethan collector, Richard Hakluyt, had the voyages retranslated from the Italian into English and took over the picture along with them. Hakluyt also got somewhere, not from Ramusio, a part of the narrative of Cartier's next voyage, that of 1541, in which he gives Hochelaga the go-by. Later on a French edition of the two voyages was printed from another manuscript (1598) and, much later, manuscripts, but not in Cartier's hand, were found in the French National Library for both the Bref Recit and the Relation Originale.

The reader must reconstruct for himself the nature of the stockade that is thus described. No two authorities agree about it, and Ramusio's picture, as Dr. W. D. Lighthall has abundantly shown in his Hochelaga monograph of 1932, is not so much a help as a hindrance. If we accept it on its face value it must have taken a powerful quantity of logs and a terrific amount of cutting. The trees available would have been elm and oak, hardwood, with perhaps soft maple, though soft maple doesn't run enough to length. There was no spruce, pine, or tamarack. But even at that the stone tomahawk of the Indians was an instrument of argument, not of carpentering.

Champlain saw later a few Indian axes beaten flat out of bits of Lake Superior copper. But Indians couldn't cut down trees on any real scale. Their canoes were sometimes made from birch-bark: but they only prized off the bark; they didn't cut the tree. Most of the St. Lawrence canoes were dugouts, burned-out logs with the ends pointed by alternate charring and cutting. You could have done that with a hoe. But, as a matter of fact, even a hoe would have been far above anything an Indian had. He would have used it to shave with.

Take the number of logs in the Hochelaga lodges, each 150 feet by 30; allowing 15 feet per log, it takes 24 logs to go round once—one course: it takes 20 courses (15 feet) as a minimum of height; that means 480 logs to each house and a total of 24,000 logs. There are still the partitions and the roofs to provide for, and the big stockade itself. Give it a perimeter—or no, don't even give it a perimeter. It's too silly; Hochelaga is like the farmer's giraffe. No such animal.

Now we must admit that Champlain found a pretty big stockade fort among the Onondagas. Everyone recalls how he had a platform made, higher than this Onondaga fence, and had himself (and his musket) carried on the platform for a sort of aerial attack on the Onondagas. But you can pack all this into a very small compass. Even Champlain's own Onondaga drawing does not compare with Hochelaga. One admits, of course, that the Huron mission Indians, massacred in 1649, had hundreds of lodges and that the military expeditions of La Barre and the Marquis de Tracy (1666) destroyed hundreds of Mohawk lodges. But if instead of lodge we read "wigwam," instead of stockade read "fence," instead of "palisade" read "pole," then Hochelaga shrinks back to very different dimensions.

It was evidently there, or thereabouts. Certain relics of it exist. If it had really consisted of 24,000 big logs, no fires, no rot would have wiped it out so utterly. Burned-out cities like pre-Roman London or Troy leave old charred logs for centuries. But call it all poles and sticks, a sort of bird's nest, and you can burn it all up like yesterday's camp. The relics that exist, pipes, stone axes, and so on, are the kinds of things that would have been found, and are found, round any annual squatting place of savages. In this case their location, as said above, points to the University Club as the center of Hochelaga. The little river, the Burnside Brook, that now gurgles itself to death in the sewers ran around the lower side. It is strange to think that it was in the lounge room of the University Club that Jacques Cartier read the Gospel of St. John to the savages. It is a thing that would stand doing again.

But why, then, did such an account come into being? It has been argued that possibly it was what we now call "propaganda." It was made to "sell" Canada to King Francis I of France. Hence the same narrative tells of the "Kingdom of Saguenay," full of rubies and gold and men as white as Frenchmen. But the Gospel was needed also. The ladies of the French court were all set on saving the souls of the Indians. As Francis Parkman said, it was an easy way to save their own. Hence the two motives, wealth and the kingdom of heaven, appear in the words of an old nursery rhyme, "as a pretty dish to set before the King."

It might be objected that Cartier would not have stooped to write this. Quite so: he couldn't and didn't, because he didn't write it. In any sustained writing there is always evidence not exactly as to who wrote it but as to who didn't. No one but an actual sailor could have written the sea stories of Fenimore Cooper; no one but a person with all the phrases of the law on his finger tips could have written the plays of Shakespeare. Yet here is Cartier, if it is Cartier, muddling up the sea terms that a Breton pilot would use; here is Cartier writing a windy, fulsome dedication and urging King Francis to kill the heretics. This piece of savagery would be just right to say to Francis, who afterward killed them with great cruelty (the Vaudois), but it sounds all wrong for the humane Cartier to say it. Cartier was dead before the book was ever printed in French.

Oddly enough this lying propaganda, if it was such, like so much that is sinful, succeeded. In fact, we owe Montreal to it. One of the few things we know from the mixed account of Cartier's third voyage (1541) is that King Francis was enthusiastic about Saguenay and determined to open it up. He authorized the Sieur de Roberval to open all the jails in France and help himself to Canadian settlers. The "wars of religion" intervened (piety always comes first), but the story of the Royal Mountain, or its flock of meek Indians, their rapt faces turned to the sky, waiting only for the Gospel, became a legend. "Montreal," long before it was founded, came to mean vaguely a distant place in North America where the savages needed Christ.

From the Hochelaga stockade Cartier and his gentlemen and twenty sailors made the ascent of the mountain which he named Mount Royal. In the French of the day, "royal" was still writable as réal. Montreal carries its name unchallenged. Here upon the summit—not from any one spot, for the trees forbade and still forbid it, but from various points of vantage—Cartier viewed the imposing panorama "of thirty leagues in all," as he expressed it. The Indians explained it to him—the islands, the enfolding lakes, the great rivers that here came together. One of them, pointing to the Ottawa, then touched Cartier's silver whistle and the gilt handle of a sailor's dagger. Cartier thought they meant that where they pointed silver and gold were found. And they did mean that. But later history, still ignorant, explained away Cartier's error; the Indians, it said, only referred to the silver color of the Ottawa, a flight of fancy quite beyond a Huron. Since the opening of the northern mining district, richer in gold and silver than all Peru, we know better. Perhaps luckily, history remained in the dark.

Cartier came down, impressed with the idea that here was the path to Saguenay. But the season was too late to reach it now. He hastened back, picked up his Emérillon, and so came safely to Stadacona in mid-October. Here all the previous good fortune was to change to the record of the terrible winter that followed. It is no part of the present work to follow it in detail. Cartier's men had built a solid log fort and mounted on it the cannon from the ships. It was to stand them in good stead. The winter set in early and intense with the utmost rigor of the Canadian cold. The ships froze in solid in mid-November. Indian friendship changed to Indian treachery. A terrible plague, recognizable as scurvy, struck down the French. In February only ten out of the one hundred and ten were fit for service. Twenty-five men were dead, lying under the snow, unburied. Cartier concealed his losses. His men made a brave show of manning the ramparts against the Indians now gathering for the slaughter. Then came what seemed a miracle, or at least a miraculous remedy, made from a native balsam, which cured the pestilence. The Indians waited, hesitating, as Indians always did, before an open attack. Then came the spring, the melting ice, the open river, Canada's annual deliverance.

Cartier hastened his departure. The ships were rapidly prepared. Donnacona kept up his false friendship to the last, kept up his wonder tales of the gold and silver of Saguenay, heightening the wonder with stories of men as white as the French, of men with one leg and no stomach, and "other marvels too long to tell." In reward for which, as a sort of poetic justice, Cartier carried him, by strategy, off to France, as too good to leave behind. With him were taken ten others—a source of later woe. Sailing on May 6, the ships reached Saint-Malo on July 16, 1536.

The First View of Montreal. Cartier's Visit to Hochelaga in 1535. From an Old Print. Courtesy of the New York Public Library

And with that Jacques Cartier's career, as far as it affected Canada, practically ended. There was a third voyage, as mentioned above, of which the record is confused and uncertain. In this, if we can believe the broken fragment left of the narrative, Cartier came up the river again and rowed past his Hochelaga without troubling to look at it. There may have been a fourth voyage. But in any case nothing came of it all. The energies of France were being absorbed for half a century in what the irony of history calls the "wars of religion." North American discovery fell asleep again. When it awoke Hochelaga had vanished.