whole enterprise, with Cartier as a subordinate officer, but who, the year before, had allowed Cartier to go off to Canada and prepare the way, promising to follow immediately. The interview between Cartier and Roberval, near where the capital of Newfoundland (St. John's) now stands, was a stormy one. Roberval ordered Cartier to return at once to Charlesbourg and await his arrival. However, in the middle of the night which followed this interview, Cartier took advantage of a favourable wind and set sail for France, arriving soon afterwards at St. Malo.
But Roberval arrived at Charlesbourg (going the roundabout way through the straits of Belle Isle, for Cartier had told him nothing of the convenient passage through Cabot Strait), and there spent the winter of 1542–3, sending his ships back to France. This winter was one of horrors. Roberval was a headstrong, passionate man, perfectly reckless of human life. He maintained discipline by ferocious sentences, putting many of his men in irons, whipping others cruelly, women as well as men, and shooting those who seemed the most rebellious. Even the Indians were moved to pity, and wept at the sight of the woes of these unhappy French men and women under the control of a bloodthirsty tyrant, and many of them dying of scurvy, or miserably weak from that disease.[10]
However, when the weather was warm again, in June, 1543, Roberval started up the St. Lawrence River in boats to reach the wonderful country of Saguenay. Apparently he met with little success, and, being relieved by French ships in the late summer of 1543, he returned to France.
Thus the splendid work achieved by Cartier seemed to have come to nothing, for neither he nor Roberval revisited America. The French settlement near Quebec was abandoned, so far as the officers of the French king were concerned, and between 1545 and about 1583, if any other Frenchman or European visited Canada it was some private adventurer who traded with the natives in furs, or Basques from France and Spain who frequented the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on account of the abundance of whales, walruses, and seals. In fact, at the close of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Basques had established themselves on shore at Tadoussac and other places, and seemed likely to colonize the country.
1 Funk Island—called by Cartier "the Island of Birds"—is only about 3 miles round, and 46 feet above the sea level. It is 3 miles distant from the coast.
2 The Great Auk (Alca impennis), extinct since about 1844 in Europe and 1870 in Labrador, once had in ancient times a geographical range from Massachusetts and Newfoundland to Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, N.E. England, and Denmark. Perhaps nowhere was it found so abundantly as on the coasts of Eastern Newfoundland and on Funk Island hard by. The Great Auk was in such numbers on the north-east coast of Newfoundland that the Amerindians of that country and of southern Labrador used it as fuel in the winter time, its body being very full of oil and burning with a splendid flame. The French seamen called it pingouin ("penguin") from its fatness, and this name was much later transferred to the real penguins of the southern seas which are quite unrelated to the auks.
3 On the shores of these islands they noticed "several great beasts like oxen, which have two tusks in the mouth similar to those of the elephant". These were walruses.
4 Anticosti Island received from Cartier the name of "the Island of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin", in consequence of his having discovered it to be an island on the feast day of that name. It did not receive its present title until the late seventeenth century.
5 Then called "Canada". The word Quebec (pronounced Kebek) means the narrow part of a river.
6 The Canada Blueberry (Vaccinium canadense), called by the French bluës or bluëts. These bluës were collected and dried by the Amerindians, and made a sweet nutriment for eating in the winter.
7 Cartier, in Hakluyt's translation, is made to say (I modernize the spelling): "They dig their grounds with certain pieces of wood as big as half a sword, on which ground groweth their corn, which they call 'offici'; it is as big as our small peason. … They have also great store of musk melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers, peas, and beans of every colour, yet differing from ours." Wampum, or shell money (which recalls the shell money of the Pacific Islands), consisted either of beads made from the interior parts of sea shells or land shells, or of strings of perforated sea shells. The most elaborate kind of wampum was that of the Amerindians of Canada and the eastern United States, the shell beads of which were generally white. The commoner wampum beads were black and violet. Wampum belts were made which illustrated events, dates, treaties of peace, &c, by a rude symbolism (figures of men and animals, upright lines, &c), and these were worked neatly on string by employing different-coloured beads.
8 "There groweth also a certain kind of herb whereof in summer they make a great provision for all the year, making great account of it, and only men use it; and first they cause it to be dried in the sun, then wear it about their necks wrapped in a little beast's skin made like a bag, together with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe. Then when they please they make powder of it and put it in one of the ends of the said cornet or pipe, and laying a coal of fire upon it at the other end, suck so long that they fill their bodies full of smoke, till that it cometh out of their mouth and nostrils, even as out of the tunnel of a chimney. They say that this doth keep them warm and in health: they never go without some of it about them. We ourselves have tried the same smoke, and having put it in our mouths, it seemed almost as hot as pepper." The foregoing is one of the earliest descriptions of tobacco smoking in any European language, the original words being in Cartier's Norman French.
9 This tree was the balsam fir, Abies balsamea.
10 A story was subsequently told of Roberval's stern treatment which had a germ of truth in it, though it has since been the foundation of many a romance. On the journey out from France it is said that Roberval took with him his niece Marguerite, a high-born lady, who was accompanied by an old companion or nurse. Marguerite was travelling with her uncle because, unknown to him, she had a lover who had sailed with him on this expedition and whom she hoped to marry. As they crossed the Atlantic these facts leaked out, and Roberval resolved to bide his time and punish his niece for her deception. As they passed the coast of Southern Labrador Marguerite and her old nurse were seized and put into a boat, Roberval ordering his sailors to row them ashore to an island, and leave them to their fate. They were given four guns with ammunition and a small supply of provisions. But, as the boat was leaving the ship, Marguerite's lover threw himself into the sea and swam to the island. Here, according to the story which Marguerite is supposed to have told afterwards, they endeavoured to live by killing the wild animals and eating their flesh; but her lover-husband died, so also did
