The French in the Heart of America | Page 4

the mysterious "square gulf,"
which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter
of a century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose a passage to
the Indies.
It was from St. Malo that Carrier set sail on the highroad to Cathay, as
he imagined, one April day in 1534 in two ships of sixty tons each.
[Footnote: I crossed back over the same ocean, nearly four hundred
years later, to a French port in a steamship of a tonnage equal to that of
a fleet of four hundred of Carrier's boats; so has the sea bred giant
children of such hardy parentage.] There is preserved in St. Malo what
is thought to be a list of those who signed the ship's papers subscribed
under Carrier's own hand. It is no such instrument as the "Compact"
which the men of the Mayflower signed as they approached the
continent nearly a century later, but it is none the less fateful.
The autumn leaves had not yet fallen from the trees of Brittany when
the two ships that started out in April appeared again in the harbor of St.
Malo, carrying two dusky passengers from the New World as proofs of
Carrier's ventures. He had made reconnoissance of the gulf behind
Newfoundland and returned for fresh means of farther quest toward
Cathay.
The leaves were but come again on the trees of Brittany when, with a
larger crew in three small vessels (one of only forty tons), he again
went out with the ebb-tide from St. Malo; his men, some of whom had
been gathered from the jails, having all made their confession and
attended mass, and received the benediction of the bishop. In August he
entered the great river St. Lawrence, whose volume of water was so
great as to brighten Carrier's hopes of having found the northern way to
India. On he sailed, with his two dusky captives for pilots, seeing with

regret the banks of the river gradually draw together and hearing
unwelcome word of the freshening of its waters--on past the "gorge of
the gloomy Saguenay with its towering cliffs and sullen depths, depths
which no sounding-line can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge
the wheeling eagle seems a speck"; on past frowning promontory and
wild vineyards, to the foot of the scarped cliff of Quebec, now "rich
with heroic memories, then but the site of a nameless barbarism";
thence, after parley with the Indian chief Donnacona and his people, on
through walls of autumn foliage and frost- touched meadows to where
the Lachine Rapids mocked with unceasing laughter those who
dreamed of an easy way to China. There, entertained at the Indian
capital, he was led to the top of a hill, such as Montmartre, from whose
height he saw his Cathay fade into a stretch of leafy desert bounded
only by the horizon and threaded by two narrow but hopeful ribbons of
water. There, hundreds of miles from the sea, he stood, probably the
only European, save for his companions, inside the continent, between
Mexico and the Pole; for De Soto had not yet started for his burial in
the Mississippi; the fathers of the Pilgrim Fathers were still in their
cradles; Narvaez's men had come a little way in shore and vanished;
Cabeça de Vaca was making his almost incredible journey from the
Texas coast to the Pacific; Captain John Smith was not yet born; and
Henry Hudson's name was to remain obscure for three quarters of a
century. Francis I had sneeringly inquired of Charles V if he and the
King of Portugal had parcelled out the world between them, and asked
to see the last will and testament of the patriarch Adam. If King Francis
had been permitted to see it, he would have found a codicil for France
written that day against the bull of Pope Alexander VI and against the
hazy English claim of the Cabots. For the river, "the greatest without
comparison," as Cartier reported later to his king, "that is known to
have ever been seen," carried drainage title to a realm larger many
times than all the lands of the Seine and the Rhone and the Loire, and
richer many times than the land of spices to which the falls of Lachine,
"the greatest and swiftest fall of water that any where hath beene
scene," seemed now to guard the way.
"Hochelaga" the Indians called their city--the capital of the river into
which the sea had narrowed, a thousand miles inland from the coasts of

Labrador which but a few years before were the dim verge of the world
and were believed even then to be infested with griffins and fiends--a
city which vanished within the next three quarters of a century. For
when Champlain came