c, and other
places in some profusion during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The family seems to have died out, although not many years
ago direct descendants of Pierre Cartier, the uncle of Jacques, were
still surviving in France.

It is perhaps no great loss to the world that we have so little
knowledge of the ancestors and relatives of the famous mariner. It is,
however, deeply to be deplored that, beyond the record of his voyages,
we know so little of Jacques Cartier himself. We may take it for
granted that he early became a sailor. Brought up at such a time and
place, he could hardly have failed to do so. Within a few years after
the great discovery of Columbus, the Channel ports of St Malo and
Dieppe were sending forth adventurous fishermen to ply their trade
among the fogs of the Great Banks of the New Land. The Breton boy, whom
we may imagine wandering about the crowded wharves of the little
harbour, must have heard strange tales from the sailors of the new
discoveries. Doubtless he grew up, as did all the seafarers of his
generation, with the expectation that at any time some fortunate
adventurer might find behind the coasts and islands now revealed to
Europe in the western sea the half-fabled empires of Cipango and
Cathay. That, when a boy, he came into actual contact with sailors who
had made the Atlantic voyage is not to be questioned. We know that in
1507 the Pensee of Dieppe had crossed to the coast of Newfoundland and
that this adventure was soon followed by the sailing of other Norman
ships for the same goal.

We have, however, no record of Cartier and his actual doings until we
find his name in an entry on the baptismal register of St Malo. He
stood as godfather to his nephew, Etienne Nouel, the son of his sister
Jehanne. Strangely enough, this proved to be only the first of a great
many sacred ceremonies of this sort in which he took part. There is a
record of more than fifty baptisms at St Malo in the next forty-five
years in which the illustrious mariner had some share; in twenty-seven
of them he appeared as a godfather.

What voyages Cartier actually made before he suddenly appears in
history as a pilot of the king of France and the protege of the high
admiral of France we do not know. This position in itself, and the fact
that at the time of his marriage in 1519 he had already the rank of
master-pilot, would show that he had made the Atlantic voyage. There is
some faint evidence that h