ch met
its melancholy fate by deliberate and ruthless destruction at the hands
of the whites. Cabot had already seen these people on his voyage to the
coast, and described them as painted with 'red ochre.' Three of them he
had captured and taken to England as an exhibit. For two hundred years
after the English settlement of Newfoundland, these 'Red Indians' were
hunted down till they were destroyed. 'It was considered meritorious,'
says a historian of the island, 'to shoot a Red Indian. To "go to look
for Indians" came to be as much a phrase as to "look for partridges."
They were harassed from post to post, from island to island: their
hunting and fishing stations were unscrupulously seized by the invading
English. They were shot down without the least provocation, or captured
to be exposed as curiosities to the rabble at fairs in the western
towns of Christian England at twopence apiece.' So much for the
ill-fated savages among whom Cartier planted his first cross.

On June 15, Cartier, disappointed, as we have seen, with the rugged
country that he found on the northern shore, turned south again to pick
up the mainland, as he called it, of Newfoundland. Sailing south from
Brest to a distance of about sixty miles, he found himself on the same
day off Point Rich on the west coast of Newfoundland, to which, from
its appearance, he gave the name of the Double Cape. For three days the
course lay to the south-west along the shore. The panorama that was
unfolded to the eye of the explorer was cheerless. The wind blew cold
and hard from the north-east. The weather was dark and gloomy, while
through the rifts of the mist and fog that lay heavy on the face of the
waters there appeared only a forbidding and scarcely habitable coast.
Low lands with islands fringed the shore. Behind them great mountains,
hacked and furrowed in their outline, offered an uninviting prospect.
There was here no Eldorado such as, farther south, met the covetous
gaze of a Cortez or a Pizarro, no land of promise luxuriant with the
vegetation of the tropics such as had greeted the eyes of Columbus at
his first vision of the Indies. A storm-bound coast, a relentless
climate and a reluctant soil-these were the treasures of the New World
as first known to the discoverer of Canada.

For a week Cartier and his men lay off the coast. The headland of Cape
Anguille marks the approximate southward limit of their exploration.
Great gales drove the water in a swirl