of milk-white foam among the
rocks that line the foot of this promontory. Beyond this point they saw
nothing of the Newfoundland shore, except that, as the little vessels
vainly tried to beat their way to the south against the fierce storms,
the explorers caught sight of a second great promontory that appeared
before them through the mist. This headland Cartier called Cape St
John. In spite of the difficulty of tracing the storm-set path of the
navigators, it is commonly thought that the point may be identified as
Cape Anguille, which lies about twenty-five miles north of Cape Ray,
the south-west 'corner' of Newfoundland.

Had Cartier been able to go forward in the direction that he had been
following, he would have passed out between Newfoundland and Cape
Breton island into the open Atlantic, and would have realized that his
New Land was, after all, an island and not the mainland of the
continent. But this discovery was reserved for his later voyage. He
seems, indeed, when he presently came to the islands that lie in the
mouth of the Gulf of St Lawrence, to have suspected that a passage here
lay to the open sea. Doubtless the set of the wind and current revealed
it to the trained instinct of the pilot. 'If it were so,' he wrote, 'it
would be a great shortening as well of the time as of the way, if any
perfection could be found in it.' But it was just as well that he did
not seek further the opening into the Atlantic. By turning westward
from the 'heel' of Newfoundland he was led to discover the milder
waters and the more fortunate lands which awaited him on the further
side of the Gulf.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST VOYAGE--THE GULF OF ST LAWRENCE

On June 25 Cartier turned his course away from Newfoundland and sailed
westward into what appeared to be open sea. But it was not long before
he came in sight of land again. About sixty miles from the Newfoundland
shore and thirty miles east from the Magdalen Islands, two abrupt rocks
rise side by side from the sea; through one of them the beating surf
has bored a passage, so that to Cartier's eye, as his ships hove in
sight of them, the rocks appeared as three. At the present time a
lighthouse of the Canadian government casts its rays from the top of
one of these rocky islets, across the tossing waters of the Gulf.
Innumerable sea-fowl encircled the isolated spot and built their nests
so densely upon the rocks as to cover the whole of the upper surface.
At the base of on