St Lawrence. The navigation at
this point was by no means easy. The river here feels the full force of
the tide, whose current twists and eddies among the great rocks that
lie near the surface of the water. The ships lay at anchor that night
off Hare Island. As they left their moorings, at dawn of the following
day, they fell in with a great school of white whales disporting
themselves in the river. Strange fish, indeed, these seemed to Cartier.
'They were headed like greyhounds,' he wrote, 'and were as white as
snow, and were never before of any man seen or known.'

Four days more brought the voyagers to an island, a 'goodly and fertile
spot covered with fine trees,' and among them so many filbert-trees
that Cartier gave it the name Isle-aux-Coudres (the Isle of Filberts),
which it still bears. On September 7 the vessels sailed about thirty
miles beyond Isle-aux-Coudres, and came to a group of islands, one of
which, extending for about twenty miles up the river, appeared so
fertile and so densely covered with wild grapes hanging to the river's
edge, that Cartier named it the Isle of Bacchus. He himself, however,
afterwards altered the name to the Island of Orleans. These islands, so
the savages said, marked the beginning of the country known as Canada.

CHAPTER V

THE SECOND VOYAGE--STADACONA

At the time when Cartier ascended the St Lawrence, a great settlement
of the Huron-Iroquois Indians existed at Quebec. Their village was
situated below the heights, close to the banks of the St Charles, a
small tributary of the St Lawrence. Here the lodges of the tribe gave
shelter to many hundred people. Beautiful trees--elm and ash and maple
and birch, as fair as the trees of France--adorned the banks of the
river, and the open spaces of the woods waved with the luxuriant growth
of Indian corn. Here were the winter home of the tribe and the wigwam
of the chief. From this spot hunting and fishing parties of the savages
descended the great river and wandered as far as the pleasant country
of Chaleur Bay. Sixty-four years later, when Champlain ascended the St
Lawrence, the settlement and the tribe that formerly occupied the spot
had vanished. But in the time of Cartier the Quebec village, under its
native name of Stadacona, seems to have been, next to Hochelaga, the
most important lodgment of the Huron-Iroquois Indians of the St
Lawrence valley.

As the French navigators wandered on the shores of the Island of
Orleans,