ist somewhere
on the beautiful Penobscot River, in the present State of Maine. A
memorial of the same name still lingers in the little harbours of
Norumbec, or Lorambeque, or Loran, on the southeastern coast of Cape
Breton. Enthusiastic advocates of the Norse discovery and settlement
have confidently seen in Norumbega, the Indian utterance of Norbega,
the ancient form of Norway to which Vinland was subject, and this
belief has been even emphasised on a stone pillar which stands on some
ruins unearthed close to the Charles River in Massachusetts. _Si non e
vero e ben trovato_. All this serves to amuse, though it cannot
convince, the critical student of those shadowy times. With the
progress of discovery the city of Norumbega was found as baseless as
the fables of the golden city on the banks of the Orinoco, and of the
fountain of youth among the forests and everglades of Florida.

{29}

III.

A BRETON SAILOR DISCOVERS CANADA AND ITS GREAT RIVER.

(1534-36.)

In the fourth decade of the sixteenth century we find ourselves in the
domain of precise history. The narratives of the voyages of Jacques
Cartier of St. Malo, that famous port of Brittany which has given so
many sailors to the world, are on the whole sufficiently definite, even
at this distance of three centuries and a half, to enable us to follow
his routes, and recognise the greater number of the places in the gulf
and river which he revealed to the old world. The same enterprising
king who had sent Verrazano to the west in 1524, commissioned the
Breton sailor to find a short passage to Cathay and give a new dominion
to France.

At the time of the departure of Cartier in 1534 for the "new-found
isle" of Cabot, the world had made considerable advances in
geographical knowledge. South America was now ascertained to be a
separate continent, and the great Portuguese Magellan had {30} passed
through the straits, which ever since have borne his name, and found
his way across the Pacific to the spice islands of Asia. As respects
North America beyond the Gulf of Mexico and the country to the North,
dense ignorance still prevailed, and though a coast line had been
followed from Florida to Cape Breton by Cabot, Gomez, and Verrazano, it
was believed either to belong to a part of Asia or to be a mere
prolongation of Greenland. If one belief prevailed more than another
it was in the existence of a great sea, called on the maps "the sea of
Verrazano," i