CHAPTER II

Jacques Cartier


Verrazano and Gomez, and probably the English captain, John Rut, had
all sought for the opening of a strait of salt water--like Magellan's
Straits in the far south--which should lead them through the great
North-American continent to the regions of China and Japan. Yet in
some incomprehensible way they overlooked the two broad passages to
the north and south of Newfoundland--the Straits of Belle Isle and of
Cabot--which would at any rate lead them into the vast Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and thence to the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes; a
natural system of waterways connected each with the other and all with
the Mississippi and Missouri, the Arctic Ocean, and Hudson's Bay; nay,
more, with the North Pacific also; so that with a few "portages", or
carryings of canoes from one watershed to another, a traveller of any
enterprise, accompanied by a sturdy crew, can cross the broad
continent of North America at its broadest from sea to sea without
much walking.

Estevão Gomez noticed Cabot Straits between Cape Breton and
Newfoundland, but thought them only a very deep bay. John Rut and
others discerned the Straits of Belle Isle as a wide recess in the
coast rather than the mouth of a channel leading far inland. And yet,
after thirty years of Breton, English, and Portuguese fishing
operations in these waters, there must have been glimmerings of the
existence of the great Gulf of St. Lawrence behind Newfoundland: and
JACQUES CARTIER (or Quartier), who had probably made already one
voyage to Newfoundland (besides a visit to Brazil), suspected that