effort. Unhappily, at the moment of his return, his royal
master was deeply engaged in a disastrous invasion of
Italy, where he shortly met the crushing defeat at Pavia
(1525) which left him a captive in the hands of his
Spanish rival. His absence crippled French enterprise,
and Verrazano's explorations were not followed up till
a change of fortune enabled Francis to send out the famous
expedition of Jacques Cartier.

One other expedition to Canada deserves brief mention
before we come to Cartier's crowning discovery of the St
Lawrence river. This is the voyage of Stephen Gomez, who
was sent out in the year 1524. by Charles V, the rival
of Francis I. He spent about ten months on the voyage,
following much the same course as Verrazano, but examining
with far greater care the coast of Nova Scotia and the
territory about the opening of the Gulf of St Lawrence.
His course can be traced from the Penobscot river in
Maine to the island of Cape Breton. He entered the Bay
of Fundy, and probably went far enough to realize from
its tides, rising sometimes to a height of sixty or
seventy feet, that its farther end could not be free,
and that it could not furnish an open passage to the
Western Sea. Running north-east along the shore of Nova
Scotia, Gomez sailed through the Gut of Canso, thus
learning that Cape Breton was an island. He named it the
Island of St John-or, rather, he transferred to it this
name, which the map-makers had already used. Hence it
came about that the 'Island of St John' occasions great
confusion in the early geography of Canada. The first