High up on the face of the cliffs, Cartier saw growing
huge pine-trees that clung, earthless, to the naked
rock. Four canoes danced in the foaming water at the
river mouth: one of them made bold to approach the
ships, and the words of Cartier's Indian interpreters so
encouraged its occupants that they came on board. The
canoes, so these Indians explained to Cartier, had come
down from Canada to fish.

Cartier did not remain long at the Saguenay. On the next
day, September 2, the ships resumed their ascent of the
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