We have, however, no record of Cartier and his actual
doings until we find his name in an entry on the baptismal
register of St Malo. He stood as godfather to his nephew,
Etienne Nouel, the son of his sister Jehanne. Strangely
enough, this proved to be only the first of a great many
sacred ceremonies of this sort in which he took part.
There is a record of more than fifty baptisms at St Malo
in the next forty-five years in which the illustrious
mariner had some share; in twenty-seven of them he appeared
as a godfather.

What voyages Cartier actually made before he suddenly
appears in history as a pilot of the king of France and
the protege of the high admiral of France we do not know.
This position in itself, and the fact that at the time
of his marriage in 1519 he had already the rank of
master-pilot, would show that he had made the Atlantic
voyage. There is some faint evidence that he had even
been to Brazil, for in the account of his first recorded
voyage he makes a comparison between the maize of Canada
and that of South America; and in those days this would
scarcely have occurred to a writer who had not seen both
plants of which he spoke. 'There groweth likewise,' so
runs the quaint translation that appears in Hakluyt's
'Voyages,' 'a kind of Millet as big as peason [i.e. peas]
like unto that which groweth in Bresil.' And later on,
in the account of his second voyage, he repeats the
reference to Brazil; then 'goodly and large fields' which
he saw on the present site of Montreal recall to him the