later, to a French port in a steamship of a tonnage equal to that of a
fleet of four hundred of Carrier's boats; so has the sea bred giant
children of such hardy parentage.] There is preserved in St. Malo what is
thought to be a list of those who signed the ship's papers subscribed
under Carrier's own hand. It is no such instrument as the "Compact" which
the men of the _Mayflower_ signed as they approached the continent nearly
a century later, but it is none the less fateful.

The autumn leaves had not yet fallen from the trees of Brittany when the
two ships that started out in April appeared again in the harbor of St.
Malo, carrying two dusky passengers from the New World as proofs of
Carrier's ventures. He had made reconnoissance of the gulf behind
Newfoundland and returned for fresh means of farther quest toward Cathay.

The leaves were but come again on the trees of Brittany when, with a
larger crew in three small vessels (one of only forty tons), he again went
out with the ebb-tide from St. Malo; his men, some of whom had been
gathered from the jails, having all made their confession and attended
mass, and received the benediction of the bishop. In August he entered the
great river St. Lawrence, whose volume of water was so great as to
brighten Carrier's hopes of having found the northern way to India. On he
sailed, with his two dusky captives for pilots, seeing with regret the
banks of the river gradually draw together and hearing unwelcome word of
the freshening of its waters--on past the "gorge of the gloomy Saguenay
with its towering cliffs and sullen depths, depths which no sounding-line
can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling eagle seems a
speck"; on past frowning promontory and wild vineyards, to the foot of the
scarped cliff of Quebec, now "rich with heroic memories, then but the site
of a nameless barbarism"; thence, after parley with the Indian chief
Donnacona and his people, on through walls of autumn foliage and frost-