He mapped a gulf—and borrowed “Canada” from two towns
Jacques Cartier of Brittany (31 December 1491–1 September 1557) was the first European to describe and chart the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the river’s shores. He named the country “Canada” from Iroquoian labels for Stadacona (Quebec City) and Hochelaga (Montreal Island).
A respected Saint-Malo mariner, he married into a leading local family in 1520, taking Mary Catherine des Granches as his wife, and local baptism registers show him often standing as godfather. In 1534, two years after Brittany was joined to the French crown, the bishop Jean Le Veneur presented him to Francis I. His royal commission of 20 April sent him looking for a western route to the Indies and for lands said to be rich in gold.
The crossing took twenty days. From 10 May he worked along Newfoundland, the Strait of Belle Isle, southern Labrador, the Gaspé and the gulf’s larger islands. On 24 July at Gaspé Bay he raised a ten-metre cross hailing the French king in front of St. Lawrence Iroquoians, and in September he sailed home convinced he had touched Asia.
His second voyage left on 19 May 1535 with three ships, 110 men and two Iroquoian captives. He went upriver to Stadacona, ruled by Chief Donnacona, then took his smallest ship to Hochelaga on 2 October, where more than a thousand people crowded the bank to greet him. That winter his fleet sat frozen at the St. Charles River beneath the Rock of Quebec, in river ice nearly two metres thick, while scurvy struck the Iroquoians and then the French. In May 1536 he kidnapped Donnacona to tell the king about a gold-rich ‘Kingdom of Saguenay’.
In 1541 he returned with five ships, now under the Huguenot courtier Roberval, and settled at Cap-Rouge. The diamonds and gold his men gathered proved to be quartz and pyrite, giving French a saying about fakes as false as Canadian diamonds. After a grim winter he slipped past Roberval off Newfoundland in June 1542 and went home. He died in Saint-Malo during an epidemic in 1557; France had no lasting Canadian settlement until Port Royal in 1605.
Source: Jacques Cartier
