Jacques Cartier and the St Lawrence: ice, scurvy and the name Canada

In the winter of 1535, three French ships were trapped in the ice of a great North American river and could not move for nearly five months. By February, not even ten of the 110 men were in good health. Then a drink, boiled from a recipe given by a local man, brought the sick back on their feet. This happened on the voyage on which Jacques Cartier first mapped the St Lawrence and gave the region the name that is now the name of a whole country: Canada.

The sailor of Saint-Malo

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Cartier was born in 1491 in the French coastal town of Saint-Malo. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the historian Marcel Trudel calculated that he was born between June and December 1491.

In 1534, King Francis I of France ordered him to lead an expedition to North America. The aim was to find gold, spices and a sea route to Asia.

First voyage: a tour of the gulf

According to Britannica, Cartier left Saint-Malo on 20 April 1534 with two ships and 61 men. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, he reached the coast of Newfoundland twenty days later and entered the Gulf of St Lawrence through the Strait of Belle Isle. According to Britannica, he sighted present-day Prince Edward Island and went as far as Anticosti Island in the gulf. He set out on the return journey on 25 July. On the way back he took two sons of the local Iroquoian chief Donnacona, Domagaya and Taignoagny, with him to France.

Second voyage: Hochelaga and “Mont Royal”

The next year’s expedition was larger. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, it had 110 men and three medium-sized ships: the Grande Hermine, the Petite Hermine and the Émérillon, which had been specially prepared for sailing in the river. Setting out in mid-May 1535, they took fifty days to cross the ocean. According to Britannica, Donnacona’s two sons, now returning from France, became the guides. Cartier went up the river as far as present-day Quebec, where he made his base near the Iroquoian settlement of Stadacona.

The American scholar James Phinney Baxter published an English translation of Cartier’s accounts in 1906. According to it, Cartier left the large ship behind and went upriver in boats with a few gentlemen and 28 sailors, reaching Hochelaga on 2 October 1535. Cartier writes that more than a thousand men, women and children gathered on the bank and “welcomed us as a father welcomes his son”. They began throwing fish and maize bread into the boats.

The next morning, on the way to the town, the path was well levelled and there were oak trees on both sides, with the ground beneath them covered in acorns. Then came large fields of maize, and in the midst of them lay the town of Hochelaga. According to Cartier’s account, the town was round and surrounded by a fence of three rows of timber, with only one gate. Inside were about fifty long houses, each fifty paces or more in length and twelve to fifteen paces wide, built of wood and covered with broad strips of bark. Above the houses were granaries.

Next to the town was a hill. Cartier writes: “We named that mountain Mont Royal.” From its top they saw more than thirty leagues into the distance: mountain ranges to the north and south, flat fertile land in between, and a very swift rapid in the river. According to Baxter’s note, these were the Lachine Rapids.

Ice, scurvy and “annedda”

The winter camp was at the mouth of the St Charles River. According to Britannica, the French had expected a mild winter because Quebec lies further south than Paris, but the cold took them by surprise. According to Cartier’s account, from mid-November until 15 April the ships were locked in ice. The ice was more than two fathoms (about twelve feet) thick, and there was more than four feet of snow on the ground, rising above the sides of the ships. Drinks froze in the casks.

Then illness spread. Cartier writes that legs swelled, gums rotted and teeth began to fall out. According to Baxter’s note, this was scurvy. By mid-February, “we were a hundred and ten, and not ten of us were in good health”. By mid-March, twenty-five men had died.

One day Cartier saw Domagaya in good health. Ten or twelve days earlier he had suffered from the same illness. When asked, Domagaya said he had been cured by the juice of the leaves of a tree. He sent two women with Cartier, who brought back nine or ten branches and showed the method: boil the bark and leaves in water, drink it every other day, and put the leftover pulp on the swollen legs. In the local language the tree was called “annedda”. According to Cartier, after two or three drinks the sick began to recover. Demand then grew so great that a very large tree was used up in less than eight days. There is no agreement on which tree it was. According to Baxter’s note, some writers take it to be the white spruce and others the white pine.

According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, when spring came, Cartier took Donnacona, his two sons and seven others to France on the return voyage. They never came back.

Third voyage and the “diamonds”

Because of war in Europe, the next expedition was delayed until 1541. This time the king gave a nobleman, Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, the task of founding a colony and made Cartier his subordinate. According to Britannica, Cartier sailed first and reached Quebec on 23 August 1541. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, he built a settlement a few kilometres above Quebec, at the meeting of the Cap Rouge River and the St Lawrence.

According to Britannica, they found many things here that they took for gold and diamonds. At the end of May 1542, Cartier left the settlement. In Newfoundland he met Roberval, who ordered him to go back, but Cartier slipped away in the dark of night towards France. In France it emerged that his “gold” and “diamonds” were in fact pyrite and quartz.

According to Britannica, Cartier was given no further expedition after that. He lived on his estate near Saint-Malo and died on 1 September 1557. Britannica also states that the name “Canada” comes from the Huron-Iroquois word “kanata”, meaning a village or settlement, and that Cartier used the name only for the area around the present city of Quebec.

Next instalment: Orellana: the first voyage down the Amazon.