Cartier was born in St. Malo, Brittany on December 31, 1491. In 1534, after Brittany was united with France, Cartier was introduced by his bishop to King Francis I, who gave Cartier a commission to discover a western passage to Asia. He sailed with two ships and 121 men on April 20, 1534. After twenty days, Cartier and his crewmen reached the coast of North America. On the Island of Birds, his crew slaughtered over 1000 birds.
...Presently they came to an island. It lay far out in the sea, and was surrounded by a great upheaval of jagged and broken ice. On it and around it they saw so dense a mass of birds that no one could have believed who had not seen it for himself. The birds were as large as jays [auk], they were colored black and white, and they could scarcely fly because of their small wings and their exceeding fatness...The sailors killed large numbers of the birds, and then filled two open boats with them.
On July 25, 1534, Chief Donnaconna and his sons revisited the ships in the bay. They made protest against the dedication of the cross and the French claim.
They rightly saw in the erection of the cross the advancing shadow of the rule of the white man...[Chief Donnaconna] made a long oration which the French could not understand. Pointing shoreward to the cross and making signs, the chief gave it to be understood that the country belonged to him and his people. He and his followers were easily pacified, however, by a few gifts and with the explanation that the cross was erected to mark the entrance to the bay. The French entertained their guests bountifully with food and drink, and having gaily decked out the two sons of the chief in French shirts and red caps, they invited these young savages [sic] to remain on the ship and to sail with Cartier. They did so, and the chief and the others departed rejoicing. The next day the ships weighed anchor....
The days that followed were marked with entreaty and protest by Chief Donnaconna. He did not want Cartier to sail to Hochelaga.
On September 16, the Hurons came again. About five hundred of them gathered about the ships.
Donnaconna, with ten or twelve of the chiefest men of the country, came on board the ships, where Cartier held a great feast for them and gave them presents according to their rank. Taignoagny explained to Cartier that Donnaconna was grieved that he was going to Hochelaga. The river, said the guide, was of no importance and the journey not worth while. Cartier's reply to this protest was that he had been commanded by his king to go as far as he could go, but that, after seeing Hochelaga, he would come back again. Taignoagny flatly refused to act as guide, and the Indians abruptly left the ship and went ashore.
Donnaconna and his men were back again on the morrow... They brought with them eels and fish as presents, and danced and sang upon the shore opposite the ships in token of their friendship.
The next day the Indians made one more attempt to dissuade Cartier from his journey. Finding that persuasion and oratory were of no avail, they decided to fall back upon the supernatural and to frighten the French from their design... From beneath the foliage of the river bank a canoe shot into the stream, the hideous appearance of its occupants contrasting with the bright autumn tints that were lending their glory to the Canadian woods. The three Indians in the canoe had been carefully made up by their fellows as stage devils to strike horror into Cartier and his companions. They were dressed like devils, being wrapped in dog skins, white and black, their faces besmeared as black as any coals, with horns on their heads more than a yard long. The canoe... floated past the ships, the devils making no attempt to stop, not even turning but counterfeiting the sacred frenzy of angry deities. The devil in the center shouted a fierce harangue into the air... The whole thing was a piece of characteristic Indian acting, viewed by the French with interest but apparently without the faintest alarm.
Later, Taignoagny explained to the French that the great god, Cudragny, had spoken at Hochelaga and sent the three spirits in the canoe as a warning not to come to Hochelaga.
In spite of the warning, Cartier departed with two ships for Hochelaga and arrived on October 3, 1535. Here he met Huron Chief Agouhanna. The chief brought all his sick and infirm to the French for a possible cure by touch. The French touched them and recited prayers for them. Gifts were exchanged and there was a celebration of friendship.
The French saw fifty well-built longhouses within a fortified stockade. They visited Mount Royal. They inquired about gold and silver and other valuable minerals. The Hurons indicated that there was copper far to the west, past three waterfalls, and silver in the vicinity of today's Ottawa. The French left Hochelaga and returned to Stadacona for winter.
During the winter of 1535-36, the French explorers discovered for themselves the severity of a Quebec winter. From mid-November 1535 to mid-April 1536 the French fleet lay frozen in ice at the mouth of the St. Charles River. Ice was over 10 feet thick on the river, and snow was four feet deep on land. The French learned to survive the cold, but they had no ready answer to scurvy--which started among the Huron and then among the French. The symptoms of teeth falling out, bad gums, swollen limbs and pain all over the body was unmistakable, according to Cartier's Journal.
Domagaya had scurvy too, but one day he appeared at the French camp and said he was cured. He told the French about the curative properties of arborvitae, or white cedar. The leaves could be steeped in water. Cartier wrote that the Hurons brought back from the forest nine or ten branches and "showed us how to grind the bark and boil it in water, then drink the potion every other day and apply the residue as a poultice to swollen and infected legs." Of the 110 men that made up the second voyage, 85 survived the winter.
Winter brings people together and stories are told. Often the stories are fables or myths.Many stories are designed to frighten or gratify the listeners.
Chief Donnaconna was an accomplished storyteller in the oral tradition of the Huron. He knew the French were looking for valuable minerals such as gold and silver. He told them about the Kingdom of Saquenay (long before the myth was crafted into a computer game). He had been there himself, he said, and it had immense quantities of gold, silver and rubies.He said it was protected by a fierce people. He told Cartier and his men about a pygmy people who were unipeds and attacked travelers from the branches of trees. He said there was also a race of people with no anus, who subsisted on liquids. Chief Donnaconna was a great chief and a great storyteller.
Sadly, he was kidnapped along with his two sons and several others when Cartier and his shipmates weighed anchor on May 6, 1536 and left for France. Hundreds of Hurons in canoes raced alongside the three ships and they conversed with the chief and his sons who were on deck. There was nothing they could do to rescue the chief and the other kidnapped Hurons. Soon they were left in the wakes of the departing French ships.
On July 6, 1536, the Cartier expedition reached the harbor of St. Malo. "We reached the harbor of St. Malo, by the Grace of our Creator, whom we pray, making an end of our navigation, to grant us His Grace, and Paradise at the end. Amen."
Chief Donnaconna died in France in 1539. So did the other Hurons who were kidnapped and taken to France.
References;
The Mariner of St. Malo--A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier by Stephen Leacock. Quotes from this reference are in italics in this post.
The Great Explorers by Samuel Eliot Morison
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