The most significant voyages of the 1500s were those of the French, which actually struck deep into the Canadian river system.

Jacques Cartier was born a subject of France, an early indigenous navigator, the hold of Italian interests now fading as national interests waxed. He was a Breton, meaning a Gaelic person with as much in common with Cornish and Devonshire seafaring men across the channel than with most of the ethnic group of France. Cartier seems to have been the best navigator of the 1500s, by far.

-1527, Basque whaling off Newfoundland

-1534, April 20, Cartier sails from Saint Malo, financed from the King’s naval treasury, charged with finding China by way of a northwest passage

-May 10, midnight landfall in Newfoundland, where Cartier had sailed before, as had many of his crew

-May 21, ice bergs, had to be dealt with to get to Canada, in spring, from the Atlantic. These Little Ice Age seas from 1290 to 1816 were much tougher to deal with than they had been in the Viking Age.

-May 24, Cartier’s crew kills swimming polar bear

-May 27, rounding Newfoundland into Gulf of Saint Lawrence

-June, explores Labrador, rescues a French fishing boat lost in this “undiscovered region” as fishermen followed the fish in a more passive type of exploration and were not eager to give away their fishing shoals. Natives from further south, who “paint themselves in tan colors,” either Beothuk or Iroquois, were seal hunting in birch bark canoes. My bet is Iroquois.

-Sunday, June 14, mass in harbor, the entrance to Canada was being mapped, such as Brion, Magdalen and Prince Edward Islands…

-July 6, Micmacs in two fleets of 50 canoes, brandish furs to be sold, indicating that Europeans had already been trading in these waters extensively. So many tribesmen appeared that the French initially panicked.

-Mid July, trading with Hurons

-July 24, Cross is raised, Chief Donnaconna objects, gives his two sons as ambassadors to France

-August 1, Cartier calls a counsel of officers, a rare departure from tyrannical captaincy of the time

-August 5, Cartier finds Montagnais tribesmen fishing as contractors for a certain Captain Theinnot, who had a private fleet nearby. It is obvious that private ventures made most of the North American discoveries long before official government navigators placed flags and crosses in the name of a king.

-September 5, Cartier returns, his crew eager to sign on for another voyage.

-1535, May, Cartier’s second voyage mans a small fleet of three ships with 112 men, with powers to punish granted by the king. Fishing and trading merchants prevented sailors for signing on to the naval ships, crew members listed by name, except for the much abused ships boys. This is not a voyage of discovery, but an attempt by government to catch up to the private sector.

-September, Donnaconna speaks with sons, finds they were well treated, and makes alliance with Cartier. The Huron princes then stall in their duty as pilots, not wanting to lead Cartier to their enemies up river. Cartier is given a slave girl and two slave boys as gifts, one a son of the chief. The slave girl of 10 or 12 ran away from French rapist sailors. Recaptured, she was joined by another sex slave, a girl of 8 or 9, with the Christian captain and the heathen chief, both parties to this crime.

-October finds Cartier up the Saint Lawrence River to Hochelaga “a wooden citadel,” and King Agouhana. The Hurons thought the French were deities and sought healing, while the French, in very European fashion, sought a mythic city of gold at Lake Superior, where copper was abundant. The passage could not be made until a French outpost could be established generations later.

-Winter in Canada is a disaster, with cold and scurvy killing French and Indians. French were allowed to use the virgin girls, no doubt leaving some genetic traces. French fleet frozen in ice from middle of November to middle of April; a great scene for a horror novel if I wasn’t busy unearthing this neglected past…

-May 3, Cartier violently kidnaps Donnaconna, carrying to France: him, his 3 sons, 1 boy, 2 girls and three others, none to return, despite Cartier’s “promise” to return the chief.

-1537, Cartier accused of piracy by Spain and of assisting in Lord Gerald Fitzgerald’s attempt to become King of Ireland.

-1538, Cartier’s Third Voyage, shared with fanatic Protestant politician Roberval, counts 6 ships, 274 persons, including miners and sawyers and noble “supercargo” tourists. The labor positions could not be filled, so 50 men were “recruited” from prisons, provided they had not been condemned for religious heresy, speaking against the king or counterfeiting coins. Murderers were good to go. The same year 24 fishing ships sailed from the same port.

Morison notes, “It is difficult for Americans, north or south, to accept the fact that for a century after Columbus’s discovery, the ordinary sort of European had to be bribed, drugged or beaten to go to this land of promise, unless to fish.”

-With land lubber Roberval promoted to co command with Cartier, we witness the beginning of French Plantation economics, identical to later English practices. Roberval bought a chained gang of thieves of both sexes, ranging from age 18 to 45, to be settled in a land that froze solid from November to April. These included an engaged couple. Cartier would even torture Spanish fishermen for information. The entire expedition was like a brutal science fiction novel.

-Left behind in France, Dannonconna told that Cartier’s men used Huron’s for sword practice and robbed anybody they could. His sons died in criminal violence after they got involved in gang rackets. Roberval marooned a young woman and her maid for the noble lady having an affair with a gent. The lady survived, was rescued after a year in the arctic that claimed the life of her maid, lover, who heroically swam to shore, and infant. She became a school teacher, the friend of the queen, and the subject of the queen’s novel, about “the Valiant Demoiselle.” Indians resisted the French pirate rapists.

-Roberval built a fort named FranceRoy, had men and women beaten regularly, failed to trade with the Indians, just as Cartier failed to find the fabled Saguenay kingdom. Men were lost men to scurvy and barely survived the winter

-1539, (Hernan de Soto invades Florida with 600 men.)

-1542, Harleian Desceliers Dauphin Map with alleged portrait of Cartier, a lean faced man with a forked beard in cloak, set against a later sketch of a portrait in which he has a short beard and practical head rag.

-1542, English law passed discouraging fish merchants from buying from Flemish and French, and encouraging English to fish.

-1543, (Soto dies in Arkansas, after wiping out a few civilizations.)

-1545, Cartier publishes a Brief recit

-1561, Roberval finally killed in political street violence in Paris

-1564, French protestants settle in Florida at Saint John’s River

-1565, Spanish wipe out French in Florida

-1567, October, David Ingram and 100 other sailors are marooned by Drake at Mouth of Rio Grand and begin walking to Maine.

-1568, French pirate wipes out Spanish garrison in Florida, killing all prisoners.

-1569, Ingram and two surviving mates hail a ship at Cape Breton and are brought back to England. He supports his drinking habit and finds shelter by traveling from Inn to Inn telling tales of lost kingdoms!

-1578, Newfoundland, Parkhurst reports on fishing fleet: 50 English, 150 French/Breton, 100 Spanish

-1578 French fleet settling convicts on Sable Island captured by English, with no news as to the fate of the crooks

-1579, Sir Humphry Gilbert outfits an expedition to find David Ingram’s fanciful kingdom.

-1580, Trinity Harbor, Newfoundland, Beothuk will not trade with Captain Richard Whitbourne, English learn to hunt.

-1583, Etienne Bellinger explores Maine coast, looking for Ingram’s pubcrawl kingdom.

-1583, Gilbert claims Newfoundland for England

-1584, French convict ship bound for Sable Island wrecked!

-1586, Newfoundland, 300 fishing ships, including Dutch

-1588, Year of the Spanish Armada

-1593, English Captain George Drake finds Labrador Islands occupied by Breton and Basque whalers

-1598, October, Norman/French captain Thomas Chefdhostel, empties prisons and maroons 60 men and women on Sable Island.

-1603, Chefdhostel finds 11 men alive on sable island, robbed them of their peltry and took them to France. King Henry IV wished to see the men, who appeared like “ancient river gods,” with four year beards, in skins, and demanded that the fiendish Chefdhostel return their thieved property. Throughout the Plantation Era, the working class are treated with extreme cruelty by merchants and nobility and rarely find any kindness, except in the persons of Kings, military governors and magistrates. [1]

-1604, Camplain resumes French mission to colonize Canada

…

Notes

-1. So Her Master May Have Her Again, the story of Mary Glass in Spanish Louisiana and Of A Panted Land, the stories of Jemmy Annelsey and of Isrаel Potter