[woop] LAURENCIANA 43 
eye was quick, his judgment sound, his pen terse. He says he couldn’t find 
a cartload of good earth in the whole of Labrador, and that it must be the 
country God had reserved for Cain. This was true enough of a land 
that had never borne a harvest since it rose from the depths. But 
Cartier’s interests were navigational; and, making due allowance for 
difference of opportunity, his hydrographical descriptions will bear 
comparison with those of the Admiralty surveys of our own time. 
Compare, for instance, the description he gives of Cumberland Harbour 
with the one in the last edition of The St. Lawrence Pilot. A casual 
entry in his log about another Labrador harbour had a most momentous 
result in geographical nomenclature. On the 10th of August he hap- 
pened into a little salt-water bay of no particular importance. Yet 
from this stray circumstance more than half the fresh waters in the 
world have taken their general name! He was a pious soul, observant 
of saints’ days; and so his entry runs: Nous nommasmes la dicte baye 
la baye Sainct Laurens. Nobody knows how or why this name left its first 
home, in what is now called Pillage Bay, and set out to conquer the 
whole of what is now the Saint Lawrence. But so it was. Those were 
great days for sporting chances in the matter of names and places. 
Cartier gravely enters the names of the three “Kingdoms” which he 
passed through in as many hundred miles on his way to Montreal, 
the Kingdoms of Saguenay, Canada and Hochelaga. What different des- 
tinies these three names have had since then! Saguenay has now shrunk 
to a single stream, Canada has grown to a Dominion the size of Europe, 
and Hochelaga has faded away into a memory and nothing more! 
On the 8th of September, the anniversary of the day on which 
the pettifogging politician Vaudreuil surrendered New France to Am- 
herst at Montreal two hundred and twenty-five years later, the staunch 
sailor Jacques Cartier landed at St. Joachim to meet Donnacona, the 
“King of Canada,” whose capital was at Kebek, the “Narrows” of 
“The Great River.” It is a curious reflection that if Sir John Mac- 
donald’s suggestion had not been over-ruled by a timid Colonial Secre- 
tary we should now be living under another “King of Canada,” 
George V. Cartier had two “Canadians” with him, Taignoagny and 
Domagaya, whom he had taken home from Gaspé the year before and 
now brought back as interpreters. And here we might remember 
something else to his credit. All the whites treated all the Indians 
_as their natural subjects. But, while Columbus and the Spaniards 
enslaved or butchered them on all occasions, Cartier and the French 
treated them more as foundlings, to be made the obedient servants 
of both the King of France and the King of Heaven. Donnacona, like 
all the chief men in Canada, excelled in florid oratory; and the country 
of the Ottawas was even then marked on European maps as the scene 
