Jacques Cartier's Voyages to Canada (1534-1542)

Jacques Cartier’s voyages were three French expeditions, in 1534, 1535-1536 and 1541-1542, that explored the Gulf of St Lawrence and sailed up the St Lawrence River into the heart of what is now Canada. Cartier, a navigator from Saint-Malo, met the St Lawrence Iroquoians at Stadacona and Hochelaga and recorded the word “Canada”. His voyages gave France its claim to the region, although the first attempt at a French colony there failed.

Background: France looks west

By the 1530s Spain and Portugal had divided the newly explored world between them, and Spain was growing rich from Mexico. King Francis I of France rejected their monopoly and wanted a share of American wealth, or a northern sea route to Asia. Breton and Norman fishermen already knew the waters around Newfoundland well.

Jacques Cartier, born in Saint-Malo in 1491, was an experienced mariner who may already have sailed to Newfoundland and Brazil. In 1534 he received a royal commission to search for gold and a passage to Asia.

The first voyage, 1534

Cartier left Saint-Malo on 20 April 1534 with two ships and 61 men. He reached Newfoundland in about 20 days, passed through the Strait of Belle Isle and explored the Gulf of St Lawrence, including the coasts of Prince Edward Island and Chaleur Bay. He traded with Mi’kmaq people, who were clearly used to dealing with Europeans.

At Gaspé Bay he met a large fishing party of St Lawrence Iroquoians from Stadacona, led by Donnacona. On 24 July 1534 Cartier raised a cross about ten metres high carved with the words “Long live the King of France”. Donnacona protested, and Cartier persuaded or forced two of his sons, Domagaya and Taignoagny, to come back with him to France.

The second voyage, 1535-1536

Domagaya and Taignoagny, who learned some French, told Cartier of a great river leading inland. In May 1535 he sailed again with three ships, the Grande Hermine, Petite Hermine and Émérillon, and about 110 men, bringing the two young men home.

Guided by them, Cartier became the first known European to sail up the St Lawrence River. In September 1535 he reached Stadacona, at the site of today’s Quebec City. Donnacona tried to discourage him from going further, but Cartier went upriver with a smaller party.

On 2 October 1535 he reached Hochelaga, a palisaded town of about 50 longhouses on the island of present-day Montreal, where he was welcomed by more than a thousand people. He climbed the mountain behind the town and named it Mont Royal. Rapids above the island, later called Lachine, blocked his way further west.

The people of Hochelaga, like those of Stadacona, were St Lawrence Iroquoians. They lived in large bark-covered longhouses, grew maize, beans and squash, and fished the river. Cartier’s account of the town, with its circular palisade and central square, is one of the few descriptions of these communities before they disappeared.

Cartier wintered near Stadacona. The winter was severe, and scurvy broke out among both his men and the local population. About 25 of the French died before Domagaya showed them a remedy: a drink made from the bark and leaves of a tree the Iroquoians called annedda, probably eastern white cedar. Most of the remaining sick recovered.

This episode is often cited as one of the first recorded cures of scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C. The knowledge was not kept, however, and scurvy continued to kill sailors and colonists for more than two centuries.

Relations with Stadacona had grown tense. In May 1536, before leaving, Cartier seized Donnacona, his two sons and several others and took them to France. He returned to Saint-Malo in July 1536.

The seizure poisoned relations between the French and the Stadaconans. For Cartier, the captives were proof of his discoveries and witnesses who could describe the interior to the king. For Donnacona’s people, it was the abduction of a leader and his family by guests they had fed and helped through a terrible winter.

The name Canada

Cartier recorded the Iroquoian word kanata, which he wrote as “Canada”, meaning a village or settlement. The Stadaconans used it of their own town; Cartier applied it to the region around it. Later mapmakers spread the name more widely, and it eventually became the name of the whole country.

The third voyage and the failed colony, 1541-1542

In France, Donnacona told Francis I of a rich “Kingdom of Saguenay” full of gold and other treasure. The stories helped persuade the king to back a colony. Donnacona and almost all the others taken in 1536 died in France; Donnacona died around 1539.

In October 1540 Francis I named Cartier captain-general of a new expedition, but in January 1541 he gave overall command to a nobleman, Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval. Cartier sailed first, in May 1541, with five ships. He built a settlement called Charlesbourg-Royal at Cap-Rouge, just upstream from Stadacona. When the Stadaconans asked about Donnacona, Cartier told them he had stayed in France as a rich lord, but trust between the two sides had broken down.

Cartier collected what he thought were gold and diamonds. After a hard winter and attacks by the Stadaconans, he abandoned the settlement in June 1542. At St John’s, Newfoundland, he met Roberval arriving with new colonists. Roberval ordered him to return, but Cartier sailed home by night. His “treasure” turned out to be iron pyrite and quartz.

Roberval’s colony, France-Roy, struggled through a winter in which many settlers died of scurvy, and it was abandoned in 1543. In 2006 archaeologists confirmed the site of Charlesbourg-Royal at Cap-Rouge.

Legacy

Cartier made no more major voyages and died in Saint-Malo on 1 September 1557. His expeditions produced the first written descriptions of the St Lawrence and its peoples, and his maps and accounts shaped European knowledge of the region for decades.

Cartier is remembered in Canada through place names, monuments and the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal. Modern accounts also stress the other side of his story: the Iroquoian hosts who guided him, cured his crew and lost their leader to his ambitions. Both perspectives are now part of how the voyages are taught.

When Samuel de Champlain returned to the river in the early 1600s, Stadacona and Hochelaga had disappeared, and the St Lawrence Iroquoians had vanished from the valley, for reasons historians still debate, including warfare and disease. Permanent French settlement began only with the founding of Quebec by Champlain in 1608. Cartier’s voyages had nonetheless given France the claim on which New France was built, challenging the division of the world set out in the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Timeline

• 1534, 20 April: Cartier sails from Saint-Malo on his first voyage.
• 1534, 24 July: Cartier raises a cross at Gaspé and meets Donnacona.
• 1535, May: The second voyage sets out with three ships.
• 1535, September: Cartier reaches Stadacona (Quebec City).
• 1535, 2-3 October: Cartier visits Hochelaga and names Mont Royal.
• 1536, July: Cartier returns to France with Donnacona as a captive.
• 1541, May: The third voyage sails; Charlesbourg-Royal is founded at Cap-Rouge.
• 1542, June: Cartier abandons the colony and returns to France.
• 1557, 1 September: Cartier dies in Saint-Malo.

Why it matters

Cartier’s voyages opened the St Lawrence, the great waterway into the interior of North America, to Europeans and laid the basis for French Canada. They also left a vivid record of Iroquoian towns that soon disappeared. And they gave a modern country its name, borrowed from a word for “village”.