This is one of the first maps to portray the geographic information Cartier obtained during his first two voyages to Canada. Hocheiaga and Stadacona are iocated, the mythicai Kingdom of the Saguenay is included, and whalers appear in the coastal waters. The orientation is north-south rather than south-north, as later became usual. Extract from Pierre Descelliers’s world map, 1546 (nineteenth-century copy).
The land should not be called New Land, being composed of stones and horrible
Rugged rocks____I did not see one cartload of earth and yet I landed in many places...
There is nothing but moss and short, stunted shrub. I am rather inclined to believe that this is the land God gave to Cain.
These were Jacques Cartier’s first images of Canada, and they were the impressions of a bitterly disappointed explorer. Jacques Cartier had been commissioned by Francois i to look for gold in the New World and a passage to Asia. With these goals in mind he had set out from the small port of St-Malo, France, on April 20, 1534, with two ships and sixty-one men. After navigating his ships around numerous menacing icebergs off the foggy coast of northern Newfoundland, Cartier had crossed the Strait of Belle Isle in early June, and probed the Labrador coast south-westward for a distance of some 200 kilometres (125 miles). Along this coast he met a few “wild and savage folk” who “clothed themselves in the furs of animals” and wore their hair “tied up on the top of their heads like a handful of twisted hay, with a nail or something of the sort passed through the middle... into which they weave a few bird’s feathers.” What a rude contrast these Aboriginal people were to the wealthy Asian merchants or the gold - and silver-rich Aztecs of Mexico Cartier hoped to find! Given his mission and expectations, his initial disappointment and harsh characterization of Canada and of the people he first encountered is understandable. The Native world of the early sixteenth century was far more complex and wealthy than Cartier could have known. And we can only guess at what the Indians thought of Cartier. What we do know is that they loved their homeland and had a deep spiritual attachment to it.
Archaeologists believe that the ancestors of Canada’s Native peoples migrated across the Bering landbridge from Siberia more than 12,000 years ago, towards the end of the ice age. Flunters of prehistoric bison, caribou, elk, mammoth, mastodon, and other large mammals, they advanced rapidly—an average of about 80 kilometres (50 miles) a generation—until, some 10,500 years ago, they had settled all the habitable areas of North and South America below the waning ice-sheets. A few thousand years later the glaciers had retreated far enough that some of the Native peoples were able to occupy Central Canada, around Hudson Bay and James Bay.
Despite enduring legends of Carthaginians, Phoenicians, the Irish Saint Brendan the Navigator, and other wanderers dating from the Bronze Age to late medieval times, contact between Canada and Europe seems to begin with the Vikings nearly one thousand years ago. The Norse were an adventurous sea people and they spread rapidly across the northern Atlantic in the ninth century. Norse sagas describe several voyages to North America after they had settled in Greenland late in that century; the most famous of these heroic stories tells of Leif Ericsson’s wintering at a place he called “Vinland” around the year 1000. The Greenlanders probably made occasional forays across Davis Strait to Baffin Island, Labrador, and Newfoundland, and the Norse settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland must be one of many places where they landed or wintered. The sagas, and evidence excavated from Native sites, suggest that the Norse explored the northern coast quite widely, and that there was sporadic contact between them and the Native peoples of northern North America over many years. There was, however, little basis for trade or friendly exchange between them, and the Native peoples appear to have defended their territory effectively against the intruders until the decline of the Norse colony in Greenland put an end to these encounters in the thirteenth century.
These contacts were made during a warm phase in the climate which lasted two centuries. It was apparently the deterioration in the climate that led the Norse to abandon the area. It was not until five hundred years after Leif Ericsson, in 1497, that John Cabot’s voyage from Bristol in England reopened European contact with Canada. Again there are legends and possibilities of prior voyages, but even if Cabot’s was not the first, it was certainly the one with consequence. His voyage was part of the explosive fifteenth-century maritime expansion that took the Europeans right around the world by 1520. Cabot (born Giovanni Caboto) understood, like his Italian contemporary Christopher Columbus, that a direct and possibly shorter route
L’Anse aux Meadows, Epaves Bay, on the north-east tip of Newfoundland: the first Norse settlement found so far in North America. Here eight Viking house-sites and four boatsheds dating from c. 1000 AD were excavated, between 1961 and 1968, by seven archaeological expeditions.
Cartier rencontre les Indiens de Stadacona. This romanticized image of Cartier’s first encounter with the Stadacona shows the explorer making a bold approach to shy, retiring Indians; in fact, Cartier’s own accounts indicate that the roles were reversed. Most often the newcomers were welcomed. This 1907 oil painting is by Marc-Aurele De Foy Suzor-Cote.
To the spice trades of the Far East might be found by sailing west. Finding backers in England for a reconnaissance on a more northerly latitude than Columbus’s, he probably landed in northern Newfoundland, spent a month sailing this new coast, and returned to Bristol to acclaim and a royal pension.
Cabot’s reconnaissance, and ones that followed by Joao Fernandes (1500), the Corte-Real brothers (1500), Joao Alvares Fagundes (1520-25), and Giovanni da Verrazano (1524-28), showed that no easy westward route to the Indies existed. Cabot, however, had on his return announced a different kind of wealth: cod. Already there was a strong market in Europe for these fish—Europeans had been catching cod in the North Sea and off Iceland for generations. Soon after Cabot’s voyage, fishermen from Portugal, France, and Britain began to fish for cod on the banks of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. By the 1550s the Newfoundland cod trade Employed hundreds of ships and thousands of men travelling annually between European ports and the new fishing grounds.
Along with the fishermen came whalers, particularly Basques from northern Spain and south-western France. They focused on the Strait of Belle Isle where the narrow waters facilitated their hunt. In the 1560s and 1570s more than a thousand whaling men were summering—and sometimes wintering—there every year. The fishermen and whalers were more interested in Canadian waters than Canadian land, but they gradually developed a third trade through contact with the Native peoples. There was a luxury market for furs and pelts in Europe, which the fishermen could tap once they entered into amicable exchanges with the Natives. By the latter half of the sixteenth century, voyages were being organized specifically for this trade.
In 1534, when Jacques Cartier explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence, he not only encountered fishing boats and visited harbours already named by Basque whalers, but also traded furs at Chaleur Bay with the Mi’kmaq (Micmac). Cartier, however, had a different agenda. By then it was clear that Columbus’s westward search had discovered not the Indies but a new continent, which was already being called America. A route through this continent was still hoped for, but the Spanish experience in Mexico and Peru had established a new motive for exploration. By Cartier’s time, the conquistadores had conquered Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru and seized treasure troves as valuable as the riches of the Far East. Accordingly, the King of France’s commission to Cartier authorized him to discover “certain isles and countries where it is said there must be great quantities of gold and other riches.”
Although Cartier’s initial disappointment with Canada proved unfounded, his assessment was accurate in one fundamental respect. By comparison to most of western Europe, Canada is a harsh land. Except for the prairies and the Pacific coast, the Canadian climate north of the 49th parallel is like that of Europe north of the 60th parallel: Norway, central Sweden, and Finland. In other words, Canada is primarily a northern country. South of the 49th parallel, in southern Ontario, the St. Lawrence valley, and on the prairies, the climate is like that of eastern central Europe and the western Soviet Union. Only coastal British Columbia and the Maritimes, with the exception of Newfoundland, are comparable to France and the British Isles. Only southern British Columbia, the prairies, southern Ontario, the St. Lawrence valley, and the southern Maritimes have growing seasons in excess of 160 days, enough to make large-scale agriculture possible. As a result, most of what is now Canada was better suited to the lifestyles of Native hunters and fishermen than it was to the
Captain Cook’s Ships Moored in Resolution Cove, Nootka Sound. Vancouver Island. March 1778. The trade between the British and the Nootka was, in James Cook’s words, “carried on with the strictest honesty on both sides.” After completing his trading and repairing his ships, the great explorer sailed on to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where he was killed in a dispute with the Natives. Watercolour by M. B. Messer after John Webber.
European peasant farmers who followed in the footsteps of the early explorers.
This fundamental fact of Canadian geography greatly influenced the course of the relationship between the Native peoples and the European intruders. In contrast to the land that was to become the United States, few areas of this northern world were suitable for farming. This meant that the conflict between them over possession of land was substantially less in the early days than it was in the United States, where the climate and geography made an agricultural way of life possible, and had led the Aboriginal people to clear and settle some of the best land; there, conflict was inevitable when the newcomers took it over for their own use. In Canada, until the nineteenth century, Europeans mostly prized the rich fishing they found along the Atlantic coast and the wealth that the Native people harvested from the forests.
The scramble for the wealth of the forests began slightly more than half a century after Cartier cast disapproving eyes on the Montagnais of the Labrador coast. In 1588 two of his nephews sought and obtained from Henry iii of France a short-lived monopoly on trade with the Montagnais and other Natives. This signalled the beginning of a fight for control of the fur trade that was to last until the middle of this
Native Canada at the time of early European contact. This map illustrates the distribution of Native groups in relationship to language areas. The incomplete records of the period and the high mobility of the Native peoples make the establishment of precise historical boundaries difficult to determine; many are disputed to this day.
Century—a contest which quickly became enmeshed in the imperial struggle between France and England for control of the northern half of the continent. It was one of the driving forces behind the European invasion, and its outcome influenced the shape of the modern political map of North America. The fur trade itself would disrupt the Native world by fostering conflicts between groups who jockeyed to control the supply of furs to the Europeans and the trading routes to the interior, by spreading epidemic diseases, by stimulating the migration of whole populations, and by introducing iron-age technologies into stone-age economies, and drawing Native people into an international commodity marketing system in the process. These developments did not have the same impact on all of Canada’s Native peoples. Native Canada, on the eve of contact by the Europeans, was too rich and complex a world for that—both geographically and culturally. Nevertheless, the coming of the Europeans would change it forever.
World History
