The Mariner of St Malo | Page 6

as women,
but that the women go somewhat straighter and closer in their garments
than the men do, with their waists girded. They paint themselves with
certain roan colours. Their boats are made with the bark of birch trees,
with the which they fish and take great store of seals, and, as far as we
could understand since our coming thither, that is not their habitation,
but they come from the mainland out of hotter countries to catch the
said seals and other necessaries for their living.'
There has been much discussion as to these savages. It has been
thought by some that they were a southern branch of the Eskimos, by
others that they were Algonquin Indians who had wandered eastward
from the St Lawrence region. But the evidence goes to show that they
belonged to the lost tribe of the 'Red Indians' of Newfoundland, the
race which met its melancholy fate by deliberate and ruthless
destruction at the hands of the whites. Cabot had already seen these
people on his voyage to the coast, and described them as painted with
'red ochre.' Three of them he had captured and taken to England as an
exhibit. For two hundred years after the English settlement of
Newfoundland, these 'Red Indians' were hunted down till they were
destroyed. 'It was considered meritorious,' says a historian of the island,
'to shoot a Red Indian. To "go to look for Indians" came to be as much
a phrase as to "look for partridges." They were harassed from post to
post, from island to island: their hunting and fishing stations were
unscrupulously seized by the invading English. They were shot down
without the least provocation, or captured to be exposed as curiosities
to the rabble at fairs in the western towns of Christian England at
twopence apiece.' So much for the ill-fated savages among whom
Cartier planted his first cross.

On June 15, Cartier, disappointed, as we have seen, with the rugged
country that he found on the northern shore, turned south again to pick
up the mainland, as he called it, of Newfoundland. Sailing south from
Brest to a distance of about sixty miles, he found himself on the same
day off Point Rich on the west coast of Newfoundland, to which, from
its appearance, he gave the name of the Double Cape. For three days
the course lay to the south-west along the shore. The panorama that was
unfolded to the eye of the explorer was cheerless. The wind blew cold
and hard from the north-east. The weather was dark and gloomy, while
through the rifts of the mist and fog that lay heavy on the face of the
waters there appeared only a forbidding and scarcely habitable coast.
Low lands with islands fringed the shore. Behind them great mountains,
hacked and furrowed in their outline, offered an uninviting prospect.
There was here no Eldorado such as, farther south, met the covetous
gaze of a Cortez or a Pizarro, no land of promise luxuriant with the
vegetation of the tropics such as had greeted the eyes of Columbus at
his first vision of the Indies. A storm-bound coast, a relentless climate
and a reluctant soil-these were the treasures of the New World as first
known to the discoverer of Canada.
For a week Cartier and his men lay off the coast. The headland of Cape
Anguille marks the approximate southward limit of their exploration.
Great gales drove the water in a swirl of milk-white foam among the
rocks that line the foot of this promontory. Beyond this point they saw
nothing of the Newfoundland shore, except that, as the little vessels
vainly tried to beat their way to the south against the fierce storms, the
explorers caught sight of a second great promontory that appeared
before them through the mist. This headland Cartier called Cape St
John. In spite of the difficulty of tracing the storm-set path of the
navigators, it is commonly thought that the point may be identified as
Cape Anguille, which lies about twenty-five miles north of Cape Ray,
the south-west 'corner' of Newfoundland.
Had Cartier been able to go forward in the direction that he had been
following, he would have passed out between Newfoundland and Cape
Breton island into the open Atlantic, and would have realized that his
New Land was, after all, an island and not the mainland of the

continent. But this discovery was reserved for his later voyage. He
seems, indeed, when he presently came to the islands that lie in the
mouth of the Gulf of St Lawrence, to have suspected that a passage
here lay to the open sea. Doubtless the set of the wind and current
revealed it to the trained instinct of the pilot. 'If it were so,' he wrote, 'it
would