8 leagues farther up the stream in a good and safe harbour." Cartier's reception committee was a band of more than two hundred Indians of the Huron-Iroquois family. The men and their women and children had come to Gaspé Basin for the mackerel fishing. Cartier found them very poor. "These creatures are indeed savages. Besides their fishing boats and nets all that they had was not worth five sols." When they crowded about in canoes to traffic with the white men he gave combs and tin bells to the maidens and knives and glass paternosters to the males, who expressed their delight by singing and dancing in their boats. "Sur la pointe de l'entrée de ce port," probably at Sandy Beach, the Norman captain planted a cross thirty feet in height on which he hung a shield painted with three lilies. In large letters the legend, Vive le Roy de France was cut in the wood. When Cartier had thus dedicated a New France to his King he knelt on the ground and prayed with the Indians about him. The following day, July 25, 1534, he departed for Anticosti Island, 50 miles to the north, and from there passed through the gateway of the River St. Laurent which conducted him to Stadaconé and Hochelaga.
Gaspeg was the Indians' name for Land's End. At the tip of the crooked finger of the spindling Forillon[1] is Cape Gaspé. Facing it, on the other
- ↑ "This word is generically used by the French for a
