He had discovered a hot, fair land, widely different from the bleak and rock-bound coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador; and the good report which he brought of his discoveries was more than enough to find him backing for a second venture. Accordingly, in the following year, on May 19, 1535, he sailed again from St. Malo, and, reaching {22} the straits of Belle Isle after storm and tempest, took his way, the first of European explorers, up the great river of Canada. He moored his three ships below the rock of Quebec--then the site of Stadaconé, a native Indian village, and the dwelling-place of a chief Donnaconna, who is styled in the narrative the Lord of Canada. There he left his two larger vessels, and pushed on in his pinnace and boats to the town of Hochelaga. That town, the Indians had told him, was the capital of the land; and he found it, palisaded and fortified in native fashion, where Montreal now stands.[34] The Frenchmen were received as gods by the Indians; they were asked, like the Apostles of old, to touch and heal the sick; and, ever mindful of the duty of spreading the Christian religion, they read the gospel to their savage admirers in the strange French tongue, to cure their souls if they could not mend their bodies. [Footnote 34: As Mr. Parkman points out (_Pioneers of France_, p. 212), Quebec and Montreal were in old days, as now, the centres of population in Lower Canada. 'Stadaconé and Hochelaga, Quebec and Montreal, in the sixteenth century, as in the nineteenth, were the centres of Canadian population.'] Returning down stream to their ships, they passed the winter underneath Quebec, amid ice and snow, stricken with scurvy, and distrustful of their Indian neighbours; and at length, on the return of summer, they set sail for France, carrying away the Indian chief Donnaconna and some of his companions, to die in a far-off land. They reached St. Malo in the middle of July, 1536, and so ended Cartier's second voyage to 'the New found lands by him named New France.'[35] [Footnote 35: End of the narrative of Cartier's second voyage in Hakluyt, vol. iii, p. 285.] [Sidenote: _Failure of Roberval's attempt at colonization._]