where the scenery is grand but the trees smaller and the land less fertile than in the neighbourhood of Chaleur and its rivers. On a point at the entrance of the harbour of Gaspe--an Indian name having probably reference to a split rock, which has long been a curiosity of the coast--Cartier raised a cross, thirty feet in height, on the middle of which there was a shield or escutcheon with three fleurs-de-lis, and the inscription, _Vive le Roy de France_. Cartier then returned to France by way of the strait of Belle Isle, without having seen the great river to whose mouth he had been so close {34} when he stood on the hills of Gaspe or passed around the shores of desolate Anticosti. Cartier brought back with him two sons of the Indian chief of a tribe he saw at Gaspe, who seem to have belonged to the Huron-Iroquois nation he met at Stadacona, now Quebec, when he made the second voyage which I have to describe. The accounts he gave of the country on the Gulf appear to have been sufficiently encouraging to keep up the interest of the King and the Admiral of France in the scheme of discovery which they had planned. In this second voyage of 1535-36, the most memorable of all he made to American waters, he had the assistance of a little fleet of three vessels, the _Grande Hermine_, the _Petite Hermine_, and the _Emerillon_, of which the first had a burden of one hundred and twenty tons--quite a large ship compared with the two little vessels of sixty tons each that were given him for his first venture. This fleet, which gave Canada to France for two centuries and a quarter, reached Newfoundland during the early part of July, passed through the strait of Belle Isle, and on the 10th of August, came to a little bay or harbour on the northern shore of the present province of Quebec, but then known as Labrador, to which he gave the name of St. Laurent, in honour of the saint whose festival happened to fall on the day of his arrival. This bay is now generally believed to be the port of Sainte Genevieve, and the name which Cartier gave it was gradually transferred in the course of a century to the whole gulf as well as to the river itself which the Breton sailor was the first to place {35} definitely on the maps of those days of scanty geographical knowledge. Cartier led his vessels through the passage between the northern shores of Canada and the island of Anticosti, which he called Assomption, although it has long since resumed its old name, which has been gradually changed from the original Natiscotic to Naticousti, and finally to Anticosti. When the adventurers came near the neighbourhood of Trinity River on the north side of the Gulf, the two Gaspe Indians who were on board Cartier's vessel, the Grande Hermine, told them that they were now at the entrance of the kingdom of Saguenay where red copper was to be found, and that away beyond flowed the great river of Hochelaga and Canada. This Saguenay kingdom extended on the north side