Also the following passage from Lescarbot will show how much the
neighboring coasts were frequented by Europeans in the sixteenth
century. Speaking of his return from Port Royal to France in 1607, he
says: “At last, within four leagues of Campseau [the Gut of Canso], we
arrived at a harbor [in Nova Scotia], where a worthy old gentleman from
St. John de Lus, named Captain Savale, was fishing, who received us
with the utmost courtesy. And as this harbor, which is small, but very
good, has no name, I have given it on my geographical chart the name of
Savalet. [It is on Champlain’s map also.] This worthy man told us that
this voyage was the forty-second which he had made to those parts, and
yet the Newfoundlanders [_Terre neuviers_] make only one a year. He was
wonderfully content with his fishery, and informed us that he made
daily fifty crowns’ worth of cod, and that his voyage would be worth
ten thousand francs. He had sixteen men in his employ; and his vessel
was of eighty tons, which could carry a hundred thousand dry cod.”
(Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 1612.) They dried their fish on the
rocks on shore.
The “Isola della Réna” (Sable Island?) appears on the chart of “Nuova
Francia” and Norumbega, accompanying the “Discourse” above referred to
in Ramusio’s third volume, edition 1556-65. Champlain speaks of there
being at the Isle of Sable, in 1604, “grass pastured by oxen (_bœufs_)
and cows which the Portuguese carried there more than sixty years ago,”
_i.e._ sixty years before 1613; in a later edition he says, which came
out of a Spanish vessel which was lost in endeavoring to settle on the
Isle of Sable; and he states that De la Roche’s men, who were left on
this island seven years from 1598, lived on the flesh of these cattle
which they found “_en quantie)_,” and built houses out of the wrecks of
vessels which came to the island (“perhaps Gilbert’s”), there being no
wood or stone. Lescarbot says that they lived “on fish and the milk of
cows left there about eighty years before by Baron de Leri and Saint
Just.” Charlevoix says they ate up the cattle and then lived on fish.
Haliburton speaks of cattle left there as a rumor. De Leri and Saint
Just had suggested plans of colonization on the Isle of Sable as early
as 1515 (1508?) according to Bancroft, referring to Charlevoix. These
are but a few of the instances which I might quote.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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