In company with the Pensée, another ship, commanded by Giovanni da Verrazzano, also sailed from the port of Dieppe. The two entering the river of St. Lawrence, ascended it to the distance of eighty leagues. The exploration of the river is thus described: “The people of Dieppe continued their commercial intercourse with the East Indies. When they heard of the discoveries which the Spaniards had made in America, they found their emulation incited, and they equipped two vessels to discover whether that part of the world did not extend its coast to the north. They intrusted the command of the ships to two of their most skillful captains, named Thomas Aubert and Jean Vérassen. These two ships sailed from Dieppe at the beginning of the year 1508, and discovered the same year the St. Lawrence River, to which they gave the name of Saint Lawrence because they began to ascend it on this saint’s day [the tenth of August]. They explored the river for more than eighty leagues, finding the inhabitants friendly, with whom they made very profitable exchanges for peltries.”[363] As related in the chronicle of Eusebius, printed at Paris in 1512, it appears that Aubert and Verrazzano, on their departure from the New Land, carried to France a number of natives. Under the date of 1509, it is said: “Seven wild men were brought from that island (which is called the New Land) to Rouen with their canoe, clothing, and weapons. They are of a sooty color, with thick lips, and bearing marks on the face drawn like blue veins along the cheek-bones from the ear to the middle of the chin; with black hair and coarse like a horse’s mane; having no beard throughout the whole life; no hair on any part of the body, except on the head and eyebrows. They wear a girdle to cover their nakedness, in which girdle is a sort of pouch; they form a dialect with their lips; religion they have none. Their canoe is bark, which a man can lift on his shoulders with one hand. Their weapons are large bows, the strings being intestines or sinews of animals; their arrows are canes barbed with flint or fish-bone. Their food is boiled flesh; their drink water. Of bread and wine and money they have not the least use. They go naked or clad in the skins of beasts,—bears, deer, sea-calves, and the like. Their country, parallel to the seventh climate,[364] is nearer the West[365] than France is farther from it.”[366]