The two ships commanded by Cartier sailed from the port of St. Malo, on the twentieth of April, 1534. Reaching Newfoundland on the tenth of May, Cartier began to search for a navigable channel to India. Three months were passed in exploring the coast of Labrador and the Strait of Belle Isle and a part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On the fifteenth of August, Cartier set sail for France, and arrived in the port of St. Malo, on the fifth of September. In the following year, Cartier sailed again to New France and explored the St. Lawrence River to the island of Hochelaga, the site of the city of Montreal. It is said that he was told by the natives that from there it was only “a month’s sailing to go to a land where cinnamon and cloves are gathered.”[431] Returning from this voyage, Cartier reached St. Malo on the sixth of July, 1536.[432] The first explorers of the new continent called its inhabitants by different names. Columbus and his Spanish companions, imagining the field of their discoveries to be in Eastern Asia, named the aborigines Indians (_Indios_), believing them to be natives of India. Seven of the people of Canada, carried to France, in 1509, were described by a contemporaneous Latin writer as wood or wild men (_homines sylvestres_).[433] The French, it appears, called the natives of New France _manants_ or _manans_, and _paysans_, peasants, the former name being used in the middle ages as a designation for unintelligent people or those of low condition. The name _manants_ was likewise a designation for persons of this class living in villages and on farms. _Manants_ properly speaking were the natives of a place, and the _habitans_ were those who came to it to reside.[434] The French appellation _manants_ or _manans_ not only fitly expressed the low condition of the natives of New France, but it also gave prominence to the fact that they dwelt in villages and were indigenous people. The French, as late as the year 1677, called the old Indians, or rather the descendants of the Senecas, _paisans_, peasants.[435] The Italians also called the natives of North America peasants, _paesani_.[436] The Manants living on the island on which the city of New York is built, were very friendly to the French who came to the Grande River, in the sixteenth century, to traffic for furs. The Hollanders, however, found them to be quite hostile in the following century. De Laet, the Dutch historian, describing the natives of the Groote River in 1625, remarks: “On the east side, upon the main-land, dwell the Manhattans, a bad race of savages, who have always been very obstinate and unfriendly toward our countrymen.”[437] He also says that Hudson, in 1609, called the Great River “Manhattes from the name of the people who dwelt at its mouth.”[438]