“Up the said river, fifteen leagues, there is a town which is called Norombègue, and there is in it a good people, and they have many peltries of all kinds of animals. The inhabitants of the town are dressed in skins, wearing mantles of martens. I think that the said river runs into the river Hochelaga [the St. Lawrence], for it is salt for more than forty leagues up, according to the statement of the people of the town. The people use many words which resemble the Latin, and they worship the sun, and are a handsome people, and large framed. The land of Norombègue is high and good. “Before and on this side of the said river, one hundred and fifty leagues, there is an island called Vermonde [Bermuda?] which is in about thirty-three degrees of the height of the arctic pole.[456] And on the west side of the said town there are many rocks which extend to the sea, about fifteen leagues, and north of it there is a bay, in which there is a small island, which is often subject to tempests and cannot be inhabited.” [Illustration: A copy of the map of a part of North America, in the third volume of Ramusio’s “Raccolta di Navigationi e Viaggi,” printed in 1556; made by Giacomo de Gastaldi. (The original is about one-third larger.)] While Jean Alphonse was exploring the coast of La Terre d’Anormée Berge (which at this time geographically included all the country between the Grande River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence), he ascended the Grande River to the height of its navigation, from which point he inferred that the stream extended to the St. Lawrence, as it is represented on the map made by Giacomo de Gastaldi, a Piedmontese cartographer, about the year 1553.[457] “I have been at a bay as far as forty-two degrees, between Norumbega and Florida, and I have not searched the end thereof, and I know not whether it [the river] pass through.... I doubt not but [the river] Norumbega entereth into the river of Canada, and unto the sea of Saguenay.”[458] This opinion, that the Hudson was an outlet of the St. Lawrence, was held by the Dutch as late as the year 1625, for De Laet observes: “Judging from appearances this river extends to the great river of St. Lawrence, or Canada, since our skippers assure us that the natives come to the fort [on the site of Albany] from that river.”[459] René Goulaine de Laudonnière, a French officer, commanding Fort Caroline, on the river May, in 1564, gives, in his notable history of Florida, a short account of Verrazanno’s discoveries in 1524.[460] He says that the French planted in the New Land “the ensigns and arms of the king of France, so that the Spaniards themselves, who were there afterward, have called this country French land (_nõmé ce païs terre Francesque_).... The east part of it is named by the moderns Terre de Norumberge, which ends at the Gulf of Gamas, which separates it from the island of Canada.”[461]