In 1534, Jacques Cartier, a shrewd, enterprising, and adventurous sailor, made his first voyage across the Atlantic, touching at Newfoundland, and exploring the coast to the west and south of it. The two vessels of Cartier, called ships by the historians of the period, were each of only forty tons burden. On the return of Cartier to France, so favorable was his report of the results of the expedition, that Francis I. commissioned him, the year following, for another voyage, and in May, 1535, after impressive religious ceremonies, he sailed with three vessels thoroughly equipped. The record of this second voyage of Cartier, by Lescarbot, contains the first historical notice of the cataract of Niagara. The navigator, in answer to his inquiries concerning the source of the St. Lawrence, "was told that, after ascending many leagues among rapids and water-falls, he would reach a lake one hundred and forty or fifty leagues broad, at the western extremity of which the waters were wholesome and the winters mild; that a river emptied into it from the south, which had its source in the country of the Iroquois; that beyond the lake he would find a cataract and portage, then another lake about equal to the former, which they had never explored." In 1603, a company of merchants in Rouen obtained the necessary authority for a new expedition to the St. Lawrence, which they placed under the direction of Samuel Champlain, an able, discreet, and resolute commander. On a map published in 1613 he indicated the position of the cataract, calling it merely a water-fall (_saut d'eau_), and describing it as being "so very high that many kinds of fish are stunned in its descent." It does not appear by the record that he ever saw the Falls. During the sixty years that elapsed between the establishment of the French settlements by Champlain and the expedition of La Salle and Hennepin, there can be little doubt that the great cataract was repeatedly visited by French traders and adventurers. Many of the earlier travelers to the region of the St. Lawrence believed that China could be reached by an overland journey across the northern part of the continent. Father Vimont informs us ("Relations of the Jesuits," 1642-3) that the Jesuit Raymbault "designed to go to China across the American wilderness, but God sent him on the road to heaven." As he died at the Saut Ste. Marie in 1641, he must have passed to the north of the Falls without seeing them. In 1648, the Jesuit father Ragueneau, in a letter to the Superior of the Mission, at Paris, says: "North of the Eries is a great lake, about two hundred leagues in circumference, called Erie, formed by the discharge of the _mer-douce_ or Lake Huron, and which falls into a third lake, called Ontario, over a cataract of frightful height."