The Mariner of St Malo - Stephen Leacock (great novels to read .txt) 📗

many accounts of the voyages of Jacques Cartier have been written both in French and in English; but the fountain source of information for all of these is found in the narratives written by Cartier himself. The story of the first voyage was written under the name of ‘Relation Originale du Voyage de Jacques Cartier au Canada en 1534.’

The original manuscript was lost from sight for over three hundred years, but about half a century ago it was discovered in the Imperial Library (now the National Library) at Paris. Its contents, however, had long been familiar to English readers through the translation which appears in Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ published in 1600. In the same collection is also found the narrative of the second voyage, as translated from the ‘Bref Recit’ written by Cartier and published in 1545, and the fragment of the account of the third voyage of which the rest is lost. For an exhaustive bibliography of Cartier’s voyages see Baxter, ‘A Memoir of Jacques Cartier’ (New York, 1906). An exceedingly interesting little book is Sir Joseph Pope’s ‘Jacques Cartier: his Life and Voyages’

(Ottawa, 1890). The student is also recommended to read ‘The Saint Lawrence Basin and its Borderlands,’ by Samuel Edward Dawson; papers by the Abbe Verreau, John Reade, Bishop Howley and W. F. Ganong in the ‘Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada;’ the chapter, ‘Jacques Cartier and his Successors,’ by B. F. de Costa, in Winsor’s ‘Narrative and Critical History of America,’ and the chapter ‘The Beginnings of Canada,’ by Arthur G. Doughty, in the first volume of ‘Canada and its Provinces’ (Toronto, 1913).