The things we do!

It was a true son of France who first had the persistence of courage and
the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates
close behind him--Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo,
commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of
King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious "square gulf,"
which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter of a
century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose a passage to the
Indies.
It was from St. Malo that Carrier set sail on the highroad to Cathay, as
he imagined, one April day in 1534 in two ships of sixty tons each.
[Footnote: I crossed back over the same ocean, nearly four hundred years
later, to a French port in a steamship of a tonnage equal to that of a
fleet of four hundred of Carrier's boats; so has the sea bred giant
children of such hardy parentage.] There is preserved in St. Malo what is
thought to be a list of those who signed the ship's papers subscribed
under Carrier's own hand.


Pages:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25