The White and the Gold by Thomas B. Costain Read Free Book Online Page A

(meaning a village) instead of turning his ships into the tossing waters between the spine-chilling black cliffs in pursuit of the chimera of gold. The Kingdom of Saguenay would have to wait. Canada beckoned them on.
    It has already been made clear that the first impression of the new continent was always of its vastness and silence. It seemed to rest in repose, waiting for the arrival of man to waken it to fertility. The forests along the shores, tall and dense, seemed both interminable and inscrutable. The only sounds heard were the occasionalsplash of a leaping fish and perhaps a distant cawing from the treetops.
    Life, when it finally manifested itself, would be full of surprises. The mouth of a bay would open and there would be a village, a community of wigwams packed with red-skinned people, an exuberant people with painted faces. It would become apparent later that all these natives did not belong in the little village but had gathered there to greet the visitors. Eyes, clearly, had been on the white gods from the start, and the word of their coming had been carried through the forests and up and down the rivers with a speed which defied understanding.
    Or it might be that a single canoe would be seen on the water, motionless and silent. Then there would be another and, almost in the winking of an eye, there would be many more. Finally there would be a fleet of them, filled with naked savages who would suddenly explode into excitement and sound. They would stand up in the canoes, waving their paddles and emitting bloodcurdling shrieks. This did not always signify hostility. The Indians, it developed, were always dramatic in anything they did: fierce in war, unrelenting in punishment, mad in their dances. They were graceful and expressive in their gestures, they fairly boiled with eloquence, they were actors in every square inch of their powerful and sometimes rancid bodies; and above everything else they were dramatic in their mastery of surprise.
    The silence along the great rivers is understandable in the light of the relatively small numbers of the native population. Most of the tribesmen on the north shore of the St. Lawrence were nomadic, and people who do not sink down roots do not increase and multiply. The Montagnais and the Algonquins, the Indians with whom the French first made contact, were not numerically powerful. Even the Iroquois, who fastened their spell over the forests and the rivers to such an extent that it seemed as if a Mohawk warrior lurked behind every tree trunk, were not a large nation. It was estimated a century later, when the people of the Long House were at the peak of their power, that they could not muster more than two thousand warriors. This would place the total number of the Iroquois people somewhere between ten and twenty thousand. Canada was a silent land because it contained great stretches of country where the naked foot or the moccasin of the redskin had never trod.
    Cartier pursued his way along the north shore of the basin, findingthat he was indeed in an estuary which was shelving in rapidly. The tip of the great funnel was discovered to be a river not more than a mile in width at its mouth.
    Cartier’s ships came finally to the most beautiful island on which the eyes of the crews had ever rested. The commander called it the Isle of Bacchus because of the abundance of wild grapes growing on the beaches, but this would be changed later to the island of Orleans. Here a surprise awaited them. Some natives were seen in the woods, and it was apparent that they were going to run away in a great panic. Then they perceived Taignoagny and Damagaya and immediately they began instead to greet the returned hostages with every indication of joy and excitement. It was explained by the pair that this was the tribe to which they belonged and that they had been in Gaspé Bay on a fishing expedition when Cartier landed there and set up his cross.
    The safe return of Taignoagny and Damagaya