Part 28

The information he got from Daghnacona was not encouraging. This was not, it appeared, the chief town of the country. That was many miles up the river, and was called Hochelaga. It would not be safe for the white men to go there. Their ships might be caught between ice-floes, and the falling snow would blind and bewilder them. Cartier glanced at the blue autumn sky and smiled. No one is quicker than an Indian to read faces. Daghnacona saw that the white chief intended to go, all the same.

Cartier decided to leave the larger ships where they were, and proceed up the great river to Hochelaga with a forty-ton pinnace, two boats, and about fifty men. Early in the morning, before he was quite ready to start, a canoe came down stream, in which were three weird figures resembling the devils in a medieval miracle-play. Their faces were jet black, they were clothed in hairy skins, and on their heads were great horns. As they passed the ships they kept up a monotonous and appalling chant, and as their canoe touched the beach all three fell upon their faces. Indians, rushing out of the woods, dragged them into a thicket, and a great hubbub followed, not a word of which was understood by the white men, for the Indian interpreters were there with the rest. Presently the interpreters appeared on the beach yelling with fright.

"Pierre! Kadoc!" the annoyed commander called from his quarter-deck, "what is all this hullabaloo about?"

"News!" gasped Pierre. "News from Canghyenye! He says white men not come to Hochelaga!" And Kadoc chimed in eagerly, "Not go! Not go!"

"Coudouagny?" Cartier repeated to Maclou, completely mystified. "Who can that be?"

Further questioning drew out information which sounded as if Coudouagny, or Canyengye, were a tribal god. In reality this was the word for "elder brother." In that region it was applied to the Tekarihokens, the eldest of the five nations in the league of the Long House. They were afterward dubbed by their enemies the Mohawks or man-eaters, and the fear for the white men's safety which the interpreters expressed may very well have been quite genuine.

But the Breton captain had not come across the Atlantic to give up his plans for fear of an Indian god, if it was a god, and his reply to the warning was to the effect that Coudouagny must be a numskull. More seriously he explained to the interpreters that although he had not himself spoken with the God of his people his priests had, and he fully trusted in the power of his God to protect him. The party set forth at the appointed time.

In about two weeks they reached the greatest Indian town that any of them had ever seen. It was not the walled city of the Norumbega legend, but both Maclou and Cartier had ceased to expect anything of that kind. The Indian guides had said that the town was near, and all were dressed in their best. A thousand Indians, men, women and children, were on the shore to receive them, and the commander at the head of his little troop marched into Hochelaga to pay their respects to the chief.

The Indian city was inhabited by several thousand people, living in wigwams about a hundred and fifty feet long by fifty wide, built of bark over a frame of wood, and arranged around a large open space. The whole was surrounded by a stockade of three rows of stakes twelve or fifteen feet high. The middle row was set straight, the other two rows five or six feet from it and inclining toward it like wigwam-poles. The three rows, meeting at the top, were lashed to a ridgepole. Half way down and again at the bottom cross-braces were fastened diagonally, making a strong wall. Around the inside, near the top, was a gallery reached by ladders, on which were piles of stones to be thrown at invaders. Instead of being square, or irregular with many angles and outstanding towers, like a French walled town, it was perfectly round.

The interpreters afterward explained that each of the houses was occupied by several families, as the head of each house shared his shelter with his kinfolk. When a daughter was married she brought her husband home, as a rule, and her father added an apartment to his house by the simple device of taking out the end wall of bark and building on another section. Each household had its own stone hearth, the smoke escaping through openings in the roof. A common passage-way led through the middle of the house. On the sides were rows of bunks covered with furs. Weapons hung on the walls, and meat broth or messes of corn and beans simmered fragrantly in their kettles. Some of these long houses held fifty or sixty people each, and there were over fifty of them in all. In that climate, with warlike neighbors, the advantage of such an organized community over scattered single wigwams was very great. All around were cleared fields dotted with great yellow pumpkins, where corn and beans had grown during the past summer.

To the sons of Norman and Breton peasants it was evident that these fields had not been cultivated for centuries, like those of France, any more than the wall around Hochelaga was the work of stone-masons toiling under generations of feudal lords. If this were the chief city of these people, they had no Norumbega. But it was very picturesque in its sylvan barbaric way, among the limitless forests of scarlet and gold and crimson and deep green, which stretched away over the mountains. Upon the rude cots in the wigwams as they passed, Cartier's men saw rich and glossy furs of the silver fox, the beaver, the mink and the marten, which princesses might be proud to wear. Curious bead-work there was also on the quivers, pouches, moccasins and belts of these wild people, done in white and purple shell beads made and polished by hand and not more than a quarter of an inch long and an eighth of an inch thick. These were sewn in patterns of animals, birds, fishes and other things not unlike the emblems of old families in France. Belts of these beads were worn by those who seemed to be the chief men of Hochelaga. Porcupine quills were also used in embroidery and head-bands.

The people thronged into the open central space, which was about a stone's throw across, some carrying their sick, some their children, that the strangers might touch them for healing or for good fortune. The old chief, who was called Agouhana, was brought in, helpless from paralysis, upon a deerskin litter. When Cartier understood that his touch was supposed to have some mysterious magic he rubbed the old man's helpless limbs with his own hands, read from his service-book the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John and other passages, and prayed that the people who listened might come to know the true faith. Then, after beads, rings, brooches and other little gifts had been distributed, the trumpets blew, and the white men took their leave. Before they returned to their boats the Indians guided them to the top of the hill which rose behind the town, from which the surrounding country could be seen. Cartier named it Montreal--the Royal Mountain.

It was now the first week in October, and the rapids in the river above Hochelaga blocked further exploration with a sailing vessel. As for going on foot, that was out of the question with winter so near. The party returned to Stadacona and went into winter quarters. While they had been gone their comrades had built a palisaded fort beside the little river where the ships lay moored. They were hardly settled in this rude shelter before snow began to fall, and seemed as if it would go on forever, softly blanketing the earth with layer on layer of cold whiteness. It was waist-deep on the level; the river was frozen solid; the drifts were above the sides of the ships, and the ice was four inches thick on the bulwarks. The glittering armor of the ice incased masts, spars, ropes, and fringed every line of cordage with icicles of dazzling brightness. Never was such cold known in France. Maclou thought, whimsically, while his teeth chattered beside the fire, of a tale he had once told Marguerite of the palace of the Frost King. That fierce monarch, and not the guileless Indian chief, was the foe they would have to fight for this kingdom.

Their provisions were those of any ship sent on a voyage into unknown lands in those days--dried and salted meat and fish, flour and meal to be made into cakes or porridge, dried pease, dried beans. For a time the Indians visited them, in the bitterest weather, but in December even this source of a game supply was cut off, for they came no more. The dreaded scurvy broke out, and before long there were hardly a dozen of the whole company able to care for the sick. Besides the general misery they were tormented by the fear that if the savages knew how feeble they were the camp might be attacked and destroyed. Cartier told those who had the strength, to beat with sticks on the sides of their bunks, so that prowling Indians might believe that the white men were busy at work.

But the wild folk were both shrewder and more friendly than the French believed. Their medicine-men told Cartier one day that they cured scurvy by means of a drink made from the leaves and bark of an evergreen. Squaws presently came with a birch-bark kettle of this brew and it proved to have such virtues that the sick were cured of scurvy, and in some cases of other diseases which they had had for years. Cartier afterward wrote in his report that they boiled and drank within a week all the foliage of a tree, which the Indians called aneda or tree of life, as large as a full-grown oak. Many had died before the remedy was learned, and when the weather allowed the fleet to sail for home, there were only men enough for two of the ships. The Indians had told of other lands where gold and rubies were found, of a nation somewhere in the interior, white like the French, of people with but one leg apiece. But as it was, the country was a great country, and well worth the attention of the King of France. Leaving the cross and the fleur-de-lis to mark the place of their discovery, the expedition sailed for France, and on July 16, 1536, anchored once more in the port of Saint Malo.

"And there is no Norumbega really?" asked little Margot rather dolefully, when the story of the adventure had been told. "And your hair is all gray, here, on the side."

"None the less I have gifts for thee, little queen, and such as no Queen of France hath in her treasury." Maclou's smile, though a trifle grave, had a singular charm as he opened his wallet. Margot nestled closer, her eyes bright with excitement.

The first gift was a little pair of shoes of deer-skin dyed green and embroidered with pearly white beads on a ground of black and red French brocade. They had no heels and no heavy leather soles, and were lined with soft white fur; and they fitted the little maid's foot exactly.

The second gift was a girdle of the same beads, purple and white, in a pattern of queer stiff sprays. "That," said Alain Maclou, "is the Tree of Life that cured us all of the sickness."

The third was a cluster of long slender crystals set in a fragment of rock the color of a blush rose.

"'Tis a magic stone, sweetheart. Keep it in the sunshine on thy window-ledge, and when summer is over 't will be white as snow. Leave it in a snowbank, or in a cellar under wet moss, and 't will turn again to rose-color. This I have seen. In the winter nights the Frost King hangs his ice-diamonds on every twig and rope and eave, and when they shine in the red sunrise they look like these crystals. And I have seen all the sky from the zenith to the horizon at midnight full of leaping rose-red flames above such a world of ice. 'Tis very beautiful there, Reine Margot, and fit kingdom for a fairy queen."

Marguerite turned the strange quartz rock about in her small hands with something like awe.

"And the shoes are shoes of silence, for an Indian can go and come in them so softly that even a rabbit does not hear. They were made by a kind old squaw who would take no pay, and a young warrior gave me the wampum belt, and I found the stone one day while I was hunting in the forest, so that all three of thy gifts are really gifts from Norumbega."

"I think--I'm rather glad it is not a real city," said Margot with a long breath. "It is more like fairyland, just as it is,--and the Frost King and the terrible sickness are the two ogres, and the good medicine man is a white wizard. It is a very beautiful kingdom, Alain, and I think you are the Prince in disguise!"

NOTES

Kanonghsionni was the name which the Iroquois gave themselves. It appears that at this time they occupied the country along the St. Lawrence held some centuries before by the Ojibways and later, in the time of Champlain, by the Hurons.

Hiawatha is generally said to have founded the league of the Five Nations. Although these nations were united against any attack from outside they were not always free from interior enmities and dissensions, and the Mohawks in particular were objects of the fear and dislike of their neighbors, as the significance of their sobriquet clearly shows.

Aneda is said to be the Iroquois word for spruce. When Champlain's men were attacked by scurvy in the same neighborhood half a century later, the Iroquois no longer lived there, and this remedy was not suggested.