Jacques Cartier's voyages of 1534, 1535, and 1541constitute the first record of European impressions of the St Lawrence region of northeastern North American and its peoples. The Voyages are rich in details about almost every aspect of the region's environment and the people who inhabited it. As Ramsay Cook points out in his introduction, Cartier was more than an explorer; he was also Canada's first ethnographer. His accounts provide a wealth of information about the native people of the region and their relations with each other. Indirectly, he also reveals much about himself and about sixteenth-century European attitudes and beliefs. These memoirs recount not only the French experience with the Iroquois, but alo the Iroquois' discovery of the French. In addition to Cartier's Voyages, a slightly amended version of H.P. Biggar's 1924 text, the volume includes a series of letters relating to Cartier and the Sieur de Roberval, who was in command of cartier on the last voyage. Many of these letters appear for the first time in English. Ramsay Cook's introduction, 'Donnacona Discovers Europe,' rereads the documents in the light of recent scholarship as well as from contemporary perspectives in order to understand better the viewpoints of Cartier and the native people with whom he came into contact.

Brief biography of the French explorer who was the first European to explore the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, the St. Lawrence River and the lands that bordered them.

Historians have long engaged in passionate debate about collective memory and national identity. Alan Gordon focuses on one national hero � Jacques Cartier � to explore how notions about the past have been passed from generation to generation in English- and French-speaking Canada and used to present particular ideas about the world. Nineteenth-century celebrations of Cartier reflected a new understanding of history that accompanied the arrival of modernity in North America. This sensibility, in turn, influenced the political and cultural currents of nation building in Canada. Cartier may have been a point of contact between English and French Canada, but the nature of that contact, as Gordon shows, had profound limitations.

Excerpt from Jacques Cartier, His Life and Voyages In thus enlarging the number of his judges, the writer ventures to express the hope that the same kindly criticism which he has so far met with, may attend him in the wider field. Whatever of imperfection there may be in his work, he can at least honestly say, that his earnest endeavour has been to set out in plain and truthful language the facts connected with the earliest dawn of Canadian history, and to give an accurate and faithful picture of the central figure in the scene. To that end the original records have been diligently studied and compared, and the most trivial statements of fact, whenever practicable, carefully verified. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.