Cartier and his crew stay over the…
May 1536 CE
Cartier and his crew stay over the winter and are effectively saved by the Stadaconans, who know how to prepare for them a vitamin-rich broth made from white cedar as a cure for scurvy, which has already killed twenty-five of the French sailors.
Relations between the St. Lawrence Iroquoian and French deteriorate over the winter, during which over fifty Iroquois of the village die from diseases carried by the Europeans.
Cartier in the spring explores the Saguenay River.
He intends to take the chief to France, so that he might personally tell the tale of a country further north, of blond men rich with gold and furs, in a place they call Saguenay.
He kidnaps Chief Donnacona and nine others from the tribe, including Domagaya and Taignoagny, in May 1536, and embarks with his surviving crew on an arduous trip down the St. Lawrence and a three-week Atlantic crossing.
His return to Saint-Malo, France, on July 15, concludes his second voyage to the New World.
Donnacona will be treated well in France, and looked after at the king's expense.
Cartier has promised to bring hi,m back in twelve moons, but Donnacona will die in France around 1539.
All but one of the other Iroquoians also die, a little girl whose fate is unknown.
The presence of these first nations visitors whet the French appetite for New World exploration with their tales of the golden kingdom called "Saguenay".
While imprisoned in France in the 1530s, Donnacona himself also tells stories about it, claiming it has great mines of silver and gold.
French explorers in Canada will look for this kingdom in vain.
Today, it is typically understood to be entirely mythical, a European misunderstanding (or made up), or an Iroquoian attempt to trick or confuse the French.
However, some people have speculated it was an ancient, pre-Columbian European settlement to which the Iroquoian oral tradition referred, such as the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows.
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