was the limit of Cartier's explorations on this journey. He
returned thence to "Canada" or Stadacona, where his men built a fort
armed with artillery, and where his ships were anchored. Here he had
to stay from the middle of November, 1535, to the middle of April,
1536, his ships being shut in by the ice. The experiences of the
French during these five months were mostly unhappy. At first Cartier
gave himself up to the collecting of information. He noticed for the
first time the smoking of tobacco,[8] and collected information about
the products and features of "Canada". The Indians told him of great
lakes in the far west, one of which was so vast that no man had seen
the end of it. They told him that anyone travelling up the Richelieu
River (as it was called sixty years later) would eventually reach a
land in the south where in the winter there was no ice or snow, and
where fruit and nut trees grew in abundance. Cartier thought that they
were talking to him of Florida, but their geographical information can
scarcely have stretched so far; they probably referred to the milder
regions of New Jersey and Virginia, which would be reached by
following southwards the valley of the Hudson and keeping to the
lowlands of the eastern United States.

[Footnote 8: "There groweth also a certain kind of herb whereof in
summer they make a great provision for all the year, making great
account of it, and only men use it; and first they cause it to be
dried in the sun, then wear it about their necks wrapped in a little
beast's skin made like a bag, together with a hollow piece of stone or
wood like a pipe. Then when they please they make powder of it and put
it in one of the ends of the said cornet or pipe, and laying a coal of
fire upon it at the other end, suck so long that they fill their
bodies full of smoke, till that it cometh out of their mouth and
nostrils, even as out of the tunnel of a chimney. They say that this
doth keep them warm and in health: they never go without some of it
about them. We ourselves have tried the same smoke, and having put it
in our mouths, it seemed almost as hot as pepper." The foregoing is
one of the earliest descriptions of tobacco smoking in any European
language, the original words being in Cartier's Norman French.]

As the winter set in with its customary Canadian severity the real
trouble of the French began. They did not suffer from the cold, but
they were dying of scurvy. This disease, from wh