they heard of a
city great and populous, with walls of stone, ruled by a king richer
than any of their chiefs, but no two stories agreed on the location.
Some had heard that it was an island, west of Cape Breton; others that
it was on the bank of a great river to the southward. Maclou had seen at
a fair one of the Indians brought to France ten years before in the
_Dauphine_, and spoken to him. According to this Indian the chief town
of his people was on an island in the mouth of a river where high gray
walls of rock arose, longer and statelier than the walls of Dieppe. In
describing these walls the Indian did not indeed say that they encircled
the city, but no Frenchman could have imagined rock palisades built for
any other purpose. On the other hand Maclou knew a pilot who had been
caught in a storm and blown down the coast southwest from the fisheries,
and he and his crew had seen, from ten or twelve leagues out at sea,
white and shining battlements on the crest of a mountain far inland.
When they asked their Indian guides what city it was the slaves trembled
and showed fear, and declared that none of their people ever went there.
Had only one man seen the glittering walls it might have been a vision,
but they had all seen.

If Norumbega really existed, the expedition of Jacques Cartier in 1535
seemed likely to find it. He had made a voyage the year before with two
ships and a hundred and twenty men, of whom Maclou had been one. Not
being prepared to remain through the winter, they had been obliged to
turn back before they had done more than discover a magnificent bay
which Cartier named the Bay of Chaleur on account of the July heat, and
a squarish body of water west of Cape Breton which seemed to be marked
out on their map as the Square Gulf. Now the veteran of Saint Malo had
instructions to explore this gulf and see whether any strait existed
beyond it which might lead to Cathay. On general principles he was to
find out how great and of what nature the country was. The maps of the
New World were fairly complete in their outline of the southern
continent and islands discovered by Spain; it was hoped that this
expedition might give an equally definite outline to the northern coast.
Cartier had on his previous voyage caught two young Indians who had come
from far inland to fish, and brought them back to France. They had since
learned enough Breton to make themselves understood, and from what they
said it seemed to Ca