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Updated: June 24, 2025
Scurvy is said to be a disease of the blood caused by a damp, cold, and impure atmosphere combined with absence of vegetable food and a diet of salted or semi-putrid meat or fish, such as was so often the winter food of Amerindians and of the early French pioneers in Canada. The American farmers of to-day cannot adopt any better method.
They had now nothing but good news left to tell, and in less than half an hour probably nothing but smiles and cheerfulness would be seen on every face. One direction in which the Amerindians did not shine was in their treatment of women. This perhaps was worse than in other uncivilized races. Woman was very badly used, except perhaps for the first year of courtship and marriage.
In January and February, also, Donnacona and these two interpreters and many of the Huron men had been absent hunting in the forests, so that there was no one among the Amerindians to whom the French could turn for information regarding this strange disease. At last 25 out of the 112 who had left France were dead, and of the remainder only 10 men, including Cartier, were not grievously ill.
In the following autumn he had an experience which showed him how near famine was to great abundance, and how ready the Amerindians were in cases of even slight privation to turn cannibal, kill and eat the weaker members of the party.
There were no traces of the Frenchmen, however, amongst the skulls and skeletons lying around him; for the skulls retained sufficient hair to show that they belonged to Amerindians. Nevertheless, he deposited his new stock of goods and most of his men in the ruins of the Fort Crèvecoeur, and descended the River Illinois to the Mississippi. But he was obliged to turn back.
Between April 15th and May 1st the ice on the river was all melted, and on the 6th May, 1536, Cartier started from the vicinity of Quebec to return to France. But before leaving he had managed to kidnap Donnacona, the chief of the Huron settlement, and six or seven other Amerindians, amongst them Tainyoanyi, one of the two interpreters who had already been to France.
It was these people subsequently killed out by the British settlers on Newfoundland who originated the term "Red Indians", or, in French, Peaux Rouges, because their skins, like those of so many other Amerindians, were painted with red ochre. Many of the British Columbian peoples made themselves artificially ugly by flattening the sides of the head.
As they travelled westwards or south-westwards, day after day, the jagged blue wall resolved itself into towering snow-capped peaks, glittering in the sun and provoking the appellation of "the Mountains of Bright Stones", a name probably given to the Rocky Mountains by the Amerindians, but used in all the earlier French and English maps until the end of the eighteenth century.
The most elaborate kind of wampum was that of the Amerindians of Canada and the eastern United States, the shell beads of which were generally white. The commoner wampum beads were black and violet.
Some of the agents of the North-west Company apologize in their writings for the amount of rum that was circulated among the Amerindians at the orders of that company to stimulate trade, by saying that it was seven parts water. Nevertheless it excited them to madness, as the following extracts show.
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