12 Facts About Jacques Cartier

Jacques Cartier was a French maritime explorer from Brittany.

Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named "The Country of Canadas" after the Iroquoian names for the two big settlements he saw at Stadacona and at Hochelaga.

Jacques Cartier was born in 1491 in Saint-Malo, the port on the north-east coast of Brittany.

In 1534, two years after the Duchy of Brittany was formally united with the French crown in the Edict of Union, Jacques Cartier was introduced to King Francis I by Jean Le Veneur, bishop of Saint-Malo and abbot of Mont Saint-Michel, at the Manoir de Brion.

Jacques Cartier wrote that they later told him this region where they were captured was called by them Honguedo.

Jacques Cartier claimed a land near St Lawrence River in 1534; but France paid little attention to the colony for 60 years.

The Frenchmen used up the bark of an entire tree in a week on the cure, and the dramatic results prompted Jacques Cartier to proclaim it a Godsend, and a miracle.

Jacques Cartier spent the rest of his life in Saint-Malo and his nearby estate, where he often was useful as an interpreter in Portuguese.

Jacques Cartier produced an intelligent estimate of the resources of Canada, both natural and human, albeit with a considerable exaggeration of its mineral wealth.

Jacques Cartier was the first to document the name Canada to designate the territory on the shores of the St-Lawrence River.

Jacques Cartier used the name to describe Stadacona, the surrounding land and the river itself.

Jacques Cartier Island, located on the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula in Newfoundland and Labrador in the town of Quirpon, is said to have been named by Jacques Cartier himself on one of his voyages through the Strait of Belle Isle during the 1530s.