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History Corner

April 20, 1534 –Jacques Cartier, Explorer/Mariner set sail from St. Malo, Bretagne, France with 2 ships and 61 men. He was commissioned by King Francis to go explore the east coast of the new world looking for a passage to the Orient.
History Corner

April 20, 1534 –Jacques Cartier, Explorer/Mariner set sail from St. Malo, Bretagne, France with 2 ships and 61 men. He was commissioned by King Francis to go explore the east coast of the new world looking for a passage  to the Orient. He did some exploration of what is now New Foundland, Prince Edward Island, and then on to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. At a place he called Baie de Chaleur, he met a group of Micmac with whom he did some trading. He erected a cross at Gaspé Bay and claimed the new land for France. On his second voyage in 1535, he had 3 ships and 110 men. He sailed up the St. Lawrence and spent time at various sites: where Québec City and Montreal are  and as far as Lachine. He and his crew spent the winter — a miserable one with a break-out of scurvy. It is on this voyage that Cartier records the name CANADA for the first time.

Over the centuries of the French regime, the inhabitants of the French Province of Canada called themselves “Canadiens” and “Canadiennes.” Even in decades after the Conquest and the Treaty of Paris in 1763, new immigrants from England continued to call themselves “English” leaving the noun “Canadiens” to refer to the French-speaking inhabitants. The noun “Canadien” would not be translated to an Anglicized version of “Canadian” until about the mid-1800s. We were all considered “British Subjects” — those born on Canadian soil and those who became “naturalized” until the Canadian Citizenship Act of 1946 when finally we had true citizenship.  

Québec celebrated 450 years of Canada’s birth with a great rendez-vous of tall sailing ships at the old Port of Québec in 1984.