FOLLOWING JACQUES CARTIER TO ... LAVAL?
Traditionalists agree the island he landed on was Montreal. Donald Wiedman begs to differ. Andy Riga goes in search of the lost village of Hochelaga.
We set out to follow the path Jacques Cartier took in October 1535 when he swept into Hochelaga — the first recorded visit of a European to the Montreal region.
But we don’t start at the mighty St. Lawrence River, walk up the incline from Old Montreal to downtown or hike Mount Royal. Instead, our exploration begins on a tranquil river, takes us through farmers’ fields and ends at a giant hole. We are not in Montreal. My tour guide is Donald Wiedman, a talkative amateur historian (he prefers “modern-day explorer”; some might describe him as an out-in-left-field blogger). He thinks experts are wrong: Cartier didn’t land in present-day Montreal. Instead, the French explorer took the Mille-Îles River and landed on another island: Laval.
“If you read his words closely, follow the rivers, follow geography, follow Canadian history, you’ll find that Jacques Cartier describes this very spot,” Wiedman says as we stand near the eastern tip of Laval on the Mille-Îles. Looking eastward, we see the nearby Rivièredes-Prairies and the St. Lawrence in the distance.
A little geography: the St. Lawrence laps Montreal’s south shore, the Rivière-des-Prairies the north; Laval is just north of Montreal, with the Rivière-des-Prairies on its south shore, the Mille-Îles on its north.
Don’t tout Wiedman’s theory to Joceyln Duff, an affable architect and history buff. He says Cartier actually sailed down the Rivièredes-Prairies, stopping in AhuntsicCartierville. A plaque on Montreal’s oldest church attests to it.
Neither Wiedman nor Duff would agree with Christian Gates St-Pierre’s conclusion.
The fair-minded Université de Montréal archeologist has weighed all the hypotheses and sides with traditionalists: Cartier stayed on the St. Lawrence. But as the man in charge of the first concerted effort to find the lost village of Hochelaga, Gates St-Pierre is keeping his options open.
Wiedman, Duff and Gates StPierre have taken up the torch in a protracted argument over Cartier’s voyage.
Some things we know. Cartier arrived on Oct. 2, 1535, welcomed with open arms by Indigenous Peoples whom archeologists describe as Iroquoians.
Cartier visited a village called Hochelaga. He climbed a mountain. He turned around the next day and sailed back eastward, up the St. Lawrence River.
But, despite what you might have read in history books, many details of the monumental (though very short) visit remain murky 482 years later.
Perhaps intentionally, Cartier’s writings are vague. Did he stick to the St. Lawrence? Where did he drop anchor near the island he visited? Most importantly, where exactly was Hochelaga?
Since a chance downtown discovery in 1860, Montrealers have puzzled over Cartier’s writings and historical maps and parsed countless articles and books. Over more than 150 years, theories and counter-theories have flown, and bitter disputes have erupted between academics, sometimes with an undercurrent of anglophone-francophone tension. Why was Cartier so vague? “He was looking for a route to China or west to discover new lands and new resources, so he was not that interested in meeting people as much as getting information from them,” Gates St-Pierre said.
“He was asking (the Indigenous Peoples) where he should go; that’s why they brought him to the top of Mount Royal to explain the possible routes, how to navigate different rivers of the Montreal area.”
Cartier was not very precise “perhaps also because he wants to keep that information secret,” Gates St-Pierre added. “There were other Europeans in the St. Lawrence River Valley doing commerce with the Indigenous People and he probably wanted to keep what he learned to himself.”
Cartier made maps but no trace of them remains.
It’s worth delving into the English translation of Cartier’s observations in The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (University of Toronto Press, 1993).
Cartier describes his arrival: “And on reaching Hochelaga (island), there came to meet us more than a thousand persons, men, women, and children, who gave us as good a welcome as ever father gave to his son, making great signs of joy; for the men danced in one ring, the women in another, and the children also apart by themselves.”
The next morning, Cartier put on his armour and, accompanied by 20 sailors, set off on a “path (that) was as well-trodden as it is possible to see.” After walking a distance, they came upon cultivated fields, in the middle of which stood Hochelaga, “near and adjacent to a mountain, the slopes of which are fertile and are cultivated, and from the top of which we can see for a long distance. We named this mountain ‘Mount Royal.’ ” The Hochelagans — no population figure was given — lived in 50 large houses in the circular, fortified village.
Then Cartier hiked up the mountain. Describing the view, he refers to mountains, a plain, rapids and says his guides indicate gold and silver could be found down a river in the distance. Cartier and his men then headed back to the shore. Some of his hosts, seeing “our people tired, took them upon their shoulders, as on horseback and carried them.” Then they boarded their boats and left.
No one knows what happened to Hochelaga. Cartier returned in 1541 but only part of his account was preserved. In it, he mentions another village — Tutonaguy — but not Hochelaga. When Samuel de Champlain set out to expand on Cartier’s findings decades later, he said he found no one living on Montreal. Champlain scouted a spot — near today’s Pointe-à-Callière Museum in Old Montreal — that French colonists returned to in 1642 to found the village that would become Montreal.
Fast forward to 1860. At a construction site near McGill University — in the area just south of Sherbrooke St., between Metcalfe and Mansfield Sts. — Indigenous objects were discovered, including pottery and tools. The items were found to be Iroquoian, dating to the Cartier era. Sir John William Dawson, McGill’s principal at the time, concluded Hochelaga had been found.
But a competing theory soon bubbled up. What if Cartier took the Rivière-des-Prairies? The intriguing idea was picked up by Aristide Beaugrand-Champagne, who fleshed it out in the 1920s. A Montreal architect remembered as the designer of the Mount Royal chalet, he was a Renaissance man who studied archeology and history and mapped the lakes, rivers, marshes and streams that graced Montreal between 1542 and 1642.
Beaugrand-Champagne concluded Hochelaga had been located on a flat area between Mount Royal Cemetery and Maplewood Ave., between Pagnuelo and McCulloch Aves., in Outremont.
He might have thought it a likely location because Indigenous villages were located near water sources and one remained in the area Beaugrand-Champagne highlighted, Gates St-Pierre said. Parts are now underground, but a visitor today can admire a stream that rushes through the backyard of a house on Springgrove Ave. and into tiny Oakwood Park before slipping into yards of Maplewood Ave. homes. A pond in nearby Outremont Park is a remnant of the same watercourse.
Though skeletons believed to be Indigenous were found along Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd. in the 1920s, no evidence of an Indigenous village in Outremont was ever unearthed.
Other theories have surfaced. Was Hochelaga atop Mount Royal? Or maybe in Westmount?
Jocelyn Duff was working to save a historic site on the Rivière-desPrairies from condo development in early 2017 when he came upon a curious inscription. It was near the front door of Église de la Visitation, in the Sault-au-Récollet area of Ahuntsic-Cartierville.
The plaque suggests the 265-year-old Gouin Blvd. church is near the spot where Cartier landed. Wait — that doesn’t jibe with a plaque near McGill that claims to be near Hochelaga, Duff thought. How could Cartier have arrived here and then circumvented Mount Royal to arrive near McGill?
“I said whoa, there’s a problem here,” Duff said. So he started examining archival documents posted online by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Three rapids described by Cartier could be found on the Rivièredes-Prairies, whereas the St. Lawrence only had two obstructions, one of which could have been passed by Cartier, Duff concluded.
His doubts about conventional wisdom were backed up by an exhaustive 1972 book, by archeologists Bruce Trigger and James Pendergast, that suggested the site near McGill might have been too small to be Hochelaga.
Last year, to highlight Montreal’s Indigenous past, McGill moved its commemorative Hochelaga plaque and the five-tonne granite boulder to which it is affixed to a more prominent location.
In a Le Devoir opinion piece published in April, Duff argued the McGill plaque is erroneous and should no longer be considered a national historic monument.
He’s also skeptical of Beaugrand-Champagne’s Outremont location. However, “there are a lot more clues that tell us Cartier used the Rivière-des-Prairies than that he took the St. Lawrence,” said Duff, who is building a new home near the spot where he thinks Cartier landed.
Donald Wiedman has spent years exploring Laval on foot and bike and blogging about his findings (one of his theories suggests Vikings visited Laval, though there’s no hard evidence they ventured farther into present-day Canada than L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland).
Wiedman, a Laval native who lives in Toronto, explained his Cartier hypothesis in a detailed post on his blog, LavalHallalujah. He presents his case using Cartier’s descriptions, historical maps, archival aerial photos and Google Earth images. He has measured distances in Laval and says they match Cartier’s distances.
“I was doing this for my Viking research and then I started measuring the distances and realized they all lined up with Jacques Cartier,” said Wiedman, a communications consultant.