Wampum, or shell money (which recalls the shell money of the Pacific Islands), consisted either of beads made from the interior parts of sea shells or land shells, or of strings of perforated sea shells.  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.  Wampum belts were made which illustrated events, dates, treaties of peace, &c, by a rude symbolism (figures of men and animals, upright lines, &c), and these were worked neatly on string by employing different-coloured beads.]

From the eminence on which the Huron city stood, Cartier obtained a splendid view of rivers and mountains and magnificent forests, and called the place then and there, in his Norman French, Mont Real, or Royal Eminence, a name which it will probably bear for all time, though the actual city of Montreal lies a few miles below.

Montreal was the limit of Cartier’s explorations on this journey.  He returned thence to “Canada” or Stadacona, where his men built a fort armed with artillery, and where his ships were anchored.  Here he had to stay from the middle of November, 1535, to the middle of April, 1536, his ships being shut in by the ice.  The experiences of the French during these five months were mostly unhappy.  At first Cartier gave himself up to the collecting of information.  He noticed for the first time the smoking of tobacco,[8] and collected information about the products and features of “Canada”.  The Indians told him of great lakes in the far west, one of which was so vast that no man had seen the end of it.  They told him that anyone travelling up the Richelieu River (as it was called sixty years later) would eventually reach a land in the south where in the winter there was no ice or snow, and where fruit and nut trees grew in abundance.  Cartier thought that they were talking to him of Florida, but their geographical information can scarcely have stretched so far; they probably referred to the milder regions of New Jersey and Virginia, which would be reached by following southwards the valley of the Hudson and keeping to the lowlands of the eastern United States.

[Footnote 8:  “There groweth also a certain kind of herb whereof in summer they make a great provision for all the year, making great account of it, and only men use it; and first they cause it to be dried in the sun, then wear it about their necks wrapped in a little beast’s skin made like a bag, together with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe.  Then when they please they make powder of it and put it in one of the ends of the said cornet or pipe, and laying a coal of fire upon it at the other end, suck so long that they fill their bodies full of smoke, till that it cometh out of their mouth and nostrils, even as out of the tunnel of a chimney.  They say that this doth keep them warm and in health:  they never go without some of it about them.  We ourselves have tried the same smoke, and having put it in our mouths, it seemed almost as hot as pepper.”  The foregoing is one of the earliest descriptions of tobacco smoking in any European language, the original words being in Cartier’s Norman French.]