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63 of these landes, where is fownd great plenty of Tunnies which the inhabytauntes caul Baccalaos, whereof the lande was so named."

Baccalaos was the Biscayan word for cod. Early map-makers designated present-day Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Newfoundland as the "Baccalaos Landes."

After Cabot, Jean Denys discovered and explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Sable Island, off the Nova Scotian coast, was colonised in 1518 by de Léry, a French baron. In 1524, Verrazzano the Florentine visited the "Bretones' Country," and about this time a Portuguese expedition attempted the colonisation of Cape Breton. Ten years later, on the twentieth day of April, 1534, there sailed from the Brittany harbour of St. Malo two ships bearing "le Capitaine Jacques Quartier" and his co-venturers to the continent across the sea. They also were lured by the wish to find a westerly passage to golden India.

On the tenth of May they arrived at the Cap de Bonne Vue (Bonavista) near the rocky gate of the harbour that first sheltered Cabot. In his Discours du Voyage, Cartier narrates further adventures which occurred during the progress of his two sixty-ton ships along the coast and among the islands of the Gulfs of St. Lawrence and Chaleur. Prince Edward Island he described as "low, and full of beautiful trees and meadows." The Golfe de la Chaleur was so named by its discoverer