10. Final thoughts on Jacques Cartier
As Lord Roberval and Jacques Cartier realize how unwelcome they had become amongst the Indigenous peoples of Canada, did they learn anything at all?
Updated March 3, 2024
Canadian historian Joseph Pope wrote some very prescient words in 1889 about Canadian lack of interest or even knowledge about the history of their own country.
But how shall we account for the indifference of the mass of Canadians to the early history of their own country? For we have a history a record of great deeds done and great things suffered, not thousands of miles across the sea, but here on the very ground we tread.
There is not a day in which the citizens of Quebec and Montreal, for example, do not look upon objects and places made for ever memorable by the piety or valor of their forefathers places into which for some of us, the memory of the illustrious dead has passed, but which are wholly devoid of interest to the ordinary passer-by, in whom they awaken no emotion or tell no story.1
I included myself in this ignorance. Before taking up this challenge to write the history of Upper Canada from first contact to Confederation in 1867, I had a schoolboy’s k…
