As they left their moorings, at dawn of the following day, they fell in with a great school of white whales disporting themselves in the river.

Strange fish, indeed, these seemed to Cartier.
'They were headed like greyhounds,' he wrote, 'and were as white as snow, and were never before of any man seen or known.' Four days more brought the voyagers to an island, a 'goodly and fertile spot covered with fine trees,' and among them so many filbert-trees that Cartier gave it the name Isle-aux-Coudres (the Isle of Filberts), which it still bears.

On September 7 the vessels sailed about thirty miles beyond Isle-aux-Coudres, and came to a group of islands, one of which, extending for about twenty miles up the river, appeared so fertile and so densely covered with wild grapes hanging to the river's edge, that Cartier named it the Isle of Bacchus.

He himself, however, afterwards altered the name to the Island of Orleans.

These islands, so the savages said, marked the beginning of the country known as Canada..