Excerpt from The Results in Europe of Cartier's Explorations: 1542-1603

Three or four years later we come to the crowning work of Gerard Mercator in his'great planisphere of 1569 and a year later to the atlas of the famous Flemish geographer who did so much to revolutionize cartography, -abraham Ortelius. The great bay has now become, with Mercator, the Gulf of St. Lawrence Sinus but the main river is left without a name, and is carried far west beyond Hochelaga (montreal) to a water-shed, which separates the great interior valley of the Continent from the Pacific slope. Here was what no one had before attempted in interpretation of the vague stories which Cartier had heard from the Indians. Mercator makes what is apparently the Ottawa Open a water-way, as Cartier could have fancied it, when he gazed from the summit of Mont Royale. This passage carried the imagination into the great country of the Saguenay, which the Indians told of, as bounding on a large body of fresh water. It seems easy to suppose that this was an interpretation of that route which in the next generation conducted many a Jesuit to the Georgian Bay, and so developed the upper lakes long before the Shores of Lake Erie were comprehended. Not one of the earlier maps had divined this possible solution of Cartier's problem; and Mercator did it, so far as we can now see, with nothing to aid him but a study of Cartier's narrative, or possibly of Car tier's maps or data Copied from them. It was one of those feats of prescience through comparative studies which put that Flemish geographer at the head of his profession. By a similar insight he Was the first to map out a great interior valley to the continent, separated from the Atlantic slope by a mountainous range that could well stand for the Alleghanies. Dr. Kohl suggests that Mercator might have surmised this eastern water-shed of the great interior valley, by studying the reports of De Soto in his passage to the Mississippi, during the very year when Cartier and Roberval were developing the great northern valley. There was yet no conception of the way in which these two great valleys so nearly touched at va rions points that the larger was eventually to be entered from the lesser.

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