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A R^ENfLY FOUNb PORTRAIT MEDALLION

...OF.** i

JACQUES CARTIER

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dr. flbHN lyi; Clarke
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This wooden medallion, 20 inches in diameter, bears on the back the deeply carved date
1 704 and the initials J. C. It was found between the outer and inner "skins" of an ancient house
in the French fishing village of Cape des Rosiers, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence river,
November, 1 908, and was the stern shield of some French vessel wrecked on that coast. The
face is that of Jacques Cartier, the discoverer of Canada.

A RECENTLY FOUND PORTRAIT MEDALLION
....OF....
JACQUES CARTIER

BY
DR. JOHN M. CLARKE
Director of New York State Museum
Albany

Read before the New York State Historical Association
at its Annual Meeting held in Mount Vernon,
October 19th and 20th, 1909

1000 SEPARATES FOE
PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION

X^ : .1* \ U* * / %?

GLENS FALLS PUBLISHING CO.
PRINTERS
GLENS FALLS, N. Y.

The San Malo picture of Cartier; from Parkman's reproduction

A RECENTLY FOUND PORTRAIT MEDALLION
OF JACQUES CARTIER
By JOHN M. CLARKE
Director of tlie State Museum
By way of introduction to the particular purpose of this paper it
is desirable to take note of the known portraits of the famous nav
igator and discoverer of New France, Jacques Cartier, some of
which have commonly passed as authentic pictures.
The best known of these is the painting by Riss which hangs in
the Hotel de Ville of Cartier 's home town, San Malo. This has been
reproduced in several forms and probably the best copy of it is that
given by Parkman, taken directly from the painting (Pioneers of
France in the New World, 1899 ) . According to Parkman this was
executed in 1839. Probably most of us are familiar with this half
length standing figure of the captain, resting his left arm on the
solid gunwale of his caravel and his young bearded chin in his hand,
his head capped with the Breton tufted hat, his flowing robe belted
at the waist and hung with sword and rapier, his penetrating eyes
gazing intently over the expanse of the unswept sea, and his right
hand pressed flat and hard againt the region of his appendix. This
picture was redrawn by the Canadian artist Hamel with some quite
distinct effects upon the physiognomy of the subject, and it is
Hamel's picture that has been most frequently used to illustrate
English books on the French occupation. In the Tross edition of
the Relation Originale of the first or 1534 voyage* the face of this
picture is reproduced as a medallion on the title page, though
reversed in pose and with alterations in the expression that make
it the face of a less forceful conception than the original. Indeed
were it not for the positive statement of the editor that it is taken
from the San Malo picture, one might doubt that both were design
ed to represent the same man. That of San Malo has a more
copious supply of beard on cheeks and chin and a more intent and
•Relation Originale du Voyage de Jacques Cartier au Canada en
1534 : H. Michelant and A. Rame. Paris. Libraire Tross. 1867.

penetrating gaze in the eyes, which, in the Hamel picture, is intens
ified into an introspective stare. Cartier was 43 years old when he
made his first voyage to New France and these two portraits repre
sent a man of about such years and hirsuteness.
Another picture is reproduced as a medallion in Rame 's Note sur
le Manoir de Jacques Cartier, Tross edition, 1867, published with
the Relation Originale referred to. This is the face of an older,
heavily bearded man whose locks fully sixty years have whitened.
It is stated in this Tross edition that this print is in the Departe-
ment des Estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale, but I am under
obligations to M. de la Ronciere of that bureau for the information
that it is not in that collection and there seems much doubt among
several writers if this was ever intented to represent Cartier.
M. de la Ronciere has also called my attention to the Vallard map
of eastern North America, made about or soon after 1543, whereon is
a group of figures which have been supposed to represent the land
ing of Cartier and his crew among the Indians of Gaspe. This
map has been reproduced in J. G. Kohl's History of the Discovery
of Maine (1869) and while a curious and interesting embellishment
of the map, the figures are conventional and perhaps fairly com
pared with the bizarre monsters which dot the land and sea on
many of the old charts. It seems evident that the comment kindly
made to me by Mr. H. P. Biggar expresses the proper estimate of
this picture. "It must always be very doubtful," he says,
' ' whether any of the figures in the French group on that map can
be taken as representing a likeness of Jacques Cartier. They are
certainly Cartier 's people but we have no proof of any kind that
he is among them. ' '
Dr. Kohl gave a different interpretation of these figures, con
ceiving them designed to depict Roberval 's occupation of Quebec.
# # #
At the mouth of the St Lawrence river, indeed at the very point
on its south shore where the navigators of many generations and
the marine usage of today have regarded the river as ending and
the Gulf as beginning, lies Cape des Rosiers. It is an angry rem
nant of black rocks cut into a terrace by the waves of an older sea
but sending its menacing point well out into the waters. It faces

Alleged portrait of Cartier from Rame's
Manoir de Jacques Cartier, 1 867.

Head of the San Malo portrait as re
produced in the Relation Originale, 1867.

The Hamel portrait from the San/ Malo picture; from Shea's Charlevoix

fair and full the prevailing northwest storms of the expanded
river, here more than 100 miles across. Beyond it towards the
Gulf lies first a little cove and fishing beach, then the limestone
cliffs at once rise high and sheer in majestic escarpments along the
Bon Ami rocks eastward to Cape Gaspe, the outermost point of the
Gaspe eoast. Behind it lower the gray bare walls of mighty Mt.
St. Alban, abrupt and unscalable, their summit at 1800 feet, capped
with evergreen of spruce and fur. Cape des Rosiers lies on the
northern side of an unusual and fascinating spot on the Atlantic
coast. The wall of mountains behind it runs six miles to the land's
end and is in places but a half mile wide. It is a single range of the
Appalachian mountain system sliced vertically in half. One half,
the northern, the eternal sea has devoured, the other slopes by
easier declivities to the water of Gaspe Bay and on its tilted sides
and along its beaches life is played out in some of its gentlest and
most primitive phases. Cape des Rosiers has been from the ear
liest days a fearful menace and disastrous obstacle to navigation
in the gulf and river St Lawrence. Where records fail, tradition
of the country side tells of many a craft lost on its rocks. Indeed
to the struggling settlements of this and other coasts in the gulf
a shipwreck has often been a godsend and, if hereditary stories
are to be credited, the old settlers of this place, like those on the
island of Antieosti further out in the river's mouth, were not
guiltless of inviting these mischances.
As one crosses this little Gaspe peninsula, the eastermost tip of the
Appalachian Mountains, stretching its index finger out into
the Gulf, the single road that leads to Cape des Rosiers rises from
the waters of Gaspe Bay at Grande Greve, soon reaches the mount
ain summit and thence drops downward at an angle that is almost
unbelievable for its obtuseness, into the cove of this Cape. Until
the autumn of 1908 the first of the fishermen's houses to meet the
traveler down this impossible declivity called a road, lay beneath
the lower stretches of the long cliff and was occupied by and the
property of a man named Smith, English by name, French by
tongue and habit of life. For sixty years this house had been in the
Smith family and before that, was long the property of James Eves ;
it had been occupied for many generations — how many I have

8
not been able to learn. I have been told by Mr. A. W. Dolbel whose
acquaintance with this coast dates back for nearly fifty years, that
the Smith house was the oldest in that settlement. So old was it,
at any rate, that the ravages of time made it a precarious shelter,
and its owner at the time I have mentioned, Marcil Smith, deter
mined to tear it down and builtl afresh. In dismantling the old
house Smith discovered a dummy window unknown to him or his
predecessors. This hole had been battened up on the outside and
sealed up inside. In between these two walls where it had rested
concealed for unknown generations lay the object which is here
reproduced for the first time. It was taken by the finder, Marcil
Smith, to the store of the William Fruing Company, one of the
oldest fishing estabishments of Gaspe, only a short distance away,
and was obtained by John Lemasurier, an intelligent Jerseyman,
the agent of the Company at Cape des Rosiers. My very excell
ent friends of the Fruing Company with most considerate thought-
fulness laid the object aside till the time of my next visit to this
country, and thus I acquired it.
This object is a great wooden medallion, 20 inches in diameter,
carrying the relief portrait of a man in middle life, full bearded,
capped with tufted hat or bonnet, with jacket buttoned high about
a sturdy neck and covered with a collared surtout. The carving
is overlain with many a coat of paint and where this crust has flak
ed off one may see the successive paintings in red, black, yellow
and blue ; now its central portion is of ocher red, surrounded by a
yellow border, except where the bust projects above and below.
On the back of this medallion, which is unpainted and browned
with weather, is the deep carved date, 1704, and beneath the date
the initials, J. C. These numerals and letters are as deeply weather
ed as all the rest of this unpainted surface and are unquestionably
contemporaneous with it.
This very interesting object presents two inquiries:
1) What is it?
2) What evidence is there that it represents Cartier?
There is little uncertainty among the seafaring folk who have
seen it as to what it is. Too many ships have gone ashore on the
cape and cove of Rosiers to leave much doubt abroad that it is the

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relic of some vessel that lost its life and perhaps that of its crew
in this abattoir of ships. The schooners and barks of the early
1700 's on that coast were mostly fishermen from Breton and Nor
mandy and it was the custom then and to a much later day for
them to wear elaborate figureheads and sternshields. There is
barely a fishing estabishment in all Gaspe that does not display
somewhere about its buildings the figurehead or nameplate of some
lost ship of later years than this. Great wrought iron nails pro
jecting from the back of this medallion and sorely twisted, indicate
that it was wrenched with violence from its moorings and the
surface where the paint has been rubbed off near the top and the
grain of the wood frayed out, tell plainly how the surf had battered
it upon the pebbles of the Rosiers beach. It was a shield nailed
against the flat stern of a Breton schooner.
In regard to the evidence for the identity of the portrait, the cap
ital letters J. C. on the back of the medallion must be, I think, under
the circumstances, fairly regarded as indicative of the intentions
of the carver. It is easy to say they have some other meaning,
may be the initials of the workman himself, but certainly they are
prima facie evidence of the intention to portray Cartier and the
realization of such intention that in the judgement of the workman
required no other explanation than that vouchsafed by the initials.
We must not forget that Cartier 's name and the fame of his achieve
ments and doubtless his features, as recorded up to that time, were
the common possession and the proper pride of the Breton sailors.
The shipbuilders of that day and place remembered and revered
him. This Breton had discovered and taken possession of a new
world for his sovereign and had brought luster and honor to his
calling. Probably the vessel that carried the sternshield bore his
name and may quite likely have sailed from his home port, for the
Malouins were abundant frequenters of this coast during all the
French ascendency.
It must be admitted that this carving is an admirable piece of
workmanship in wood. The successive coats of paint on it have
helped to cover and soften some of the original detail and perhaps
have concealed some of the action of the features without loss of
vigor.

10
It lends itself to analysis. The San Malo painting and the more
recent portrait by Hamel both wore the light Milan bonnet, soft,
low crowned, with turned-up brim. It was a style of hat which had
a long life during the 16th and in the 17th centuries, variously
slashed and ornamented. But it was the hat of a gentleman, of the
gentleman of the faubourgs and chateaux, not the head piece of a
sailor. Cartier was a freeholder, the Sieur of the manor of
Limoilou, and as such this hat was appropriate to his social station,
but this social station was not achieved until his voyages were over
and he was rewarded with the favor of his sovereign. Such
fragile headgear did not go with his days of service under his
patron, the Admiral Chabot, nor does it match the gales of the
North Atlantic and the Gulf of St Lawrence. It is little likely
that the delicate starched ruffs at his neck and wrist, his long
sleeveless and belted doublet with which the San Malo and the
Hamel pictures make him fall in line with the costume of the time ;
that these were the proper garb for the pilot and ship captain of
the 1500 's. One does not travel today on the angry Gulf of St
Lawrence in evening clothes and the skipper of the 16th century
went equipped for his rough work. The tufted bonnet with its
tight head band, the high necked jacket and heavy surtout were
the proper and historic gear for the sailor of his time.
The face on this medallion is very much as other artists have
conceived Cartier and it is posed in profile as the others have been.
There is an undeniable resemblance between this protrait and those
already known, in trim of face and beard and the contour of its
physiognomy, though the features compared with the San Malo
and Hamel pictures are of a man older and more hardened by
exposure. There is even one detail of agreement which suggests a
common origin for these conceptions. In the San Malo portrait
there is no hair in the beard growing in front of the ear, nor is
there in the Rosiers medallion — perhaps an indication of an in
dividual facial peculiarity. I am disposed to have confidence in
the fact that all the evidence, intrinsic and extrinsic, that can be
extracted from this very interesting object bears out the belief
that the face was intended to represent Cartier. It is the rugged
conception of it as it lay, authentically or traditionally, in the

Date and initials on back of Cartier meda

11
minds of his fellow countrymen, particularly of the artisan of 1704
who created this carving. And it further appears from all this
evidence to be the earliest of all attempts at portraiture of the dis
coverer. It is at least 205 years old, even though it was made 170
years after the discovery of Canada.
It is of rather extraordinary interest that this relique should have
been found close on the track of Cartier 's voyages. It was just
around the Cape of Gaspe, six miles away, and thence up Gaspe
Bay on the Sandy Beach near its head that Jaques Cartier went
ashore, erected the cross and lilies of France with this posie : ' ' Vive
le Roy de France ' ' and took possession of the land in the name of
his king. He did not go so far as Cape des Rosiers upon his first
voyage yet he could barely have failed to see its projecting point
as he passed out Gaspe Bay and across the St Lawrence. On his
second and third voyage he did pass it on his way up to Hochelaga.
In the light that has shone so brilliantly on Champlain, the organ
izer of government in New France, the fame and service of the
great captain whose untiring zeal in the king's service twice explor
ed the St Lawrence river after having first found the Gaspe coast,
has been somewhat obscured, but those who today own their alle
giance to the sailor of San Malo might do well to place on that
conspicuous point of the Gaspe peninsula that reaches far out in
the gulf and which every vessel passing up the great river must
see, some worthy and commanding monument to the discoverer of
their country.

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