Jacques Cartier made history and made friends along the St Lawrence, but then threw all that goodwill away.
In the Spring of 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St Lawrence River (so he named it) to Stadacona, near what would soon after become Quebec, and then further upriver to Hochelaga, which he named Montreal. Everything went well until winter came, for which the French were hopelessly unprepared.
In 1692, a girl of fourteen was left to defend her father’s manor from angry Iroquois raiders.
In 1672, the Count de Frontenac came to Canada as governor of the French settlers around Montreal. He built good relations with the Iroquois by casting himself as father to their nation, but the French found him high-handed and in 1682 King Louis XIV of France recalled him. His replacement, the Marquis de Denonville, treated the Iroquois barbarously and provoked reprisals which Frontenac, restored in 1689, struggled to contain.
On the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 24th, 1497, Venetian navigator John Cabot claimed North America for the King of England.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean islands, and was hailed as the first European to see the Americas. But this was not North America, the region where the great English-speaking nations of Canada and the United States would later rise. That was discovered — or rediscovered, since the Vikings had been there long before — five years later in 1497.