One day as Cartier was walking near the river, feeling very sad and discouraged, he met an Indian who, but a short time before, had been ill. Upon Cartier’s asking him how he had been cured he explained that it was by taking a medicine made from an evergreen tree called Ameda.* With hope and joy Cartier hurried back to tell his men. They tried the remedy at once in fact, they used up nearly a whole tree and before long all were well again.
At last spring came, the warm winds began to blow, the ice melted away, and the French prepared for their homeward voyage. It was at this time that Cartier did a very wicked thing. He captured Donnacona and four other Indian chiefs, and took them against their will to France. He did this simply because he wanted to show them to the people of his country, and to have them tell the king of the wonders of the New World. They never saw their native land again, but died in a strange country and among strange people. This was the way Cartier repaid the Indians for all the kindness they had shown him during his stay with them.
From ‘The Story of Canada’ (1927) by Edith Louise Marsh (1870-1960).
The man he met down on the ice was Domagaia, one of the Iroquois tribesmen from Stadacona, whom Cartier had recently seen in a sorry state thanks to scurvy. The transformation was breathtaking, and cautiously (for fear of admitting how many men he had lost) Cartier asked Domagaia’s secret. It was, he learnt, a certain tree. “Domagaia straight sent two women to fetch some of it,” we learn from the translation in Hakluyt’s Principal Voyages, “which brought ten or twelve branches of it, and therewithal shew’d the way how to use it, and that is thus, to take the barke and leaves of the sayd tree, and boile them together, then to drinke of the sayd decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon his legs that is sicke: moreover, they told us, that the vertue of that tree was, to heale any other disease: the tree is in their language called Ameda or Hanneda, this is thought to be the Sassafras tree.” Modern science is more inclined to think it was the Northern White-Cedar, thuja occidentalis, which yields high levels of vitamin C.