For a time the
Indians visited them, in the bitterest weather, but in December even
this source of a game supply was cut off, for they came no more. The
dreaded scurvy broke out, and before long there were hardly a dozen of
the whole company able to care for the sick. Besides the general misery
they were tormented by the fear that if the savages knew how feeble they
were the camp might be attacked and destroyed. Cartier told those who
had the strength, to beat with sticks on the sides of their bunks, so
that prowling Indians might believe that the white men were busy at
work.
But the wild folk were both shrewder and more friendly than the French
believed. Their medicine-men told Cartier one day that they cured scurvy
by means of a drink made from the leaves and bark of an evergreen.
Squaws presently came with a birch-bark kettle of this brew and it
proved to have such virtues that the sick were cured of scurvy, and in
some cases of other diseases which they had had for years. Cartier
afterward wrote in his report that they boiled and drank within a week
all the foliage of a tree, which the Indians called aneda or tree of
life, as large as a full-grown oak.[3] Many had died before the remedy
was learned, and when the weather allowed the fleet to sail for home,
there were only men enough for two of the ships.
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