ABSTRACT
In the opening years of the seventeenth century in the Montagnais country, Pierre Pastedechouan’s grandmother loved to tell him how astonished she had been at the first sight of a French ship. With its large sails and many people gath ered on the deck, she had thought the wooden boat a floating island. She and the other women in her band immediately set up cabins to welcome the guests.1 The people on a floating island appeared also to a young Micmac woman of the Saint Lawrence Gulf in a dream which she recounted to the shaman and elders of her community and which came true a few days later when a European ship arrived.2
