Strait of Honguedo

The passage south of Anticosti Island separates it from the Gaspé peninsula and opens toward the St Lawrence estuary. On the nearby Gaspé shore, Jacques Cartier encountered Donnacona and people from Stadacona in 1534. They had travelled downriver to fish for mackerel, showing that these gulf approaches belonged to an Indigenous seasonal world before appearing on French charts.

Cartier's account of his next voyage, in 1535–1536, described passing between the island he called Assumption and Honguedo, his name for Gaspé. Sixteenth-century maps, including Mercator's map of 1569 and Wytfliet's of 1597, identified the channel as the Strait of Saint-Pierre. The present strait's name recalls this earlier coastal place-name, whose linguistic origin remains disputed. The historical geography of these waters therefore joins an established fishing journey from the St Lawrence with the voyages and mapmaking through which French navigators began to distinguish the island, coast and entrance to the river.