Jacques Cartier's expedition reached the fortified village of Stadacona, home to the St. Lawrence Iroquoians led by Chief Donnacona, marking one of the earliest sustained European contacts in the region that would become Quebec. Cartier would winter nearby, and his accounts of the encounter shaped decades of French ambition in North America, though the Stadaconans themselves would vanish from the historical record within a generation.
Cartier had already made one voyage to the Gulf of St. Lawrence the year before, but this second expedition pushed further, following the river into the heart of the continent guided by two Stadaconan men, Domagaya and Taignoagny, whom he had taken to France and brought back.
When the ships arrived near the site of modern Quebec City, Cartier found a substantial fortified settlement of perhaps 500 people under Chief Donnacona, surrounded by cornfields. Relations were initially warm and curious, though they would sour badly over the following months as Cartier pushed onward to Hochelaga (modern Montreal) against Donnacona's wishes, and later kidnapped the chief and several others to bring to France, where they all died.
Within decades, the St. Lawrence Iroquoian culture Cartier described had disappeared entirely from the region, likely through some combination of disease, warfare, and displacement — a mystery still debated by archaeologists. Cartier's journals remain the only detailed written record of a vanished society, and Stadacona's name and location would later underpin Samuel de Champlain's founding of Quebec City in 1608.