Hochelaga (pronunciation: ) was a St. Lawrence Iroquois 16th century fortified village on or near Mount Royal in present-day Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Jacques Cartier arrived by boat on October 2, 1535; he visited the village on the following day. He was greeted well by the Iroquois, and named the mountain he saw nearby Mount Royal. Several names in and around Montreal and the Hochelaga Archipelago can be traced back to him. A stone marker commemorating the former village was placed in 1925 on land adjacent to McGill University. It is believed to be in the vicinity of the village visited by Cartier in 1535. The site of the marker is designated a National Historic Site of Canada. The name of the village survives in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the name of a neighbourhood of Montreal; a variant spelling survives in Montreal's contemporary Osheaga Festival. Etymology Most linguists accept the word Hochelaga as a French borrowing of an Iroquoian term either osekare, meaning "beaver path" or "beaver dam", or osheaga, meaning "big rapids", in reference to the nearby Lachine Rapids. An alternative explanation has been proposed in which osheaga means "people of the shaking hands"; in some versions of this story, the Iroquoian people were bewildered by Cartier waving his hands wildly to attract their attention as he first approached the settlement in his boat, while in others, they were bewildered by his European custom of greeting them with a handshake. These latter explanations are favoured by the Mohawk people further downriver at Kahnawake, but are not easily supported by the Mohawk language's significant dissimilarities from what is known of the related but not identical Laurentian language, which was spoken by the Iroquoian people at Hochelaga. Location The original documentation that describes the village’s location is Bref récit et succincte narration de le navigation faite en MDXXXV et MDXXXVI, which Cartier gave to King Francis I of France in 1545. A plan exists titled La Terra de Hochelaga nella Nova Francia, which illustrates, in the European manner of the period, Cartier's original visit. Giacomo Gastaldi illustrated Hochelaga in the third volume of Delle navigationi et viaggi, a work done in Venice between 1550 and 1556 by Giovanni Battista Ramusio. The perfect, regular arrangement of the houses, conforming to the urban ideal of the Italian Renaissance, as well as the boards covering the village's palisade, were probably his own fabrications. If the plan faithfully illustrates