feet protected only by heavy sandals, the Recollets landed at Quebec, and with cannon booming, white men all on bended knee, held service before the amazed savages.
Of the Recollets, it was agreed that Joseph le Caron should go west to the Hurons of the Sweet Water Sea. Accompanied by a dozen Frenchmen, the friar ascended the Ottawa in July, passed that Allumette Island where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the land of the Hurons. Nine days later Champlain followed with two canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brulé, his interpreter. In order to hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada, Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south. It was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like wolves raiding a sheep pen. No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from a chance war party.
Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage. Where the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries. This is the Mattawa. Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the pebble bottom. Then the gravel grated keels. The shallows became weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening on a low-lying, clay-colored lake—the country of the Nipissings, with whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.
In a few sleeps—they tell him—he will reach the Sweet Water Sea. The news is welcome; for the voyageurs are down to short rations, and launch eagerly westward on the stream draining Nipissing Lake—French River. This is a tricky little stream in whose sands lie buried the bodies of countless French voyageurs. It is more dangerous going with rapids than against them; for the hastening current is sometimes an undertow, which sweeps the canoes into the rapids before the roar of the waterfall has given warning. And the country is barren of game.
As they cross the portages, Champlain's men are glad to snatch at the raspberry and cranberry bushes for food; and their night-time meal is dependent on chance fishing. Indian hunters are met—three hundred of them—the Staring Hairs, so named from the upright posture of their headdress tipped by an eagle quill; and again Champlain is told he is very near the Inland Sea.
It comes as discoveries nearly always come—his finding of the Great Lakes; for though Joseph Le Caron, the missionary, had passed this way ten days ago, the zealous priest never paused to explore and map the region. You are paddling down the brown, forest-shadowed waters—long lanes of water like canals through walls of trees silent as sentinels. Suddenly a change almost imperceptible comes. Instead of the earthy smell of the forest mold in your nostrils is the clear tang of sun-bathed, water-washed rocks; and the sky begins to swim, to lose itself at the horizon. There is no sudden bursting of a sea on your view. The river begins to coil in and out among islands. The amber waters have become sheeted silver. You wind from island to island, islands of pink granite, islands with no tree but one lone blasted pine, islands that are in themselves forests. There is no end to these islands. They are not in hundreds; they are in thousands. Then you see the spray breaking over the reefs, and there is its sky line. You are not on a river at all. You are on an inland sea. You have been on the lake for hours. One can guess how Champlain's men scrambled from island to island, and fished for the rock bass above the deep pools, and ran along the water line of wave-dashed reefs, wondering vaguely if the wind wash were the ocean tide of the Western Sea.
But Champlain's Huron guides had not come to find a Western Sea. With the quick choppy stroke of the Indian paddler they were conveying him down that eastern shore of Lake Huron now known as Georgian Bay, from French River to Parry Sound and Midland and Penetang. Where these little towns to-day stand on the hillsides was a howling wilderness of forest, with never a footprint but the zigzagging trail of the Indians back from Georgian Bay to what is now Lake Simcoe.
Between these two shores lay the stamping grounds of the great Huron tribe. How numerous were they? Records differ. Certainly at no time more numerous than thirty thousand souls all told, including children. Though they yearly came to Montreal for trade and war, the Hurons were sedentary, living in the long houses of bark inclosed by triple palisades, such as Cartier had seen at Hochelaga almost a century before.
Champlain followed his supple guides along the wind-fallen forest trail to the Huron villages. Here he found the missionary. One can guess how the souls of these two heroes burned as the deep solemn chant of the Te Deum for the first time rolled through the forests of Lake Huron.
But now Champlain must to business; and his business is war. Brulé and twelve Indians are sent like the carriers of the fiery cross in the Highlands of Scotland to rally tribes of the Susquehanna to join the Hurons against the Iroquois. A wild war dance is held with mystic rites in the lodges of the Hurons; and the braves set out with Champlain from Lake Simcoe for Lake Ontario by way of Trent River. As they near what is now New York state, buckskin is flung aside, the naked bodies painted and greased, and the trail shunned for the pathless woods off the beaten track where the Indians glide like beasts of prey through the frost-tinted forest.
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