CHAMPLAIN DISCOVERS LAKE ONTARIO
To discover a passage westward was still the main object of those who
made their way up the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. This, too, was the
object of Samuel Champlain, known as "the Father of New France," when
he arrived with orders from France to establish an industrial colony
"which should hold for that country the gateway of the Golden East."
He had already ascended the river Saguenay, a tributary of the St.
Lawrence, till stopped by rapids and rocks, and the natives had told
him of a great salt sea to the north, which was Hudson's Bay, discovered
some seven years later, in 1610. He now made his way to a spot called
by the natives Quebec, a word meaning the strait or narrows, this being
the narrowest place in the whole magnificent waterway. He had long
been searching for a suitable site for a settlement, but "I could find
none more convenient," he says, "or better situated than the point
of Quebec, so called by the savages, which was covered with nut trees."
Accordingly here, close to the present Champlain market, arose the
nucleus of the city of Quebec--the great warehouse of New France.
[Illustration: THE FIRST SETTLEMENT AT QUEBEC. From Champlain's
_Voyages_, 1613. The bigger house in front is Champlain's own
residence.]
Having passed the winter of 1608 at Quebec, the passion of exploration
still on him, in a little two-masted boat piloted by Indians, he went
up the St. Lawrence, towards Cartier's Mont Royal. From out the thick
forest land that lined its banks, Indians discovered the steel-clad
strangers and gazed at them from the river-banks in speechless wonder.
The river soon became alive with Indian canoes, but the Frenchmen made
their way to the mouth of the Richelieu River, where they encamped
for a couple of days' hunting and fishing. Then Champlain sailed on,
his little two-masted boat outstripping the native canoes, till the
unwelcome sound of rapids fell on the silent air, and through the dark
foliage of the islet of St. John he could see "the gleam of snowy foam
and the flash of hurrying waters." The Indians had assured him that
his boat could pass unobstructed through the whole journey. "It
afflicted me and troubled me exceedingly," he tells us, "to be obliged
to return without having seen so great a lake, full of fair islands
and bordered with the fine countries which they had described to me."
He could not bear to give up the exploration into the heart of a land
unvisited by white men. So, sending back his party, accompanied only
by two Frenchmen as brave as himself, he stepped into an Indian canoe
to be carried round the rapids and so continue his perilous
journey--perilous, indeed, for bands of hostile natives lurked in the
primeval forests that clothed the river-banks in dense masses.
As they advanced the river widened out; the Indian canoes carried them
safely over the broad stream shimmering in the summer sun till they
came to a great silent lake over one hundred miles long, hitherto
unexplored. The beauty of the new country is described with enthusiasm
by the delighted explorer, but they were now in the Mohawk country
and progress was fraught with danger. They travelled only by night
and lay hidden by day in the depth of the forest, till they had reached
the far end of the lake, named Lake Champlain after its discoverer.
They were near the rocky promontory where Fort Ticonderoga was
afterwards built, when they met a party of Iroquois; war-cries pealed
across the waters of the lake, and by daybreak battle could no longer
be averted. Champlain and his two companions, in doublet and hose,
buckled on their breastplates, cuisses of steel and plumed helmets,
and with sword and arquebus advanced. Their firearms won the day, but
all hope of further advance was at an end, and Champlain returned to
Quebec with his great story of new lands to the south. It was not till
the spring of 1611 that he was again free to start on another exploring
expedition into the heart of Canada.
[Illustration: THE DEFEAT OF THE IROQUOIS BY CHAMPLAIN AND HIS PARTY
ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN. From a drawing in Champlain's _Voyages_, 1613.]
His journey to the rapids of the St. Louis has been well described:
"Like specks on the broad bosom of the waters, two pigmy vessels held
their course up the lonely St. Lawrence. They passed abandoned
Tadoussac, the channel of Orleans, the tenantless rock of Quebec, the
wide Lake of St. Peter with its crowded archipelago, and the forest
plain of Montreal. All was solitude. Hochelaga had vanished, and of
the savage population that Cartier had found sixty-eight years before,
no trace remained."
In a skiff with a few Indians, Champlain tried to pass the rapids of
St. Louis; but oars, paddles, and poles alike proved vain against the
foaming surges, and he was forced to return, but not till the Indians
had drawn for him rude plans of the river above, with its chain of
rapids and its lakes and its cataracts. They were quite impassable,
said the natives, though, indeed, to these white strangers everything
seemed possible.
"These white men must have fallen from the clouds," they said. "How
else could they have reached us through the woods and rapids which
even we find it hard to pass?" Champlain wanted to get to the upper
waters of the Ottawa River, to the land of the cannibal Nipissings,
who dwelt on the lake that bears their name; but they were enemies,
and the natives refused to advance into their country.
Two years later he accomplished his desire, and found himself at last
in the land of the Nipissings. He crossed their lake and steered his
canoes down the French river. Days passed and no signs of human life
appeared amid the rocky desolation, till suddenly three hundred
savages, tattooed, painted, and armed, rushed out on them. Fortunately
they were friendly, and it was from them that Champlain learned the
good news that the great freshwater lake of the Hurons was close at
hand.
What if the Friar Le Caron, one of Champlain's party, had preceded
him by a few days, Champlain was the first white man to give an account
of it, if not the first to sail on its beautiful waters. For over one
hundred miles he made his way along its eastern shores, until he reached
a broad opening with fields of maize and bright patches of sunflower,
from the seeds of which the Indians made their hair-oil. After staying
a few days at a little Huron village where he was feasted by friendly
natives, Champlain pushed on by Indian trails, passing village after
village till he reached the narrow end of Lake Simcoe. A "shrill clamour
of rejoicing and the screaming flight of terrified children" hailed
his approach. The little fleet of canoes pursued their course along
the lake and then down the chain of lakes leading to the river Trent.
The inhabited country of the Hurons had now given place to a desolate
region with no sign of human life, till from the mouth of the Trent,
"like a flock of venturous wild fowl," they found themselves floating
on the waters of Lake Ontario, across which they made their way safely.
It was a great day in the life of Champlain when he found himself in
the very heart of a hostile land, having discovered the chain of inland
lakes of which he had heard so much. But they were now in the land
of the Iroquois--deadly foes of the Hurons. There was nothing for it
but to fight, and a great battle now took place between the rival tribes,
every warrior yelling at the top of his voice. Champlain himself was
wounded in the fray, and all further exploration had to be abandoned.
He was packed up in a basket and carried away on the back of a Huron
warrior. "Bundled in a heap," wrote the explorer, "doubled and
strapped together after such a fashion that one could move no more
than an infant in swaddling clothes, I never was in such torment in
my life, for the pain of the wound was nothing to that of being bound
and pinioned on the back of one of our savages. As soon as I could
bear my weight, I got out of this prison." How Champlain wintered with
the Hurons, who would not allow him to return to Quebec, how he got
lost while hunting in one of the great forests in his eagerness to
shoot a strange-looking bird, how the lakes and streams froze, and
how his courage and endurance were sorely tried over the toilsome
marches to Lake Simcoe, but how finally he reached Montreal by way
of Nipissing and the Ottawa River, must be read elsewhere. Champlain's
work as an explorer was done. Truly has he been called the Father of
New France. He had founded Quebec and Montreal; he had explored Canada
as no man has ever done before or since. Faithful to the passion of
his life, he died in 1635 at Quebec--the city he had founded and loved.