founder of New France, and its first Governor General. No name in Canadian annals is more illustrious than his. He was born in Brouage Saintonge, about the year 1570, of a noble family. In his youth he served in the French navy, was pensioned and attached to the person of Henry IV of France.

In 1603, M. de Chastes, Governor of Dieppe, obtained permission from the king to found a settlement in North America. De Chastes appointed Champlain as his substitute, and Henry gave him the title of General Lieutenant of Canada. On the 15th of March Champlain set sail for America in a ship commanded by Pont-Gravé, an enterprising mariner of St. Malo.

They sailed up the St. Lawrence to the Sault St. Louis, being as far as Jacques Cartier had proceeded with his ships in 1535, and after carefully examining its banks, returned to France.

Upon his return, Champlain published his first work, entitled Des Sauvages. In the meantime De Chastes had died, and his concessions had been transferred to Sieur de Monts. De Monts was made Vice-Admiral and Lieutenant General of his majesty in that part of Acadia called Norumbega, with full powers to make war and peace, and to trade in peltries from lat. 40 to 46 N., in exclusion of all others. Armed with these plenary powers, De Monts and Champlain sailed for Acadia, and attempted a settlement at Port Royal, but returned to France in 1607.

Champlain's third voyage to America was undertaken at the solicitation of De Monts in the year 1608. In this year he founded his colony of Quebec, in the heart of the old, wild, savage wilderness, upon the site of the old Indian

hamlet Sta-da-cone, found by Jacques Cartier seventy years before, under the sway of the royal chief Don-na-co-na.

In the beginning of the summer of the next year, (1609) months before Henry Hudson sailed up the North River, and eleven years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Champlain discovered and explored the lake which still bears his name, and planted on its shores the Cross and the Lilies of France.

At Quebec, during his hunting excursions with the Indians, while sitting around their wild camp fires, they had told him marvelous stories of a great inland sea filled with wonderful islands, lying far to the southward of the St. Lawrence, in the land of the terrible Iroquois. His curiosity was excited, and as soon as the melting snows of the next spring would permit, he set out upon a voyage for its discovery.

He was accompanied by two companions only besides his savage allies, who numbered sixty warriors, with twentyfour canoes. They were Hurons, Algonquins and Montagnais. The Montagnais were a roving tribe of the Algonquin family who inhabited the country of the Saguenay, called by the French the paupers of the wilderness.

After a toilsome passage up the rapids of the Richelieu, Champlain entered the lake-the far-famed "wilderness sea of the Iroquois." It was studded with islands that were clothed in the rich verdure of the early summer; its tranquil waters spreading southward beyond the horizon. From the thickly wooded shores on either side rose ranges of mountains, the highest peaks still white with patches of snow. Over all was flung the soft blue haze, sometimes called mountain smoke, that seemed to temper the sunlight

and shade off the landscape into spectral-like forms of shadowy beauty. Who does not envy the stern old forest ranger his first view of the lake that was destined to bear his name to the latest posterity?

Champlain and his allies proceeded cautiously up the lake, traveling only by night and resting on the shore by day, for they were in the land of the much dreaded Iroquois, the hereditary enemies of the Algonquin nations.

On the morning of the 29th of July, after paddling, as usual, all night, they retired to the western shore of the lake to take their daily rest. The savages were soon stretched along the ground in their slumbers, and Champlain, after a short walk in the woods, laid himself down to sleep upon his bed of fragrant hemlock boughs. He dreamed that he saw a band of Iroquois warriors drowning in the lake. Upon attempting to save them, his Algonquin friends told him that "they were good for nothing, and had better be left to die like dogs." Upon awakening, the Indians, as usual, beset him for his dreams. This was the first dream he had remembered since setting out upon the voyage, and it was considered by his superstitious allies as an auspicious vision. Its relation filled them with joy, and at early nightfall they re-embarked flushed with the hope of an easy victory. Their anticipations were soon to be realized. About ten o'clock in the evening, near what is now Crown Point, they saw dark moving objects upon the lake before them. It was a flotilla of Iroquois canoes. moment more each party of savages saw the other, and their hideous war cries, mingling, pealed along the lonely shores.

In a

The Iroquois landed at once, and barricaded themselves

upon the shore with fallen trees and brush-wood. The Algonquins lashed their canoes together with long poles within a bow-shot of the Iroquois barricade, and danced in them all night their hideous war dances. It was mutually agreed between the hostile bands that the battle should not come off till the morning. At the dawn of day the Algonquins landed, and the Iroquois marched, in single file, from their barricade to meet them, full two hundred strong. They were the boldest, fiercest warriors of the New World, and their tall, lithe forms and noble bearing elicited the warmest admiration of Champlain and his white companions. The chiefs were made conspicuous by their tall plumes. Champlain, who, in the meantime, had been concealed, now advanced to the front, with arquebuse in hand, clad in the metallic armor of the times. The Iroquois warriors, seeing for the first time such a warlike apparition in their path, halted, and stood gazing upon Champlain in mute astonishment. Champlain levelled his arquebuse and fired. One Iroquois chief fell dead, and another rolled lifeless into the bushes at his feet. Then there rose an exulting yell from the Algonquin allies, and clouds of feathery arrows whizzed through the air. But the bold Iroquois, panic-stricken at the strange appearance of a white man clad in glittering armor, and sending forth from his weapons fire, smoke, thunderings and leaden hail, 'soon broke and fled in uncontrollable terror toward their homes on the Mohawk, leaving everything behind them.

The Iroquois afterward became the friends and allies of the English, and this first forest encounter was the forerunner of a long and bloody warfare between the French and the English, and their respective Indian allies, of

which the soil of Northern New York often formed the battle ground.

Four years afterward Champlain made a long journey up the Ottawa River to the country of the Hurons. On his return he discovered Lake Ontario, the name meaning in the Indian tongue, the "Beautiful Lake." He fought another battle with the Iroquois to the south of the lake in Western New York. He explored its shores along the western border of Northern New York, in the vicinity of what was afterward known to the French as La Famine. On his return he passed down the St. Lawrence to his colony at Quebec, thus becoming the first explorer of the Lake of the Thousand Isles.

In 1620 Champlain was made Governor-General of Canada, and died at Quebec in 1635. In 1620 his wife accompanied him to Quebec. Madame de Champlain,* as she was married to him when she was only twelve years of age, was still very young. The Indians, struck with her frail and gentle beauty, paid homage to her as a goddess. "Champlain," says Parkman, "was enamored of the New World, whose rugged charms had seized his fancy and his heart, and as explorers of the Arctic seas have pined in their repose for polar ice and snow, so did he, with restless longing, revert to the fog-wrapped coast, the piney odors of forests, the noise of waters, the sharp, piercing sun-light, so dear to his remembrance. Fain would he unveil the mystery of that boundless wilderness, and plant the Catholic

*Madam de Champlain was Hélène Bouté, daughter of Nicholas Bouté, Secretary of the royal household at Paris. She remained four years in America, returned to France, founded a convent of Ursulines at Meaux, entered it as Sister Helen of St. Augustine, and died there in 1654.