Indians on a
war-path, their appeals to evil spirits to help them against their
enemies, their faith in dreams, and their methods of marching in a
hostile country. The party passed into the beautiful lake which has
ever since that day borne the great Frenchman's name; they saw its
numerous islets, the Adirondacks in the west, and the Green Mountains
in the east. Paddling cautiously for some nights along the western
shore, they reached at last on the evening of the 29th of July a point
of land, identified in later days as the site of Ticonderoga, so
celebrated in the military annals of America. Here they found a party
of Iroquois, who received them with shouts of defiance, but retreated
to the woods for the night with the understanding on both sides that
the fight would take place as soon as the sun rose next morning. The
allies remained in their canoes, dancing, singing, and hurling insults
at their foes, who did not fail to respond with similar demonstrations.

Next morning, two hundred stalwart Iroquois warriors, led by three
chiefs with conspicuous plumes, marched from their barricade of logs
and were met by the Canadian Indians. Champlain immediately fired on
the chiefs with such success that two of {74} them fell dead and the
other was wounded and died later. "Our Indians," writes Champlain,
"shouted triumphantly, and then the arrows began to fly furiously from
both parties. The Iroquois were clearly amazed that two chiefs should
have been so suddenly killed although they were protected from arrows
by a sort of armour made of strong twigs and filled with cotton. While
I was reloading, one of my men, who was not seen by the enemy, fired a
shot from the woods and so frightened the Iroquois, no longer led by
their chiefs, that they lost courage and fled precipitately into the
forest, where we followed and succeeded in killing a number and taking
ten or twelve prisoners. On our side only ten or fifteen were wounded,
and they very soon recovered."

On their return to the St. Lawrence, the Indians gave Champlain an
illustration of their cruelty towards their captives. When they had
harangued the Iroquois and narrated some of the tortures that his
nation had inflicted on the Canadians in previous times, he was told to
sing, and when he did so, as Champlain naively says, "the song was sad
to hear."

A fire was lit, and when it was very hot, the Indians seized a burning
brand and applied it to the naked body o