important schemes of colonisation and trade in the western lands. The
sovereign of France was Henry the Fourth, the intrepid Prince of Bearn,
as brave a soldier as he was a sagacious statesman. Henry listened
favourably--though his able minister, Sully, held different views--to
the schemes for opening up Canada to commerce and settlement that were
laid before him by an old veteran of the wars, and a staunch friend,
Aymar de Chastes, governor of Dieppe. Pontgrave, a rich Breton
merchant of St. Malo, had the charge of the two vessels which left
France in the spring of 1603, but it is a fact that a great man, Samuel
Champlain, accompanied the {49} expedition that gives the chief
interest to the voyage. Champlain, who was destined to be the founder
of New France, was a native of Brouage in the Bay of Biscay, and
belonged to a family of fishermen. During the war of the League he
served in the army of Henry the Third, but when Henry of Navarre was
proclaimed King of France on the assassination of his predecessor, and
abjured the Protestant faith of which he had previously been the
champion, Champlain, like other Frenchmen, who had followed the Duke of
Guise, became an ardent supporter of the new regime and eventually a
favourite of the Bernese prince. He visited the West Indies in a
Spanish ship and made himself well acquainted with Mexico and other
countries bordering on the Gulf. He has described all his voyages to
the Indies and Canada in quaint quarto volumes, now very rare, and
valuable on account of their minute and truthful narrative--despite his
lively and credulous imagination--and the drawings and maps which he
made rudely of the places he saw. His accounts of the Indians of
Canada are among the most valuable that have come to us from the early
days of American history. He had a fair knowledge of natural history
for those times, though he believed in Mexican griffins, and was versed
in geography and cartography.

In 1603 Pontgrave and Champlain ascended the River St. Lawrence as far
as the island of Montreal, where they found only a few wandering
Algonquins of the Ottawa and its tributaries, in place of the people
who had inhabited the town of Hochelaga in the days of Cartier's
visits. Champlain attempted to {50} pass the Lachine rapids but was
soon forced to give up the perilous and impossible venture. During
this voyage he explored the Saguenay for a considerable distance, and
was able to add largely to