n the British Museum.
This map, like so many of the older charts, is drawn upside down, the
South being at the top and the East on the left, while the Panama Isthmus
is at the bottom on the right. The river above the "Lake of Manoa"
is the Amazon.]

CHAPTER XL

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
afflict