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.

CHAPTER XLI

EARLY DISCOVERERS OF AUSTRALIA

While the French and English were feverishly seeking a way to the East,
either by the North Pole or by way of America, the Dutch were busy
discovering a new land in the Southern Seas.

And as we have seen America emerging from the mist of ages in the
sixteenth century, so now in the seventeenth we have the great Island
Continent of Australia mysteriously appearing bit by bit out of the
yet little-known Sea of the South. There is little doubt that both
Portuguese and Spanish had touched on the western coast early in the
sixteenth century, but gave no information about it beyond sketching
certain rough and undefined patches of land and calling it Terra
Australis in their early maps; no one seems to have thought this
mysterious land of much importance. The maritime nations of tha