ns, trade and the flag have been inseparable in all lands. The
expedition of 1609 had, however, some results besides the discomfiture
of an Iroquois raiding party. It disclosed to the French a water-route
which led almost to the upper reaches of the Hudson. The spot where
Champlain put the Iroquois to flight is within thirty leagues of
Albany. It was by this route that the French and English came so often
into warring contact during the next one hundred and fifty years.

Explorations, the care of his little settlement at Quebec, trading
operations, and two visits to France occupied Champlain's attention
during the next few years. Down to this time no white man's foot had
ever trodden the vast wilderness beyond the rapids above Hochelaga.
Stories had filtered through concerning great waters far to the West
and North, of hidden minerals there, and of fertile lands. Champlain
was determined to see these things for himself and it was to that end
that he made his two great trips to the interior, in 1613 and 1616,
respectively.

The expedition of 1613 was not a journey of indefinite exploration; it
had a very definite end in view. A few years previously Champlain had
sent into the villages of the Algonquins on the upper Ottawa River a
young Frenchman named Vignau, in order that by living for a time among
these people he might learn their language and become useful as
an interpreter. In 1612 Vignau came back with a marvelous story
concerning a trip which he had made with his Algonquin friends to the
Great North Sea where he had seen the wreck of an English vessel. This
striking news inflamed Champlain's desire to find out whether this was
not the route for which both Cartier and he himself had so eagerly
searched--the western passage to Cathay and the Indies. There is
evidence that the explorer from the first doubted the truth of
Vignau's story, but in 1613 he decided to make sure and started up the
Ottawa River, taking the young man with him to point the way.

After a fatiguing journey the party at length reached the Algonquin
encampment on Allumette Island in the upper Ottawa, where his doubts
were fully confirmed. Vignau, the Algonquins assured Champlain, was an
impostor; he had never been out of their sight, had never seen a Great
North Sea; the English shipwreck was a figment of his imagination.
"Overcome with wrath." writes Champlain, "I had him removed from my
presence, being unable to bear the sight of him." The part