captain in the royal navy, where he himself
seems also to have served, though during the war he had fought for the
King in Brittany, under the banners of D'Aumont, St. Luc, and Brissac.
His purse was small, his merit great; and Henry the Fourth out of his
own slender revenues had given him a pension to maintain him near his
person. But rest was penance to him. The war in Brittany was over. The
rebellious Duc de Mercaeur was reduced to obedience, and the royal army
disbanded. Champlain, his occupation gone, conceived a design consonant
with his adventurous nature. He would visit the West Indies, and bring
back to the King a report of those regions of mystery whence Spanish
jealousy excluded foreigners, and where every intruding Frenchman was
threatened with death. Here much knowledge was to be won and much peril
to be met. The joint attraction was resistless.

The Spaniards, allies of the vanquished Leaguers, were about to evacuate
Blavet, their last stronghold in Brittany. Thither Champlain repaired;
and here he found an uncle, who had charge of the French fleet destined
to take on board the Spanish garrison. Champlain embarked with them,
and, reaching Cadiz, succeeded, with the aid of his relative, who
had just accepted the post of Pilot-General of the Spanish marine, in
gaining command of one of the ships about to sail for the West Indies
under Don Francisco Colombo.

At Dieppe there is a curious old manuscript, in clear, decisive, and
somewhat formal handwriting of the sixteenth century, garnished with
sixty-one colored pictures, in a style of art which a child of ten might
emulate. Here one may see ports, harbors, islands, and rivers, adorned
with portraitures of birds, beasts, and fishes thereto pertaining. Here
are Indian feasts and dances; Indians flogged by priests for not going
to mass; Indians burned alive for heresy, six in one fire; Indians
working the silver mines. Here, too, are descriptions of natural
objects, each with its illustrative sketch, some drawn from life and
some from memory,--as, for example, a chameleon with two legs; others
from hearsay, among which is the portrait of the griffin said to haunt
certain districts of Mexico,--a monster with the wings of a bat, the
head of an eagle, and the tail of an alligator.

This is Champlain's journal, written and illustrated by his own hand, in
that defiance of perspective and absolute independence of the canons of
art which mark the earliest efforts of