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The Inland Waterways. Geographical Situation of Montreal. The St. Lawrence Basin. Champlain's Voyages of Exploration. At Montreal Island, 1603. Establishes Place Royale, 1611. Later Journeys.

Here it may be proper, for the later purposes of this book, to pause a while, as it were, with Cartier on the summit of Mount Royal and view with the aid of modern survey and topography the scene around us. The unusual physical features of this exceptional and happy environment make it one of the chief geographical centers of North America.

Its meaning lies in the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa rivers, which here come together with such a great gathering of the waters that no single channel carries it. It forces its way through the higher ground, dividing it into a complex of islands and intervening channels. Down the steeper slopes it gathers into rapids. In the wide hollows that it has itself helped to deepen, the St. Lawrence spreads out into the expansion of Lake St. Louis above the Lachine Rapids and the La Prairie Basin below. On the other side the Ottawa expands into the Lake of the Two Mountains. Of the larger islands formed by these dividing channels there lies farthest south and west, farthest upstream, Isle Perrot, a rough oblong of a length of about seven miles with a maximum breadth of about three. Immediately below it is the main island, the beautiful island of Montreal, thirty miles long from point to point, shaped in a long oval. Side by side with it and so beautifully wooded that in places the eye does not see the dividing Rivière des Prairies is Isle Jésus. On the other side of Isle Jésus runs the similar Rivière des Milles Isles in a wide concave bow from the foot of the Lake of the Two Mountains down to its junction with the Rivière des Prairies at the north end of Montreal Island.

In all this area it is difficult to indicate the direction of the rivers and the lie of the islands by simple reference to the cardinal points of the compass. The compass lies awkwardly across them. The St. Lawrence River in its passage from Lake Ontario to Lachine is moving virtually eastward. But the great rapids give it a throw to the left, and from La Prairie Basin, past the city of Montreal, the river is moving almost due north. Between Montreal and Quebec it flows about northeast, and below Quebec the river and the trend of the Gulf to which it enlarges is more and more directed toward the east. Readers will find that the north and south of Montreal are now called east and west in the perplexing nomenclature of our streets. Visitors to the city must remember that St. Catherine Street East and Sherbrooke Street East run fairly close to north, and that the south shore of the river lies east of the north shore; this is because the north shore got its name away back in Cartier's days from the geography of its mouth at the Gulf, where it really lies north. All such references as the recurrent historical statement that "the harbor of Montreal lies on the north side of the river," must be taken in this sense. As a matter of fact, the Victoria Bridge in crossing the river from the city to St. Lambert on the south shore runs almost northeast and the new Harbour Bridge due east.

The Ottawa where it joins the St. Lawrence has indeed run a strange course. Its sources lie in the wilderness about 160 miles north of the city of Ottawa. It starts off as if it meant to run westward to lake Superior but keeps swinging around until by the time it has reached Ottawa it has completed a vast semi-circle. Inside this enclosed sweep lie its great tributaries, the Coulanges, the Gatineau, the Rivière du Lièvre. At Ottawa it passes without deflection of its course over the roaring "caldron" of the Chaudière Falls, an imposing, almost terrifying sight as seen by Champlain and the early explorers, but now almost buried under the dams, power sites, and bridges of the capital city.

On its exit from the Lake of the Two Mountains the part of the Ottawa that does not join the St. Lawrence above Montreal Island is turned to an easterly course down the Mille Isles and Rivière des Prairies, and beyond Bout de L'Ile joins the main northeast current of the St. Lawrence.

Now the whole area thus described around the confluence of the two great rivers and the enfolded islands is blocked and guarded by rapids by which nature prevented all further navigation from the sea and gave the site its meaning and its history. Explorers coming up the St. Lawrence and reaching the bottom end of the island system (Bout de L'Ile) would naturally, and as a matter of course if guided by Indians, prefer the main channel, the one on their left hand. But some twelve miles up from Bout de L'Ile their course would be impeded—not absolutely blocked—by the broken water of St. Marys current. This is where the island named by Champlain St. Helens Island lies midway in the stream with shallow, rapid water on one side and on the other this fierce St. Marys current, varying with the season, but at times moving at six miles an hour. Boats and canoes could pass it by vigorous rowing, poling, or trekking. But it was obvious and natural to land at the foot of it, as Cartier did on his first discovery of Hochelaga.

But to pass St. Marys current had, in any case, no further meaning than to attain the sheltered water of the natural harbor under the projecting bank and a little island beside it, the original harbor of Montreal. The passage up the St. Lawrence beyond Montreal Island was barred by the vast rapids variously called the Great Sault, the Sault St. Louis, and finally the Lachine Rapids. In spite of the terrifying aspects and the awful roar of the waters of the Great Sault, of which even Champlain was not ashamed to record his fears, canoes and boats under proper guidance could come down in safety. Champlain himself is the first white man on record to have "shot the rapids." Presently it was found that even large steamers could shoot Lachine in safety. The terror of the explorer became the mock terror of the tourist.

Canoes and boats could come down. But nothing could go up except with laborious portaging and trekking. This was the end of real navigation till the nine-mile canal of 1825 left Lachine on one side.

The upward voyage past Montreal, behind the island by the Rivière des Prairies and the Rivière des Milles Isles, is similarly blocked. There are heavy rapids near the bottom end of the Rivière des Prairies, and halfway up its course is the famous and tumultuous Sault au Recollet. It is so called in memory of the tragic drowning of a Recollet friar in 1625, drowned in sight of his Indian flock, with or without their assistance. The Rivière des Milles Isles is blocked by great rapids beside the Isle St. Jean and Terrebonne.

At the upper end of the island system, where the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence connect, are the famous Rapids of St. Anne. Montreal is thus a full stop.

But it is a full stop, then as now, only for a new start. Even the liveliest imagination cannot readily realize what a concourse of waters, what a multitude of inland waterways are represented by these colossal converging streams. Here was to the acute eye of a Champlain the key to the continent. Nor is it a bygone key to a rusted lock. For the course of North American history has turned a full cycle, and the whole question of the St. Lawrence is up again with the discussion of the continental seaway. This magnificent project, to turn a dream to a reality, is already a matter of international agreement, postponed only by the present war. In the hope of many of us it will stand as one of the huge enterprises of constructive peace that will help to obliterate the ravages of war. Hence the facts behind it are as much front-page matter to us as they were to Cartier, Champlain, and La Salle.

The St. Lawrence River when it reaches Montreal has already drained all the Great Lakes. One of the strangest physical features of our continent is that the Great Lakes, an area of nearly 100,000 square miles, are fed almost entirely by rainfall and snow. The rivers that come into them are so short, the watersheds so relatively narrow, that only six miles from Lake Erie there are streams that start to flow to the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Ohio. The Des Plaines River, bound the same way via the Mississippi, rises only four miles west of Lake Michigan. Even on the north side, where Lake Nipigon drains to Lake Superior, it is only ten miles from Lake Nipigon to where the rivers start for James Bay. Apart from the minor tribute of rivers in western Ontario, the Great Lakes, as said, are fed only by precipitation. Yet their depth is so great, all but Lake Erie reaching far below the bottom of the sea, that this vast unaided reservoir keeps Niagara falling. Strangely enough, modern engineering now sets its hand to correct this unfair competition of the watersheds and to turn the waters from the wasted tumult of the empty North to the broad bosom of the Great Lakes, mother of man's industry. That is a far cry from the Montreal of Champlain but a vital concern to the seaport of today.

Nor does the glory of the volume of the St. Lawrence end with the island of Montreal. Passing down, it receives at Sorel, forty-three miles below, the flood of the Richelieu, the Rivière des Algonquins, which has drained Lake Champlain and all the country south to where the headwaters of the Hudson and the Mohawk dispute to carry it down the Hudson to the Atlantic. All these rivers and lakes, trails and portages connect in the retrospect of history with over two centuries of the dark shadows of conflict and war and with one in the bright daylight of peace and good will.

On the south side below the Richelieu are the lesser rivers, the St. Francis, Yamaska, Nicolet, and Ste. Croix.

The north side pays an even fuller tribute. The St. Maurice, whose sources rise beside the sources of the Ottawa but avoid its western aberration, comes into the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers, thus making with the course of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence a sort of huge circle, and with it an inner chain of communication, known and used by the Indians, especially when the ravages of the Iroquois endangered the main river sources. Another great river joining the St. Lawrence from the north is the Batiscan. But all that they add to the St. Lawrence is eclipsed by the great flood of the Saguenay. This vast river, whose very name is mystery, has come down 112 miles from Lake St. John that lies north and a little west of Quebec. This lake is fed by streams from the north and the northwest that have come down hundreds of miles from where the watershed turns to Hudson Bay and Ungava. Here, straight from the north, is the Peribonka (a river of some 400 miles in length), now a part of the world's literature as the home of Maria Chapdelaine. Westward the huge river Ashuapmuchuan still offers its majestic name to a newer heroine. Some distance below the Saguenay begins the desolate territory and the north shore, Jacques Cartier's land of Cain.

All this vast vision of the waters of the past, the present, and the future—legend, history, and dreams—is spread out before us as we stand on Mount Royal. And now, equipped as Cartier never was, we may come down from the mountain.

A man now comes on the scene of American history in the person of Samuel de Champlain, who did more than any other single person toward opening up these inland waterways of the continent. Exploration and discovery had fallen virtually asleep since Cartier's time, but private interest had kept awake. The fisheries of the Newfoundland coast had greatly increased, with not only Breton and Norman sailors, but with a large English fleet out of Bristol and with Spaniards and Basques from the little port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a place older in its people and language than all record, a fishing port for centuries, a theater of war from the days of Henry of Navarre to those of the Duke of Wellington, yesterday a drowsy little watering place, and now again caught up in the fate of Europe.

The fishermen pushed farther and farther into the Gulf and adjacent waters. The furs brought down by the Indians opened a new trade. Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, became each summer the gathering place of canoes and ships. But each attempt to make winter settlement as yet meant death in that bleak region. All this trade in fish and furs was carried on as a "free trade" by the private ventures of the merchants and pilots of the ports or by associated groups of them. Many persons of rank and court influence were interested. The fisheries remained an open trade, but monopolies were obtained from the Crown for the trade in furs and merchandise in the "River of Canada" and successively broke down. Such a commission of exclusive trade, on condition of settlement, was given to François Gravé Sieur du Pont, written also as Dupont-Gravé. He made a voyage to Tadoussac in 1600, planned greater things to follow, and in 1603 sent out Samuel de Champlain to search for a better site than Tadoussac.

Samuel de Champlain was of Brouage, a Bay of Biscay port, a sailor from his childhood, a sea pilot of exceptional knowledge for his day. He had made a two-year West Indian voyage, had written an account of it, and enjoyed a rising reputation. He was a devout Christian but a practical man too. There is a passage in his Narrative of the Third Voyage (1611), evidently meant for the eye of King Louis XIII, since it argues the need of funds, expressing the hope of "bringing many poor tribes to the knowledge of our faith in order that later on they may enjoy the heavenly kingdom." Meantime he helped some of the Iroquois on their way there with a harquebus.

With this voyage of 1603 begin the comings and goings of Champlain to Canada that extend over thirty years, that took him from the Bay of Fundy to the Georgian Bay, from the Richelieu to Lake Champlain, from New York State to Lakes Ontario and Simcoe. He made in all thirteen voyages out and twelve voyages back, ending his life at Quebec where his remains now lie.

Champlain first landed at Tadoussac where he met a great assemblage of savages, a war party making ready to attack the Iroquois. To these he promised the help of France.

It has been said that Champlain was not the first to offer such an alliance. Yet in this initial error of Indian policy there lay for French Canada the source of as many woes as those which brought down Troy. There is here the key to our North American history, the fate of a continent. For the future settlements, as at Montreal, it meant a half century of ever-present danger and the hideous massacre of the summer of 1689, the "Indian Summer" of Lachine. All of this, of course, was veiled from Champlain, but the historical background is plain enough to us.[7]

But at any rate here at Tadoussac, at the very opening of Champlain's career, we have the first illustration of that extraordinary instinct for geography which made him able, as it were, to divine the secrets of the unseen waterways of America. From his conversation with the savages he was able to plot our the region north and west of the Saguenay. It is strange to realize that the region of the Mistassini country remains almost unknown to the geography of ordinary people even now; or at least it was so till the day of the gold mines and the airplane in Canada. Much of it is shown on the new hydrographic maps to be an inconceivable tangle of thousands of small lakes and islands. Yet Champlain reconstructed its broad features; the course of the Saguenay; Lake St. John, its great tributaries leading to a farther watershed; the distances all estimated: so many portages, so many days . . . "a lake two days to cross" . . . "they can easily make 11 to 15 leagues in a day" (thirty to thirty-seven miles). . . . At the divide, so he was told, they met other Indians. . . . "These said savages from the north say that they are in sight of a sea which is salt. I hold that if this be so, it is some gulf of this our sea which overflows from the north into the midst of the continent; and indeed it can be nothing else."

Thus did Champlain "discover" the Hudson Bay some nine years before he read in a printed book the story of Henry Hudson's final and fatal voyage of 1611.

From Tadoussac, Champlain, accompanied by Dupont, passed on to inland discovery. "On the eighteenth of June," he writes, "we set out from Tadoussac to go to the Sault." This—the Rapid, or the Great Rapid—was the name widely current since Cartier's time for the Lachine Rapids, the great central point of inland intercourse. Champlain passed through and specially noted "the narrows," which the Indians called, as they still can any narrows, Kebek. The French spelling of the word long obscured for French people its Indian origin and for English people its Indian pronunciation. Champlain speaks of a waterfall from the top of a mountain (Montmorency) and of the beautiful trees, but of Stadacona not a word, either of name or settlement. It seems to have vanished.

As Champlain went up the river above Quebec he came to a place which he said was the farthest limit of Jacques Cartier's ascent. In reality he was only at the river now called Jacques Cartier, thirty-five miles above Quebec. Cartier had said that at that point there was a place called Hochelay. The name had appeared with various spellings, Ochelay, Achelay, or Hochelay, in several maps before Champlain's voyage. Champlain at this time knew of Cartier's voyage only by hearsay, and it seems likely that he confused Hochelay with Hochelaga, though he mentions neither. If so this would help to explain why he never looked for the real Hochelaga up above.

All about him in this untroubled summer voyage was the beauty of the St. Lawrence. The farther he went, so he reports, "the finer was the country" . . . "trees like walnut trees" . . . "islands pleasant and fertile." Then came the broad stretch of Lake Peter; at the head of it "thirty small islands . . . with many vines on them." Above the lake Champlain found the incoming of the Richelieu River, called by his guides the River of the Iroquois, since it comes down out of their country. He tried to ascend it but was blocked by the rapids of St. Ours fourteen miles up, now flooded over by a dam. Champlain turned back to the main river, ascended another forty-three miles, noting the beauty of the south shore, the islands, and the beautiful open woods in the lowlands, the clustered fruits, "good and pleasant with many meadows," and thus to the island of Montreal at St. Marys current, where Cartier had made his landing sixty-eight years before. With a fair wind astern, Champlain's boats (a shallop and skiff) passed this current and made their way along the shore to the shelter of a little island close to shore and offering protection against the current out in the river. This little island was later to be called the Ilot Normandin and then Market Gate Island, and the sheltered water between it and the shore was, as already said, the original Montreal Harbour. Later the island disappeared under the quays and the docks of the port. Here they came to anchor and went ashore. Then Champlain and Dupont, with Indian guides, made their way some distance farther up in their skiff and, when that failed, went on foot to the Great Sault (Lachine) and beyond.

From what he thus saw and from what the Indians told him Champlain not only gives an accurate description of the vicinity of Montreal but a marvelous reconstruction of what was beyond and above, all the way to Lake Huron. He writes with no reference to Cartier's voyage, to his "Mount Royal" and his "Hochelaga." He explains it all from the beginning. "There are two large islands, one on the north side some fifteen leagues long and almost as many broad which extends beyond the rapid." This is the island of Montreal. Jacques Cartier had not recognized it as such. It is thirty-six miles at the longest, nine at the widest; Champlain makes it thirty-six miles long, a close estimate; for the breadth, no doubt, he perhaps took the doubled islands (Montreal and Jesus), thickly wooded, for one. Champlain's island to the south is Isle Perrot. Montrealers think of it as west of them, but it lies due south of the upper end of Montreal Island.

Champlain describes, without names, the La Prairie Basin, St. Pauls (otherwise Nuns) Island, and Isle Ronde lower down. He speaks of a mountain (of course Mount Royal) "visible from very far in the interior." He describes the Lachine Rapids with something of a mixture of wonder and awe. Indeed in a later visit, when his companion Louis was drowned there, he says that the sight of them "made his hair stand on end." Beyond the rapids he could not go. He took the latitude as forty-five degrees and some minutes north. "We saw we could do no more," he said; "we returned to our shallop," at the harbor. Here he questioned the Indians and "made them draw by hand." He gathered that beyond this first rapid (Lachine) they go ten or fifteen leagues to a river in the country of the Algonquins (the Ottawa). Farther up the St. Lawrence, beyond where the Ottawa comes in, Champlain traces, with an extraordinary approach to truth, all the difficult succession of rapids, portages, and open lakes which lie between Montreal and Lake Ontario. For example, he indicates Lake St. Francis, the great expansion of the river between Valleyfield and Cornwall; makes it thirty-six miles long (actually twenty-six), and gives the length of the principal rapids and whether or not canoes must be portaged or can be paddled. Beyond all this stretch of river and rapid, he writes, is a lake that is eighty leagues (192 miles) long; at the upper end of it the water is far less cold and the winter mild. This, of course, is Lake Ontario (197 miles long), which Champlain himself was later to discover. At the upper end is Burlington Bay with water far less cold than in Lower Canada. Beyond this is a somewhat high waterfall, continues Champlain, where but little water flows. This is evidently a confusion of what the Indians said. Niagara at times runs dry, and in any case the crest of the falls looks flat beside Lachine. Beyond this is another lake—Lake Erie—sixty leagues long (144 miles; actually 250), then a strait—our Detroit. Beyond that, the Indians said, was a great lake, but they had never seen the other side of it, a lake "so vast that they will not venture to put out into it."

This was, surely, Lake Huron, where the knowledge of the Canadian Indians ended. They said that the sun in summer sets north of it and that "the water there is very salt like that of our own sea." This "salt" no doubt was a mistake, arising from the salt of Hudson or James Bay connected by river and portage with Lake Huron. But Champlain naturally says, "This makes me believe that this is the South Sea. Nevertheless," he adds, "we must not give too much credence to this view."

It is a strange thing, as already indicated, that in none of these discussions does Champlain mention Hochelaga. He doesn't say that it had gone. He just ignores it.

Champlain's first voyage thus ended with information that made him eager to pursue inland discovery. But for a time other tasks absorbed him. His next journey (in 1604) was taken up with the exploration of the Bay of Fundy and the adjacent coasts and with his foundation of Port Royal, near by the present Annapolis, a lost paradise of peace and plenty, embowered in orchards and gardens, enlivened in winter by the food and merriment of the "Order of Good Cheer"—too bright to last. Then came his foundation of Quebec, 1608, and with it the first permanent settlers in French Canada and a strategic center on which turned the fate of North America. Yet Champlain's famous "habitation of Quebec" remained for years rather a fort with a winter garrison than a real colony. Not till 1617 appears the record of Louis Hébert, the first settler to bring out a family. Even at that the number of French wintering in New France, down till Champlain's death in 1635, was only about a hundred. New France for its first century was little more than a vast project which, to the very end, its limited population rendered futile.

The foundation of Quebec was followed by Champlain's participation with his Indian associates, Algonquins and Hurons, in their war against the Iroquois, now spreading their ravages far and wide. As has been said, this ill-chosen policy was to bring evil results for Montreal and for French Canada. For the moment it meant the temporary discomfiture of the Iroquois by a handful of Frenchmen using firearms.

Champlain had never lost from his mind the Great Sault (Lachine) and the lake and river route these opened to the South Sea. But it was not till 1611 that he was able to attempt a definite establishment at what we now call Montreal. He left France (Honfleur) early in the season (March 1611) but merely learned thereby the full meaning of the St. Lawrence ice. It took two months and a half to reach Tadoussac. From there in a shallop (longboat) he made his way up the river to Montreal Island, to the little harbor behind the island disclosed in his first visit. At that point a little river, rising in a pond or small lake near Lachine, ran down the sunken hollow that later was to hold the Lachine Canal. It fell into the main river just opposite the little island already mentioned (Ilot Normandin—Market Gate Island). Close to its mouth it was joined by little streams that then ran down what is now Craig Street, and from the mountainside flow streams, such as the Burnside of James McGill, that now sparkle and murmur but a brief moment to fall to the dark pollution of the city sewers.

Round this pleasant meeting place of forgotten waters was a stretch of smooth and fertile meadowland where once the Indians of Hochelaga had grown their winter corn. The inroads of war had long since returned it to desolation. Here Champlain laid out his settlement, Place Royale, as he named it. Champlain was fascinated with the place. "There are fine meadows," he said, "which would feed as many cattle as one could wish; all the varieties of wood which we have in our forest of France with vines and butternuts, plums, cherries and strawberries . . . and an abundance of fish . . . and game birds." Champlain ordered trees cut, a building to be erected on the little island, and fields prepared. He tested the clay of the ground for brickmaking and built a wall (an embankment or levee) ten yards long, four feet high, and thus twelve feet above the summer water, to see how it would be effective against the flood season. This scientific and experimental attitude appears in Champlain throughout. Especially he took note of the possibility of a walled town on a larger lower island, still called, as he christened it, by his wife's name, St. Helens Island.

Dupont joined him from Tadoussac with a large company of free traders attracted at once by the rumor of a new center of trade. Champlain sent out Indian messengers to summon their companions to the place. On the thirteenth of June (1611) a large concourse of Hurons came down from the Ottawa country. There was the usual tumultuous welcome, shouting and noise of firearms and the inevitable Indian oratory. These Indians gave Champlain a hundred beaver skins and eagerly asked for his friendship.

The Iroquois had now become an ever-present menace. Many savages were afraid to come down to the Sault for fear of them. A rumor had been treacherously spread that Champlain was going to go over to the Iroquois. As for the French traders, the Indians trusted them not at all; they rightly saw in them reckless, adventurous men, looking for gain, with no common purpose. Champlain reassured the Indians; he would ask the King for fifty men equipped with firearms; he would protect them if they were willing to show him their country. He hoped to find, with their help, the way to the South Sea. "I had much conversation with them," he said, "regarding the source of the Great River" (the St. Lawrence), ". . . the rivers, falls, lakes and lands." Some of the Indians claimed to have seen a great sea to the west, far away, difficult to reach. Champlain remained at and around Place Royale from the twenty-eighth of May till the eighteenth of July. It was during this sojourn that Champlain's companion, a servant of De Monts called Louis (we have no other name for him), was drowned in the Lachine Rapids, frequently henceforth called the Sault St. Louis, either in his memory or in honor of King Louis XIII. Bands of Indians kept coming down, but the distrust and the fear of the Iroquois hindered trade. Champlain, promising to return, left on July 18; his shallop flew with the wind and current in a single day from Place Royale harbor to Three Rivers, seventy-seven miles below. Such were the varying fortunes of travel, for a week's voyage perhaps a day's return, or for a day a week. Champlain reached La Rochelle September 11, 1611.

This was to all intents and purposes Champlain's last connection with Place Royale. In his journeys of 1613 and 1615 he came and went to Montreal Island but never found time to prosecute the development of the fort and settlement he had planned. Had he done so the history of Canada might have received a forward development of far-reaching consequences. But Champlain's mind was set on exploration. While in France in 1612 he heard the news of the discovery of the great inland sea, since called the Hudson Bay. This, we must remember, was a one-sided discovery, not of a closed sea locked in with rugged shores, as it turned out to be, but apparently of a great sea all open to the west. Hudson's men who marooned him and came home had seen only the eastern side. Not till the voyages of Captains Fox and James (1631) was the sea known to be closed.

Champlain, therefore, on his next voyage went past Montreal Island up the Ottawa on a fruitless search for this great sea. After that there came the most famous voyage of all, which took him up the Ottawa, hence to the Georgian Bay, Lake Simcoe, and central Ontario and brought the discovery of Lake Ontario itself. On this journey again Champlain pursued his fatal policy of attempting to lead his insignificant forces and his doubtful allies against the Iroquois. He abandoned exploration for war, crossed Lake Ontario, and, in the Iroquois country itself (New York State), led an attack against the stockade at Onondaga, near Oneida Lake. The attack failed. Champlain was successfully carried away, wounded. He wintered in the lodges of the Hurons, in the Lake Simcoe and Lake Huron country. He meant to strike out west to the great sea in 1616. Indian war prevented this. He came down past Montreal and so to Quebec July 11, 1616.

It is said in defense of Champlain's war on the Iroquois that he found this policy all set on his first arrival at Tadoussac in 1603; also that he would have succeeded and driven out the Iroquois forever if the King would only have given the soldiers for the work; one regiment would have been enough—nothing as beside the army of France. This plea Champlain continued all his life.

When the English took Quebec in the war of 1629—it was held by only a starving garrison of sixteen men—Champlain became a prisoner, was taken to England, released at the peace of 1632, to return to Quebec in 1633, and there to die on Christmas Day, 1635.