At the close of the banquet every one danced, with the skulls of their Iroquois enemies slung over their backs. As they danced they slapped their knees with their hands, and shouted: "Ho! ho! ho!" till they were out of breath.
The huts of these Indians were low and made like tents, being covered with the bark of the birch tree. An opening about a foot of the top was left uncovered to admit light and to allow the smoke to escape. Though low, the huts were sometimes quite large, and would accommodate ten families. These slept higgledy-piggledy on skins, with their dogs amongst them. The dogs in appearance were something like what we know as Eskimo dogs, and also rather resembled the Chinese chow, with broad heads and rather short muzzles, prick ears, and a tail inclined to curl over the back. "All these people have a very cheerful disposition, laughing often, yet at the same time they are somewhat phlegmatic. They talk very deliberately, as if desiring to make themselves well understood, and, stopping suddenly, they reflect for a long time, when they resume their discourse."
They were agile, well-proportioned people, who in the summertime went about nearly naked, but in the winter were covered with good furs of elk, otter, beaver, bear, seal, and deer. The colour of their skin was usually a pale olive, but the women for some reason made themselves much darker-skinned than the men by rubbing their bodies with pigments which turned them to a dark brown. At times they suffered very much from lack of food, being obliged then to frequent the shore of the river or gulf to obtain shellfish. When pressed very hard by famine they would eat their dogs (their only domestic animal) and even the leather of the skins with which they clothed themselves. In the autumn they were much given to fishing for eels, and they dried a good deal of eel flesh, to last them through the winter. During the height of the winter they hunted the beaver, and later on the elk. Though they ate wild roots and fruits whenever they could obtain them, they do not seem to have cultivated any grain or vegetables. In the early spring they were sometimes dying of hunger, and looked so thin and haggard that they were mere walking skeletons. They were then ready to eat carrion that was putrid, so that it is little wonder that they suffered much from scurvy.
Yet the rivers and the gulf abounded in fish, and as soon as the waters were unlocked by the melting of the ice in April, the surviving Indians rapidly grew fat and well, and of course the late summer and the autumn brought them nuts (hickory and other kinds of walnut, and hazel nuts), wild cherries, wild plums, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, currants,[5] cranberries, and grapes.
Champlain observed amongst them for the first time the far-famed Amerindian snowshoes, which he compares very aptly for shape to a racquet used in tennis.
Champlain next visited the site of Stadacona, but there was no longer any settlement of Europeans at that place, nor were the native Amerindians the descendants of the Hurons that had received Jacques Cartier. For the first time the name Quebec (pronounced Kebek) is applied to this point where the great River St. Lawrence narrows before dividing to encircle the Isle of Orleans. In fact, Quebec meant in the Algonkin speech a place where a river narrows; for a tribe of the great Algonkin family, the Algonkins, allied to the tribes of Maine and New Brunswick, had replaced the Hurons as the native inhabitants of this region.
On the shore of Quebec he noticed "diamonds" in some slate rocks—no doubt quartz crystals. Proceeding on up the River St. Lawrence he observed the extensive woods of fir and cypress (some kind of Thuja or Juniper), the undergrowth of vines, "wild pears", hazel nuts, cherries, red currants and green currants, and "certain little radishes of the size of a small nut, resembling truffles in taste, which are very good when roasted or boiled". As they advanced towards the interior the country became increasingly mountainous on the south (the green mountains of New Hampshire), and was more and more beautiful—"the pleasantest land yet seen". Landing on the south bank of the St. Lawrence, west of the entrance of the river of the Iroquois (the Richelieu), he found magnificent forests, which, besides the trees already mentioned, included oaks, chestnuts, maples, pines, walnut-like nut trees,[6] aspens, poplars, and beeches; with climbing hops and vines, strawberries trailing over the ground, and raspberry canes and currant bushes "growing in the thick grass". These splendid woods on the islands and banks of the broad river were full of game: elks,[7] wapiti deer, Virginian deer, bears, porcupines, hares, foxes, beavers, otters, and musk rats, besides many animals he could not recognize.
At last his little expedition in "a skiff and canoe" had to draw into the bank, warned by the noise that they were approaching a great fall of water—the La Chine or St. Louis Rapids. Champlain wrote: "I saw, to my astonishment, a torrent of water descending with an impetuosity such as I have never before witnessed. … It descends as if in steps, and at each descent there is a remarkable boiling, owing to the force and swiftness with which the water traverses the fall, which is about a league in length. … The territory on the side of the fall where we went overland consists, so far as we saw it, of very open wood, where one can go with his armour without much difficulty."
From the Algonkin Indians in the neighbourhood of these St. Louis Rapids, and also from those living near Quebec, Champlain obtained a good deal of geographical information to add to his own observations. He was given an idea, more or less correct, of Lake Ontario, the Falls of Niagara, Lake Erie and Lake Huron, and perhaps also of Lake Superior, a sea so vast, said the Amerindians, that the sun set on its horizon. This sheet of water, Champlain calculated, must be 1200 miles distant to the west, and therefore identical with the "Mer du sud" (Pacific Ocean), which all North-American explorers for three centuries wished to reach.
After collecting much information about possible copper mines in the regions north and south of the Lower St. Lawrence, and of silver[8] in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, and a terrible story which he more than half believed about a monster of prodigious size, the Gougou,[9] Champlain set sail for France at the end of August, 1603.
In April, 1604, Champlain accompanied the Sieur de Monts (who had succeeded the dead Amyard de Chastes as head of a chartered fur-trading association) in a fresh expedition to North America, together with a hundred and twenty artisans and several noblemen. They were to occupy the lands of "Cadie" (Acadia, Nova Scotia), Canada, and other places in New France. De Monts thought Tadoussac and Quebec too cold in wintertime, and preferred the sunnier east coast regions. He aimed indeed at colonizing what is now New England.
On the way to Nova Scotia, the expedition was nearly wrecked on Sable Island, about one hundred and twenty miles south of Cape Breton Island, and noticed there the large red cattle run wild from the bulls and cows landed on Sable Island by the Portuguese some sixty years earlier. (The Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries deserved well of humanity for the generous way in which they left cattle, goats, pigs, and rabbits to run wild on desert islands and serve as provender for shipwrecked mariners like Robinson Crusoe.) Champlain also speaks of the "fine large black foxes" which he and other voyagers noticed on Sable Island. How they came there is a mystery, unless the island had once been part of the mainland.
This same Sable Island had been the scene of an extraordinary experiment at the end of the previous century. In 1598 the Marquis de la Roche, given a commission to colonize New France, sailed in a small ship for North America with sixty convicts from French prisons as colonists. He landed them on Sable Island, and went away to look for some good site for his colony. But then a storm arose, and his little ship was literally blown back to France. The convicts, abandoned thus, built themselves shelters out of