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 party went no further, but returned to Quebec.  As for the impostor, the generosity of his leader in the end allowed him to go unpunished.  Though the expedition had been in one sense a fool’s errand and Champlain felt himself badly duped, yet it was not without its usefulness, for it gave him an opportunity to learn much concerning the methods of wilderness travel, the customs of the Indians and the extent to which they might be relied upon.  The Algonquins and the Hurons had proved their friendship, but what they most desired, it now appeared, was that the French should give them substantial aid in another expedition against the Iroquois.