“I marched twenty paces in advance of the rest” (wrote Champlain) “till I was within about thirty paces of the Iroquois....  I rested my musket against my cheek, and aimed directly at one of the three chiefs.  With the same shot two fell to the ground, and one of their men was so wounded that he died some time afterwards.  I had loaded my musket with four balls.  When they saw I had shot so favourably for them, they (the Algonkins and Hurons) raised such loud cries that one could not have heard it thunder.

“Meantime the arrows flew on both sides.  The Iroquois were greatly astonished that two men had been so quickly killed, though they were equipped with armour woven from copper thread and with wood, which was proof against their arrows.”

Whilst Champlain was loading to fire again one of his two companions fired a shot from the woods, whereupon the Iroquois took to flight, abandoning their camp and fort.  As they fled they threw off their armour of wooden boards and cotton cloth.

As to the way in which the Hurons tortured their Iroquois prisoners, Champlain writes of one instance.

“They commanded him (the prisoner) to sing, if he had courage, which he did, but it was a very sad song.”  The Hurons kindled a fire, and when it was well alight they each took a brand from the blaze, the end of which was red-hot, and with this burnt the bodies of their prisoners tied to stakes.  Every now and then they stopped and threw water over them to restore them from fainting.  Then they tore out their finger nails and applied fire to the extremities of the fingers.  After that they tore the scalps off their heads, and poured over the raw and bleeding flesh a kind of hot gum.  Then they pierced the arms of the prisoners near the wrists, and drew up their sinews with sticks inserted underneath, trying to tear them out by force, and, if failing, cutting them.  One poor wretch “uttered such terrible cries that it excited my pity to see him treated in this manner, yet at other times he showed such firmness that one would have said he suffered scarcely any pain at all”.

In this case Champlain, seeing that the man could not recover from his injuries, drew apart and shot him dead, “thus putting an end to all the tortures he would have suffered”.

But the savage Hurons were not yet satisfied.  They opened the corpse and threw its entrails into the lake.  Then they cut off head, arms, and legs, and cut out the heart; this they minced up, and endeavoured to force the other prisoners to eat it.

With those of his allies who were Montagnais Indians from Tadoussac, Champlain returned to that place.  As they neared the shore the Montagnais women undressed themselves, jumped into the river, and swam to the prows of the canoes, from which they took the heads of the slain Iroquois.  These they hung about their necks as if they had been some costly chain, singing and dancing meanwhile.

However, in spite of these and other horrors, Champlain had “separated from his Upper Canadian allies with loud protestations of mutual friendship”, promising to go again into their country and assist them with continued “fraternal” relations.