to have entered upon a period of protracted peace, he determined to become an explorer.  In 1728, when he was commandant of the trading post of Nipigon, to the north of Lake Superior, he heard from an Indian that there was a great lake beyond Lake Superior, out of which flowed a river towards the west, which ultimately led to a great salt lake where the water ebbed and flowed.  As a matter of fact, these stories simply referred to Lake Winnipeg, but the importance of them lay in the fact that they acted as a powerful incentive to La Verendrye to push his explorations westwards, and perhaps discover a route to the Pacific Ocean.[13]

[Footnote 13:  The water of Lake Winnipeg—­whatever it may be now—­was frequently stated by Amerindians in earlier days to be “stinking water”, or salt, brackish water, disagreeable to drink, and this lake exhibits a curious phenomenon of a regular rise and fall, reminding the observer of a tide, a phenomenon by no means confined to Lake Winnipeg, but occurring on sheets of water of much smaller extent.]

La Verendrye afterwards went to Quebec, where he discussed his plans for Western exploration with the Governor of New France, the Marquis de Beauharnais, who was a distant connection of the Beauharnais family from which sprang the first husband of the Empress Josephine, the grandfather of Napoleon III.

This Governor entered into his scheme with enthusiasm, though he could obtain little or no money from the ministers of Louis XVI.  But a way out of the difficulty was found by the Governor giving La Verendrye the monopoly of the fur trade in the far North-West.[14] This monopoly enabled La Verendrye to obtain the funds for his expenditure from the merchants of Montreal, and in the summer of 1731 he started out on his explorations, accompanied by three of his sons, his nephew, fifty soldiers and French Canadian canoe men, and a Jesuit missionary.  For a guide they had the Indian, Oshagash, who had first told La Verendrye of the western river and the salt water.  After many delays, necessitated by the need for trading in furs to satisfy the merchants of Montreal, La Verendrye and his expedition skated on snowshoes down the ice of the Winnipeg River and reached the shores of Lake Winnipeg.  They were probably the first white men to arrive there.  La Verendrye established forts and posts along his route from Lake Nipigon, but his expedition had not been a commercial success.  There was a deficit of L1700 between the amount realized in furs and the cost of the equipment and wages of the French and French Canadians.  De Beauharnais made a fresh appeal to the French Court; he urged that the expenditure to convey La Verendrye’s expedition to the Pacific Ocean would not be a large one—­perhaps only L1500.

[Footnote 14:  What we should call to-day a “concession".]

But the French Court was obdurate; it would not furnish a penny.  Thus La Verendrye, in all probability, was prevented from forestalling the British explorers of sixty and seventy years later, besides the expeditions of Captain Cook and Captain Vancouver, which secured for Great Britain a foothold on the Pacific seaboard of British Columbia.