to Isle Percée at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. He was still a week's
journey from Three Rivers, but chance befriended him. Algonquin canoes
were on the way up the river to war on the Iroquois. Joining the
Indian canoes, he slipped past the hilly shores of the St. Lawrence and
in five days was between the main bank on the north side and the muddy
shallows of the Isle of Orleans. Sheering out where the Montmorency
roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across
St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below
the beetling heights of Cape Diamond, Quebec.

[Illustration: One of the earliest maps of the Great Lakes.]

It was May, 1651, when he had first seen the turrets and spires of
Quebec glittering on the hillside in the sun; it was May, 1652, that
the Iroquois had carried him off from Three Rivers; and it was May,
1654, when he came again to his own. He was welcomed back as from the
dead. Changes had taken place in the interval of his captivity. A
truce had been arranged between the Iroquois and the French. Now that
the Huron missions had been wiped out by Iroquois wars, the Jesuits
regarded the truce as a Divine provision for a mission among the
Iroquois. The year that Radisson escaped from the Mohawks, Jesuit
priests had gone among them. A still greater change that was to affect
his life more vitally had taken place in the Radisson family. The year
that Radisson had been captured, the outraged people of Three Rivers
had seized a Mohawk chief and burned him to death. In revenge, the
Mohawks murdered the governor of Three Rivers and a company of
Frenchmen. Among the slain was the husband of Radisson's sister,
Marguerite. When Radisson returned, he found that his widowed sister
had married Médard Chouart Groseillers, a famous fur trader of New
France, who had passed his youth as a lay helper to the Jesuit missions