rearing of the pile of wooden buildings where the lower town now stretches
along the river; the unsuccessful plot to kill Champlain before the fort
is finished; the death of all of the twenty-eight men save eight before
the coming of the first spring--these are the incidents of the first
chapter.

The visit to the Iroquois country; the discovery of the lake that bears
his name; the first portentous collision with the Indians of the Five
Nations, undertaken to keep the friendship of the Indian tribes along the
St. Lawrence; a winter in France; the breaking of ground for a post at
Montreal; another visit to France to find means for the rescue and
sustenance of his fading colony, make a depressing second chapter.

Then follows the journey up the Ottawa with the young De Vignau, who had
stirred Paris by claiming that he had at last found the northwest passage
to the Pacific, when he had in fact spent the winter in an Indian lodge
not two hundred miles from Montreal; the noble forgiveness of De Vignau by
Champlain; his crestfallen return and his going forth from France again in
1615 with four Recollet friars (Franciscans of the strict observance) of
the convent of his birthplace (Brouage) inflamed by him with holy zeal for
the continent of savages. For a little these "apostolic mendicants" in
their gray robes girt with the white cord, their feet naked or shod in
wooden sandals, tarried beneath the gray rock and then set forth east,
north, and west, soon (1626) to be followed and reinforced by their
brothers of stronger resources, the Jesuits, the "black gowns," upon a
mission whose story is as marvellous as a "tale of chivalry or legends of
lives of the saints."

Meanwhile Champlain, exploring the regions to the northwest, is the first
of white men to look upon the first of the Great Lakes--the "Mer Douce"