CHAPTER II

FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES


We shall not be able to enter the valley of the Mississippi in this
chapter. There is a long stretch of the nearer valley of the St. Lawrence
that must first be traversed. Just before I left America in 1910 two men
flew in a balloon from St. Louis, the very centre of the Mississippi
Valley, to the Labrador gate of the St. Lawrence, the vestibule valley, in
a few hours, but it took the French pioneers a whole century and more to
make their way out to where those aviators began their flight. We have but
a few pages for a journey over a thousand miles of stream and portage and
a hundred years of time. I must therefore leave most of the details of
suffering from the rigors of the north, starvation, and the Iroquois along
the way to your memories, or to your fresh reading of Parkman, Winsor,
Fiske, and Thwaites in English, or to Le Clercq, Lescarbot, Champlain,
Charlevoix, Sagard, and others in French.

The story of the exploration and settlement of those valleys beyond the
cod-banks of Newfoundland begins not in the ports of Spain or Portugal,
nor in England, but in a little town on the coast of France, standing on a
rocky promontory thrust out into the sea, only a few hours' ride from
Paris, in the ancient town of St. Malo, the "nursery of hardy mariners,"
the cradle of the spirit of the West. [Footnote: After reaching Paris on
my first journey, the first place to which I made a pilgrimage, even
before the tombs of kings and emperors and the galleries of art, was this
gray-bastioned town of St. Malo.]