If ever there was one greatly disheartened, it was myself, since I had been waiting to see this year what during many preceding ones I had been seeking for with great toil and effort, through so many fatigues and risks of my life. But realizing that I could not help the matter, and that everything depended on the will of God, I comforted myself, resolving to see it in a short time. I had such sure information that I could not doubt the report of these people, who go to traffic with others dwelling in those northern regions, a great part of whom live in a place very abundant in the chase and where there are great numbers of large animals, the skins of several of which I saw, and which I concluded were buffaloes from their representation of their form. Fishing is also very abundant there. This journey requires forty days as well in returning as in going.
Thus Champlain almost had a chance to see the bison and the great plains of the West. As it was, he did his immediate duty and restored the peace of Huron and Algonquin. In partial compensation for the alluring journey he relinquished, he had a better opportunity to study the Hurons in their settlements and to investigate their relations with their neighbours—the Tobacco Nation, the Neutral Nation, les Cheveux Relevés, and the Race of Fire. Hence the Voyage of 1615 not only describes the physical aspects of Huronia, but contains intimate details regarding the life of its people—their wigwams, their food, their manner of cooking, their dress, their decorations, their marriage customs, their medicine-men, their burials, their assemblies, their agriculture, their amusements, and their mode of fishing. It is Champlain's most ambitious piece of description, far less detailed than the subsequent narratives of the Jesuits, but in comparison with them gaining impact from being less diffuse.
It was on May 20, 1616, that Champlain left the Huron country, never again to journey thither or to explore the recesses of the forest. Forty days later he reached the Sault St Louis, and saw once more his old friend Pontgravé. Thenceforward his life belongs not to the wilderness, but to Quebec.
[[1]] An Algonquin tribe dwelling to the north of the St Lawrence, for the most part between the Saguenay and the St Maurice.
[[2]] Henry Hudson, an English mariner with a Dutch crew, entered the mouth of the Hudson in a boat called the Half Moon on September 4, 1609. As named by him, the river was called the 'Great North River of New Netherland.'
[[3]] Marsolet's defence was that he acted under constraint.