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RALEIGH'S MAP OF GUINEA, EL DORADO, AND THE ORINOCO COAST. From the original map, drawn by Raleigh, in the British Museum. This map, like so many of the older charts, is drawn upside down, the South being at the top and the East on the left, while the Panama Isthmus is at the bottom on the right. The river above the "Lake of Manoa" is the Amazon. |
But, besides the Orinoco in South America, there was the St. Lawrence in North America, still very imperfectly known. Since Jacques Cartier had penetrated the hitherto undisturbed regions lying about the "river of Canada," little had been explored farther west, till Samuel Champlain, one of the most remarkable men of his day, comes upon the scene, and was still discovering land to the west when Raleigh was making his second expedition to Guiana in the year 1617.
CHAPTER XL
CHAMPLAIN DISCOVERS LAKE ONTARIO
To discover a passage westward was still the main object of those who made their way up the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. This, too, was the object of Samuel Champlain, known as "the Father of New France," when he arrived with orders from France to establish an industrial colony "which should hold for that country the gateway of the Golden East." He had already ascended the river Saguenay, a tributary of the St. Lawrence, till stopped by rapids and rocks, and the natives had told him of a great salt sea to the north, which was Hudson's Bay, discovered some seven years later, in 1610. He now made his way to a spot called by the natives Quebec, a word meaning the strait or narrows, this being the narrowest place in the whole magnificent waterway. He had long been searching for a suitable site for a settlement, but "I could find none more convenient," he says, "or better situated than the point of Quebec, so called by the savages, which was covered with nut trees." Accordingly here, close to the present Champlain market, arose the nucleus of the city of Quebec—the great warehouse of New France.
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THE FIRST SETTLEMENT AT QUEBEC. From Champlain's Voyages, 1613. The bigger house in front is Champlain's own residence. |