“After each side had sung and danced and threatened enough, day broke. My [white] companions and I were always concealed for fear the enemy would see us preparing our arms the best we could, being separated, each in one of the canoes belonging to the St. Lawrence savages.
“After being equipped with light armor, we took each an arquebus and went ashore. I saw the enemy leave their barricade. They were about two hundred men, of strong and robust appearance, who were coming slowly toward us with a gravity and assurance which greatly pleased me, led on by three chiefs. Ours were marching in similar order, and told me that those who wore three tall feathers were the chiefs, and that I must do all I could to kill them.
“The moment we landed, our Indians began calling me with a loud voice, and making way, placed me marching at their head—about twenty paces in advance—until I was within thirty paces of the enemy. The moment they [the Iroquois] saw me, they halted, gazing at me and I at them. When I saw them preparing to shoot at us I raised my arquebus, and aiming directly at one of the three chiefs, two of them fell to the ground by this shot, and one of their companions received a wound of which he died afterwards. I had put four balls in my arquebus. Our Indians, on witnessing a shot so favorable for them, set up such tremendous shouts that thunder could not have been heard, and yet there was no lack of arrows on either side.
“The Iroquois were greatly astonished, seeing two men killed at once, though they were protected by arrow-proof armor, woven of cotton thread and wood, this frightened them very much. While I was reloading one of my [white] men in the bush fired a shot which so astonished them anew that they lost courage, took to flight, and abandoned the field and their fort, hiding in the depths of the forest where I followed them and killed some others. Our savages also killed several of them, and took ten or twelve prisoners. The rest carried off the wounded. Fifteen or sixteen of ours were wounded by arrows; they were promptly cured.
“After gaining the victory, they amused themselves plundering Indian corn and meal from the enemy, also the arms which the Iroquois had thrown away in order to run faster. After feasting, dancing and singing, we returned three hours later with the prisoners.
“I named the place where this battle was fought Lake Champlain.”
“The White Governor” went on to tell about the devilish delight his friends, the St. Lawrence Indians, took in torturing their Iroquois prisoners. The braves, and even the squaws, would try to think of something to do that would make the dying Indians’ sufferings still more terrible. If the victim cried out or uttered the least sound, the torturing Indians would laugh and dance about for joy. Champlain begged his friends to stop this fiendish sport, but they could not understand why. The Iroquois would have tortured them just as wickedly if they had won. So “the White Governor” shot several of the suffering victims to put them out of their agonies. After that, when the St. Lawrence Indians gained a victory, Champlain would demand as many prisoners as he could for his share. These he would not allow to be tortured, and, in time, would contrive to let them escape.
By being friends with the neighboring tribes in war, Champlain made bitter enemies of the Iroquois who lived in New York, so that in the later wars between France and England those powerful tribes fought with the English against the French, and in the end helped to place New France in the hands of the British.
Champlain’s sympathetic and romantic nature made him a welcome visitor, whether in the wigwams of the savages or in the palaces of the kings and noblemen of France. He did all he could to help the people of Old France and New to understand one another. He sent a young Frenchman up into the country some distance north of Montreal to live among the savages. After this youth had spent the winter in the north, he came back to the St. Lawrence with glowing stories about the finding of a “salt sea” much farther north. He was taken to France and became the lion of the day there, for explorers from all lands were still looking for a northwest passage across America to “the South Sea” and China. Just about this time Henry Hudson had discovered the Hudson River and was lost in Hudson Bay in his search for this passage; but this was not yet known in Europe.