[Also written in the last year of his life,—1631.]
The wars in Europe, Asia, and Africa, taught me how to subdue the wild savages in Virginia and New England in America.… Having been a slave to the Turks, prisoner amongst the most barbarous savages; after my deliverance commonly discovering and ranging those large rivers and unknown nations, with such a handful of ignorant companions, that the wiser sort often gave me for lost; always in mutinies, wants, and miseries; blown up with gunpowder; a long time prisoner among the French pirates, from whom escaping in a little boat by myself, and adrift all such a stormy winter night, when their ships were split, more than an hundred thousand pound lost, we had taken at sea,and most of them drowned upon the Isle of Ree,[331] not far from whence I was driven on shore in my little boat, &c.; and many a score of the worst of winter months lived in the fields; yet to have lived near thirty-seven years in the midst of wars, pestilence, and famine, by which many an hundred thousand have died about me, and scarce five living of them went first with me to Virginia, and see the fruitsof my labors thus well begin to prosper,—though I have but my labor for my pains, have I not much reason both privately and publicly to acknowledge it, and give God thanks, whose omnipotent power only delivered me to do the utmost of my best to make his name known in those remote parts of the world, and his loving mercy to such a miserable sinner?
BOOK XII.
CHAMPLAIN ON THE WAR-PATH.
(A.D. 1609.)
This passage is taken from “Voyages de la Nouvelle France, par le Sieur de Champlain,” Paris, 1632, as translated in O’Callaghan’s “Documentary History of the State of New York,” vol. iii. p. 3.
Parkman gives a full account of Champlain’s adventures, in the latter half of his “Pioneers of France in the New World,” from p. 165 onward.
CHAMPLAIN ON THE WAR-PATH.
Champlain on the War-Path.
[This narrative is of great interest, as showing the mode of early Indian warfare, and the way in which the French at once modified it by teaching them the use of fire-arms. It also illustrates the way in which the French explored the interior of the country, even before the English had colonized the coasts, thus giving rise to that dispute out of which grew the series of French and Indian wars. Samuel de Champlain first sailed for America in 1603, and was the founder and governor of Quebec.]