Wild Mem’ry’s spells resume their wonted might,
And sternly shroud me from thy world of light!
MY ROUTE INTO CANADA.
NO. II.
Lake Champlain was long known to the Dutch, and through them to the English, as the Lake of Corlaer. It seems that one Corlaer was for a long time the great man of a little Dutch settlement on the Mohawk, where for many years he swayed the civic sword so potently and with such terror to evil-doers among the Indians, that they adopted his name into their language to signify a white governor. This doughty Dutchman, therefore, left the title to his successors, and the Corlaers went through their decline and fall with as much dignity, in a small way, as history ascribes to the Pharaohs and the Cæsars. Like the founders of other dynasties, however, the original Van Corlaer came to a remarkable and tragic end; and as this deplorable event took place on the Lake, now known by the name of Champlain, the Dutch stubbornly regarded their own hero as having the best right to name it. For a time it seemed likely that fortune would decide for the Dutch; but, with a fickleness for which the flirt is proverbial, she suddenly declared for the French claim; and time having ratified the award, the name of Corlaer is no more heard among mortals, except when some one of antiquarian tastes, like myself, discovers, with a meditative sigh, that it once could start a ghost as soon as Cæsar, and come very near being “writ in water,” which, strange to say, would have rendered it immortal.
It seems that in those days there was, somewhere in the lake, a remarkable rock which the Mohawks regarded as the dome of a submarine palace, in which dwelt with his mermaids a wicked old Indian enchanter, who ruled over Boreas and Euroclydon. The superstition was quite coincident in its particulars with the more classical and familiar one which is served up in the story of Æneas: but this mischievous king of the winds had the merit of being easily propitiated; and the Indians, as they timidly passed his stronghold, never failed to send down to him the tributary peace offering of a pipe, an arrow, or any thing else, save their bottles of fire-water, of which the old fellow was dexterously cheated. The doughty Van Corlaer, undertaking a voyage to the north, was duly informed of these facts; but he swore “by stone and bone” that he would not pay the tribute, or ask any one’s permission to navigate the lake. I am sorry to add that he would not be argued out of his rash and inconsiderate vow. Tradition relates that, as he approached the rock, his mariners showed signs of fear, which appeared so puerile and idle to the enlarged soul of the hero, that he on the contrary steered close to the fearful citadel, and, shamefully exposing his person, made an unseemly gesture towards the abode of the Indian Æolus, and added some Dutch formula of defiance. It is almost needless to relate that the wrath of his ventose majesty was greatly excited. He scorned, indeed, to make a tempest about it; but despatching several angry little squalls after the insolent admiral, they bored him fore and aft, and beset him from so many quarters at once, in a narrow gorge of the lake, that, in short, he was effectually swamped, and thus made a warning example to all succeeding Van Corlaers. His name, as I said, was for a while bequeathed to the lake; but even this poor recompense for a disaster so terrible has proved as evanescent as the bubbles, in which the last sigh of the unfortunate Dutchman came up from the caves to which, like the great Kempenfelt, he went down in a moment.
The lake, therefore, retains its Gallic appellation, and preserves the name and memory of Samuel de Champlain, a servant of Henry IV., and justly surnamed the father of La Nouvelle France. The expedition in which it first received his name was a romantic one, and so well illustrates what I have already said of the border feuds of the seventeenth century, that I must be excused for relating its story. Champlain had come down to the shores of the lake with a party of Adirondacks, and was advancing through the forest towards the lands of the Iroquois, when suddenly they came in sight of a strong party of that nation, who showed no disposition to decline an encounter. On the contrary, setting up their warwhoop, they advanced pell-mell to the attack. The Frenchmen, betaking themselves to an ambuscade, made ready to receive them with their fusils; while their savage allies awaited the foe with their usual coolness and contempt of danger. The Iroquois were the more numerous, and, elated by their apparent superiority, came down with the sweeping violence of a whirlwind. The Adirondacks seemed in their eyes as chaff; and with howls and hatchets they were just pouncing upon their prey, when the blazing fusils of Champlain and his comrades laid the foremost of the Iroquois warriors in the dust. The remainder fled into the wilderness with the most frantic outcries of astonishment and despair. It was the first volley of fire-arms that ever reached the ear or the heart of an Iroquois—the first that ever startled the echoes of that lake, which was so soon destined to tremble beneath the bellowing thunders of navies. They were defeated they knew not how; but they retired to the depths of the forest, muttering the deadliest vows of revenge. It so happened that another collision of the same kind occurred soon after on the Saurel—a little river, much broken by rapids, through which the waters of the lake make their way to the sea. There was among the Algonquins a bold and dashing chief whose name was Pisquaret. He had made an incursion against the Iroquois, and was laden with the scalps which he had taken from an Indian village which he surprised at night and completely destroyed. As he was navigating the rapids of the Saurel with his Adirondacks and several Frenchmen, he was surprised by a powerful armament of Iroquois, who immediately bore down upon him, with great advantage from the current. The treacherous Algonquins feigned to give themselves up for lost, and, setting up the death-song of the Adirondacks, appeared to await their inevitable fate. The Frenchmen, throwing themselves flat in the batteaux, and resting the muzzles of their carbines upon the gunnels, coolly calculated the effects of the coming discharge; but Pisquaret and his warriors raised their voices in chanting the victories of their tribe, inflaming the Iroquois by vaunts of injuries which they had done them, and defying them in return not to spare any torture in seeing how the Algonquins could die. The exasperated foe was just pealing the war-cry, when the deadly blaze of the carbines changed their exultation in a moment to howls of agony and dismay. But these were tricks which could not be repeated; and, long after, the empire of the Grande Monarque paid dearly for these frolics in the unpruned wilderness. Those who are fond of tracing the greatest political events and changes to accidents inconsiderable in themselves, have maintained that the first volley of fire-arms that startled the echoes of Lake Champlain, decided the fate and fixed the limits of French dominion in America. Nor is this theory to be lightly dismissed as fanciful; for it cannot be doubted that the subsequent spread of the Anglo-Saxon race over the hunting-grounds of the Mohawks, and through them to the further west, was owing to the favourable treaties which the English were able to effect with the Iroquois in the days of their power,—treaties which, had they been secured by the French, would have opened the whole region now called New York to their countrymen, and filled it with a mongrel population under the absolute control of Jesuits and political adventurers. Nor can any thing be ascertained more decisive of what was at first a game and a problem, than the collisions I have described. The Iroquois soon found out the secret of their discomfiture, and associated the name of a Frenchman with that of the Algonquins in their inveterate hatred. And when they in turn found Pale-faces to seek their alliance, and supply them with arms, they became the barrier of British enterprise against the encroachments of France; and so it was that the beautiful vale of Mohawk, the shores of Erie and Ontario, and the rugged mountains of Vermont, came to be filled with the sons of Englishmen, and not with the dwarfish overgrowth of the French Canadian provinces. The laws, civil institutions, and the religion of England thus found a footing in that great territory, which, as more or less influencing all the other members of the American confederacy, is called the empire state:—and perhaps the bells that ring for the English service throughout that region would have been tolling for the Latin mass, but for those early encounters on the shores of Lake Champlain.
Our delay at Whitehall was owing to a blunder of Freke’s. He had assured us that we would certainly arrive in time to take the steamer down the lake to St John’s; but it had been several hours on its way when we arrived at the inn. Since the burning of a steamer several years before, there had been but one on these waters; and as it was now on its downward trip, it could not again leave Whitehall for several days. Here was a pretty mess for some half-dozen of us!
There was nothing for us but bedtime; and poor enough beds it brought us. I was up before the sun had found a chance to send a squint into the town over its rocky eastern wall; and I wonder not that the sun is slow to visit it, for it is altogether a disagreeable hole. For this I was unprepared. Whitehall hath a royal prestige, and the notion of the head of a lake had given me the pleasing expectation of a picturesque little harbour, and a romantic water view. There is nothing of the sort. The harbour is well called the basin; and Wood-creek, the canal, and the lake, just here, are all ditches together. Vessels of different sorts and sizes lie huddled and crowded at their confluence, and the waters are precisely of the colour of café-au-lait! Shade of merry Charles, how came they to change Skenesborough into Whitehall?
I have compared the ditch-water to café-au-lait; but all I can say of my breakfast is, that its coffee was not comparable to ditch-water. Freke was despatched to look us out a vessel willing to take us any where, for staying here was out of the question. He had given us the Indian name of the place as Kaw-ko-kaw-na, assuring us that this euphonious polysyllable was good Iroquois for the place where they catch fish. This little item of knowledge proved to us a dangerous thing, for it suggested a fishing excursion to fill up the hours of Freke’s anticipated absence. We rowed ourselves for some distance along a narrow channel, with marshes on both sides, which looked like the stronghold of that cohort of agues and fevers which, since the days of Prometheus, have delighted in burning and shaking the race of mortals. Wood-creek throws itself into the basin with a foaming cataract of waters; and beyond the marshes are precipitous walls of rocks, that confine the view. These rocks they call the Heights; and I doubt not they would look well at a distance, but the mischief is, there is no viewing them in so favourable a way. They rise like a natural Bastile, and so near your nose, that your only prospect is perpendicular; and you are consequently obliged to think more of your nose than the prospect. In the moonlight, the evening before, I did think there was something magnificent about the Heights; but this impression, like other visions of the night, did not survive the daybreak. I should think a geologist or a stone-mason might find them interesting; and an unprincipled inhabitant of Whitehall, out of patience with life in such a place, or emulous of the Lesbian Sappho, would doubtless find them suitable to the nefarious purpose of breaking his neck. This is all I can say for them; and as for the fishing excursion, we soon gave it up, and paddled back to the quay, out of patience with Freke for his instructions in Indian philology, and heartily tired of attempting to catch fish in Kaw-ko-kaw-na.