" But I think of him rather as a
Prometheus who, after his years of bravest defiance of elements and
Indians, is to have his heart plucked out day by day, chained to that same
gray rock--only that death instead of Herculean succor came.
There is space for only the briefest recital of the exploits and
endurances of the stout heart and hardy frame of the man of whom any
people of any time might well be proud. The founding of Quebec, the
rearing of the pile of wooden buildings where the lower town now stretches
along the river; the unsuccessful plot to kill Champlain before the fort
is finished; the death of all of the twenty-eight men save eight before
the coming of the first spring--these are the incidents of the first
chapter.
The visit to the Iroquois country; the discovery of the lake that bears
his name; the first portentous collision with the Indians of the Five
Nations, undertaken to keep the friendship of the Indian tribes along the
St. Lawrence; a winter in France; the breaking of ground for a post at
Montreal; another visit to France to find means for the rescue and
sustenance of his fading colony, make a depressing second chapter.
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