Then follows the journey up the Ottawa with the young De Vignau, who had
stirred Paris by claiming that he had at last found the northwest passage
to the Pacific, when he had in fact spent the winter in an Indian lodge
not two hundred miles from Montreal; the noble forgiveness of De Vignau by
Champlain; his crestfallen return and his going forth from France again in
1615 with four Recollet friars (Franciscans of the strict observance) of
the convent of his birthplace (Brouage) inflamed by him with holy zeal for
the continent of savages. For a little these "apostolic mendicants" in
their gray robes girt with the white cord, their feet naked or shod in
wooden sandals, tarried beneath the gray rock and then set forth east,
north, and west, soon (1626) to be followed and reinforced by their
brothers of stronger resources, the Jesuits, the "black gowns," upon a
mission whose story is as marvellous as a "tale of chivalry or legends of
lives of the saints."
Meanwhile Champlain, exploring the regions to the northwest, is the first
of white men to look upon the first of the Great Lakes--the "Mer Douce"
(Lake Huron) being discovered before the lakes to the south--the first
after the boy Etienne Brule and Friar Le Caron: the latter having gone
before him, celebrated the first mass on Champlain's arrival the 12th of
August, 1615, a day "marked with white in the friar's calendar," and
deserving to be marked with red in the calendar of the west.
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