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in a wish to find an easy waterway to the Pacific for trade routes to Asia. That, of course, was the goal of most explorers then. Indians had told Champlain about the lakes in 1603 during his first visit to the St. Lawrence. Butterfield gives his description written then, and help= fully adds modern identification: "Then they come to a lake (Ontar~ io) some eighty leagues long, with a great many islands, the water at its extremity being fresh and the winter mild. At the end of this lake they pass a fall (Niagara) somewhat high and with but little water flowing over. Here they carry their canoes overland about a quarter of a league, in order to pass the fall, afterwards entering another lake (Erie) some sixty leagues long, and containing very good water. Having reached the end, they come to a strait (Detroit and St. Clair riv~ ers) two leagues broad and extending a considerable distance into the interior. They said they had never gone any farther, nor seen the end of a lake (Huron) some fifteen or sixteen leagues distant from where they had been." 2 Even this secondahand account was old news. Indians had told Jacques Cartier a similar de8cription on his pioneering visits to the St. Law= rence as early as 1535. The site of Montreal was Cartier's deepest pene- tration of Canada, however, and he abandoned his Canadian ventures by 1542. Political unrest in Europe prevented further French expeditions to the St. Lawrence for fifty-seven years. Then Tadoussac was briefly settled as a fur trading post in 1599. Champlain's visit of 1603 was the first to cover the territory Cartier had explored, up to the Lachine Rapids (then known as the Falls of St. Louis). For the next four years, Champlain was busy with a colony in Acadia on the Atlantic coast. Not until 1608 did permanent settlement begin on the St. Lawrence TELESCOPE August 173 TO THE FRESHWATER SEA at Quebec sac. and once again at Tadous- Fur trade was partly intended to finance exploration for such a westâ€" ward route or for other greater trading benefits for France. The military expedition to Lake Cham= plain in 1609 was partly an effort to let an Indian war party guide Champlain to unknown and possibly useful territory. Champlain was unlucky then in his choice of allies and his consequent choice of enema ies; for the Iroquois quickly reCOVn ered their composure. By 1650 the Iroquois had exterminated or driven into exile their neighboring Indian nations around Lakes Erie, Ontario and Huron, and had threatened the survival of the French colony, itself. Because the Iroquois Hfive nan tions" were spread across what is now upper New York State, Frenchmen avoided that region. Lake Erie was accordingly the last of the Great Lakes they seem to have explored. Until late in the seventeenth cen~ tury, the usual French approach to the West would be up the Ottawa Riv= er to Georgian Bay, a route more likely to avoid Iroquois marauders. * * * In 1613, by way of the Ottawa Riv~ his first major er, Champlain made journey west of Montreal. He was searching for the "North Sea." The year before, on a visit home to Par- is, he had met one of his former scouts, Nicholas de Vignau. This man claimed to have found a route this North Sea. via the Ottawa to Champlain probably thonght this was Hudson's Bay, then just discovered by the Englishman, Henry Hudson; for Vignau said he had found the wreck- age of an English ship there. Cham- plain excitedly persuaded Vignau to guide him to this North Sea. On May 29, 1613, Champlain left the vicinity of Montreal with Vig-