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Before setting out, he had detached with Father Hennepin, one of his companions named Dacan, on a mission to reascend the Mississippi beyond the river of the Illinois, and if possible, to its source. "These two travellers," says Father Charlevoix, "set out from the fort of Crèvecoeur, on February 28th, and having entered the Mississippi, ascended it as far as 46 degrees of north latitude.
I would have revenged him: I would have had their scalps." La Potherie, IV. 91. Charlevoix, after his fashion on such occasions, suppresses the revenge and the scalping, and instead makes the dying Christian say, "I would have prevented them from so treating my God."
The historian Charlevoix describes it as being in 1721 a low-lying, malarious place, infested by snakes and alligators, and consisting of a hundred wretched hovels. In spite of this dreary outlook, it was still true that France, planted at the mouth of the Mississippi, controlled the greatest waterway in the world.
To these may be added La Hontan, Tonty, Nicolas Perrot, La Potherie, and the Senecas examined before the authorities of Albany, whose statements are printed in the Colonial Documents, III. These are the original sources. Charlevoix drew his account from a portion of them. It is inexact, and needs the correction of his learned annotator, Mr. Shea.
In the Indian village of Caughnawaga, situated near the Lachine Rapids, is the half-ruined Curial House, if it may be so called, of the early historian, the Jesuit Charlevoix. Like all French travellers of that period, he had his visions of reaching the Pacific coast, which, although never realized, yet he was a celebrated explorer and an accurate and painstaking writer.
Hitherto the Indians of Acadia had lived peaceably with the whites, but the closing years of the seventeenth century were destined to witness a sad transformation. There lived at Quebec in the latter part of the seventeenth century one Charles le Moyne, seigneur de Longueil, who is called by Charlevoix the Baron de Becancourt; he was of Norman extraction, but his sons were natives of New France.
Charlevoix relates an amusing instance of the governor's stubborn resistance to de Poincy's authority. A silver statue of the Virgin, captured by some buccaneer from a Spanish ship, had been appropriated by Levasseur, and de Poincy, desiring to decorate his chapel with it, wrote to him demanding the statue, and observing that a Protestant had no use for such an object. Levasseur, however, replied that the Protestants had a great adoration for silver virgins, and that Catholics being "trop spirituels pour tenir
Cartier's commission for the same service is dated in October, 1540. Charlevoix, misled probably by the letters granted by Henry IV to the Marquis de la Roche in 1598, in which the letters to Roberval are partially recited, asserts that Roberval is styled in them lord of Norumbega.
After much hard work he gained the top of the hill, the hot blood spurting from his neck at each fall of the handle-bar, and went hurrying down the long easy grade to Charlevoix.
Who was the father of the child or who the mother, is neither mentioned by Hennepin nor Charlevoix, and the office of Prothonotary, or Registrar of Births, Marriages, and Deaths had not been instituted. It is not even in the chronicles that Champlain was at the christening, nor is the ceremony alluded to at all.
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