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With prisoners, ship, cannon, and ammunition, but with few provisions for food, the French now set sail westward across the Bay for Albany, La Chesnaye no doubt bearing in mind that a large quantity of beaver stored there would compensate him for his losses at Nelson two years before when the furs collected by Jean Chouart on behalf of the Company of the North had been seized by the English.
Probably he and his brother-in-law, Médard Chouart, who styled himself the Sieur des Groseillers, in the course of their long trading journeys among the Indians, in 1658 reached the Mississippi. One important discovery they unquestionably made a few years later.
Truly it might be said that religion was rapidly ceasing to be the line of demarcation among the nations, as had been the case for the two last generations of mankind. The Duke of Bouillon soon afterwards departed for the Netherlands, where the regular envoy to the commonwealth, Paul Chouart Seigneur de Buzanval, had already been preparing the States-General for their entrance into the league.
"Precious pearls," he exclaims, "but 'tis a gift of the gods!" "Sir?" "Pardieu, Chouart; listen to this," and he tells his kinsman, Groseillers. "Why not?" asks Groseillers. "You mean to send her to Mary Kirke?" Mary Kirke was Pierre Radisson's wife, who would not leave the English to go to him when he had deserted England for France. "Sir John Kirke is director of the English Company now.
In 1661, without the leave of the French Governor of Canada, who wanted them to take two servants of his own with them and to give him half the profits of the venture, Chouart and Radisson hurried away to the west, picked up large bodies of natives who were returning to the regions north of Lake Huron, with them fought their way through the ambushed Iroquois, and once more navigated the waters of Lake Superior.
Keep your colours flying and you may sail into hell, man, and conquer, too! Yes we sail! Man or devil, don't swerve, lad! Go your gait! Go your gait! Chouart here will look after the ships! Paris is near London, and praise be Providence for that little maid of thine! We shall presently have letters from her and," he added, "from Sir John Kirke of the Hudson's Bay Company!"
When Radisson returned, he found that his widowed sister had married Médard Chouart Groseillers, a famous fur trader of New France, who had passed his youth as a lay helper to the Jesuit missions of Lake Huron. Radisson was now doubly bound to the Jesuits by gratitude and family ties. Never did pagan heart hear an evangel more gladly than the Mohawks heard the Jesuits.
"Do you mind, Chouart," he asked, "how the padre wanted to put poison in the meat, and the Dutchman wouldn't let him? Then the Dutchman wanted to murder them all in their sleep, and the padre wouldn't let him?" Both men laughed. "And the end?" asked Jean.
Chouart there had sewed his thumb up, where an old squaw had hacked at it with a dull shell. The padre's nails, which the Indians tore off in torture, had grown well enough for him to handle a gun. One day we were allowed out to hunt. Chouart brought down three deer, the padre two moose, and I a couple of bear.
"Now praise be Heaven, that little ward will open the way for us in England, Chouart," said M. de Radisson, as he moodily listened to news of the trouble abrewing in Quebec. And all the way up the St. Lawrence, as the rolling tide lapped our keel, I was dreaming of a far, cold paleocrystic sea, mystic in the frost-clouds that lay over it like smoke. Then a figure emerged from the white darkness.
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