First French Foot-Prints Beyond the Lakes. 125 



teenth century a company formed in France to work a mine of 

 green earth reported to exist at the sources of the Mississippi, 

 sent a party of thirty miners up that river. Their voyage up 

 stream last, d ten months. 



Among the earliest volunteers from the retainers of Champlain 

 to ascend the Ottawa with savages, who had descended from a 

 country no white man had ever trod, was Yignan, in 1610. On 

 his return next season, he declared that he had pushed on to a 

 salt ?ea, seen the wreck of an English ship, and heard of Cathay 

 and Zipango, — so China and Japan were then called — as not far 

 away. 



The spark fell in gunpowder. Champlain heard not only what 

 he wished to believe, but what all men of his time and a century 

 after held for certain, that a short Northwest passage to the East 

 Indies existed, and would at once double the wealth of any nation 

 which could appropriate it by right of discovery. His own fleet 

 had been equipped in 1608, not merely to colonize Acadia, but 

 " to penetrate inland even to the Occidental sea and arrive some 

 day at China." 



He believed that in 1609 a vessel, clearing from Acapulco, — a 

 Mexican port on the Pacific, lost its reckoning in a storm, but 

 after two months found itself in Ireland, — and that the King of 

 Spain had ordered the journal of the pilot to be burned so as to 

 keep foreigners from knowing the course followed, but which 

 was supposed to be north of Canada. The map of Verrazano, 

 then still an authority, in addition to the Isthmus of Panama 

 showed another no less narrow near the latitude of New York 

 with the Pacific beyond it on tn% West. 



More than three score years afterward, La Salle sought that 

 East Indian route by way of the Mississippi. His estate just above 

 Montreal was, and is still, called or nick-named. La Ghine^ that is 

 China, because he started from there bound for the Empire of 

 Celestials. Years after he had stood at the mouth of the Missis- 

 sippi, he spoke of that river as separated from the China sea only 

 by the breadth of the province of Culiacan, and was confident of 

 meeting not far from the mouth o£ the Missouri, with rivers 

 which flowed into the ocean he sought. 



