PEOVINCETOWN. 
219 
country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incog¬ 
nita to them, — or rather many years before the earliest 
date referred to, — Champlain, the Governor of Can¬ 
ada^ not to mention the inland discoveries of Cartier,^ 
Roberval, and others, of the preceding century, and his 
own earlier voyage, had already gone to war against 
the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the 
Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had 
heard of New England. In Champlain’s “Voyages,*’ 
printed in 1613, there is a plate representing a fight in 
which he aided the Canada Indians against the Iroquois, 
near the south end of Lake Champlain, in July, 1609, 
eleven years before the settlement of Plymouth. Ban¬ 
croft says he joined the Algonquins in an expedition 
against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, in the northwest 
of New York. This is that “ Great Lake,” which the 
English, hearing some rumor of from the French, long 
after, locate in an “ Imaginary Province called Laconia, 
and spent several years about 1630 in the vain attempt 
to discover.” (Sir Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine Hist. 
Coll., Yol. 11. p. 68.) Thomas Morton has a chapter on 
this “ Great Lake.” In the edition of Champlain’s map 
dated 1632, the Falls of Niagara appear; and in a great 
lake northwest of Mer Donee (Lake Huron) there is an 
island represented, over which is written, Isle on il 
y d une mine de cuivref — “Island where there is a 
* It is remarkable that the first, if not the only, part of New Eng¬ 
land which Cartier saw was Vermont (he also saw the mountains 
of New York), from Montreal Mountain, in 1535, sixty-seven years 
before Gosnold saw Cape Cod. If seeing is discovering^ — and that 
is all that it is proved that Cabot knew of the coast of the United 
States, — then Cartier (to omit Verrazzani and Gomez) was the dis¬ 
coverer of New England rather than Gosnold, who is commonly 
10 styled. 
