Excerpt from Spoliation of the Falls of Niagara Jacques Cartier had ascended the St. Lawrence in 1535 and again a few years later. Champlain followed in his tracks as far up the river as Montreal (in 1603) five years before the settlement of Quebec. From the summit of the old volcanic mountain at Montreal he saw the first or Lachine rapids of the St. Lawrence, above which he could discern the smooth water of the expanded river, now known as Lake St. Louis. Here he received accounts from three different Indians as to the nature of the country beyond. Their communication must have been largely carried on by signs and diagrams, drawn on the sand. Although the first volume of Champlain's works is extremely rare, the accounts were transcribed by lescarbot in his history of New France, published soon after, in 1609. The description of the rapids and various lake-like expansions of the St. Lawrence, the Thousand Islands, Lake Ontario, the occurrence of Niagara with its rapids, and Lake Erie reaching to Lake Huron beyond which no man had been, were all so complete that a navigator unimpeded by hostile Indians could easily have found his way. But the natives were hostile, so that Lake Huron came to be known long before Lake Erie and the Niagara River. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.