Excerpt from Strange Stories of the Great River: The Adventures of a Boy Explorer After the New World was discovered some daring French explorers longing for adventure traveled into those wilds to see if they could find the hidden waterway of Indian romance. One of them, a bold trader of Canada, in his scarlet coat and three-cornered hat, ventured into the farthest-away channels. Only one Of his companions, a boy, came back with him to present the map he drew of the southern reaches of the mighty stream. Next, a gray-frocked Belgian friar, sandaled and shaven of crown, set down on parchment the northern trend of the same river His goose quill wrote the name of his young oarsman who sang to appease their Indian captors as White men and red rode the waves together. A nobleman of France in doublet and hose journeyed farther than all others into the wilder ness of bayous and tributaries and wrote his tragic history in the foundations of the fortresses which he built and in the heart Of a stripling who served him. Wearing the armor of a knight and command ing a fleet of brigantines, another Canadian adventurer, half gentleman and half buccaneer, with a motley Old World crew - one of them a whistler - made a gallant defense of the river's mouth against the pirates of the Spanish Main. 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.