The great motive force of modern adventure was, as has been seen, the search for a direct route to the East. Engaged in this search Henry Hudson, in 1609, piloted the Dutch into the Hudson river.[7] Champlain's first expedition up the Ottawa was due to a lying tale that along that river had been found a way to the sea. La Salle, the explorer of the Mississippi, had his mind ever set on the East, and his Seigniory above Montreal was named La Chine; for, 'like {54} Champlain and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the south sea, and a new road for commerce to the riches of China and Japan.'[8] Many long years passed before the geography of North America was known with any accuracy, and in the meantime the recesses of the continent, from which the rivers flowed, seemed to hide the secret of a thoroughfare by the West to the East. Similarly, from the time when Columbus sought for and thought he had found the Indies in the New World, down to our own day, the natives of America have been known as Indians. [Footnote 7: Hudson in 1609 sought for a North-West Passage about the fortieth degree of latitude. 'This idea had been suggested to Hudson by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea leading into the western ocean by the north of Virginia.' See _A Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland_, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam, Frederick Müller, 1868), Introd. pp. xxv, xxvi.] [Footnote 8: Parkman's _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_ (1885 ed.), p. 8.] [Sidenote: _The Indians of North America._] [Sidenote: _The Algonquins._] The two native races, with which the history of Canada is mainly concerned, are the Algonquins and the Huron Iroquois. The former were far the more numerous of the two, and were spread over a much larger area. They included under different names the Indians of the lower St. Lawrence, of Acadia, New England, and the Atlantic states as far as the Carolinas--the Montagnais, the Abenakis, the Micmacs, the Narragansetts, the Pequods, and others. The Delawares, too, were members of the race, and Algonquin tribes were to be found on the Ottawa, at Lake Nipissing, on the further shores of the great lakes, in Michigan and Illinois. From the day when Champlain joined forces with them against their hereditary foes the Iroquois, they ranged themselves for the most part on the side of the French. [Sidenote: _The Huron Iroquois._]