set off up the river and soon met again friendly Indian chiefs of the Algonquin and Huron tribes, who told him terrible tales of their sufferings at the hands of their enemies the Iroquois or the Five Nations. In their despair these chiefs sought out the Man-with-the-Iron-Breast, as they called Champlain, on account of the steel breast-plate he wore, and asked his help against the blood-thirsty Iroquois. These men of the Five Nations, Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Oneidas, lived in the forests south of Lake Ontario, and were perhaps at once the most intelligent and the most cruel of all the Indians on the continent. It was the Iroquois who had destroyed the old Huron towns of Stadacona and Hochelaga which Cartier had seen and described, and as they bore the Hurons and Algonquins an implacable enmity, it was natural that they would extend this enmity to the pale-faces who had now come to dwell in the Huron country. They might, it is true, have been propitiated; but Champlain did not stop to consider any questions of policy: he favoured at once the idea of alliance with the surrounding red-men, an alliance which was to cost him and his new colony a bloody and fearful price. Champlain, then, made three warlike expeditions into the country of the Iroquois during the next six years. In the first he paddled in canoes {32} up the Richelieu River and came to a beautiful lake, to which he gave his own name ("Lake Champlain"). Meeting a party of Iroquois of the Mohawk nation or tribe, he fell upon them suddenly. The Mohawks fancied at first that they had only to do with Algonquins, and felt confident of victory, until the Frenchmen's muskets rang out; then not fast enough could they flee in panic from the magic bullets, leaving many slain, including their bravest chiefs. Champlain had only 60 Frenchmen and Indians, while the Mohawks numbered 200; but his victory was complete; not one of his force was killed, and the town of the enemy was wiped from the face of the earth. Notwithstanding Champlain's protests, the Algonquins insisted on torturing one of their Iroquois captives to death by every device of savage cruelty. Mercy was not in their code; they neither gave it, nor, when captured, expected it. During the next three years Champlain was kept very busy in explorations, in attacking the Iroquois, and in protecting his colony. During this time he returned to France, and was favourably received at Fontainebleau by King Henry, who listened with interest to Champlain's tale of his adventures in "New France." But in spite of royal favour, Champlain had so many rivals and enemies that, like Poutraincourt in Acadia, he found it impossible to get the charter renewed, and so his friend and patron, De Monts, was obliged to try and get along without it. Equipping two more ships, he sent Champlain back with them to Canada.