Despite the unspeakable horrors, bloodshed, and martyrdom related in the last chapter, nothing of lasting value was accomplished by the hapless mission to the Hurons except a knowledge of the great Lake Superior, which an interpreter, named Jean Nicollet, had discovered a few years before. Season now followed season, and each saw the French but little better than prisoners in their three towns on the St. Lawrence. If they ventured very far out of these fortified posts, it was only to give the Iroquois a chance to spring upon them and bear {77} back their scalps in triumph to their lodges in the wilderness. The French might have made a treaty of alliance with their English neighbours in New England, who had now set up a number of towns and were flourishing, although they too were at the mercy of the surrounding savages. But the French Governor made it a condition of the treaty that the New Englanders should help Canada to exterminate the terrible Iroquois. This the English colonists were loath to do; they had no wish to bring the Iroquois tomahawks down upon their heads also, as the French had done; and so the plan fell through. After a time one of the Iroquois tribes, having lost a great many of their fighting men in the long war, began to think of making recruits. The idea occurred to them that the unfortunate Hurons and Algonquins, who had joined their fortunes to the French, would be the very men for their purpose, if they could only induce them to desert the alliance. Forthwith they sent courtiers to announce to the Hurons that they no longer bore them any grudge and were willing to adopt them--to receive them into the bosom of their lodges. But it soon appeared that all the Iroquois were not unanimous in their approval of this plan, and as their treachery was well known, the Hurons and Algonquins, now settled on the Isle of Orleans near Quebec, naturally hesitated about accepting the offer. The few foolish ones who trusted in Iroquois good faith were actually tomahawked by their so-called friends on the way to the Iroquois lodges. In attempting to punish a band of Iroquois ambushed near his fort, Du Plessis Bochat, the Governor of {78} Three Rivers, lost his life; Father Buteaux was killed on his way to his mission, and another priest, Father Poucet, was borne away to a Mohawk village, and after being tortured was sent back to Quebec to offer peace to the French. Peace was indeed welcome, but the French were naturally still suspicious. The truth was that the Iroquois were then too busily engaged in destroying the Eries, a tribe which had burned one of their most illustrious chiefs, to spare time to massacre the pale-faces. As the chief, a Seneca, had stood with unquivering nerve at the stake he had cried out, "Eries, you burn in me an entire nation!" for he knew the Senecas would avenge his death. Much, then, as the Governor, De Lauzon, wanted peace, neither he nor his Indian allies knew how far they could trust the Iroquois.