That night, on promise of forgiveness, Vignau fell on his knees and confessed the imposture to Champlain. When the fur canoes came down the Ottawa to trade at Montreal, Champlain accompanied them to the St. Lawrence, and sailed for France. His exploration had been an ignominious failure. {52} Champlain was ever Knight of the Cross as well as explorer. He longed with the zeal of a missionary to reclaim the Indians from savagery, and at last raised funds in France to pay the expense of bringing four or five Recollets--a branch of the Franciscan Friars--to Quebec in May of 1615. With the peaked hood thrown back, the gray garb roped in at the waist, the bare feet protected only by heavy sandals, the Recollets landed at Quebec, and with cannon booming, white men all on bended knee, held service before the amazed savages. Of the Recollets, it was agreed that Joseph le Caron should go west to the Hurons of the Sweet Water Sea. Accompanied by a dozen Frenchmen, the friar ascended the Ottawa in July, passed that Allumette Island where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the land of the Hurons. Nine days later Champlain followed with two canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brulé, his interpreter. In order to hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada, Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south. It was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like wolves raiding a sheep pen. No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from a chance war party. Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage. Where the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries. This is the Mattawa. Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the pebble bottom. Then the gravel grated keels. The shallows became weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening {53} on a low-lying, clay-colored lake--the country of the Nipissings, with whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.