Even as late as 1633 we find Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Colony, who was not the most likely to be misinformed, who, moreover, has the _fame_, at least, of having discovered Wachusett Mountain (discerned it forty miles inland), talking about the “Great Lake” and the “hideous swamps about it,” near which the Connecticut and the “Potomack” took their rise; and among the memorable events of the year 1642 he chronicles Darby Field, an Irishman’s expedition to the “White hill,” from whose top he saw eastward what he “judged to be the Gulf of Canada,” and westward what he “judged to be the great lake which Canada River comes out of,” and where he found much “Muscovy glass,” and “could rive out pieces of forty feet long and seven or eight broad.” While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a _terra incognita_ to them,—or rather many years before the earliest date referred to,—Champlain, the _first Governor of Canada_, not to mention the inland discoveries of Cartier,[1] Roberval, and others, of the preceding century, and his own earlier voyage, had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England. In Champlain’s “Voyages,” printed in 1613, there is a plate representing a fight in which he aided the Canada Indians against the Iroquois, near the south end of Lake Champlain, in July, 1609, eleven years before the settlement of Plymouth. Bancroft says he joined the Algonquins in an expedition against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, in the northwest of New York. This is that “Great Lake,” which the English, hearing some rumor of from the French, long after, locate in an “Imaginary Province called Laconia, and spent several years about 1630 in the vain attempt to discover.” (Sir Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine Hist. Coll., Vol. II., p. 68.) Thomas Morton has a chapter on this “Great Lake.” In the edition of Champlain’s map dated 1632, the Falls of Niagara appear; and in a great lake northwest of _Mer Douce_ (Lake Huron) there is an island represented, over which is written, “_Isle ou il y a une mine de cuivre_,”—“Island where there is a mine of copper.” This will do for an offset to our Governor’s “Muscovy Glass.” Of all these adventures and discoveries we have a minute and faithful account, giving facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all scientific and Frenchman-like, with scarcely one fable or traveller’s story.