The fur-trade of Canada produced a class of men hardy, agile, fearless, and in habits approximating to the savage.[446] Inured to toil, the _voyageurs_ arose in the morning, “when it was yet dark,” and pushing their birch-bark canoes into the water, swiftly glided away, “like the shade of a cloud on the prairie,” and often did not break fast until the sun had been for hours above the horizon. Halting for a short period, they partook of their coarse fare, then re-embarking they pursued their voyage to the land of the beaver and buffalo, the woods echoing their _chansons_ until the “shades of night began to fall,” when, “Worn with the long day’s march and the chase of the deer and the bison, Stretched themselves on the ground, and slept where the quivering firelight Flashed on their swarthy cheeks, and their forms wrapped up in their blankets.” Among the pioneers of these wanderers in the American forests was Étienne (Anglicized, Stephen) Brulé, of Champigny.[447] It has been mentioned that he went with Champlain to the Huron villages near Georgian Bay, but did not with his Superior cross Lake Ontario. After three years of roaming, he came back to Montreal, and told Champlain that he had found a river which he descended until it flowed into a sea,—the river by some supposed to be the Susquehanna, and the sea Chesapeake Bay.[448] While in this declaration he may have depended upon his imagination, yet to him belongs the undisputed honor of being the first white man to give the world a knowledge of the region beyond Lake Huron. Sagard[449] mentions that this bold _voyageur_, with a Frenchman named Grenolle, made a long journey, and returned with a “lingot” of red copper and with a description of Lake Superior which defined it as very large, requiring nine days to reach its upper extremity, and discharging itself into Lake Huron by a fall, first called Saut de Gaston, afterward Sault Ste. Marie. Upon the surrender of Quebec, in 1629, to the English, Étienne Brulé chose to cast in his lot with the conquerors.[450] During the occupation of nearly three years the English heard many stories of the region of the Great Lakes, and they encouraged the aborigines of the Hudson and Susquehanna to purchase English wares. The very year that the English occupied Quebec, Ferdinando Gorges and associates, who had employed men to search for a great lake, received a patent for the province of Laconia, and the governor thereof arrived in June, 1630, in the ship “Warwick,” at Piscataway, New Hampshire.[451] Early in June, 1632, Captain Henry Fleet, in the “Warwick,” visited the Anacostans, whose village stood on the shores of the Potomac where now is seen the lofty dome of the Capitol of the Republic. These Indians told Fleet that they traded with the Canada Indians; and on the 27th of the month, at the Great Falls of the Potomac, he saw two axes of the pattern brought over by the brothers Kyrcke to Quebec.[452]