Countless hopes and fears must have animated the breasts of the Frenchmen. It is so with every venture that is based on the unknown. The very fact that possibilities _are_ unknown gives scope to unbridled fancy and the wildest hopes; gives scope, too, when the pendulum swings the other way, to deepest distrust. The country boy trudging along the road with a carpetbag to seek his fortunes in the city, dreams of the day when he may be a millionaire. By nightfall, he longs for the monotonous drudgery and homely content and quiet poverty of the plow. So with Radisson and Groseillers. They had brought back 600,000 beaver pelts overland from Hudson Bay five years before. If they could repeat the feat, it meant bigger booty than Drake had raided from the Spanish of the South Seas, for the price of beaver at that time fluctuated wildly from eight shillings to thirty-five. And who could tell that they might not find a passage to the South Seas from Hudson Bay? That old legend of a tide like the ocean on Lake Winnipeg, Radisson had heard from the Indians, as every explorer was to hear it for a hundred years. The explanation is very simple to anyone who has sailed on Lake Winnipeg. The lake is so shallow that an inshore wind lashes the waters up like a tide. Then sudden calm, or an outshore breeze, leaves the muddy flats almost bare. I remember being stranded on that lake by such a shift of wind for twenty-four hours. To the Indians who had never seen the ocean, the phenomenon seemed like the tide of which the white man told, so Radisson had reported to the Adventurers that the Indians said the South Sea was only a few weeks’ journey from Hudson Bay. Radisson, whose highest hope from boyhood was to be a great explorer, must have dreamed his dreams as the ships slid along the glassy waters of the Atlantic westward. Six weeks, ordinarily, it took sailing vessels to go from the Thames to the mouth of Hudson Straits, but furious storms—as if the very elements themselves were bent on the defeat of these two indomitable men—drove their ships apart half way across the Atlantic. As is often the case, the little ship—Gillam’s _Nonsuch_—weathered the hurricane. Now buried under billows mountain-high, with the yardarms drenched by each wash of the pounding breakers, now plowing through the cataract of waters, the little _Nonsuch_ kept her head to the wind, and if a sea swept from stem to stern, battened hatches and masts naked of sails took no harm. The staunch craft kept on her sea feet, and was not knocked keel up.