Champlain was a pioneer in the exploration of the Atlantic coast of New England and the eastern provinces of Canada, From the Strait of Canseau, at the northeastern extremity of Nova Scotia, to the Vineyard Sound, on the southern limits of Massachusetts, he made a thorough survey of the coast in 1605 and 1606, personally examining its most important harbors, bays, and rivers, mounting its headlands, penetrating its forests, carefully observing and elaborately describing its soil, its products, and its native inhabitants. Besides lucid and definite descriptions of the coast, he executed topographical drawings of numerous points of interest along our shores, as Plymouth harbor, Nauset Bay, Stage Harbor at Chatham, Gloucester Bay, the Bay of Baco, with the long stretch of Old Orchard Beach and its interspersed islands, the mouth of the Kennebec, and as many more on the coast of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. To these he added descriptions, more or less definite, of the harbors of Barnstable, Wellfleet, Boston, of the headland of Cape Anne, Merrimac Bay, the Isles of Shoals, Cape Porpoise, Richmond's Island, Mount Desert, Isle Haute, Seguin, and the numberless other islands that adorn the exquisite sea-coast of Maine, as jewels that add a new lustre to the beauty of a peerless goddess. Other navigators had coasted along our shores. Some of them had touched at single points, of which they made meagre and unsatisfactory surveys. Gosnold had, in 1602, discovered Savage Rock, but it was so indefinitely located and described that it cannot even at this day be identified. Resolving to make a settlement on one of the barren islands forming the group named in honor of Queen Elizabeth and still bearing her name; after some weeks spent in erecting a storehouse, and in collecting a cargo of "furrs, skyns, saxafras, and other commodities," the project of a settlement was abandoned and he returned to England, leaving, however, two permanent memorials of his voyage, in the names which he gave respectively to Martha's Vineyard and to the headland of Cape Cod. Captain Martin Pring came to our shores in 1603, in search of a cargo of sassafras. There are indications that he entered the Penobscot. He afterward paid his respects to Savage Rock, the undefined _bonanza_ of his predecessor. He soon found his desired cargo on the Vineyard Islands, and hastily returned to England. Captain George Weymouth, in 1605, was on the coast of Maine concurrently, or nearly so, with Champlain, where he passed a month, explored a river, set up a cross, and took possession of the country in the name of the king. But where these transactions took place is still in dispute, so indefinitely does his journalist describe them.