But among Champlain's interpreters there were doubtless some who bore a very different character. Jean Nicolet was certainly a marked exception. Although Champlain does not mention him by name, he appears to have been in New France as early as 1618, where he spent many years among the Algonquins, and was the first Frenchman who penetrated the distant Northwest. He married into one of the most respectable families of Quebec, and is often mentioned in the Relations des Jesuites. _Vide_ a brief notice of him in _Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley_, by John Gilmary Shea, 1852, p. xx. A full account of his career has recently been published, entitled _History of the Discovery of the Northwest by John Nicolet in_ 1634, _with a Sketch of his Life_. By C. W. Butterfield. Cincinnati, 1881. _Vide_ also _Details fur la Vie de Jean Nicollet_, an extract from _Relation des Jesuites_, 1643, in _Decouveries_, etc, par Pierre Margry, p. 49. 227. Paul Huet and Pacifique du Plessis. The latter had been in New France more than a year and a half, having arrived in 1615. _Vide antea_, pp. 104-5. EXPLANATION OF TWO GEOGRAPHICAL MAPS OF NEW FRANCE. It has seemed to me well to make some statements in explanation of the two geographical maps. Although one corresponds to the other so far as the harbors, bays, capes, promontories, and rivers extending into the interior are concerned, nevertheless they are different in respect to the bearings. The smallest is in its true meridian, in accordance with the directions of Sieur de Castelfranc in his book on the mecometry of the magnetic needle [228] where I have noted, as will be seen on the map, several declinations, which have been of much service to me, so also all the altitudes, latitudes, and longitudes, from the forty-first degree of latitude to the fifty-first, in the direction of the North Pole, which are the confines of Canada, or the Great Bay, where more especially the Basques and Spaniards engage in the whale fishery. In certain places in the great river St. Lawrence, in latitude 45 deg., I have observed the declination of the magnetic needle, and found it as high as twenty-one degrees, which is the greatest I have seen.