ccount of what happened, traders
say the bodies of the guilty Indians were found skinned and scalped by
the white troops.

[11] Radisson puts the Senecas before the Cayugas, which is different
from the order given by the Jesuits.

[12] The fact that Radisson confessed his sins to this priest seems
pretty well to prove that Pierre was a Catholic and not a Protestant,
as has been so often stated.

CHAPTER II

1657-1658

RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE

Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the
Iroquois Mission--He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the
Thousand Islands--Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as
Prisoners of War--Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson.

From Amsterdam Radisson took ship to Rochelle. Here he found himself a
stranger in his native land. All his kin of whom there is any
record--Pierre Radisson, his father, Madeline Henault, his mother,
Marguerite and Francoise, his elder and younger sisters, his uncle and
aunt, with their daughter, Elizabeth--were now living at Three Rivers
in New France.[1] Embarking with the fishing fleet that yearly left
France for the Grand Banks, Radisson came early in the spring of 1654
to Isle Percee at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. He was still a week's
journey from Three Rivers, but chance befriended him. Algonquin canoes
were on the way up the river to war on the Iroquois. Joining the
Indian canoes, he slipped past the hilly shores of the St. Lawrence and
in five days was between the main bank on the north side and the muddy
shallows of the Isle of Orleans. Sheering out where the Montmorency
roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across
St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below
the beetling heights of Cape Diamond, Quebec.

[Illustration: One of the earliest maps of the Great Lakes.]

It was May, 1651, when he had first seen the turrets and spires of
Quebec glittering on the hillside in the sun; it was May, 1652, that
the Iroquois had carried him off from Three Rivers; and it was May,
1654, when he came again to his own. He was welcomed back as from the
dead. Changes had taken place in the interval of his captivity. A
truce had been arranged between the Iroquois and the French. Now that
the Huron missions had been wiped out by Iroquois wars, the Jesuits
regarded the truce as a Divine provision for a mission among the
Iroquois. The y