nst constantly accumulating difficulties to establish a colony on
the St. Lawrence. He won the confidence of the Algonquin and Huron tubes
of Canada, who then lived on the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, and in
the vicinity of Georgian Bay. Recognizing the necessity of an alliance
with the Canadian Indians, who controlled all the principal avenues to
the great fur-bearing regions, he led two expeditions, composed of
Frenchmen, Hurons, and Algonquins, against the Iroquois or Confederacy
of the Five Nations[2]--the Mohawks, the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas,
and Senecas--who inhabited the fertile country stretching from the
Genesee to the Hudson River in the present state of New York. Champlain
consequently excited against his own people the inveterate hostility of
the bravest, cruellest and ablest Indians with whom Europeans have ever
come in contact in America. Champlain probably had no other alternative
open to him than to become the active ally of the Canadian Indians, on
whose goodwill and friendship he was forced to rely; but it is also
quite probable that he altogether underrated the ability and bravery of
the Iroquois who, in later years, so often threatened the security of
Canada, and more than once brought the infant colony to the very verge
of ruin.

[2: In 1715 the confederacy was joined by the Tuscaroras, a southern
branch of the same family, and was then called more properly the Six
Nations.]

It was during Champlain's administration of affairs that the Company of
the Hundred Associates was formed under the auspices of Cardinal
Richelieu, with the express object of colonizing Canada and developing
the fur-trade and other commercial enterprises on as large a scale as
possible. The Company had ill-fortune from the outset. The first
expedition it sent to the St. Lawrence was captured by a fleet commanded
by David Kirk, a gentleman of Derbyshire, who in the following year also
took Quebec, and carried Champlain and his followers to England. The
English were already attempting settlements on the shores of
Massachusetts Bay; and the poet and courtier, Sir William Alexander,
afterwards known as the Earl of Stirling, obtained from the King of
England all French Acadia, which he named Nova Scotia and offered to
settlers in baronial giants. A Scotch colony was actually established
for a short time at Port Royal under the auspices of Alexander, but in
1632, by the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, both Acadia and Canada we