er. Ballast and cargo were then
cast out. It thus happened that when the tide came in, the little sloop
_Lamprey_ lifted and floated out to sea. Munck had drilled holes in the
hull of the _Unicorn_ and sunk her with all her freight till he could
come back with an adequate crew; but he never returned. War broke out in
Europe, and Munck went to his place in the Danish Navy.

Meanwhile Indians had come down to what they henceforth called the River
of the Strangers. When the tide went out they mounted the _Unicorn_ and
plundered her of all the water-soaked cargo. In the cargo were
quantities of powder. A fire was kindled to dry the booty. At once a
consuming flame shot into the air, followed by a terrific explosion; and
when the smoke cleared neither plunder nor plunderers nor ship remained.
Eighty years afterwards the fur traders dug from these river flats a
sunken cannon stamped C 4--Christian IV--and thus established the
identity of Munck's winter quarters as Churchill harbour.

Munck was not the last soldier of fortune to essay passage to China
through the ice-bound North Sea. Captain Fox of Hull and Captain James
of Bristol came out in 1631 on separate expeditions, 'itching,' as Fox
expressed it, to find the North-West Passage. Private individuals had
fitted out both expeditions. Fox claimed the immediate patronage of the
king; James came out under the auspices of the city of Bristol. Sailing
the same week, they did not again meet till they were south of Port
Nelson in the autumn, when Fox dined with James and chaffed him about
his hopes to 'meet the Emperor of Japan.' But there was no need of
rivalry; both went back disappointed men. James wintered on Charlton
Island, and towards the end of 1632, after a summer's futile cruising,
returned to England with a terrible tale of bootless suffering.

* * * * *

While England sought a short route to China by Hudson Bay, and the
Spaniards were still hoping to find a way to the orient by the Gulf of
Mexico and California, New France had been founded, and, as we may learn
from other narratives in this series, her explorers had not been idle.

In the year 1660 two French pathfinders and fur traders, Medard Chouart
des Groseilliers and Pierre Esprit Radisson, men of Three Rivers, came
back from the region west of Lake Superior telling wondrous tales of a
tribe of Indians they had met--a Cree nation that passed each summer on
the salt waters of th