Before him,
too far for sight, lay the spirit-haunted Manitonalins, and, southward,
spread the vast bosom of the Georgian Bay. For more than a hundred
miles, his course was along its eastern shores, among islets countless
as the sea-sands,--an archipelago of rocks worn for ages by the wash of
waves. He crossed Byng Inlet, Franklin Inlet, Parry Sound, and the wider
bay of Matchedash, and seems to have landed at the inlet now called
Thunder Bay, at the entrance of the Bay of Matchedash, and a little west
of the Harbor of Penetanguishine.
An Indian trail led inland, through woods and thickets, across broad
meadows, over brooks, and along the skirts of green acclivities. To the
eye of Champlain, accustomed to the desolation he had left behind, it
seemed a land of beauty and abundance. He reached at last a broad
opening in the forest, with fields of maize, pumpkins ripening in the
sun, patches of sunflowers, from the seeds of which the Indians made
hair-oil, and, in the midst, the Huron town of Otonacha. In all
essential points, it resembled that which Cartier, eighty years before,
had seen at Montreal,--the same triple palisade of crossed and
intersecting trunks, and the same long lodges of bark, each containing
several families. Here, within an area of thirty or forty miles, was the
seat of one of the most remarkable savage communities on the continent.
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