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It was at Quebec (a word meaning in the Indian language a strait) that on the third day of July 1607 Champlain gave orders to disembark. In the shadow of the towering rock of Cape Diamond, the first thing to be done was to clear a site and erect cabins for shelter. As his men toiled on unceasingly the natives gathered round in wonder and admiration. They were unaccustomed to much manual work themselves, their squaws doing most of the labour. They saw in a few short weeks the bastions of a fort and cannon set up. Scarcely had the workmen completed their task and got all snug and tidy for the winter than a plot was formed amongst some of Champlain's followers to kill him. The leader of the plot was a Norman locksmith, Jean Duval, a brave and violent fellow who had served with Champlain in Acadia, and was impatient under any kind of authority. According to the plan the conspirators drew up, their leader was to be shot, the stores pillaged, and then they were all to fly to Spain with the booty. Lucky it was for the great and good pioneer that one of the plotters, filled with remorse, went to Champlain a few days before the mutiny was to be carried out and confessed all. Champlain with great promptitude seized Duval and hanged him to the nearest tree, but the rest he only sent back to France, where the good King, at his request, pardoned them. Meanwhile Pontgravé had collected and sailed away with his cargo of furs. Spring came; the snows melted and were replaced by green meadows and blossoming trees; everywhere the birds sang. Champlain, without waiting for Pontgravé's return, set off up the river and soon met again friendly Indian chiefs of the Algonquin and Huron tribes, who told him terrible tales of their sufferings at the hands of their enemies the Iroquois or the Five Nations. In their despair these chiefs sought out the Man-with-the-Iron-Breast, as they called Champlain, on account of the steel breast-plate he wore, and asked his help against the blood-thirsty Iroquois. These men of the Five Nations, Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Oneidas, lived in the forests south of Lake Ontario, and were perhaps at once the most intelligent and the most cruel of all the Indians on the continent. It was the Iroquois who had destroyed the old Huron towns of Stadacona and Hochelaga which Cartier had seen and described, and as they bore the Hurons and Algonquins an implacable enmity, it was natural that they would extend this enmity to the pale-faces who had now come to dwell in the Huron country. They might, it is true, have been propitiated; but Champlain did not stop to consider any questions of policy: he favoured at once the idea of alliance with the surrounding red-men, an alliance which was to cost him and his new colony a bloody and fearful price. Champlain, then, made three warlike expeditions into the country of the Iroquois during the next six years. In the first he paddled in canoes up the Richelieu River and came to a beautiful lake, to which he gave his own name ("Lake Champlain"). Meeting a party of Iroquois of the Mohawk nation or tribe, he fell upon them suddenly. The Mohawks fancied at first that they had only to do with Algonquins, and felt confident of victory, until the Frenchmen's muskets rang out; then not fast enough could they flee in panic from the magic bullets, leaving many slain, including their bravest chiefs. Champlain had only 60 Frenchmen and Indians, while the Mohawks numbered 200; but his victory was complete; not one of his force was killed, and the town of the enemy was wiped from the face of the earth. Notwithstanding Champlain's protests, the Algonquins insisted on torturing one of their Iroquois captives to death by every device of savage cruelty. Mercy was not in their code; they neither gave it, nor, when captured, expected it.