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Champlain was not idle that winter, for when his wounds had healed he moved amongst the tribes, making himself acquainted with the country and the language. The woods were filled with June flowers ere he returned to Quebec, where he had been mourned as one dead. You can imagine how rejoiced were the band of martial pioneers there to see their leader once more alive and well. They cheered and sang songs and waved flags in his honour, and even discharged the great cannon, whose echoes startled the Indians prowling afar on the green banks of the St. Lawrence.

Verily the part which Samuel de Champlain and his little band of Frenchmen had played in giving armed assistance to the Hurons and Algonquins was to have terrible results. It threw the Iroquois into friendship with the Dutch and other enemies of the French, who supplied them with firearms. It caused them to bear a hate to Champlain and all his countrymen almost as great as the hate they bore to the dusky Hurons.

All this time Champlain, great as was his ambition, can only be regarded as the agent or manager of a company of men in France whose first wish was to make money out of the fur trade. These men in their hearts had very little sympathy for Champlain's schemes of colonisation and conversion of the savages, and, becoming dissatisfied with the profits Champlain was making for them, they tried repeatedly to procure his recall. In order to baffle the intrigues against him and explain to the King himself the importance of Canada to the kingdom of France, Champlain sailed away yet again for home, leaving sixty men, the entire French population of Canada, behind him in Quebec. By his zeal and eloquence he was able to obtain some fresh supplies for his colony, and also some more soldiers and workers. Amongst these was an apothecary named Louis Hébert, who is often spoken of as the first emigrant to Canada, because he took with him his wife and two children, intending to settle as a farmer on the land. Direct descendants of Hébert are alive in Canada to this day. Two years later Champlain managed to bring a body of eighty colonists out to New France, and the next year (1620) his own wife, Helen de Champlain, accompanied him for the first time to the colony. This time he had triumphed over those who wished to depose him, and was now confirmed in his title of Viceroy of New France, and all seemed in the general rejoicings on his return to promise well for his enterprise. Not only the French in Quebec, but the Indians were delighted at the beauty and manners of the Governor's wife, then only twenty-two years of age. They tell of her that she wore always a small mirror suspended from her neck, according to the custom of the ladies in those days. When the red-men who drew near her looked in the little mirror they saw each, to his astonishment, his own face reflected there, and went about telling one another that the beautiful wife of the white chief cherished an image of each in her heart.