London, April to September 1822;
Revised in December 1846
THE LITTLE beaded girl’s tribe departed. My guide, the Dutchman, refused to go with me beyond the Falls. I paid him and joined a party of traders who were leaving to go down the Ohio. But before I went, I cast a glance at the lakes of Canada. Nothing is so sad as the face of these lakes. The plains of the Ocean and the Mediterranean open paths to the nations, and their shores are or were inhabited by many powerful civilized peoples; the Canadian lakes offer nothing but bare waves that lap against denuded lands: solitudes dividing other solitudes. Uninhabited coastlines look out on shipless seas, and you step down from desolate waves onto desolate sands.
Lake Erie is more than one hundred leagues in circumference. The riverine nations were exterminated by the Iroquois two centuries ago. A chilling thing it is, to see the Indians venturing out in bark canoes on this lake famous for its tempests, where in the old days a myriad of serpents swarmed. These Indians suspend their manitous from the sterns of their boats and launch themselves into whirlwinds among the churning waves. The lakewater, level with the apertures of the canoes, seems ready to swallow them at any moment. The hunting dogs, paws resting on the sides, howl while their masters, in total silence, strike the waters rhythmically with their paddles. The canoes advance in a line. At the prow of the first stands a chief who chants the diphthong oah; o on a long, dull note, ah in a short, sharp tone. In the last canoe is another chief, also standing, and maneuvering an oar that serves as rudder. The other warriors crouch on their heels at the bottom of the boats. Through the fog and the winds, one sees only the feathers that decorate the Indians’ heads, the outstretched necks of the baying dogs, and the shoulders of the two sachems, the pilot and the augur: one might call them the gods of these lakes.
The Canadian rivers have no history in the Old World: theirs is different from the destiny of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Danube, and the Rhine. What changes have those rivers not seen on their banks? How much sweat and blood have conquerors shed in order to traverse those waters that a goatherd can step over at their source!