University of Virginia Library

Preface.

The plan of this tale is old, having suggested itself to the writer, many years since
though the details are altogether of recent invention. The idea of associating seamen and
savages, in the incidents that might be supposed characteristic of the Great Lakes,
having been mentioned to a publisher, the latter obtained something like a pledge
from the author, to carry out the design at some future day whose pledge is now tardily and imperfectly redeemed.

The reader may recognize an old friend, under new circum
stances in the principal character of this legend. If it should be found that
his present the exhibition made of this old acquaintance, in the novel circumstances
in which he appears, shall not lessen his favor with the public, it will be a
a source of extreme gratification to the writer, since he has an interest in the
individual in question, that fall little short of identity and reality. It is not
an easy Task, however, to reproduce the same character in two separate
works, and to maintain the peculiarities that are indispensable to identity,
without incurring a risk of fatiguing the reader with seamen, and the present
experiment has been so long delayed, from doubts of its success, quite as
from doubts of its success, as from any other cause. In this, as in every New undertaking, it must be
the "end" that will "crown the work."

The Indian character has so little variety, that it has been an object to
avoid dwelling in it too much, in the present occasion the association with
the sailor too, it is feared, will be found too to have more novelty than interest.

It may strike the novice, as an anachronism, to place vessels on Ontario,
in the middle of the eighteenth century, but in this particular facts will fully bear out all the
licence of the fiction , in this particular. Although the particular precise vessels mention
ed in these pages may never have existed on that water, or anywhere else, than so nearly
resembling them as to form a sufficient authority for their introduction into
a work of fiction, are known to have navigated that inland sea, even were
found much earlier than the one just mentioned. It is a fact not generally
remembered, though it may be well known, that there are isolated spots, along the line of the
great lakes that date, as settlements, as far back, as many of the older American towns,
and which were the seats of a species of civilization, long before the greater portions of
even the older states was shielded from the wilderness.

Ontario, in our own times, has been the scene of important naval evolutions. Fleets
have manoeuvred on those waters, which, half a century since, were as meandering,
as waters well can be, and the day is not distant, when the whole of the great range
of lakes will become the walk of empire, and fraught with all the interest of human

society. A passing glimpse, even though it be in a work of fiction, of what that vast
region so lately was, may help to make up the sum of knowledge by which alone, as
just appreciation can be formed of the wonderful workings of means by which providence in this Review
where Life so is clearing the way for the advancement of civilization across the whole
American continent.