Section

[figure description] Title Page.[end figure description]

STEREOTYPED BY J. FAGAN.....PHILADELPHIA.

PRINTED BY T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS.

PREFACE.

[figure description] Page (3).[end figure description]

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 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; which pledge is now tardily and
imperfectly redeemed.

The reader may recognize an old friend, under new
circumstances, in the principal character of this legend.
If it should be found that the exhibition made of this
old acquaintance, in the novel circumstances in which
he appears, shall not lessen his favour with the public,
it will be a source of extreme gratification to the
writer, since he has an interest in the individual in
question, that falls little short of reality. It is not an
easy task, however, to introduce the same character
in four separate works, and to maintain the peculiarities
that are indispensable to identity, without incurring
a risk of fatiguing the reader with sameness; and
the present experiment has been so long delayed, quite
as much from doubts of its success as from any other
cause. In this, as in every other 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 on it too much,
on the present occasion. Its association with the sailor,

[figure description] Page iv.[end figure description]

too, it is feared, will be found 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 license of the fiction. Although the precise
vessels mentioned in these pages may never have
existed on that water, or anywhere else, others 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 at a
period much earlier than the one just mentioned. It is
a fact not generally remembered, however well known
it may be, 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 portion of even the older states was rescued
from the wilderness.

Ontario, in our own times, has been the scene of
important naval evolutions. Fleets have manœuvred
on those waters, which, half a century since, were as
deserted as waters well can be; and the day is not
distant, when the whole of that vast range of lakes
will become the seat of empire, and fraught with all
the interests 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 a just appreciation
can be formed of the wonderful means, by which Providence
is clearing the way for the advancement of
civilization across the whole American continent.

[figure description] Page 013.[end figure description]