Preface

The plan of this tale 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 the exhibition made of
this old acquaintance, in the novel circumstances in which he now
appears, should be found not to lessen his favor 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 my
object to avoid dwelling on it too much on the present occasion;
its association with the sailor, 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
the 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 are known to have navigated that inland sea, even
at a period much earlier than the one just mentioned, as to form a
sufficient authority for their introduction into a work of fiction.
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 manoeuvered on those waters, which, half
a century ago, 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