Free Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brook

with Ochasteguin, reported to him that Lake
     Huron was after all not salty. It was two more summers before Champlain himself visited the lake. He tasted the water and
     found it douce , “sweet.” This confirmed the sad fact that Lake Huron was not linked to the Pacific Ocean.
    Champlain was a cartographer—it was his mapmaking skills that first brought him to the attention of his superiors on his first
     voyage—and through his life he drew a series of detailed maps of what was then called New France. His third map, produced
     in 1616, is the first to show Lake Huron. He labels it Mer Douce, the Sweetwater Sea, acknowledging the new truth while perhaps
     reminding himself that the search was still underway. Champlain introduces one ambiguity into this map, and one exaggeration.
     The ambiguity is where the Sweetwater Sea ends—he has allowed it to extend mysteriously off the left-hand side of the map,
     for who knows where it might lead? The exaggeration lies to the north. He has drawn the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean, the
     Mer du Coté du Nord, such that it sweeps south and comes very close to Lake Huron—a link to saltwater was surely out there
     somewhere. His message? The French need only to persevere with their explorations and they (he) will find the hidden transcontinental
     passage connecting France to China.
    Sixteen years later, Champlain published his final map of New France. This version provides a much fuller portrait of the
     Great Lakes, though Erie and Michigan have still not appeared. Champlain has learned that Mer Douce, the Sweetwater Sea, does
     not stretch on forever westward to the Pacific but comes to an end (this name would soon fade away in favor of Lac des Hurons,
     or Lake Huron). Beyond this freshwater lake and connected by a series of rapids, however, there appears yet another body of
     water, a Grand Lac of unknown size and extent (today’s Lake Superior): another lake in a chain that might one day prove to
     be the route to China.
    Champlain never got to Lake Superior, but Jean Nicollet did. Nicollet was one of Champlain’s coureurs de bois , or “woodland runners,” who were infiltrating the interior and operating extensive networks of trade. A year or two before
     Champlain published his map of 1632, Nicollet reached a tribe that no European had yet encountered, whom he, or someone, called
     the Puants, the Stinkers. Champlain includes them on his final map, on which he indicates a “Nation des Puants,” or Nation
     of Stinkers, living beside a lake that drains into the Sweetwater Sea. “Stinkers” is an unfortunate translation of an Algonquin
     word meaning dirty water—which is the term Algonquins used to describe brackish water, that is, water that tasted of salt.
     The Stinkers did not call themselves Puants. They were Ouinipigous, a name we spell today as Winnebagoes. 8 But the word got attached to them by a convoluted logic that was always insisting that the next body of water over the horizon
     must be salty, must be “stinky”—must be the Pacific Ocean. 9
    The chief of the Winnebagoes invited Jean Nicollet to be his guest at a great feast of welcome. Nicollet understood the importance
     of protocol. When he presented himself before the thousands who came great distances to attend the feast hosted in his honor,
     he wore the finest item he had in his baggage: a Chinese robe embroidered with flowers and birds.
    There was no way that an up-country agent such as Nicollet acquired this garment on his own. He would not have had access
     to such a thing, let alone the money to buy it. The robe must have been Champlain’s. But how did Champlain acquire it? Only
     in the early years of the seventeenth century were curiosities of this sort starting to make their way from China to northern
     Europe. As this garment no longer exists, we have no way to trace it. The likely origin was a Jesuit missionary in China,
     who brought or sent it back to Europe as a testimonial of the