Sometimes they would have plates of leather studded with shell beads and hanging over the back.
[Illustration: SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN; ALEXANDER HENRY THE ELDER] In 1616 Champlain returned to France, but visited Quebec in 1617 and 1618.

During the years spent at Quebec, which followed his explorations of 1616, he was greatly impeded in his work of consolidating Canada as a French colony by the religious strife between the Catholics and Huguenots, and the narrow-minded greed of the Chartered company of fur-trading merchants for whom he worked.

But in 1620 he came back to Canada as Lieutenant-Governor (bringing his wife with him), and after attending to the settlement of a violent commercial dispute between fur-trading companies he tried to compose the quarrel between the Iroquois and the Algonkins, and brought about a truce which lasted till 1627.
In 1628 came the first English attack on Canada.

A French fleet was defeated and captured in the Gulf of St.Lawrence, and in the following year Champlain, having been obliged to surrender Quebec (he had only sixteen soldiers as a garrison, owing to lack of food), voyaged to England more or less as a prisoner of state in the summer of 1629.

He found, on arriving there, that the cession of Quebec was null and void, peace having been concluded between Britain and France two months before the cession.