Samuel de Champlain

French-born colonial Canadian explorer

• Born: c. 1567-1570
• Birthplace: Brouage, Saintonge, France
• Died: December 25, 1635
• Place of death: Quebec, New France (now in Canada)

Widely considered to be the father of New France, Champlain now represents the French attempt to acquire and settle North America, one of the great might-have-beens of American history.

Early Life

Little is known of the early life of Samuel de Champlain (sahm-wehl duh shahm-plan), not even his date of birth. Scattered evidence and informed speculation have placed it as early as 1564 and as late as 1573; authorities seem to be divided fairly equally between 1567 and 1570. Champlain was born and reared on the Atlantic coast of France in the town of Brouage, a small seaport important for the salt trade. During the years of his youth, Brouage was a minor prize in the bitter religious wars between the Catholics and the Calvinist Huguenots. He may well have come from a Huguenot family, though as an adult he was a staunch Catholic.

As he climbed the social ladder, Champlain officially described his father as a captain in the merchant marine, attributing to him the “de” before Champlain, implying nobility. As a young man, however, the explorer was simply Samuel Champlain, and there is no record of a patent of nobility for the family. He had little formal education, but he learned the practical skills of seamanship and navigation from an early age and developed a straightforward and effective writing style, unembellished by Latinisms.

Like many of the other pioneers of the New World, therefore, Champlain was a self-made man. He was strongly religious, justifying his projects by a desire to save heathen souls for Christ as well as by arguments for the economic and political benefits to the kingdom of France. Personally, he was ascetic and self-denying, enduring the hardships of ocean voyages and frigid winters without complaint and ignoring the Native American women that other Europeans often molested or married. He was a courageous soldier and an honest administrator. He married late in life and had no children. No authentic contemporary portrait of him survives; he was described as modest in stature but tough in both mind and body.

Life’s Work

Champlain made his first voyage to the Americas in 1599, signing on with a Spanish fleet to the Caribbean. His skill as an observer, author, cartographer, and sketch artist produced a detailed record of this voyage into the Spanish Americas. He described the Spanish empire, speculated on the possibility of building a canal in Panama, and noted the injustices of the heavy-handed Spanish rule over the native peoples. His handwritten and illustrated account brought him to the attention of Henry IV, king of France, under whom he had served as a soldier, and he received an appointment as a royal geographer.

In 1603, he accompanied François Pont-Gravé, a sea captain, to North America with a royal commission to establish a French colony. The Saint Lawrence River valley had been visited and claimed for France by Jacques Cartier in 1534-1536, but the forbidding winters and the lack of either precious metals or an obvious passage to the Pacific Ocean (the elusive Northwest Passage) had discouraged French settlement. Each year, nevertheless, French, Basque, and assorted other European fishermen had braved the North Atlantic to fish in the teeming waters and engage in some trade with the North American Indians. After a stormy voyage of ten weeks, Champlain first set foot on North American soil. In the course of his sixty-odd years of life, he would cross the Atlantic no less than twenty-five times, tirelessly working to establish his dream of New France in America.

In 1604-1605, Champlain spent his first winter in America, at Saint Croix Island, which eventually became a United States National Monument along the border of Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. It was a disastrously cold winter, and thirty-five of the seventy-nine expedition members died. The settlement was abandoned the following spring. The next year Champlain and his men, reinforced by newcomers and supplies from France, tried an alternate site, Port Royal, on the protected inner coast of present-day Nova Scotia, which the French called Acadia. From this base, Champlain led exploratory expeditions down the American coast as far south as Cape Cod. He wrote descriptions and sketched navigational maps and charts of the New England coast that are remarkable for their accuracy.

The Port Royal colony proved unsatisfactory because of its high cost and modest return to the investors of the French colonial company. The French monarchy itself was disinclined to bear its costs, and there were no precious metals and few furs to be acquired. Champlain returned to France and laid a plan before Henry IV for a new colonial venture. The vast watershed of the Saint Lawrence River offered two attractive possibilities. It funneled the trade in Canadian furs to a single point, the natural fortress of Quebec, making it possible for France to institute a monopoly on the fur trade similar to Renaissance Portugal’s monopoly on East Indian spices. It also held the promise of a passage to Asia, because Canadian Indian tales spoke of vast seas that could be reached by following river routes to the west and north.

The king approved Champlain’s new plan, and in 1608, three ships sailed from Honfleur, France, to establish a permanent settlement at Quebec. Had Champlain pressed his New England exploration south of Cape Code, charted the natural harbor to be known later as New York and the lower Hudson River, and petitioned the French monarch to establish his settlement there, the history of North America might have been very different indeed. New France, however, remained centered at Quebec to the north.

Champlain and his men built a small settlement on the site of what is today the lower town of Quebec City. For himself, Champlain constructed an elaborate “habitation,” part fortress and part château. His sketch of this three-story building, complete with a moat and a tower, bears an extraordinary resemblance to the Lieutenance, the royal headquarters building at Honfleur, from which he sailed. The first winter at Quebec was a very rough one: Of the twenty-four Frenchmen who stayed on when the ships sailed for home, only Champlain and seven others survived. The settlement was reinforced from the mother country in the spring. Champlain constantly tried to encourage French families to settle in Quebec and establish farms, but with little success. He brought his young wife, Hélène, with him in 1620; she disliked the isolation of Quebec and went back to Paris in 1624, never to return. By the time Champlain died at Quebec in 1635, the number of European settlers in the colony still would not surpass two hundred.

Recalling his skirmishes with local Indians along the New England coast and the repressive Spanish rule he had seen, Champlain strove to establish and maintain good relations with the Indians of the Saint Lawrence Basin, the Montagnais, the Algonquians, and the Hurons. He respected their way of life and nurtured the hope that they could be converted to Christianity gently rather than by force. The goodwill of the Canadian Indians was essential to the colony, because they controlled the sources of the beaver pelts on which Quebec’s economy was based. Champlain cemented relations with them by promising military aid in their wars against their traditional rivals, the Iroquois.

In 1609, Champlain accompanied a war party of Montagnais and their allies against the Mohawk Iroquois. They traveled south from the Saint Lawrence River to Lake Champlain, in modern New York State, and met their enemy near the site of Fort Ticonderoga. Champlain and two other Frenchmen, protected by armor and firing harquebuses, quickly scattered the Iroquois. The victory was by no means decisive, however, and traditional enmity remained. In 1615, Champlain led another war party west to Lakes Huron and Ontario and then southward, where he fought a battle near modern-day Syracuse, New York. The Iroquois were now better informed about the limitations of the harquebus and turned back the invaders. Champlain was wounded and the myth of European invincibility was broken. Throughout the history of Quebec, the French maintained their alliance with the local tribes, but paid for it with the hostility of the Iroquois in the British American Colonies to the south.

From time to time, Champlain would return to France to lobby for governmental and commercial support for the struggling colony. The situation in Europe was volatile, a residual effect of the wars of religion. King Henry IV was assassinated in 1610 and followed to the throne by Louis XIII, a mere boy. During the 1620’s, Cardinal de Richelieu stabilized the government of France by becoming the young king’s first minister. In 1627, he founded a company called the Hundred Associates, a royally chartered monopoly to develop the Canadian colony. Champlain was confirmed as the company’s and the king’s lieutenant in Canada, strengthening his authority. Nevertheless, direct government aid to New France was meager, and without the profits from the fur trade, the whole enterprise would have collapsed.

In 1628 and 1629, France and Britain were briefly at war, and Champlain was besieged at Quebec by British privateers and forced to surrender the colony to them. Canada was returned to France by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1632, and Champlain sailed from France for the last time to reestablish the colony and govern it in 1633. He died on Christmas Day, 1635, and was buried beneath the little Catholic church he had founded, Notre Dame de la Recouvrance, much lamented by Europeans and Native Americans alike.

Significance

Like the other hardy explorers who established the European presence on the North American continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Champlain combined the virtues of fortitude to resist the hardships of the time and the vision for the possibilities of the future. Like many, though by no means all, Europeans, he also was a man of strong Christian convictions, which he sought to bring to the Canadian Indians even as he used them to discipline fellow Europeans who were given to brutal and exploitative behavior. He sought honest alliances with the Native Americans, using his superior military technology to aid them in their traditional battles. He sought to turn a fair profit for French merchants through the fur trade, but he constantly argued that what America needed most was families of settlers who would clear and work the land. He realized that a purely commercial, missionary, and military colony could never create a permanent New France in the Americas.

The British colonies in New England and Virginia grew into thriving settlements, based on agriculture and artisan manufacturing as well as trade. By the 1750’s, Champlain’s New France had extended its net of military and trading posts over thousands of miles from the Saint Lawrence River to the lower Mississippi River, laying the foundations of Detroit, Chicago, Saint Louis, and New Orleans, yet the thinly spread French were outmanned and outgunned by the more populous and more densely distributed British and their American settlers. By 1763, New France was no more. The Acadians, refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the British who took control of their territory, were forcibly deported from the region. Many of these Acadians became known as Cajuns and settled in Louisiana and elsewhere in the modern United States. Moreover, a francophone culture continues to thrive at Champlain’s Quebec, a culture strong enough to motivate many Quebecois to seek to secede from the rest of Canada.

Champlain, like Christopher Columbus, reminds Anglo-Americans that their ancestors were not the only ones whose daring and foresight served to bring Western civilization to North America. Champlain is justly recognized as the father of New France and ranks also as one of the great American discoverers.

Bibliography

Bishop, Morris. Champlain: The Life of Fortitude. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1979. A solidly written biography organized around Champlain’s many voyages to the New World. There are lengthy quotations from Champlain’s own colorful descriptions of the country and people he found and several of his own sketches, as well as excellent modern maps and several appendices on some of the more controversial aspects of his life and times.

Champlain, Samuel de. Algonquians, Hurons, and Iroquois: Champlain Explores America, 1603-1616. Translated by Annie Nettleton Bourne. Edited by Edward Gaylord Bourne. Dartmouth, N.S.: Brook House Press, 2000. The Bournes originally published a two-volume translation of Champlain’s Voyages de la Nouvelle France in 1906, with the title The Voyages and Discoveries, 1604-1616. This book is a revised edition of the earlier translation.

Eccles, William J. France in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Rev. ed. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. Originally a volume in Henry Steele Commager’s New American Nation series, this standard history covers French colonization in North America and the Caribbean from the earliest contact until the American Revolution. In his first chapters, Eccles puts the contributions of Champlain in a broader context.

Heidenreich, Conrad E. “The Beginning of French Exploration out of the St. Lawrence Valley: Motives, Methods, and Changing Attitudes Towards Native People.” In Decentering the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700, edited by Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Compares Champlain’s exploration of Canada to exploration by Jacques Cartier and Jean-François de la Rocque, sieur de Roberval.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. This prolific and esteemed naval historian has combined in this biography both scholarship and graceful prose. Morison was himself a sailor and navigated many of the waters along the New England and Canadian coasts with Champlain’s descriptions and charts at hand. In the appendix is a translation of Champlain’s “Treatise on Seamanship” of 1632.

Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. 1856. Edited by David Levin. Vol. 1. New York: Viking Press, 1983. Parkman favors the British and the Protestants, but he nevertheless gives a vivid and not unfavorable picture of Champlain. For those with the patience to savor the style of Victorian prose, this well-known book can still pay substantial dividends.

Rudin, Ronald. Founding Fathers: The Celebration of Champlain and Laval in the Streets of Quebec, 1878-1908. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. From 1878 to 1908, Quebec City celebrated its founding at four commemorative events. While Rudin’s book focuses on the staging of these celebrations, it describes Quebeckers’ perceptions of the historical significance of Champlain and Laval.