Champlain's legacy

Four hundred years ago this May, arriving at Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay River, thirtysomething cartographer and mariner Samuel de Champlain explored his options for a second career. Pensioned for his military service to the French king Henri IV and author of an illustrated manuscript on the West Indies, he sought to capitalize on his extensive knowledge of the New World. Poised to explore the great river of Canada beyond its narrowing, which the Montagnais called "Kebec," Champlain reflected on "the feasibility of discovering the passage to China, without the inconveniences of the ice of the north or the heats of the torrid zone," as he wrote in his Voyages, published in 1613. In the more "civilized" interior, a passage to the east would be found; there, Champlain would transform his social status from navigator and mapmaker to founder and governor of a new country.

His explorations over the summer of 1603 as far as the Lachine Rapids generated a good sense of the geography of the St. Lawrence basin, with the first intimations of Niagara Falls and of water routes to Hudson Bay. Champlain also observed the wide array of Amerindian nations, including Montagnais, Algonquians, and the "bons Irocois," or Hurons. By accident - or more probably by design - he began to build alliances with them. My interest in this iconic figure in the history of New France revolves around these early days of charting new territory and engaging newly encountered peoples. What Columbus and Cortes were in sixteenth-century Spanish expansion, Champlain was in seventeenth-century French: each, venturing into what for them was the unknown, improvised relations and engaged in prodigious acts of naming in this New World. But even though history celebrates him as Father of New France, Champlain's qualities as alliance-maker and ethnographer have not been fully investigated. Like the early Iberian colonizers, Champlain had a capacity to improvise a vision and to communicate with the peoples of the new land, which throws great relief onto early colonization and emerging European-Amerindian relations.

Though the outline of Champlain's career is well known, reconstructing his outlook requires some detective work. Born between 1567 and 1570 in the coastal town of Brouage, to a fishing family whose head,...