Explorations of Samuel de Champlain
Born about 1567 in the small French Atlantic port of Brouage, Samuel de Champlain had most likely already been to Spanish America when, in 1603, he embarked as an observer on a trading expedition to the St. Lawrence Valley. Hoping to find a shorter route to the Orient, he questioned Native people, notably Algonquins, whom he met at the summer trading rendezvous at Tadoussac, about the hydrography of the interior. They subsequently took him on a trip some fifty miles up the Saguenay River before showing him the St. Lawrence as far as the Lachine Rapids above present-day Montreal. The following year, Champlain joined Sieur de Monts, Newly invested with the monopoly of the fur trade, as geographer on a venture to Acadia. After exploring parts of the Nova Scotia coastline, the party spent a difficult winter at Sainte-Croix
(later St. Croix Island, Maine), before moving to Port-Royal (later Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia). On two expeditions in 1605 and 1606, Champlain mapped the coast as far as Nantucket Sound, returning to France only in 1607.
Having convinced de Monts that the St. Lawrence Valley was more promising than Acadia for trade, exploration, and settlement, Champlain—along with a few dozen artisans and workers—established a base of operations at Quebec in 1608. The colony they founded would remain essentially a commercial and missionary outpost in the explorer's lifetime. (He died in 1635.) In 1609 Champlain and two compatriots accompanied a Native war party on a foray into Mohawk Iroquois territory, emerging victorious from an engagement at the southern end (near Crown Point, New York) of the lake to which Champlain gave his name. In 1613, the Algonquins invited Champlain to visit their country in the middle reaches of the Ottawa River. In 1615 and 1616, a similar invitation from the powerful Hurons took him east and south of Lake Huron and, on the occasion of a raiding party, to Iroquois villages probably situated between Lakes Oneida and Onondaga. While the allies permitted him to see their own and some of their neighbors' or enemies' territory, they refused him access to other parts of the interior, including the route northward to Hudson Bay he had learned about. Thus aided and constrained, Champlain explored much of the lower Great Lakes region. An energetic promoter of his colony, which he saw as a future customs station for the China trade, he published his Voyages in installments, illustrating them with carefully drafted maps. The 1632 cumulative edition of the Voyages, containing a remarkable map of New France, summarized the geographic and ethnographic observations of a long career.
In the history of French exploration in North America, Champlain is a pivotal figure, for it is with him that this enterprise began to venture inland toward the Great Lakes region and beyond. This great aboriginal domain he saw as the threshold to Asia and impatiently claimed as New France. To gain entry to it, Champlain had no choice but to obtain the permission and assistance of its Native inhabitants within the framework of the broader military and commercial alliance. Champlain was forced, aided above all by a few interpreters sent to live with the allied nations, to embark on explorations that were as much diplomatic as territorial.
Bibliography
Champlain, Samuel de. The Works of Samuel de Champlain. Edited by H. P. Biggar. 6 vols. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922–1936.
Heidenreich, Conrad. "Early French Exploration in the North American Interior." In North American Exploration. Vol. 2, A Continent Defined. Edited by John Logan Allen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. "A Continent Revealed: Assimilation of the Shape and Possibilities of North America's East Coast, 1524–1610." In North American Exploration. Vol. 1, A New World Disclosed. Edited by John Logan Allen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Trigger, Bruce. Natives and New comers: Canada's "Heroic Age" Reconsidered. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985.
Trudel, Marcel. "Champlain, Samuel de." Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 1, 1000–1700. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966.
———. Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. Vol. 2, Le comptoir 1604-1627. Montreal: Fides, 1966.
—Thomas Wien
