Champlain's Dream

by David Hackett Fischer

  After all this uncertainty about the man himself, it is a relief to turn to the record of his acts. Here we have an abundance of evidence, and it makes a drama that is unique in the history of exploration. No other discoverer mastered so many roles over so long a time, and each of them presents a puzzle.

  By profession Champlain was a soldier, and he chose to represent himself that way in his self-portrait. He fought in Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, bore the scars of wounds on his face and body, and witnessed atrocities beyond imagining. Like many old soldiers, he took pride in his military service, but he grew weary of war. Always he kept a soldier’s creed of honor, courage, and duty, but increasingly did so in the cause of peace. There is a question about how he squared these thoughts.

  At the same time, Champlain was a mariner of long experience. He went to sea at an early age, and rose from ship’s boy to “admirall” of a colonizing fleet. From 1599 to 1633 he made at least twenty-seven Atlantic crossings and hundreds of other voyages. He never lost a ship under his command, except once when he was a passenger aboard a sinking barque in a heavy gale on a lee shore, with a captain who was unable to act. Champlain seized command, set the mainsail, and deliberately drove her high on a rocky coast in a raging storm—and saved every man aboard. There are interesting questions to be asked about his leadership and astonishing seamanship.16

  Champlain is best remembered for his role as an explorer. He developed a method of close-in coastal exploration that he called “ferreting,” and he used it to study thousands of miles of the American coast from Panama to Labrador. He also explored much of North America through what are now six Canadian provinces and five American states. He was the first European to see much of this countryside, and he enabled us to see it through his eyes. His unique methods raise another question about how he did that work, and with what result.

  Champlain also mapped this vast area in yet another role as a cartographer. He put himself in the forefront of geographic knowledge in his era. His many maps and charts set a new standard for accuracy and detail. Experts have studied them with amazement. They wonder how he made maps of such excellence with the crude instruments at his command.17 He also embellished his maps with handsome drawings. In his own time he was known as an artist. When rival French merchants opposed his appointment to high office, they complained that Champlain was a “mere painter,” and therefore unfit for command. In his drawings he left us a visual record of the new world, which alone would make him an important figure. To study the few originals is to discover the skill and refinement of his art. But nearly all his art survives only in crude copies that challenge us to recover the spirit of his work.18

  Champlain was a prolific writer. He is most accessible to us through his published books, which exceed in quantity and quality the work of every major explorer of North America during his era. A close second was the work of Captain John Smith, but Champlain’s published writings were larger in bulk. They covered a broader area, spanned a longer period, and drew deeply on the intellectual currents of his age. The problem is to find the mind behind the prose.

  In his books Champlain played a role as a pioneer ethnographer. He left an abundance of first-hand description about many Indian nations in North America. During the late twentieth century some scholars criticized him for ethnocentrism. That judgment is correct in some ways, but Champlain’s work remains a major source of sympathetic description. A challenging problem is to sort out truth from error.19

  He was also a naturalist. Champlain loved plants and animals, gathered information about the flora and fauna of the new world, and studied the climate and resources of the places he visited. He planted experimental gardens in four colonies and did much descriptive writing about the American environment before European settlement, and how it changed.20

  Especially important to his posterity was Champlain’s role as a founder and leader of the first permanent French settlements in North America. A major part of his life was his economic association with many trading companies that paid for New France. This was Champlain’s most difficult role, and his least successful. Wealthy investors often defeated him, and many companies failed. But in his stewardship, New France somehow survived three decades of failure—which is not only an unknown but a mystery.

  Through those same three decades from 1603 to 1635, Champlain also returned to France in most years. He had another busy career as a courtier and a tireless promoter of his American project. Four people ruled France in that era: Henri IV until 1610, Marie de Medici as queen regent after 1610, Louis XIII from 1617, and Richelieu as “first minister” from 1624. Champlain worked directly with all except the queen regent, argued vigorously for New France, and prodded them so forcefully that one wonders how he stayed out of the Bastille. During that long period, six highborn French noblemen and “princes of the blood” served as lieutenant general or viceroy or “cardinal-admiral” of New France. All but one of them were absentees who never came to America. Each of them without exception chose Champlain to be his chief lieutenant and commander in the new world. He got on with all those very difficult people—another puzzle.

  One of Champlain’s most important roles was in the peopling of New France. For some reason the French have always been less likely to emigrate than were millions of British, Germans, and other Europeans. And yet in thirty years Champlain did more than any other leader to establish three French-speaking populations and start them growing in North America. In a pivotal moment from 1632 to 1635 when he was acting governor, they suddenly began to expand by sustained natural increase, and they have continued to do so, even to our own time. Champlain had a leading hand in that, and even subsidized marriages and families with his own wealth. Each of these three populations developed its own distinct culture and speechways which made them Québécois, Acadien, and Métis. Today their descendants have multiplied to millions of people. Something of Champlain’s time survives in their language and folkways. They are chief among his many legacies.

  Champlain also played a role in the religious history of New France. He worked with Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, Recollets, Jesuits, and Capuchins. His Christian faith was deeply important to him, increasingly so as he grew older. But he struggled to reconcile an ideal of tolerance with the reality of an established Church—a problem that he never solved.

  If nothing else, his life was a record of stamina with few equals. But always it was more than that. Champlain was a dreamer. He was a man of vision, and like most visionaries he dreamed of many things. Several scholars have written about his dream of finding a passage to China. Others have written of his dream for the colonization in New France. But all these visions were part of a larger dream that has not been studied. This war-weary soldier had a dream of humanity and peace in a world of cruelty and violence. He envisioned a new world as a place where people of different cultures could live together in amity and concord. This became his grand design for North America.

  Champlain was not a solitary dreamer. He moved within several circles of French humanists during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They are neglected figures of much importance in the history of ideas—bridge-figures who inherited the Renaissance and inspired the Enlightenment. They were not of one mind, but they had large purposes in common. One group of French humanists centered on the person of Henri IV and were guided by his great example. Another was an American circle in Paris who never crossed the Atlantic but were inspired by the idea of the new world. In a third group were many French humanists who came to North America with Champlain—men such as the sieur de Mons and the sieur de Razilly. In the beginning they were his leaders. By the end he became theirs.

  Champlain traveled in other circles among the leaders of Indian nations, who also were great dreamers. He knew them intimately, and they live as individuals in the pages of his books. Champlain had a way of getting along with very different people, and he also had the rarest gift of all. In long years of labor, he foun
d a way to convert his dreams into realities. In the face of great obstacles and heavy defeats, he exercised his skills of leadership in extreme conditions. Those of us who are leaders today (which includes most of us in an open society) have something to learn from him about that.

  Champlain was a leader, but he was not a saint. We do not need another work of hagiography about him. He was a mortal man of flesh and blood, a very complicated man. He made horrific errors in his career, and some of his mistakes cost other men their lives. He cultivated an easy manner, but sometimes he drove his men so hard that four of them tried to murder him. His quest for amity and concord with the Indians led to wars with the Mohawk and the Onondaga. His private life was deeply troubled, particularly in his relations with women. Champlain lived comfortably as a man among men, but one discovery eluded this great discoverer. He never found the way to a woman’s heart. It was not for want of trying. He was strongly attracted to women, but his most extended relationship ended in frustration.

  His ideal of humanity was very large, but it was also limited in strange, ironic ways. Champlain embraced the American Indians, but not his own French servants. He had deep flaws and made many enemies, responded badly to criticism, and could be very petty to rivals. But other men who knew this man wrote of him with respect and affection. Even his enemies did so.

  Just now, we have an opportunity to study this extraordinary man in a new light. In the early twenty-first century, three nations are celebrating the 400th anniversary of his achievements. Something similar happened in the early twentieth century, for his 300th anniversary. The literature about Champlain is like a century plant. It blooms every hundred years, then fades and blooms again.

  At the start of the twentieth century, a very large literature ran heavily to hagiography, and celebrated Champlain as a saintly figure. After 1950 the inevitable reaction set in. Popular debunkers and academic iconoclasts made Champlain a favorite target.21 These attacks were deepened by a fin-de-siècle attitude called political correctness, with its revulsion against great white men, especially empire-builders, colonial founders, and discoverers.

  Incredibly, some apostles of political correctness even tried to ban the word “discovery” itself. Historian Peter Pope met this attitude on the 500th anniversary of John Cabot’s northern voyages of discovery. He recalls: “I was asked by a servant of the P.R. industry in June 1996 to summarize Cabot’s achievement without using the term discovery. She told me it had been banned…. Any talk of ‘discovery’ is understood as an endorsement of conquest.” Pope was ordered to “describe what the Venetian pilot did without using the D-word.”22

  As these attitudes spread widely during the late twentieth century, Champlain began to fade from the historical literature. He all but disappeared from school curricula in France, Canada, and the United States. Many still remember him, but when the subject came up in France, we heard people say, “Connais pas, never heard of him.” In the United States, one person asked, “Champlain? Why are you writing a book about a lake?” In 1999, Canadian historian W. J. Eccles wrote that “there is no good biography of Champlain.” For twenty years from 1987 to 2008, there was no full-scale biography at all.23

  Since the turn of the twenty-first century, attitudes have been changing yet again. Historians are returning to the study of leaders in general, and to Champlain in particular. With the inspired leadership of Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois, five volumes of collected essays appeared in Canada, France, and the United States from 2004 to 2007. Together these books prompted more than a hundred new studies of Champlain and his world.24

  They built on the foundation of a new historiography that had been growing quietly since the 1960s through all the Sturm und Drang of political correctness. Archaeological research has been taking place on an unprecedented scale. A new historical ethnography has deepened our understanding of Champlain’s relations with Indians. A major school of Canadian social history led by the great scholarship of Marcel Trudel has wrought a revolution in our knowledge of Champlain’s New France. Much important work has happened in demographic and economic history. Geographers led by Conrad Heidenreich have studied his cartography in detail. Archival scholars such as Robert Le Blant have turned up much new material on Champlain and made those findings more accessible to others.

  The new scholarship of the early twenty-first century is becoming more mature, more global, more balanced, more empirical, more eclectic, and less ideological than before. A result of this new scholarship has been to undercut the writings of iconoclasts. Two generations ago, the dominant source for Champlain’s life was his own writing, which inspired skepticism. Today in every chapter of his life, we can test his own accounts against the evidence of archaeology, archival materials, other narratives, complex chronologies, and interlocking sources in great variety. Many small errors and some larger ones have been found in Champlain’s work, but the main lines of his writings have been reinforced by other evidence. An example is René Baudry, who worked with Le Blant to make much new archival material available to others. He writes of Champlain, “It is much to his credit that information from other sources almost always confirms the accuracy of his accounts.”25

  In this recent work, old methods are being used in new ways. One of them is the method of Herodotus, and his idea of history as a genuinely free and open inquiry—the literal Greek meaning of history. Another way forward was the school that taught historians three lessons about their work: “First, go there! Do it! Then write it!” To read Champlain’s many books in that spirit, to explore the places that he described, and to follow in his track, is to make an astonishing discovery about our own world. Many of the places that Champlain described in the seventeenth century can still be seen today, not precisely as he saw them, but some of them are remarkably little changed. This is so in large parts of the St. Lawrence Valley and the magnificent Saguenay River. It is so along the Atlantic coast, the Gulf of Maine, the forests and waterways of Canada, the harbors of Acadia, and the coast of Gaspésie. It is so in the United States on Mount Desert Island, the Isles Rangées, the Puffin Islands, and Ticonderoga. It is that way again in the rolling ground of the Onondaga Country, and the natural meadowlands of Cap Tourmente.

  Champlain’s places of discovery are a world that we may be losing, but they are not yet a world we have lost. It is still possible to explore them by car and plane, by canoe and kayak, by sailboat and zodiac boat, by snowshoe—and some of the best places are accessible only by foot. At all these many sites we can rediscover this great discoverer by going there, and doing it, and traveling through his space in our time.

  Other sites in Champlain’s life are accessible in a different way. Archaeologists have been hard at work on the sites where he lived and worked. Many traces of what he did have been coming out of the ground in a most extraordinary way. That is so at Sainte-Croix Island, Port-Royal, Quebec, Pentagoet, Cap Tourmente, Ticonderoga, Huronia, and Iroquoia. On the other side of the water, it is the same at Brouage, Crozon, Blavet, Honfleur, Quimper, Fontainebleau, the Marais district of Paris, even the basement of the Louvre. Many of these places that were important to Champlain have preserved much of their character even as the world has changed around them. This book builds on all that physical evidence.

  It also seeks a path of understanding between hagiographers on the one hand and iconoclasts on the other. In that regard, one of the most important opportunities of this inquiry is for us to get right with both Champlain and the American Indians.26 Two generations ago, historians wrote of European saints and Indian savages. In the last generation, too many scholars have been writing about Indian saints and European savages. The opportunity for our generation is to go beyond that calculus of saints and savages altogether, and write about both American Indians and Europeans with maturity, empathy, and understanding. Many historians are now doing that, and this book is another effort in that direction.

  After the delusions of political correctness, ideological rage, multicultura
lism, postmodernism, historical relativism, and the more extreme forms of academic cynicism, historians today are returning to the foundations of their discipline with a new faith in the possibilities of historical knowledge, and with new results. This inquiry is conceived in that spirit. It begins not with a thesis, or a theory, or an ideology, but with a set of open questions about Champlain. It asks, who was this man? Where did he come from? What did he do? Why did he do it? What difference did he make? Why should we care? The answers to all these questions make a story. It begins where Champlain began, in a small town on the coast of France, looking outward across the Bay of Biscay toward America.

  A LEADER IN THE MAKING

  1.

  A CHILD OF BROUAGE

  The Sea as a School

  Samuel Champlain, De Brouage

  —title page of Champlain’s

  first published book, 16031

  TO TRAVEL THE OLD ROADS on the coast of France, south along the Bay of Biscay, is to find a beautiful and haunted place, full of interest for history-minded people. A few miles below the eighteenth-century navy town of Rochefort, we crossed the sparkling waters of the River Charente on a high-arched modern bridge and entered a region that was like another world. The terrain felt more like a floating island than part of the French mainland. It is very flat and not quite terra firma—a web of waterways and salt marshes, with seabirds swooping overhead and long views of sea and sky. On a sunny spring morning, the fields were green with new growth and the roadsides were brilliant with red poppies.