Other clues to Champlain’s faith come from the religion of his extended family. His uncle was born in Marseille, and is believed to have been a Protestant who converted to Catholicism. His cousin Marie Camaret in La Rochelle was Protestant. Champlain himself would later marry into a Protestant family that converted to Catholicism. All this evidence points to the same conclusion: Champlain was probably baptized and raised as a Protestant and later converted to Catholicism.31
At an early age Champlain probably went to an infant school, perhaps several of them, a common practice in the early modern era. These schools were run by housewives in their kitchens, especially in Protestant communities where rates of literacy were higher than among Roman Catholics. The purpose was to teach the fundamentals of faith, the habits of discipline, and the rudiments of reading and writing. The housewives catechized the children, kept order with their pudding sticks, and drilled them on the fundamentals of reading and ciphering. There Champlain would have learned his letters, possibly as early as the age of two or three, as was common in households of Protestants who were Children of the Book.
At a later age, Champlain may also have gone to an academy that existed in Brouage. On May 5, 1599, the Swiss traveler Thomas Platter visited the town and wrote a full account of this school. He tells us that it was a place for the “training and teaching” of “young men of the nobility and other well-born seigneurs.” The school had a rector who received his salary from Henri IV himself, and was equipped with “twenty magnificent horses, all very handsome.” The students attended for two years, and were taught the “exercises and games of cavaliers,” in particular equitation, mounting, jumping, and trick riding. They also learned to draw, to dance, and play the mandolin. Mainly they received instruction in the arts of war and the use of weapons, which Champlain mastered at an early age. He was an excellent shot with firearms, an expert with the sword, and he could ride. In the afternoons the students learned how to measure distances and lay out the foundations for a fortress. After graduation they went into the army, or into the service of a grand seigneur.
A leading French scholar, Jean Glénisson, thinks it “very possible that he attended this institution.” Other scholars disagree. Whether Champlain was a student there or not, he clearly learned what the Brouage academy had to teach.32 He learned to draw a picture, ride a horse, wield a sword, and fire an arquebus. We have no evidence of a mandolin. In legal documents dated March 18, 1615, and again in 1625 and 1626, Champlain was called an é cuyer, a term of rank which literally meant “a person used to horses,” a member of the equestrian class. Later it came to mean a young nobleman before the adoubement in which he was dubbed a knight, or more generally an upstanding young gentleman who was not a nobleman. Somehow, Champlain acquired the manners and skills of an écuyer, perhaps in the academy at Brouage.33
Young Champlain also learned other lessons from another man who had much to teach him in Brouage. The sieur Charles Leber du Carlo was a friend of the Champlain family and later lived in one of their houses. He was a highly skilled builder of fortifications, an “engineer and geographer to the king,” and an expert cartographer. He may have taught young Champlain the art of map-making.34
In another way, however, Champlain’s schooling was very limited. He never received a classical education. Like his contemporary William Shakespeare, he had little Latin and less Greek, and he was not trained in the grammar and rhetoric of classical learning. His writings make a striking contrast with the latinate prose of classically trained writers. But he had a facility with modern languages. Champlain spoke a fluent and muscular French, as strong and colorful as Elizabethan English. Like many men who went to sea in the sixteenth century, he picked up other modern languages. In maturity, he was able to speak English well enough to converse with British seamen on technical subjects. On some of his maps, Champlain mixed French and English inscriptions, and moved easily between them.35
Champlain also learned enough Spanish to communicate in that language on his West Indian voyages. His Spanish orthography suggests that he knew it mainly as a spoken language, but he could carry on a conversation with Hispanic speakers in America. He likely had a smattering of other languages, enough to get on with the Dutch, Portuguese, and Basques whom he met in his travels. Long voyages under sail with crews that spoke many tongues made a ship into a language school. Probably that was the way Champlain learned his modern languages.
Champlain’s most important school was the sea itself, and his father was his master-teacher. Dionne writes gracefully of Samuel that “his youth appears to have glided quietly away, spent for the most part with his family, and in assisting his father, who was a mariner, in his wanderings upon the sea.”36
Young Champlain went to sea many times in his childhood and youth. Later in his life he informed the Queen Regent Marie de Medici that he had studied “the art of navigation” from childhood. He remembered, “It is this art which won my love at a very early age, and inspired me to venture nearly all my life on the turbulent waves of the ocean.”37 Just how early Champlain went to sea might be inferred from another brief passage that he wrote near the end of his life. In 1632, he said he had “spent thirty-eight years of my life in making many sea voyages.” If we read that passage literally and construct a chronology of his travels after 1594, he must have made “sea voyages” in at least fourteen of his first twenty-four years.38
At an early age, Champlain learned the art of pilotage in the modern sense: the skill of sailing in coastal waters. The maritime setting of Brouage was challenging that way. The town was set on a narrow arm of the sea and surrounded on all sides by many shoals and hazards. The tight little harbor of Brouage was often crowded with ocean-going ships and small craft of every size, all bent on their own business in a thriving commercial center. To steer a vessel under sail through the harbor on a busy day was always a challenge.
One can imagine Champlain as a small boy, standing beside his father on the deck of a ship that was underway in Brouage harbor. We might see them studying the flow of tides and currents, feeling the unsteady play of onshore breezes, cocking a weather eye upward at the sky and the sails, watching the movement of shipping, dodging other craft, and carefully avoiding anchored vessels that were shifting on their moorings. All these things had to be done at the same time as they conned their ship through the narrow, twisting channel of Brouage toward the open sea. It was a rigorous school for a bright young lad, with small margin for error.
The tidal waterways from the town led outward to the Bay of Biscay. There young Samuel learned other hard lessons. The prevailing winds came from the west, which meant that he learned to sail on a lee shore. The Bay of Biscay was notorious for sudden squalls and raging storms that could be very dangerous. Sea conditions changed quickly in the bay and could catch an unwary sailor by surprise. A pilot there had to be highly skilled, constantly alert, and very flexible in his responses.
Stone sign for a seaman’s inn on the Île d’Oléron near Brouage, 1585. The top line reads, “Within: Good Wine and Lodging.” The stylized ship is a moyenne navire of the sort that young Champlain learned to sail with his father in these waters, and later used on most Atlantic crossings.
Beyond the Bay of Biscay lay the ocean. Champlain tells us that he made many ocean voyages as a child. As the ship moved out of sight of land, he had yet more skills to learn as a blue-water sailor. In his youth Champlain was probably taught to steer a course by compass and dead reckoning. His father would have instructed him in the use of an astrolabe to estimate the elevation of the sun precisely at noon, which yielded a simple measure of latitude. He would have mastered the use of a backstaffe to observe the angle of elevation for Polaris, the great North Star. It was best done at twilight, when the pole star and the horizon were both visible. It was no small feat to take a sight while standing on a moving deck of a small ship. The horizon itself seemed to rise and fall, and the stars appeared to dance in the sky as the ship rolled and pitched and yawed in
a running sea. Then came the computations, with adjustments for the “limb” of the sun, and others for Polaris, which in Champlain’s era was not as near true north as today, and had to be corrected by the use of “pointer stars” nearby. Probably he learned this too as a child from his father.
There were other lessons. As Antoine Champlain rose from the rank of pilot to master, captain, and owner, he became responsible for the business side of a voyage. Young Samuel learned about the world of commerce, markets, commodities, and money. He learned to deal with men of business who spoke languages different from his own and absolutely had to be understood. He learned that some were men to be trusted and others were not, and many things hinged on a matter of judgment.
He learned that a voyage could be dangerous in ways that had nothing to do with wind and water. The coastal waters of France were infested with corsairs, pirates, and predators. Even the harbor of Brouage attracted desperate characters. The town map in 1570 showed a gibbet outside the main gate, and it was likely in frequent use. Men at sea learned how to stay out of harm’s way as best they could, but when they were in it, they had to be able to defend themselves. A seaman in the sixteenth century was also a man-at-arms. Champlain learned the use of the great guns that every navire carried for her own protection. He also had to learn how to deal with irritable passengers and unruly crews, who were often a challenge in unexpected ways. Here was yet another set of skills for Champlain to master. He would have studied these things while he watched his father deal with the routine crises that arise on a wooden ship in an open sea. Champlain had fourteen years of this instruction before he was twenty-four.
He tells us that the sea was deeply interesting to him. The drawings on his maps show us that he was fascinated by ships of all sizes—great galleons, small craft, and anything that floated on the sea. His images of ships were sketched with bold and confident strokes, and were very precise and lovingly detailed. He always had an eye for the beauty of a full-rigged ship at sea, or the sleek lines of a sharp-built patache, or the charm of a simple shallop bobbing at anchor in a quiet cove.39
Champlain was deeply drawn to the sea, even as he learned how dangerous it could be. Like any experienced seaman, he wrote of the sea with deep respect, for he knew what it could do. His treatise on navigation is full of dire warnings and rueful lessons from hard experience. More than a few passages of his journals describe his encounters with ice and fog in the North Atlantic, rocks and shoals on treacherous coasts, hurricanes in the West Indies, wild nor’easters in the Gulf of Maine, and sou’westers in the Bay of Biscay. He met huge waves on the Grand Bank, and white squalls that suddenly blew up in mid-ocean, out of a clear blue sky. He dealt with tides and currents beyond imagining, and shoal water on the fringes of four continents. In more than a few passages, he marveled that he was still alive when many a good seaman had drowned at sea.
There was always a curious mix of fatalism and instrumentalism in his attitudes. Champlain tells us in his writings that he never learned to swim, which was common among men who kept the sea during the early modern era. It belied a strangely fatalistic attitude that was very distant from our own time. All these attitudes began to form early in his young life, when Champlain went down to the sea in ships, sailing with his father from their home in Brouage, along the coast of France, and into the western ocean. It gave him an education for a life of leadership in the years to come.
2.
TWO MEN OF SAINTONGE
Champlain and the Sieur de Mons
Sieur de Champlain Xainctongeois.
—title page of Champlain’s last book,
Les Voyages (1632)1
CHAMPLAIN, like most of us, was a man of multiple identities. In his first book, he introduced himself to the world as “Samuel Champlain, De Brouage.” Later he described himself in another way as “Champlain Xainctongeois,” a man of Saintonge.2 As he grew older and traveled widely in the world, he increasingly identified himself with the old French region in which he was raised. Here is a paradox of our modern condition, which Champlain helped to create. The more he saw of the world, the stronger was his kinship to what Eudora Welty called the “places of the heart.”3
Champlain’s place was Saintonge. In his time it was the name of a province, a people, a language, a culture, and a way of life. Today, the old province of Saintonge has been replaced by several French departments with administrative names such as Charente-Maritime, but many people who live there still think of themselves as saintongeais, and are deeply aware of their culture and history.4
The name descended from a Celtic tribe called the Santoni, a fiercely independent people with a strong sense of their own ways. Julius Caesar’s legions fought them, and Roman settlers built their villas along the coast of Saintonge. Two millennia later the Roman villas are ruins, but the descendants of the Santoni are still there, clinging stubbornly to their land. They absorbed the Roman population and invented a dialect that combined Celtic, French, and Latin elements in unique ways.
The Santoni had a talent for survival. In the Middle Ages they were assaulted from the sea by the Vikings, and attacked from the land by a multitude of warrior tribes. They took refuge in islands and marshes along the coast, and survived catastrophes that extinguished many other cultures in Europe.5 A key to their endurance was the Gulf of Saintonge, which two thousand years ago was a huge body of water, much larger than today. Nathalie Fiquet describes it as a great sea, “formed of protruding peninsulas, and sprinkled with islands and islets.” It stretched from the present coast to the higher ground of Saint-Sornin and Saint-Agnant, ten miles inland.6
Along the coasts and islands of this great gulf, descendants of the Santoni took their living from the sea. The water yielded an abundance of fish and mollusks, and the area is still a major center for France’s oyster industry. Marshes around the gulf also supplied salt, the commodity that sustained Champlain’s home port of Brouage. The people of coastal Saintonge flourished in many maritime trades. Historian Hubert Deschamps, himself a man of this region, described them as “fishermen, seamen, fishmongers, marsh workers, independent people who love struggle and adventure.”7
Others lived inland along the river valleys, where fertile fields produced large crops of grain, and pastures supported flocks of sheep. The vineyards of the Charente Valley became the cognac country of France and still supply the world with much of its best brandy.8 It is a very beautiful landscape. Deschamps wrote lyrically of the “Saintonge of the interior, with its gentle undulations, its fields, its patches of woodland, its vines, its clear rivers, its white villages, a territory humanized through the centuries by a pacific people.”9
Inland and coastal Saintonge had many differences, but they were part of the same region. They shared a bright and sunny climate, with more hours of sunshine than any other part of France. Most of the region has long views of a large sky. Much of it is near the water, either on the coast or along its rivers. The people of this place speak of the water as the beautiful robe bleue that cloaks their homeland. The strong sun, big sky, and flowing waters all lift the spirit in Saintonge, and they have entered into the soul of its population.
Through much of this province and especially along the coast, there is also a comparative abundance of material things. At the end of the sixteenth century a local poet wrote that it was so even for the humble saulniers who earned their living from the salt marshes:
The marsh worker on his salty plain
Gets bread, fish, and game without pain.10
Peasants in the interior and traders in the towns flourished in other ways—more so in some periods than in others. Even in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a time of many troubles in much of western Europe, the governor of Bordeaux reckoned in 1570 that of all the many regions of France, “the most opulent and richest province of the King is that of Saintonge.”11
With all of these advantages, the people of Saintonge also had their full share of adversity. In the Hundred Year
s War between England and France (circa 1337 to 1453) they suffered much from the ravages of marching armies. It happened again in the wars of religion during the sixteenth century. As in much of Europe, plague and pestilence spread across the countryside, and the farmers of Saintonge experienced shortages during the difficult years of the mid-1590s.12
But the troubles of the late sixteenth century were less severe in Saintonge than in other provinces. The cold temperatures of the little ice age caused sea levels to fall a little, which enlarged the productive marshland on the coast of Saintonge. The bounty of the sea and the rivers tended to diminish the hungry seasons that the French called disettes, which came each year when the old grain supply ran out, and the new crops were not in.13
Military insecurity was also a problem. The peaceable people of coastal Saintonge were often attacked, but they adapted to a dangerous environment and learned to defend themselves. More than one king remitted their taxes because they “always had arms on their shoulders” and knew how to use them in defense of their land. Another official visited the coast of Saintonge in the mid-sixteenth century and was amazed to find an “incredible number of people” living in the marshes. He described them as a strong and sturdy population “hardened to pain, knowing well the movements of the sea and its malign perils and dangers,” a people “bellicose, adventurous and skilled in war, both on sea and land,” and “valiant and hardy at sea, where they make great voyages.”14
The people of Saintonge faced their challenges and overcame them without much help from others. They were able to rise above their difficulties by their own effort, and there was a buoyancy in their culture. From their environment and history they developed a sense of themselves that set them apart from other regions of France. Champlain wrote of neighboring Brittany as a foreign country, and that attitude was reciprocated. As late as the sixteenth century, people from other parts of France regarded the Saintongeois as a breed apart. The Parisian writer Theodore de Bèze described them as “a rude people nearly without humanity—pirates and parasites of the sea.”15 It would be more accurate to say that they had a different idea of humanity. A leading historian studied “the regional mentality” of Saintonge, and concluded that one of its distinctive qualities was “a very strong individualism,” a word that has long been a pejorative in other parts of France. He writes that one “searches in vain” for the “communitarian constraints that exist elsewhere” in the nation. This regional mentality had many striking features. They found expression in a unique culture and language that made a difference in Champlain’s life.16
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