A week after the will was signed, Captain Provençal died. By his order the estate passed immediately to Champlain. No inventory or other probate record has been found, but it appears to have been large. The will was drawn under a Spanish law for estates worth more than five hundred times the average income of a laborer in Spain. The dying man swore that “this donation exceeds the quantity mentioned of 500 salaries.” Champlain inherited a landed estate near La Rochelle, “land enough to plant an orchard,” fields, vineyards, houses, and warehouses, along with all its “roads and exits, uses, customs and servants.” He also inherited commercial property in Spain and a ship of 150 tons, along with cash, investments, and merchandise. The generosity of his uncle made Champlain master of a landed estate, and holder of much other property.93
While Champlain was in Cadiz, he began to draft a “Brief Discours” on his travels in the Spanish empire. It was written for a single reader, Henri IV. In a later work, he wrote of his relationship to “the late King Henry le Grand, of happy memory, who ordered me to make the most exact researches and discoveries that I found possible.”94
Champlain probably had not been able to keep a journal or consult maps and charts during his travels—understandably so, given the sensitive nature of his mission. As he wrote, the facts were beginning to blur in his memory. He rarely referred to calendar dates, but constructed a rough and often inaccurate chronology, reckoned by the passage of days and weeks. The circumstances in which he was working may explain the character of the document, which was very rough and uneven. Its early sections were more finished and polished. The latter parts of the text bore the marks of haste, heavy pressure, and frequent distraction. The last three pages were very thin, and filled with gaps and errors. Always Champlain combined his own observations with reports from other sources, a method that he would use throughout his career. He always tried to work from first-hand observation, but did not hesitate to use other material when only that was available. The purpose of his mission appeared in patterns of description. He carefully observed the military condition of New Spain, described its major fortifications, and noted the vulnerability of towns in Panama. Overall he found great strength in the defenses of New Spain, and very little opportunity for France.95 He also painted images of New Spain as a system of violence and exploitation and in that way an example of how not to run an empire.
After a draft of this document was in hand, Champlain returned to France and went directly to Henri IV. Once again he appears to have had no difficulty getting access to the king. “I went to court,” Champlain later wrote, “having just arrived from the West Indies, where I had been nearly two and a half years, after the Spaniards had left Blavet, and made peace in France.” Champlain presented the king with his Brief Discours as a book-length intelligence report, with many maps and illustrations. The king appears to have been very pleased. He granted Champlain an annual pension and ordered him to remain at court.96
Champlain himself wrote later that he felt bound by “His Majesty’s orders, to whom I was under an obligation not only by birth but also by a pension wherewith he honored me as a means to keep me about his person.” At this point Champlain began to receive a regular pension from Henri IV for faithful service.97 The patronage of the king had an impact on Champlain’s material condition. He had already inherited a sizable estate from his uncle, and at some point he also acquired title to several houses in Brouage from his family. His pension from the king also gave him an annual income. Altogether, Samuel de Champlain had become a man of means by about the age of thirty. Later in his life he mentioned this condition of independence in his writings. Of his relations with merchants and major investors in New France, he wrote in 1632, “I am not dependent on them.” He was able to act as his own master, subject only to God and the king, and to the fulfillment of obligations that he had freely chosen to accept. He began to live his life in that spirit.98
Independence gave Champlain a new range of choices. If he wished, he could retire to his estate near La Rochelle, settle down, raise a family, and live the quiet life of a country gentleman. He might also become a courtier in the king’s daily service. Or he could go another way, toward a career of exploration and discovery in the new world. He could do these things on his own terms. Champlain was now his own master, free to follow his dreams.
EXPLORER OF ACADIA
6.
GEOGRAPHER IN THE LOUVRE
A Design for New France, 1602
To plan such designs in table talk, to speak from the imagination of distant places … that is not the way to carry out with honor the work of discovery. One must first consider maturely the matters that present themselves in such undertakings, and talk with those … who know the dangers.
—Champlain on his grand design1
IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1602–03. Champlain was in Paris at the court of Henri IV. It was an interesting place for an ambitious young man to be. “People of all conditions went there,” writes Philippe Erlanger, “gentlemen, clergy, captains, cadets eager to make their fortunes. The court was their Eldorado. Here one gained positions, pensions, and commands. Here a royal smile sufficed to change one’s destiny. Here one found also the great model: it was necessary to walk, to dance, to talk as at the court.”2
Others went to court for another purpose, which reveals the distance between their world and ours. They wished only to serve their king. Erlanger quotes Henri’s court poet, François de Malherbe, who observed: “Good subjects are to their Prince as good servants are to their masters. They love what he loves, desire what he desires, share his sadness and his joy, and in general accommodate the movements of their spirit to those of his passion.”3
Those many motives—ambitious and altruistic, selfless and self-serving—drew young Samuel Champlain to the court of Henri IV. It was an institution of astonishing complexity. Sometimes it was called the Royal Household and always it had something of a domestic air. But it was also the seat of power in France, and the center of its civilization. In the year 1602, more than 1,500 people “of rank” belonged to the royal household, not counting 1,400 soldiers of the king’s guard, and menial servants beyond reckoning.4
All this humanity crowded into the buildings of the Louvre, a sprawling compound in Paris between the rue Saint-Honoré and the river Seine. Its architecture was another of the king’s passions, and its buildings were in a state of perpetual reconstruction. Ancient walls rang with the hammers of artisans who were endlessly at work on Henri IV’s projects. In 1594, he had ordered them to build a huge addition to the Louvre, a great gallery that ran along the river from the Pont des Arts to the Pont Royal. Altogether it cost him the immense sum of eight million livres. The king laughed about the money: “People say I am miserly, but I do three things that are unrestrained by avarice: I make war, I make love, and I build!”5
On return from Spain, Champlain reported to the king, received an annual pension, and was ordered to remain at Court. It was a school of manners for a young adventurer. Upstairs in the Louvre, the King endured boring rituals such as this banquet. Below stairs, he and Champlain worked with experts on cartography and navigation.
The Grande Galerie was fifteen years in construction. Its upper floor was a magnificent open space that extended the full length of the building. There the king liked to walk among his subjects. Below were a mezzanine with elegant shops, a ground floor with studios for artists and musicians, and a vaulted basement with quarters for the palace guard. By 1603, Henri’s Grande Galerie was only half completed. The long hall was filled with craftsmen and laborers, toiling among crowds of elegant noblemen, painted ladies, high clergy in robes of red and purple, musketeers in uniforms of blue and white, scholars in black gowns, servants in livery, opulent merchants, and impoverished petitioners of every rank. In the reign of Henri IV, the Louvre was a place of beauty and refinement. It was also ugly, smelly, noisy, and filthy. Most of all, it teemed with life and throbbed with energy.6
Officers of the royal c
ourt held many levers of power in their hands. Even in a monarchy that aspired to absolute dominion, authority was distributed more broadly than one might imagine. The most worthy proposal had to win the support of many people if it was to succeed. The opposition of one powerful person could stop it, and there were many such people here. They could make all the difference for a young man with large plans in mind.
In 1602, the court included four hundred clergy who served the king in his role as rex sacerdos, the ruler-priest who was the sacred leader of France and a living symbol of divine favor. The clergy had a public role of profound importance in early modern Europe. Nothing could be done without them. Champlain was quick to understand that these men were vital to his purposes, and he was careful to cultivate Catholics and Protestants alike.7
Equally important were the high nobility. Hundreds of noblemen lived at court and served Henri in his role as rex princeps, head of state. They conducted the elaborate rituals that were fundamental to the legitimacy of the new Bourbon dynasty. At the same time, the ceremonial life of the court converted a fractious nobility into a mannered aristocracy. It bound these restless men to the king’s will.8
Other nobles in large number assisted the king as rex gubernator, head of government. They were the royal ministers, councillors, and superintendents who attended to the administration of the kingdom. Some of the most able people were governors of provinces and commanders of fortresses, men with much experience in managing institutions. Among them were the sieur de Chaste and the sieur de Mons, who shared Champlain’s purposes.
Among the most powerful men at court were soldiers who served the king as rex dux, commander-in-chief of his armed forces. Henri IV was highly successful in binding the military leaders of France to his person—which was fundamental to the survival of his new dynasty. Young Champlain knew some of these men. He had served on the staff of at least three marshals of France and soldiered with them in Brittany. They could help with his career—and did so.
More numerous at court than the clergy and nobility were men and women of the third estate. In the field of medicine, Henri IV kept eighty royal physicians around him, an entire medical faculty. More than a few were specialists in the venereal diseases that afflicted the vert-galant and his mistresses. Others of the third estate were experts in the arts that added to the douceur de vie which Henri le grand greatly enjoyed. He mustered platoons of painters, companies of sculptors, and battalions of musicians. He gave employment to gifted chefs, both the Italians who served the Medici women at court, and French cuisiniers in the tradition of the great Taillevent, who had invented the first French haute cuisine. Royal couturiers created the constant whirl of fashion that became part of the complex rhythms of modernity.9 Royal parfumeurs improved the aroma of the court, even of the king himself, who was not noted for hygiene (veteran courtiers approached him upwind). Another corps of royal plumassiers supplied the white-feathered panaches that became emblems of the new Bourbon dynasty.10
Some of the most interesting people at court were scholars and scientists. The king recruited experts in many fields and gave them apartments in the basement of the Louvre, where they worked at projects of strategic importance. Among them were the gunsmiths who invented a new and very efficient flintlock musket in these years. It would become the standard infantry weapon in Europe for many generations.
Others were professional geographers. Henri IV was fascinated by maps, globes, and the new cartography. He sponsored a great atlas called the Théâtre Français, which carefully mapped every province in the kingdom for the first time. The king also founded a geographic and hydrographic museum that boasted six huge maps of France, the continents, and the oceans. He created a center in the Louvre below the Grande Galerie, for the development of skills that would be useful in exploration, discovery, and colonization around the world. Experts in astronomy, surveying, cartography, navigation, and geography worked there.11
One of them was Samuel de Champlain. He was not a casual visitor at court but a pensioner of the Crown with a particular job. A close acquaintance described him as géographe du roi, one of many geographers employed by Henri IV in the basement of the Louvre.12 The role of geographer was more than a job for Champlain. It was a calling that he had chosen for himself. He was fascinated by the New World, all the more so after his adventures in the Spanish empire. But what he had seen of the West Indies and Mexico made him less interested in those regions as a field for French ambition. He had witnessed at first hand the appalling inhumanity to American Indians and cruelty to African slaves in New Spain. He knew that sustained effort by France in that part of the New World would lead to incessant strife—and he had seen too much of that at home.
In Oronce Fine’s “Current and Complete Description of the World” (Paris, 1536), the earth became an image of the human heart and a symbol of the sacré coeur. This linkage of science to humanism and Christianity was central to Champlain’s thinking. The map shows that the least known of its inhabited continents was North America.
* * *
In Paris, Champlain’s thoughts turned to North America, and especially to the vast region above the fortieth parallel that had been labeled “Nova Francia” on maps since the voyages of Jacques Cartier. Here French activity could expand without a head-on collision with Spain and Portugal. The English and Dutch were moving into it, and each of their voyages was a warning, but France had a claim that was recognized by other nations. Champlain was keenly aware of the king’s interest in Nova Francia. He knew that Henri IV was determined to convert that geographical expression into an actual country called La Nouvelle France.
Champlain learned of many projects, past and future. With the king’s encouragement, he made it his business to learn more. From 1601 to 1603, he visited French seaports and gathered information from Norman and Breton fishermen who were active in America. He may have spent some time in Dieppe with armateurs, the ships’ chandlers who outfitted ships for voyages to the new world. These men had long memories of earlier ventures.13 He also talked with French seamen who had been sailing to North America since the early sixteenth century, perhaps earlier. Champlain believed that “it was the Bretons and Normands who in 1504 were the first among Christians to discover the grand banks of the codfish and the islands of Newfoundland.”14
Champlain’s task was to study North America. Among his best sources were French Basques who made annual whaling voyages to seasonal stations such as this one in Red Bay, Labrador, during the 16th century. Th ey traded with the natives in a pidgin speech that combined Basque and Indian languages.
Men of Brouage and La Rochelle were also very active in the American trade. Champlain’s own family had been in the business. As early as 1570, his affluent uncle Guillaume Allène had sent the ship Espérance to Newfoundland with a captain and pilot from Saintonge. Allène’s vessel was big enough to carry twelve “pieces of artillery” and was heavily manned with a crew who could defend themselves in dangerous seas. The voyage was financed by an international partnership of merchants from La Rochelle in France and Bristol in England. Allène’s voyage showed the scale and sophistication of French enterprise in North America during the sixteenth century.15
Every year, even during the worst of the religious wars, hundreds of French fishing vessels made summer voyages from Dieppe, Saint-Malo, Honfleur, Le Havre, La Rochelle, and many other ports. These fishermen worked along the coasts of America from Labrador to Nantucket. They arrived in late spring, stayed a few months, and sailed home in late summer before the autumn storms on the North Atlantic. A few wintered among the Indians, not always by choice. In 1602, a crew from Honfleur found three fishermen in the St. Lawrence Valley who had been marooned by a skipper from Saint-Malo. Others chose freely to live among the Indians, learned their ways, and formed unions with native women. These French seamen gained much knowledge of America.16
Some of Champlain’s best sources were Basque whalers and fishermen—French Basques and Spanish Basques as he ca
lled them. Their whaling stations dotted the American coast from Labrador to the Gulf of Maine for many years. They developed the technology of whale hunting and invented the light and graceful whaleboats that would be used for many centuries.17 Later, Champlain got to know a Basque named Captain Savalette, a “fine old seaman” who hailed from the French port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. They first met in 1607, on Savalette’s forty-second voyage to North America. He had been making annual Atlantic crossings for many years—eighty-three of them since 1565, before Champlain was born. Captain Savalette and his crew of sixteen men worked near Canso in what is now Nova Scotia, operating out of a little fishing cove that Champlain later named in his honor. The work was perilous, but highly profitable. In a good year they took home 100,000 big cod, which brought as much as five crowns apiece on the Paris market.18
Through the sixteenth century, the Basques also traded with Indians, who wanted iron pots, copper pans, steel knives, metal arrowheads, and woolen textiles such as red blankets from Catalonia.19 In return, the Basques wanted furs. So strong was the European demand that the rate of exchange for a fine beaver pelt rose from one knife to eighty knives in the course of Captain Savalette’s career. Europeans also traded for products of the forest: sassafras was valued as a medicinal tea, and ginseng as a sexual restorative. By 1600, Native Americans had become aggressive entrepreneurs. Some Indians got the jump on competitors by acquiring European shallops and meeting European vessels at sea—a maritime equivalent of forestalling the market.20
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