On Sunday June 22, they reached the Île d’Orléans, named by Jacques Cartier, and found it “very pleasant and level.” On the mainland, near its western end they came upon a waterfall 265-feet high which still bears the name that Champlain gave it, Montmorency Falls, after the admiral of France in 1603. Beyond the island, they anchored at the place the Indians called Kebec, an Algonquian word that meant the narrowing of the river, less than a cannon-shot wide. On the north shore Champlain described “a very high mountain which slopes down on both sides,” and “all the rest a level country, with good land covered with trees and vines.” He wrote, “If this soil were cultivated, it would be as good as ours” in France. Here at the narrowing of the river, Champlain found the site for his settlement.42
The next day they sailed beyond Quebec. The great river broadened again, as much as five miles wide, and, he wrote, “the country grows finer and finer.” They anchored thirty miles beyond Quebec on the south shore. Champlain went ashore, dug into the ground, and found it to be soft, friable, rich, and black. He wrote, “The soil was better than in any place I had seen … if it were well tilled it would yield a great increase.”43
As they sailed upriver, the countryside kept improving. “The farther we went, the finer the ground,” Champlain wrote. The land was laced with many small rivers and streams. Ninety miles beyond Quebec they came to the broad mouth of the Saint-Maurice River, which was divided in three parts by small islands. They called it Trois-Rivières, the name it bears today. Champlain attempted to explore the Saint-Maurice in a skiff, but he got only about two leagues and was stopped by rapids. The Indian guides told him that the headwaters of the Saint-Maurice were close to the Saguenay. Champlain immediately recognized the importance of this river as a place of trade with northern nations.44 He also noted something else about Trois-Rivières. “The climate begins to be somewhat different … inasmuch as the trees are more forward there than in any place I had hitherto seen.” As they sailed upstream, they were moving steadily southwest. The distances made a difference in their latitude.45
Champlain continued up the great river and came to a lake twenty miles long and seven miles wide, and beyond it another very large stream that the Indians called the River of the Iroquois. The Indians explained that it flowed from two very large lakes to the south. They spoke of another great river beyond the lakes, which flowed in the opposite direction, toward “Florida.” They were describing Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River. Once again Champlain quickly formed an accurate idea of the country many miles to the south, mostly from conversations with the Indians.46
They resumed their journey upriver and soon found themselves among islands, rapids, and shallows. The current became so strong that the barque could no longer move forward. Champlain and five sailors took the skiff, but met “an infinite number of small rocks level with the water,” and could not get through, even when the sailors were ordered into the water to free the boat. Champlain wrote that only a canoe “passed easily.” He anchored near a large island on the northern shore. Behind it was a height that Cartier had named “Mont Réal,” from which the city of Montreal takes its name.47
Champlain went on by foot and canoe and came to massive rapids. “I never saw any torrent of water pour over with such force as this does, though it is not very high, being in some places only one or two fathoms, and at most three. It descends as it were step by step, and wherever it falls from some small height, it boils up extraordinarily, owing to the force and speed of the water as it passes through the said rapid.”48
This was the head of navigation on the St. Lawrence River in 1603. “It was beyond the power of man to pass with any boat, however small it may be,” he wrote. They continued on foot to the end of the rapids, through “very open woods,” where “one may easily carry one’s weapons.”49 Champlain appears to have used his astrolabe to take a noon sight on the sun, which yielded an estimate of latitude, “45 degrees and some minutes.” The latitude of downtown Montreal is 45 degrees, 30 minutes. By comparison, the north side of the St. Lawrence estuary is 50 degrees at its mouth, a difference of three hundred nautical miles in latitude. In this countryside from Quebec to Montreal, with its “milder and more equable” climate, Champlain believed he had found not merely the site for a settlement, but the seat of a nation.50
Champlain quizzed the Indians on what lay beyond the great rapids. They described the river in detail and told him about the Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, and the Detroit River, and said that they themselves had passed no farther. Once again, Champlain’s conversations with the Indians gave him a remarkably clear idea of the Great Lakes. From two weeks of exploration, and much conversation with the Indians, he had formed an accurate image of North America from Hudson Bay to the Hudson River, and from the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes.51
Champlain had found much of what he was after, and he was eager to report to the king. On July 4, 1603, they set off downstream. With the current and the wind behind them, they made a fast passage. At the Île d’Orléans they stopped to visit with a party of Algonquins, who told Champlain about the Ottawa River and beyond it another huge sea with sweet water, which we know as Lake Huron. Other Indians told him about rivers to the south of the lakes, in the country of the Iroquois, which was good land for corn and other crops that did not grow farther north. The Algonquins spoke also of another nation called the “good Iroquois,” who had their own homeland to the west and access to a mine of pure copper. Some spoke of a great salt sea far to the west, which Champlain took to be the Pacific Ocean.52
On July 11, they were back in Tadoussac where Bonne-Renommée was waiting for them. They still had another month for exploration and decided to spend it on the Atlantic coast of the Gaspé Peninsula. Champlain met the Malouin trader Prévert, who told him of a “very high mountain, jutting somewhat into the sea” with deposits of copper, and of another mine further south with iron and silver.53 Then they sailed for home and made a quick passage, with the prevailing westerlies and the gulf stream pushing them swiftly across the Atlantic. They reached Le Havre in fifteen days from the Grand Bank.54
It was a successful mission in every way. The backers made money from their fish and fur, which had been traded at Tadoussac by others in the expedition. One scholar reckons that they realized a net return of 30 to 40 percent on their investment, after all expenses were paid.55 Pont-Gravé and Champlain brought a new level of refinement to the exploration of the coast, the Saguenay, and the St. Lawrence Valley. They had made contact with the Indians, and the tone was good. As time passed, the importance of the tabagie at Tadoussac steadily increased. That chance meeting supported Champlain’s grand design. It sustained his vision of a new world where different nations could dwell in peace. Champlain was officially present only as an observer, but he demonstrated a gift for getting along with others. This pivotal event also brought out a recurrent theme in his life and work. The tabagie at Tadoussac came as a sudden opportunity. He acted quickly and was prepared to make the most of it. This was an attitude that he called prévoyant, a word that has no English equivalent. It was not a gift of prophecy, but the power of a prepared mind to act upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty.
Champlain, like Churchill, was “confident that history would be kind” to him, for he intended to write it himself. After he returned to France, he published a book on what he had seen. Probably he drafted it on the voyage home, for it went to press very soon after he got back. The censors licensed publication on November 15, 1603, just eight weeks after his ship reached Le Havre.
Champlain’s manuscript was published by Claude de Monstr’oeil, bookseller to the University of Paris and proprietor of a fashionable bookstore “in the Court of the palace, at the sign of Jesus.” Four centuries later, the book is still in print and sells well in both French and English editions. It remains an enduring classic of early North American history.56
Perhaps the publisher chose its sensational double title, Des Sauvages, ou, Voyage de Samuel
Champlain, De Brouage. Part of Champlain’s purpose was to describe the “true wonders” of the new world. He described the grandeur of the great “River of Canada,” the depth of the Saguenay, the height of the Montmorency Falls, and the roaring rapids of Lachine. He repeated Indians’ accounts of the cataract at Niagara, published the first reports of the Great Lakes, and described the dimensions of the great American forest that was larger than the entire continent of Europe. He searched for words to describe the grandeur of American distances, the beauty of the countryside, and the drama of its seasons.
In all these wonders Champlain saw evidence of God’s Providence. He believed that to reveal them to others was to honor God and his works. Many discoverers had the same feeling, and most things that Champlain did in his life were instruments of that driving purpose. Some modern critics have read his book as a promotional tract, but it was more than that. Champlain meant to awaken in others the passion that he felt for exploration of the world and to engage them in his grand dessein, his vision for New France.
The book centered on his account of the American Indians. In that respect, its title has misled modern readers. Many people today have understood its operative word sauvages as having the same meaning as “savages” in modern French and English. In modern usage “savage” means people who are primitive, uncivilized, coarse, simple-minded, barbaric, brutal, violent, vicious, treacherous, ferocious, and inferior to civilized people.
Champlain called the people of North America “les sauvages,” but not in that sense. In old French and early English, “sauvage” or “savage” was sometimes written salvage, a clue to its original meaning. It derived from the Latin silva, for a forest or a woodland. In the seventeenth century “sauvage” preserved this meaning, and was used to describe wild things that lived in the forest. When Champlain used the term “sauvages,” he meant forest-dwellers. It is interesting that he applied this word to North American Indians but did not often use it for the people of the West Indies. He called them Indiens, people of the Indies, not “sauvages,” or people of the forest, unless they lived in woods as they did on Guadeloupe.57
Champlain’s first book, Des Sauvages, ou, Voyage de Samuel Champlain (1603), combines a story of his visit with a survey of “mores, manner of life, marriages, wars, and habitations of the Sauvages of the Canadas.” By sauvage or salvage (from the Latin silva) he meant forest dwellers—an ecological idea, not racial. He was strongly attracted to the Indians, and they to him.
When Champlain wrote about “les sauvages,” he did not mean an inferior race of people. There was nothing racist in his thinking, nothing invidious about the intellectual capacity of the people it described. The modern idea of race developed after Champlain’s era. In French and English, the full-fledged ideology of race did not emerge until the nineteenth century, with writers such as Joseph Arthur Gobineau and his contemporaries.
Champlain regarded American Indians as fully equal to Europeans in intelligence and judgment, and he was much impressed by their qualities of mind. He wrote, “I assure you that many of them have excellent judgment, and respond very well to any question that one puts to them.”58 Once he wrote, “Should their spirit not grasp the usage of our arts, sciences and trades, their children who are young could do so.”59 Champlain was not alone in this way of thinking. Other French humanists of the period, such as the historian Marc Lescarbot, had the same high respect for the Indians, and wrote: “They have courage, fidelity, generosity, and humanity, and their hospitality is so innate and so praiseworthy that they receive among them every man who is not an enemy. They are not simpletons.”60
Champlain (and most of his contemporaries) also celebrated the physical condition of Native Americans. He observed that their limbs were straight, their muscles strong, their teeth were perfectly straight and white, their health seemed better, and they made a dramatic contrast with Europeans. Champlain empathized deeply with the Indians. He understood the difficult conditions of their lives, especially in the cruel Canadian winters. “All these people sometimes suffer so great extremity, on account of the great cold and snow.”61
Even as Champlain wrote of the Indians with sympathy and respect, he thought that some of their customs were inferior to the practices of civilized nations. He talked with the sagamore Anadabijou about their values and beliefs, and his judgments were complex. He concluded that Indians worshiped one Great Spirit, believed in the immortality of the soul, and had an idea of the Devil. But he regarded them as a people who had never been brought to the true faith. He tried to persuade the sagamore that the Christian faith and the Catholic religion were more true and more universal, apparently with no success.62
The sagamore told him “they do not make much use of religious ceremonies,” but “everyone prayed in his heart as he thought good.” Champlain wrote: “That is why I believe they have no law among them, nor know what it is to worship and pray to God, and that most of them live like brute beasts; and I think they would speedily be brought to be good Christians if their country were colonized, which they desire for the most part.” He deeply believed that the Indians were lost souls, with no hope of redemption until they were taught the true faith. But in other ways he regarded them as equal in mind and spirit to Europeans.63
Champlain was very curious about Indian ideas of law, and judged that in a European sense, “they are for the most part a people who have no law.” He meant that they lived by a primitive system of customary law, and an ethic of lex talionis, the rule of retaliation.64 He described the sadistic tortures that they inflicted on captives, and wrote: “They have one evil in them, which is that they are given to revenge, and are great liars, a people in whom it is not well to put confidence, except with reason and with force at hand. They promise much and perform little.”65
He also studied the structure of authority among the Indians, and observed that the chiefs had very little power or authority over others. Champlain noted repeatedly that chiefs would express strong opinions, but the Indians would act and judge for themselves.66 Most of all he thought that the Indians were too free. “Sauvage” for him also meant living in a condition of complete liberty. He had a language to describe an excess of liberty— libertinage, as in our libertine, and license. He described their sexual freedom, but noted that when an Indian girl takes many lovers and keeps company with whomever she likes, she was engaging in a form of courtship and marriage, and that by that method she selects a partner who pleases her most for her husband and they live together to the end of their lives.67 In these ways Champlain’s judgments of the Indians were negative, but they coexisted with many positive assessments. He took pleasure in the discovery of humanity with all its infinite variety.
In 1615, Champlain wrote of “the passion that I have always had for discoveries in New France.” He described how that passion led him to “travel through this land by means of the rivers, lakes and streams of which there are many, to gain a complete knowledge (“parfaicte cognoissance”). And also it led him to meet and know (“recognoistre”) the people who live there and “lead them to the knowledge (‘cognoissance’) of God.”68
In his thoughts and acts we always find a consuming curiosity about the world. Here was a spirit that was sweeping the western world in the sixteenth century. Part of it was linked to the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and to a search for the spirit of God in the natural world. Another part of it flowed from the Renaissance and its hunger for knowledge. It inspired a fascination with scientia, not the modern idea of science but its epistemic ancestor, which was a broader idea of ordered knowledge. With it came an idea of disciplined inquiry, a systematic spirit of observation, a love of study, and a deep belief that knowledge would be immediately useful and beneficial. These values expressed themselves in another quality of Champlain’s book: its exhilaration in the act of discovery, not in the sense of being the first to find something, but in the pleasure of revealing it to others. Like many others of his age, Champlain
used every discipline and art and science within reach. His most important instrument was the printing press.
René Descartes (1596–1650), in a portrait by Franz Hals. This kindred soul explored the inner mind in the same spirit that Champlain studied the outer world. Both shared a passion for knowledge and reason. Each was a seeker for God’s truth in the world.
In some ways Champlain’s thought was similar to that of his younger contemporary René Descartes. Both were of the haute bourgeoisie of France. Both, in Champlain’s phrase, were men of “pious habits, and inspired with a great zeal and love for the Honour of God.” Descartes’ meditations were dedicated to proving the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Both men believed in the Devil as a malevolent demon who was alive in the universe. The horrors of their own time convinced them that evil was something real in the world, something that must be fought and conquered. Both had been in military service, and that experience made them men of peace. They had seen much of war, and witnessed its horror and cruelty and destruction. But they also believed that some things were worse than war, and the worst thing was the triumph of evil in the world.69
Both believed that truth and knowledge could overcome evil. They delighted in inquiry, devoted themselves to reason, and pursued science (“scientia”) in the large sense of knowledge and truth. Champlain and Descartes believed in absolute truth and despised skepticism, cynicism, obscurantism, and the vices of learning. In their writing, they both cultivated a language that was simple, direct, precise, and very clear. They lived in the light, and shared an idea of enlightenment.
Most of all Champlain and Descartes were men of humanity. They believed that all people in the world were God’s children and that each possessed an immortal soul. This recognition of common humanity in the people of America and Europe—and all the world—lay at the heart of Champlain’s dream. It was also the center of his vision of a new world. Part of it grew from the idea of a truly Catholic Church, in the best and most literal sense of catholic, as reaching out to all humanity. And another part came from the large spirit of the Renaissance.
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