The Growth of Professional Scholarship
Other tendencies were moving in a different direction. Through that troubled era, the study of history developed as a professional discipline in universities and other institutions. That trend began at a surprisingly late date. During the nineteenth century, history had been taught in American colleges mainly as a branch of moral philosophy, often in a single course of that name, taught by the college president to all students in their senior year.96
History as an autonomous academic discipline developed at the same time as did economics, anthropology, biochemistry, and many others. They became academic departments and acquired the full apparatus of a learned discipline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once begun, the profession of history developed rapidly. Today it is one of the largest academic disciplines, and also the most eclectic. It has an active interface with most other disciplines in a university. History is not only a discipline in its own right. It is also a method of inquiry in other disciplines. Today, much academic historical scholarship happens outside history departments. Increasingly it is difficult to tell what academic department a work of history comes from. The expanding eclecticism of history is its saving grace. In the twentieth century this eclectic spirit brought an extraordinary outpouring of historical knowledge, not only in academic history but in archival scholarship, archaeology, and other fields. That pattern clearly appears in scholarship on Champlain.
Professional Archivists and Champlain: Robert Le Blant’s Discoveries
Some of the most important work was done by professional archivists, in finding, preserving, and making primary sources more generally available. A major difficulty for students of Champlain was the loss of manuscripts. Champlain tried to preserve his papers, and Lescarbot used them for his history. On his deathbed, Champlain asked that they be sent to his wife in France, and they disappeared. The records of the Company of New France also vanished. They are believed to have been destroyed by the Communards of 1871 who hauled them out of the Châtelet and made a bonfire in the streets of Paris.97
Other manuscripts survived in the archives of French ministries. Materials relating to North America in the early seventeenth century were copied by the Library of Congress, mostly from the major French ministries: Colonies, Marine, and Foreign Affairs. They were very useful for this inquiry. Canadian archivists have also made a major effort to find manuscripts in public archives, with much success. Early leaders were H. P. Biggar, who worked in British and French archives; Claude de Bonnault, an archivist trained at the French École des Chartes, and more recently Raymonde Litalien, who has played a major role in supporting the history of New France. In many years of labor, Canadian archivists began by compiling inventories, then ordered manual transcriptions in the early twentieth century. After 1945, massive microfilm projects copied more than 2.5 million pages of records on New France. In 1988, the emphasis began to shift toward digital databases and electronic texts. Since 1999 these materials have been coming online in websites sponsored by Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa and its office in Paris.98
An effort of another kind has been made by a very able French archivist who had a particular interest in Champlain. Robert Le Blant was a lawyer, jurist, councillor of the French Court of Appeal at Douai in the north of France, and a highly skilled archivist who knew well the complex ways of French legal and archival institutions. He searched many French provincial and national archives, and found a trove of materials that had eluded earlier students of Champlain. Le Blant published his findings in historical journals, and also in a larger work called Nouveaux documents sur Champlain et son époque, edited with René Baudry. The first volume, covering the period from 1560 to 1622, was printed by the Public Archives of Canada, as it then was, in 1967. A second volume, from 1622 to 1635, was promised but not published. A careful bibliography of Le Blant’s work by M. A. MacDonald surveys a large body of primary scholarship that is indispensable for any serious student of Champlain.99
Documentary Historians and Champlain’s World: Lucien Campeau
Working closely with archivists were other scholars who might be called documentary historians. Many have worked under the auspices of the Champlain Society and have prepared scholarly editions of major texts for the early history of New France. The society’s work continues, and the first volume of a new translation of Champlain’s works is promised for 2008, under an editorial team headed by Conrad Heidenreich.
Another example of documentary history in the late twentieth century is the work of Lucien Campeau (circa 1915–2003), a Jesuit scholar who was trained at the Gregorian University in Rome and taught at the Université de Montréal. Campeau devoted his energy to a great historical project that he called Monumenta Novae Franciae. Conceived as a subseries of the Jesuits’ Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, Campeau’s project was to publish all major documents relating to the Jesuits in Canada and Acadia, with another series to follow for the Illinois country and Louisiana. He intended it to supersede a large bilingual collection of the Jesuit Relations edited by the American historian Reuben Gold Thwaites.
Campeau made two organizing decisions that expanded the scope of his project but limited its use. Roughly 80 percent of his documents had never been published before. He decided to publish them only in their original languages. His fourth volume, for example, includes 178 documents, of which more than 100 are in Latin, eight in Italian, and the rest in French. They are sources of importance—and frustration—for modern users who are not trained in Church Latin. Campeau’s volumes reproduce large quantities of material on the history of New France, but they were dated in their historiography and marked by expressions of strong identity to the Jesuits and bitter hostility to their enemies. At the same time, the documents are accompanied by helpful introductions, notes, and “notices biographiques,” which have been separately published as a Biographical Dictionary for the Jesuit Mission. Altogether, for all their flaws, they are a major contribution.100
Archaeology: Material Traces of Champlain’s Life
Historical archaeology, which made great strides in the twentieth century, has contributed in a major way to our knowledge of Champlain and his world. The first amateur archaeology in this field was done as early as 1797 at Sainte-Croix Island.101 Other amateur projects followed in the nineteenth century, and much professional work in the twentieth century. A major center is Quebec, where the Ministry of Cultural Affairs has sponsored archaeological research in the city of Quebec and throughout the province, with results that have been published in more than a hundred volumes of research reports. One of the most useful for students of Champlain is volume 58, L’Habitation de Champlain, by François Niellon and Marcel Mousett (1981). It established the sequence of buildings on that site, uncovered much evidence of their architecture, and found many artifacts, including what may have been Champlain’s writing set, his sword, and much more. This work also confirmed the accuracy of Champlain’s written accounts, and went far beyond them in documenting his material life. Other volumes in the same series have studied the origins of “la vie québécoise” and the material culture of American Indians in the same era. Many artifacts that came out of the ground are on display today in the cultural center at Place Royale in the old town of Québec.102
Several other archaeological projects have had an impact on our knowledge of Champlain’s career. A careful excavation at Cap Tourmente established the history of Champlain’s farm. A project of Indian archaeology in New York state made clear that Champlain’s expedition in 1615 was mounted against the Onondaga nation near Syracuse and not at Oneida sites to the east, as historians had mistakenly believed. Underwater archaeology on the fishing coast found much evidence of that era, including early Basque whaleboats and many material remains. Excavations on Sainte-Croix Island turned up evidence of the ravages of scurvy and the remains of its victims, exactly as Champlain described, and give his description a new depth of meaning. Field archaeology in Nov
a Scotia supplied evidence of life at Port-Royal including land management and agriculture, systems of stratification and material culture. At Castine in Maine another archaeological project excavated the history of a French trading post. Maritime archaeology in the West Indies yielded much evidence about the Spanish empire at the time of Champlain’s visit, and much detail about the ships he sailed. In France archaeological work has continued at the home of the Champlain family in Brouage, which is now open to the public as a visitor center. Archaeology in this historical period has proven to be a versatile tool and an important source of knowledge that interlocks with documentary materials.103
Prosopographers and Champlain
In the mid-twentieth century, another major contribution was a large project in what the Greeks called prosopography, or collective biography. A successful Canadian businessman, James Nicholson, left a bequest to the University of Toronto for a Canadian counterpart to the British Dictionary of National Biography. The result was the Dictionary of Canadian Biography/ Dictionnaire Biographique du Canada, founded to provide critical biographies of major figures in Canadian history. Begun in 1959, the project expanded two years later into a joint Anglo-French enterprise directed by George Brown and Marcel Trudel. Historians were mobilized, and volume I appeared in 1966. The first series, for individuals who died before 1901, was completed in 1990. A second series followed for Canadians who lived in the twentieth century and was complete through 1920 at the time of this writing.
The DCB/DBC is an invaluable aid for any project in Canadian history. By comparison with the first British Dictionary of National Biography, and the original Dictionary of American Biography, the DCB/DBC is superior in coverage, documentation, and quality of writing. The Canadian project was also made more accessible than its British and American counterparts, a testament to the large purposes of its organizers. Sets were donated to schools throughout the country. The entire text was digitized and also made available on line without charge to all who wish to use it—a pattern very different from more proprietary practices in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The DCB/DBC has become an indispensable work for every period of Canadian history to the early twentieth century, especially for Champlain’s time. Much of the first volume is about his contemporaries. A particular strength of the DCB/DBC is the large number of biographies of Indians, including many who Champlain knew. Volume I also gives much attention to Champlain’s habirants, traders, interpreters, and seamen. For many of them, the biographies in the DCB/DBC are the only ones available. In interpretative terms, a major contribution of this great project is to make clear that Champlain rarely worked alone. His way of working with others appears more clearly in this large project of collective biography than in any other source.
Maritime History: Morisons Champlain
In the mid-twentieth century, highly specialized professional historians studied Champlain’s career in different ways. Many approaches emerged from the diversity of scholarship. One of these areas was maritime history, a special sub-discipline with organizations such as the Hakluyt Society, journals such as American Neptune and the Mariner’s Mirror, and scholars such as Robert Albion at Princeton, Frederic Lane at Johns Hopkins, and Samuel Eliot Morison at Harvard.
Morison was Boston-born and bred, a professional historian who taught at Oxford and Harvard and wrote history as literature for a large reading public, on the inspiration of his hero Francis Parkman. Morison was an extraordinary character, a cantankerous Yankee and a great scholar who did important work on the early American republic, the founding of Massachusetts, and the history of Harvard College. His deepest love was maritime history, which absorbed the last forty years of a long career. Among his major works were a great biography of Christopher Columbus, a maritime history of Massachusetts, and the official history of the United States Navy during the Second World War in fifteen volumes. He taught the history of exploration and discovery at Harvard, often with Champlain’s maps in hand.104
Morison summered on Mount Desert Island all his life, and sailed that beautiful coast. Even when he reached the rank of rear admiral, he preferred to call himself a sailor, and liked nothing better than to cruise the coast of Maine in his old wooden yawl, following in the wake of Champlain. Morison studied Champlain’s voyages for many years, and published a full-scale biography in 1972.105
It is a lively book, the product of long reflection. Morison was mainly interested in Champlain as a seaman and explorer. He followed every voyage in the Gulf of Maine “from Pemaquid to Port Royal,” as he said. Later he traced Champlain’s other voyages by air, in a small private plane. He wrote that his purpose was to celebrate great discoveries, “to honor one of the greatest pioneers, explorers and colonists of all time.” From his own experience, he especially admired Champlain’s seamanship, gave close attention to Champlain’s “Traitté de la Marine,” and retranslated parts of it as a guide to practical seamanship for young sailors. He was also interested in Champlain as a great captain, “a natural leader who inspired loyalty and commanded obedience.”106
Morison had a sailor’s keen awareness of contingency and he posed a set of counterfactual questions in his biography. What if Champlain had sailed another two hundred miles on his New England voyages in 1604–06 and reached Manhattan Island and its great river before the Dutch? What if the sieur de Mons had found his southern site for settlement before the founding of Jamestown? What if Poutrincourt’s party had not provoked the Indians to violence at Nauset in 1605? Morison suggested that the history of North America and the world might have been very different if those events had happened in another way.
Morison’s biography was thin on other aspects of Champlain’s career. It was one of his last books and not as well documented as his best work, but within its unique frame it was a contribution to our understanding of Champlain as a seaman.
Historical Geography: Heidenreich’s Champlain as Cartographer and Scientist
Another major contribution came from a distinguished Canadian scholar, Conrad Heidenreich, a geographer trained at both the University of Toronto and McMaster University, and founder of the Geography Department at York University, where he began to teach in 1962. His published works are models of interdisciplinary study in history, the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Among them is a prize-winning history and geography of the Huron nation during the early seventeenth century. For students of Champlain it is doubly useful as a very close and detailed discussion of the Huron, and also for its careful assessment of Champlain as an observer. Heidenreich found some errors in Champlain’s account of the Huron economy, religion, politics, and society, but concluded that he was “an accurate observer of geographical detail and most material aspects of Huron culture.” He wrote that “his view of the Huron and other groups is essentially sympathetic, accounting for the excellent rapport he established with them.”107
Also of high importance was a monograph by Heidenreich on Champlain as a cartographer. It is a work of meticulous scholarship that carefully reconstructs Champlain’s travels, compares his maps with modern terrain studies, estimates the accuracy of his work, and observes that “by and large his observations are extremely accurate, and when one takes into account the enormous area covered by him are nothing less than phenomenal.” Heidenreich assessed the quality of Champlain’s maps and concluded that “Champlain emerges as the first scientific, or at least modern cartographer of Canada. His written observations and maps are so much better than earlier ones that a comparison is not really possible.” Heidenreich added that “with some justification the large 1612 and 1632 maps may be called the ‘mother maps’ of Canadian cartography.”108
Another perspective on Champlain’s career appeared in published work by historians of surveying. One scholar of this subject, Paul La Chance, wrote that Champlain was not merely the “fondateur du Québec.” He was also “le père des arpenteurs-géomètres du Canada, the father of Canadian surveyors.” This interpr
etation appeared in a treatise by Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada (1966). It adds material not available elsewhere on Champlain’s role as a pioneering surveyor of New France, and develops yet another dimension of a busy life.109
Other scholars in the burgeoning field of environmental history have studied Champlain as an ecologist. One of the first was Carl Sauer, a geographer and ecologist at Berkeley, who gave Champlain high marks for his ethnography and ecology. Chandra Mukerji, a scholar at the University of California at San Diego, studied Champlain’s interest in nature and horticulture and found a close connection between these two subjects in his thinking.110
The New Social History: Trudel’s Champlain
A major approach developed from the new social history of the 1960s. This was not merely a new subdiscipline of history, but the discipline itself in a new form. It developed simultaneously in Britain, the United States, Canada, and especially France, where a group of gifted scholars founded a new journal called Annales in 1929. The leaders were Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the first generation, Fernand Braudel in the second, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in the third. Their ideal was an “histoire totale” of all people everywhere. Their protagonists were often not individuals but societies, economies, and cultures. Much of their work centered on the history of structures and conjunctures (long trends or processes); they were less interested in the study of events, histoire événementielle, as they called it.
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