Trigger allowed that Champlain was “obviously brave and adventurous, and apparently well-suited to win the support of Indian trading partners by accompanying them on their expeditions against their enemies.” But overall he was severely hostile to Champlain and described him as “insecure,” “ambitious,” and “cynical.” Where most historians had been impressed by Champlain’s humanity, decency, and devotion to a large cause, Trigger asserted that “he came to regard the Indians and even most Europeans with whom he had dealings, less as individuals than as means whereby he could advance his own career.” Further, Trigger asserted that Champlain was “extremely ethnocentric and inflexible,” that he cared little for the Indians, completely misunderstood their culture, and abused them, especially after 1612.135
This indictment of Champlain appeared briefly in the Children of Aataentsic and at greater length in Natives and Newcomers. Large parts of both works were correct and important. Trigger was right to argue that interactions between Indians and Europeans were fundamental to the history of New France and had been much misunderstood. He was right again to insist that scholars should write about that process in an evenhanded way, and study Indians with understanding and respect. He was also correct in asserting that European traders had been neglected figures in the early history of New France.
But he was mistaken about Champlain and other French leaders. Trigger made no sustained effort to understand these men in their own terms. His reading of Champlain’s writings was so hostile that it led to major inaccuracy, which in some cases reversed the meaning of what was actually written. Trigger violated his own ethnographic rules by treating Champlain, the Récollets, and other Frenchmen with the same contempt and misunderstanding that he complained about when it was directed to the Indians. The way forward is to apply the large spirit of Trigger’s best work on the Huron to all the people and cultures who met in North America, including the Europeans.136
Popular Iconoclasts and the Revival of Empathy
The iconoclastic impulse of the late twentieth century also appeared in popular culture and mass media, where it became even more negative and cynical than in academe. On the subject of Champlain, a startling example came from René Lévesque, the leader of Quebec’s separatist movement, who mounted an assault on the founder of Quebec. Lévesque wrote contemptuously in 1986, “Champlain? Not very stimulating, the old founding father. His wife seems to have been a lot more fun. Poor guy, always stuck with the building of his habitation at Quebec with the English overrunning it time and again, and all the while there was lovely Hélène living it up in those far away places perhaps giving secret rendezvous to a certain young soldier from Gascony, or to Athos with the velvet eyes, or to that Jesuit so quick to hoist up his skirts, Aramis by name.”137
Never mind the fact that the English overran Champlain’s Quebec only once, and he got it back again. Never mind that La Belle Hélène was on her way to a convent. Never mind the facts at all. For René Lévesque, history appears to have been a pastiche of Rabelais, Dumas, and Balzac’s Droll Stories. His assault on Champlain was an extraordinary statement, coming as it did from a leader of the Parti Québécois. Anglophone Canadian Joe Armstrong commented, “With this lack of pride in the French heritage, no wonder the revolution failed.”138 Worse was to come in the popular writings of Pierre Berton, who called Champlain an “assassin,” and accused him of murdering “unsuspecting Indians” in a complete reversal of his relations with his Indian neighbors. Lévesque had merely accused Champlain of being a bore. Berton insisted that he was a criminal.139
Iconoclasts will always be with us, but in the early twenty-first century their influence is waning. A new and more balanced mood is evident in popular writing about Champlain. An example is a wonderful book for children by Caroline Montel-Glénisson, called Champlain au Canada: les aventures d’un gentilhomme explorateur. It is cast as a story about Champlain for young readers, told by Guillaume Couillard who came to Canada in 1613, married Guillemette, daughter of the Hébert family. Champlain appears as a leader who was one of the people in Quebec. The violence and cruelty of the new world are made very clear. But Champlain appears as an engaging and very attractive figure, often surrounded by small children both Indian and European, as in fact he was. Charming illustrations by Michel Glénisson show him playing with children, working in his garden with children, ice-fishing with children. In many other scenes we see Champlain moving easily with the Indians, missionaries, traders, and people of all descriptions. The theme is Champlain’s humane spirit. The tone is irreverent and affectionate—a touch of the iconoclastic mood is combined with empathy and respect—a happy synthesis of older approaches with an impulse that was entirely new.140 The same approach appears in Caroline Montel-Glénisson’s Champlain, La découverte du Canada (2004), a brief biography for mature readers, with the same qualities of balance, insight, and empathy.
The Stirring of a New Spirit: The 400th Anniversary
In the early years of the twenty-first century, interest in Samuel de Champlain began to revive very rapidly. A stimulus was the 400th anniversary of the founding of New France, celebrated at Sainte-Croix Island in 2004, Acadia in 2005, Quebec in 2008, and the United States in 2009. The 400th anniversary has a different spirit from the monumental work inspired by the tercentenary. In the early twenty-first century, a new trend began to appear. After a period when political correctness, multiculturalism, postmodernism, relativism, and ideological rage were in fashion, scholars in many disciplines have rediscovered empirical possibilities in a different mood. Many examples appeared in new writing on Champlain, the founding of New France, and the interplay of Indian and European cultures in the new world. In the period from 2004 to 2007, historians from many nations published six volumes of new essays on Champlain and his world, with more than 100 articles, many of excellent quality.141
This effort was led by two French Canadian historians, Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois. In 2004, they published Champlain: la naissance de l’Amérique française (Champlain: The Birth of French America), a major work with many important essays on Champlain and his age. This book is full of clues about new directions for historical scholarship in the twenty-first century. We see in it the growth of a new global history and a revival of empirical work, after the relativism and postmodernism of the late twentieth century. New digital tools extend the historian’s reach and tighten his grasp. Among the results are new projects of primary synthesis (that is, broad works written from primary materials). This new scholarship makes more intensive use of images and artifacts, not merely as illustrations but as texts. In a process of fusion, it links separate sub-fields and combines strengths. The results are presented in braided narratives rather than analytic monographs, which combine story telling and problem solving in ways that realize the episetemic power of historical approaches. There is also a shift from ideological polemics to more open-ended inquiries, and a growing maturity of historical judgment. In writings on Champlain, this new generation of scholarship is beginning to get the balance right between European and American Indians.
One of the most hopeful new tendencies is the effort to study the past in its own terms and at the same time link it with the present. Only a generation ago, scholars held these two purposes to be mutually exclusive and came down on one side or another. Some insisted that any attempt to think of the present while studying the past is “unhistorical.” Others condemned that idea as academic antiquarianism. Scholars in the twenty-first century are finding a middle way, and they have opened new possibilities that we are only beginning to discover. In all these ways, the central theme is the growth of historical knowledge in the human sciences, and a larger idea of humanity, in the spirit of Champlain himself.
APPENDIX A
CHAMPLAIN’S BIRTH DATE
A persistent problem for students of Champlain is his date of birth. We have no formal record of his baptism and no firm evidence of his age at any moment in his life. He never told the reader how old
he was in his writings, nor did anyone who knew him. In the early modern era, this was also the case for Columbus, Cabot, Verrazzano, and Cartier, to name but a few. These men were born before laws that required registration of vital events. Church records were often incomplete, lost or destroyed, especially in France during the wars of religion and the revolutions that followed. Champlain’s native town of Brouage changed hands in the strife between Protestants and Catholics during the sixteenth century; town records that survived the fighting were destroyed by an arsonist before 1690.
It is unlikely that a birth record will ever be found for Champlain. More probable is a chance discovery of some reference to his age in a primary source, but nothing of that sort has turned up to the date of this writing.1
In the absence of firm evidence, scholars have suggested three birth dates for Champlain. The first appeared in Pierre Damien Rainguet’s Biographie saintongeaise ou dictionnaire historique de tous les personnages (Saintes, 1851), which tells us that “ce navigateur célèbre naquit à Brouage d’une famille de pêcheurs, en 1567; this famous navigator was born at Brouage of a family of fishing folk, in 1567.” Rainguet himself was a public official, a notary, and a prolific writer who lived at Saint-Fort-sur-Gironde, approximately thirty miles south of Champlain’s birthplace. He devoted his life to the history of his region and knew its records and local lore. But scholars have found errors in his work, and he gave no source or citation. Another historian has written in frustration, “We have no means of knowing whether the editor had access to material since lost, or whether he was merely guessing.”2
In the 1860s, a very able French Canadian scholar and editor of Champlain’s works, the Abbé C.-H. Laverdière, tested the accuracy of Rainguet’s estimate by comparing it with two passages in Champlain’s writings. One was Champlain’s statement that he had been maréchal des logis for several years in the army of Brittany under the maréchal d’Aumont, who died in August, 1595. Laverdière wrote that this rank was “a post of confidence, given only to a person of some experience,” and he believed that Champlain would have had to be about twenty-five when he was appointed, perhaps in 1592. On that assumption, Laverdière calculated that Champlain must have been born around the year 1567.
Laverdière made a mistake in understanding Champlain to say that he had served several years under d’Aumont, who died in 1595. Champlain wrote that he had served several (quelques) years under d’Aumont, St. Luc, and also Brissac, who survived the war. It ended in 1598, when Champlain was still in service. One cannot subtract several years from d’Aumont’s death date, as Laverdière did, to reach a conclusion that Champlain was serving as an aide from as early as 1592. The earliest date that can be supported by the evidence is 1594. Therefore Laverdière’s inference of a birth date in 1567 may by its own assumptions be several years too early.3
Laverdière also made another test against a passage in which Champlain wrote of his colleague François Gravé, sieur du Pont (also called Pont-Gravé or Du Pont Gravé) in 1619, “son âge me le ferait respecter comme mon père; his age would lead me to respect him as my father.” Laverdière reckoned that Pont-Gravé must have been “at least ten or twelve years older” than Champlain, and he quoted Gabriel Sagard as saying that Pont-Gravé was about sixty-five years old in 1619, which yielded a birth date of 1554 or 1555. Assuming twelve years between the two men, Champlain would have been born about 1567. On the basis of that reasoning, Laverdière concluded that a birth date of 1567 would have been “not far from the truth.”4
Laverdière’s judgment was widely accepted in the nineteenth century. Champlain’s birth date was identified as 1567 on monuments in France and in Canada. Biographers, editors and reference works adopted it. Bishop spoke for many scholars when he wrote, “on the whole, 1567 seems about right.”5
Other scholars went a different way, and a second estimate emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Canadian biographer Narcisse-Eutrope Dionne wrote without explanation in 1891 that “l’immortel fondateur de Québecy vit le jour, vers l’année 1570; the immortal founder of Quebec was born there around the year 1570.” One of the most influential Canadian historians of the twentieth century agreed. Marcel Trudel wrote: “On calcule généralement qu’il est né vers 1570, sinon en 1567; the usual calculation is that he was born around 1570, if not in 1567.” Others began to adopt the judgment of “vers 1570.” As late as 1972, the American historian Samuel Eliot Morison accepted this conclusion, and wrote in his clipped Boston English that Champlain was born “about 1570, natal day unknown and year doubtful.” This estimate has been repeated in many other works.6
In 1978, yet another birth date was proposed by Jean Liebel, a French historian and biographer of Champlain’s associate Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons. In the course of his research, Liebel discovered a new piece of evidence that was relevant to this question. In the records of the cathedral-church at Saint-Malo, he found the baptismal record of François Gravé du Pont, dated November 27, 1560, which made him a little younger than other scholars had believed. Sagard had guessed that Pont-Gravé had been baptized in 1559 or the year before; Laverdière reckoned that his date of birth was between 1555 and 1557. Liebel’s discovery shifted a benchmark that scholars had used to estimate Champlain’s age.
Liebel published an article, arguing that if Champlain respected Gravé du Pont “as a father,” there must have been “at least twenty years” between their ages, not twelve as Laverdière had reckoned. On the basis of that assumption and the new evidence of Pont Gravé’s baptismal date, he concluded that Champlain was born in 1580.7
There are several difficulties here. For one, Liebel’s discovery moved Gravé du Pont’s baptism by between one and six years, but he used it to move Champlain’s birth date by ten or thirteen years. For another, Liebel had an “axe to grind,” as a Yankee would say. He believed that the subject of his biography, Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, had received too little credit for the founding of Quebec, and Champlain had been given too much. Liebel took particular exception to the idea often engraved on monuments in Canada, that Champlain was “the founder of Quebec.” He insisted that the title properly belonged to his hero, de Mons, who gave Champlain the means, the men, the material and the provisions to construct the habitation at Quebec.8
In making his case Liebel wrote: “The word ‘founder’ that one sees in our own time, so often following his name implies a man not only rich and powerful, but also aged…. The grades, titles and qualities with which one had bestowed on Champlain after his death were totally excessive if one had no reason to suppose an age in proportion to them.” He concluded that in 1608, the year when Quebec was founded, Champlain was 28, not 38 or 41.9
Whatever Liebel’s purposes may have been, the validity of his historical argument is an empirical question, and the accuracy of his statements is a separate issue from his motives for making them. After Liebel’s article appeared in 1978, several French and Canadian scholars were quick to accept it. In a collection of essays on Champlain, published in 2004, most writers who discussed the subject of Champlain’s birth agreed with Liebel. Nathalie Fiquet wrote that “the theory that he was born around 1580 seems to best correspond to the image conveyed by his writings.” Other scholars agreed that the evidence “would make Champlain’s birthdate around 1580.”10 But is Liebel’s thesis consistent with the evidence? Let us look again at the sources. Although Champlain never mentioned his age or his date of birth, at least four sets of clues appear in his writings and other documents.
The first clue comes from Champlain’s army service records. This evidence appears not only in Champlain’s Brief Discours as Liebel asserts, but also in pay records of the army, which Robert Le Blant and René Baudry have found and published. In the year 1595, they tell us, Champlain received pay as a fourrier, a quartermaster officer, in the months of March and April. By the end of that year, he was identified as the “ayde du Sieur Hardy, marschal de logis de l’armee du roy; assistant to the si
eur Hardy, marshall of lodgings in the king’s army.” The paymaster’s records show that he received extra money in 1595 for a “certain secret voyage in which he made an important service to the King.” He also had been present at the siege of Crozon in 1594, and distinguished himself in that bloody assault sufficiently to have been mentioned in the history of that battle. In 1597 he also appears in military records as “captaine d’une compagnie” of troops at Quimper, a garrison town in southern Brittany midway between Brest and Blavet, where he is also known to have served in those years.11
Moreover, throughout the period from 1595 to 1597, army records referred to him in all but one instance as the “Sieur de Champlain.” He was given a title of respect and a particule de noblesse. These distinctions did not necessarily imply nobility, but they were reserved for officers of rank, and gentlemen in positions of honor and trust.
To conclude that Champlain was born in 1580 is to assert that in the midst of a war he was given offices of trust and distinctions of honor at the age of fourteen or fifteen. It might have been so for members of the royal family, or princes of the blood, or sons of great noble families, but Champlain was not of that rank. And this was active duty in time of war. It is reasonable to think that he was older than fourteen or fifteen—perhaps in his early twenties, when he served in positions of high responsibility with the army of Brittany in 1595–97, such as a captain in command of a company. This would indicate a birth year around 1570, plus or minus several years.
A second set of clues appears in several statements that Champlain made about the years that he spent at sea. One of these passages appeared in a dedicatory letter to the queen regent in 1613. Writing of “the art of navigation,” Champlain declared, “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.”12 This passage becomes significant in relation to another preface to Champlain’s Traitté de la marine et du devoir d’un bon marinier in 1632. Champlain wrote of “having spent thirty-eight years of my life in making many sea voyages.”13
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