1. Henry Percival Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 6 vols. and a portfolio of maps and drawings (CWB), (Toronto, 1922–36, reprinted 1971) 1:123; 2:18.
2. Lescarbot wrote that “the tribes of Gaspé and of Chaleur Bay who are near the 48th parallel of latitude to the south of the great river (St. Lawrence), call themselves Canadaquoa (as they pronounce it), that is to say, Canadaquois as we say” (Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 2:25; Champlain called them Canadiens, and wrote that their customs were the same as those of the Etchemin and Sourquois.
3. CWB 3:55.
4. CWB 6:249.
J. THE BATTLE WITH THE MOHAWK IN 1609: WHERE DID IT HAPPEN?
1. Cf. Carte de la nouvelle France, augmentée …,” 1632 in the folio of maps attached to the Biggar edition; the key is in Henry Percival Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 6 vols. and a portfolio of maps and drawings (CWB), (Toronto, 1922–36, reprinted 1971) 6:240.
2. CWB 2:93.
3. Guy Omeron Coolidge, The French Occupation of the Champlain Valley, from 1609 to 1759 (New York, 1938, 1940), 12; and in Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society 6 (1938), 143–53; Joe C. W. Armstrong, Champlain (Toronto, 1987), 298–99, and New York’s bicentennial leaders, who put up a monument to Champlain at Crown Point. The case for Ticonderoga appears in S. H. P. Pell, “Was Champlain a Liar?” Bulletin of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum 5 (1939) 5–8. Morris Bishop discussed the evidence in his Champlain: The Life of Fortitude (New York, 1948), appendix E, “The Site of the Battle of 1609,” 353–54, Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 2: Le Comptoir, 1604–1627 (Montreal, 1966), 164; Samuel Eliot Morison, Samuel de Champlain, Father of New France (New York, 1972), 110; and Robert Pell-Duchame’s excellent ms. history. A few local historians continue to support the claims of the Crown Point site, which cannot be correct.
K. THE ATTACK ON THE IROQUOIS FORT, 1615: WHICH FORT? WHAT NATION?
1. Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World (1865, revised edition with corrections, 1885; rpt. Boston, 1901), 413n.
2. Samuel Eliot Morison, Samuel de Champlain, Father of New France (New York, 1972), 156–58; Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston, 1985, 1986, 1994), 309; Louise W. Murray, ed., Selected Manuscripts of General John S. Clark relating to the Aboriginal History of the Susquehanna (Athens, Ohio, 1931); A. G. Zeller, The Champlain-Iroquois Battle of 1615 (New York, 1962).
3. Peter Pratt, Archaeology of the Oneida Indians, Occasional Publications in Northeastern Anthropology no. 1 (Rindge, N.H., 1976), viii—ix; idem, “A Perspective on Oneida Archaeology,” in Robert E. Funk and Charles F. Hayes III, eds., Current Perspectives on Northeastern Archaeology: Essays in Honor of William A. Ritchie: Researches and Transactions of the New York State Archaeological Association 17 (1977) no. 1:51–69; Daniel H. Weiskotten, “The Real Battle of Nichols Pond,” 1998.
4. Conversation with Peter Pratt, 2007; William Engelbrecht, Iroquoia; The Development of a Native World (Syracuse, 2003), 147; cf. O. H. Marshall, “Champlain’s Expedition of 1615,” Historical Writings of the late Orasmus H. Marshall (Albany, 1887), 43–66.
L. CHAMPLAIN’S FAVORED FIREARM: THE ARQUEBUSE À ROUET
1. Cf. Samuel Eliot Morison, Samuel de Champlain, Father of New France (New York, 1972), 282; Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York, 2005), 16.
2. Russel Bouchard, Les armes à feu en Nouvelle-France (Sillery, Quebec, 1999), 102–06.
3. M. A. O. Paulin-Desormeaux, Nouveau manuel complet de l’armurier du fourbisseur et de l’arquebusier, nouvelle édition, 2 vols. (Paris, 1852, rpt. Paris, 1977), 1:11–14, 184–93; author’s collection.
4. Lisa Jardine, The Awful End of William the Silent: The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Handgun (London, 2005).
M. CHAMPLAIN’S SHIPS AND BOATS
1. R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot, “Le Problème de l’Atlantique du XVIIIe et XXe siècle,” Relazione del X Congresso Internationale di Scienze Storiche, Roma 4–11 Settembre 1955 (Florence, 1955) 5: 175–239. This little-read paper, which led to the vogue for Atlantic history in the late twentieth century, is in the Library of Congress.
2. Frederic C. Lane, “Tonnages, Medieval and Modern,” Economic History Review, n.s., 17 (1964), 213–33.
3. William A. Baker, Colonial Vessels: Some Seventeenth Century Ship Designs (Barre, Mass., 1962), 25–27.
4. Père Fournier, Hydrographie, contenant la théorie et la pratique de toutes les parties de la navigation (Paris, 1643), 49; Jean Liebel, Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, fondateur de Québec (Paris, 1999), 99, 100; Charles Bréard and Paul Bréard, Documents relatifs à la Marine Normande et à ses armements aux XXVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rouen, 1889), 2.
5. Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1986), 228.
6. Henry Percival Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 6 vols. and a portfolio of maps and drawings (CWB), (Toronto, 1922–36, reprinted 1971) 1:6–8; Laura Giraudo, “Research Report: A Mission in Spain,” in Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois, eds., Champlain: The Birth of French America (Montreal, 2004), 96; L. A. Vigneras, “Le voyage de Samuel de Champlain aux Indes Occidentales,” RHAF (1959–60), 167, 188; Morison, European Discovery of America, The Southern Voyages, 1492–1616 (New York, 1974), 149, 114.
7. Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1986), 33–34, 41–46, 71–72, 78–79, 229–33; Timothy Walton, The Spanish Treasure Fleets (Sarasota, 1994), 57–64; Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea; Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, 8, 30, 134–35; Angus Konstam, The Spanish Galleon, 1530–1690 (Wellingborough, 2004), 4–16.
8. CWB 3:24; Liebel, Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, 98–100, found highly variable estimates of tonnage, some of which referred to different ships of the same name. For other examples and discussion see CWB 1:388n, 456n; 6:153; Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 2: Le Comptoir, 1604–1627 (Montreal, 1966), 206, 417; Samuel E. Morison, Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France (New York, 1972), 5, 8, 10, 77, 89, 94, 97–98, 186, 214, 238; Bréard and Bréard, Documents relatifs à la Marine Normande, 41–134.
9. Liebel, Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, 20; Père Fournier, S.J., Hydrographie contenant la théorie et la pratique de toutes les parties de la navigation (Paris, 1643), 16–43, 423.
10. Bréard and Bréard, Documents relatifs à la Marine Normande, 2.
11. CWB 6:155.
12. Bréard and Bréard, Documents relatifs à la Marine Normande, 2.
13. Ibid. 2, 153.
14. William A. Baker, “A Colonial Bark, circa 1640,” in Baker, Colonial Vessels: Some Seventeenth Century Ship Designs, 78–110.
15. CWB 1:401; Baker, Colonial Vessels, 82.
16. Ibid. 1:377.
17. Ibid. 6:61.
18. Quoted in Alain Rey et al. eds., Le Grand Robert de la langue française, 6 vols. (Paris, 2001) 5:333.
19. CWB 1:428.
20. Ibid. 6:61.
21. Ibid. 1:276–78; 3:203; Biggar mistakenly translates Champlain’s “barque” as a “long boat” or “pinnace.”
22. Google images, www.famsf.org/image.
23. See CWB 1:428.
24. CWB 3:316.
25. James Tuck and Robert Grenier, Red Bay, Labrador (St. John’s, Nfld., 1989), 36–38.
26. The best primary account is Nicolas Denys, Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia) (Toronto, 1908), 295–301, 273–74, 302–05 drawing facing 311.
27. Champlain CWB 4:39 also 1:104–05, 338–39, 339n; 2:14–15; 3:384–85.
28. Ibid. 3:37.
29. An early drawing of canoes used by the Montagnais, Têtes de Boule, Ottawa, and Algonquin nations appears in Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage (Ed
monton, 1984), 89, from Bécard de Granville, Les Raretés des Indes LAC C—33287.
30. See William N. Fenton and Ernest Dodge, “An Elm Bark Canoe in the Peabody Museum of Salem,” American Neptune 9 (1949), 185–206; for an early account, Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North-America ed. Reuben G. Thwaites, 2 vols. (1703; New York, 1970) 1:80; see also William Engelbrecht, Iroquoia: The Development of a Native World (Syracuse, 2003), 141–42. An excellent general work is Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chapelle, The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America (Washington, 1964), 7–174.
31. CWB 1:337; Carl O. Sauer, Seventeenth Century America (Berkeley, 1980), 81.
32. The leading studies are E. Y. Arima, Inuit Kayaks in Canada: A Review of Historical Records and Construction, Canadian Ethnology service paper no. 110 (Ottawa, 1987), 235 pages; and Adney and Chapelle, Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, 175–211.
33. See Adney and Chapelle, Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, 219–20.
N. CHAMPLAIN’S WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
1. Marcel Trudel, Introduction to New France (Toronto and Montreal, 1968), 221.
2. Jean Liebel, Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, fondateur de Québec (Paris, 1999), 12.
3. Conrad E. Heidenreich, Explorations and Mapping of Samuel de Champlain, 1603–1632 (Toronto, 1976), 46, and see generally, 43–50.
4. Henry Percival Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 6 vols. and a portfolio of maps and drawings (CWB), (Toronto, 1922–36, reprinted 1971) 1:200; Samuel E. Morison, Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France (New York, 1972), xiii.
5. Heidenreich, Explorations and Mapping, 43–49.
O. CHAMPLAIN’S MONEY
1. Sources include John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978), 87–97; Frank C. Spooner, The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge, 1972); David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York, 1996); for archaeological evidence see Françoise Niellon and Marcel Moussette, Le site de l’habitation de Champlain à Québec: étude de la collection archéologique (Quebec, 1981), 139–44.
2. The original contracts executed by sieur de Mons, 17–22 Feb., 1608, appear in Robert Le Blant and René Baudry, eds., Nouveaux documents sur Champlain et son époque, vol. 1 (1560–1662) (Ottawa, 1967), 154–59.
P. CHAMPLAIN’S CALENDARS
1. Sources include Marcel Trudel, Introduction to New France (Toronto and Montreal, 1968), 221–24; Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians: the History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada (Ottawa, 1966) 1:47; James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge, 2004).
2. Henry Percival Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 6 vols. and a portfolio of maps and drawings (Toronto, 1922–36, reprinted 1971) 5:282.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biographers of Samuel Champlain and historians of early New France routinely begin their works with a litany of complaint about their sources. Most of Champlain’s manuscripts and papers have disappeared. We know that he tried to preserve them, and Marc Lescarbot used them as a source for his history of New France. On his deathbed, Champlain asked Father Charles Lalement and François Derre de Gand to gather his papers and send them to his wife, Hélène, in Paris. Both men probably did as they were asked, but then the trail goes cold, and Champlain’s papers have vanished without a trace. Scattered manuscripts have survived mostly in court files, financial records, and government archives.
This problem was not specific to Champlain. The same thing happened to the papers of Aymar de Chaste, the sieur de Mons, Pont-Gravé, Lescarbot, Razilly, and most major figures in the early history of New France. In the late twentieth century, the great Canadian historian Marcel Trudel searched high and low in France for manuscripts on Champlain and New France. He also went looking for the records of commercial companies, especially the Company of New France, which had been in public archives in the mid-nineteenth century. Trudel concluded that they were destroyed by the Communards of 1871, who hauled them out of the Châtelet with many other papers and made a bonfire in the streets of Paris. For the historical period before 1627, he complained of an extreme “pauvreté de documentation,” and a “grande pénurie d’information.” Trudel wrote that in the course of his research in France he “rarely found an unpublished manuscript” of any importance. He observed that the condition of French sources for the early seventeenth century is very different from the eighteenth, and even the sixteenth (Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 1:x; 2:xxiii; 3.1:xix).
A leading American historian had a similar experience. Samuel Eliot Morison collected Champlain material through much of his busy career. He looked for published sources in France, and wrote in frustration, “Search the French literature of the reigns of Henry IV and Louis XIII and you will find very, very few references to Canada, and those mostly ironical, and even fewer to Champlain” (Morison, Champlain, 188).
Even so, many manuscripts and imprints have survived, and in the course of the twentieth century they have become more accessible to historians. Archivists in the United States, France, and especially in Canada have made a sustained effort to find manuscripts relating to America in European archives. Early leaders were H. P. Biggar, who worked in British and French archives; Claude de Bonnault, an archivist trained in the French École des Chartes, and more recently Raymonde Litalien, who has played a major role. In many years of labor, Canadian archivists began by compiling inventories, then ordered manual transcriptions in the early twentieth century. After 1945, 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.
UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In the United States, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress has a collection of manuscript materials copied from French government archives. The copies were made in the early twentieth century, of materials relating to American history. A large proportion are large bundles of photostats. Useful for this inquiry were copies of manuscripts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Marine and Colonies from the period from 1604 to 1635. Much of this material touches on the career of Champlain. It includes royal edicts of Henri IV and Louis XIII for New France, as well as charters, letters patent, and other official documents from the Royal Council. Also in these records are documents on the loss of New France and its recovery. Richelieu’s instructions to the de Caëns are there, and memoirs on trade in New France. Also in this material are scattered records of the Company of New France.
The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress has Champlain’s manuscript draft of his map of New France dated 1607/08. This is the only manuscript of his cartography and art that is known to survive. It has often been reproduced, but rarely with accuracy. The best published image is in the Map Division’s Geography and Maps: An Illustrated Guide (Washington, 1996, 28). Any serious student of Champlain must see the original of this manuscript to form an accurate understanding of his work.
UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS: THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY
The founder and namesake of this extraordinary library had a particular interest in Champlain, and assembled one of the finest collections of imprints in the world. The library owns not only all the major works of Champlain and Lescarbot, but also nearly all variant printings in the early seventeenth centuries. This is of particular importance for Lescarbot’s history of New France, as he added new materials that make a difference in what we know of Champlain’s world.
The John Carter Brown Library also has the best of three known manuscript copies of Champlain’s Brief Discours, with the largest set of Champlain’s many color illustrations, in what may be original manuscripts, or copies contemporary with Champlain.
UNPUBLISHED MA
NUSCRIPTS: LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
Many collections here are useful for a student of Champlain’s career, and include copies of manuscripts in archives scattered widely throughout France. For many years, this material was extremely difficult of access for historians. After many years of work by Canadian and French archivists, this material is now coming available on microfilm in Canada and increasingly online—a process that has only begun. In Ottawa, we worked in the following collections:
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Imprimés; thirty-five documents on New France;
Archives nationales de France, Documents concernant la Nouvelle-France, 1532–1759; six bobbins of microfilm; Amirauté de France, Juridictions spéciales, 1572–1666;
Materials on the Compagnie de Caën, the Compagnie de Montmorency, and the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France;
Fonds des Archives départementales de la Charente-Maritime, 1599–1787: sixty bobbins of microfilm;
Fonds des Archives départementales du Calvados, 1568–1791: ten bobbins of microfilm;
Fonds des Archives municipales de Honfleur: 1 document;
Fonds de la Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France, 1627–1635: fifty-seven pages.
UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS ON THE WEB
A resource of growing importance to researchers in this field is the Gallica Project, founded in 2004 by James H. Billington and Jean-Noël Jeanneney, leaders of the Library of Congress in Washington and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. It is a bilingual website called “Gallica, La France en Amérique,” and includes much material from the Bibliothèque nationale on “the French presence in North America.” Materials encompass a very large array of manuscripts, imprints, maps, prints, designs, stamps, and other genres of primary sources. They are organized around historical themes. One is “exploration and colonisation of the continent,” and has much material on Champlain. For example, Champlain’s petition to Louis XIII in 1630 is available on this site.
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