Samuel de Champlain (
b.
c. 1580 –
d.
December 25, 1635) ( ), "
The Father of New France", was a French navigator,
cartographer, draughtsman, soldier, explorer, geographer,
ethnologist, diplomat and chronicler.
He founded Quebec City
on July 3, 1608, and served as its administrator
for the rest of his life.
Born into a family of master mariners, Champlain, while still a
young man, began exploring
North
America in 1603 under the guidance of
François Gravé Du Pont.
Note:
Mathieu d’Avignon (Ph.D) est historien consultant et
chercheur affilié au Groupe de recherche sur l’histoire de
l’Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Il est titulaire d’un
doctorat en histoire obtenu à l’Université Laval en 2006.
Il
prépare une réédition intégrale, en français moderne, des récits de
voyages de Champlain en Nouvelle-France.
— The book described here above is a résumé of Mathieu
d'Avignon's Ph.D Thesis, who wrote that Champlain's "true mentor"
in North America was, from the beginning (1603), François Gravé Du
Pont...
Translation of the French Note above: Mathieu
d'Avignon (Ph.D in History, Laval University
, 2006) is an affiliate researcher into the
University of Quebec at
Chicoutimi
Research Group on History. He is
preparing a special new full edition, in modern French, of
Champlain's Voyages in New France.
Five years later, after participating in
the exploration and settlement of Acadia
between 1604 and 1607, Champlain established in 1608 the French
settlement that has since grown to become Quebec City. And Champlain became the first European to
explore and describe the Great Lakes
, making journeys after which he published maps and
accounts of what he saw or learnt from the natives, or from the
French interpreters living among the natives. He developed early
relationships between French settlers, or French interpreters, and
natives: first, with local Montagnais
Innu and later with others further west
(Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing
, or Georgian
Bay
), with Algonquin and with
Huron Wendat, who all convinced him to
provide assistance in their wars against the Iroquois.
In every way but formal title, Samuel
de Champlain served
as Quebec City's and
New France's
governor, titles that may
have been formally unavailable to him due to his non-noble status.
He
established trading companies that sent goods, primarily fur, to
France, and oversaw the growth of New France in the St. Lawrence
River
valley until his death in 1635.
Champlain is also memorialized as the "Father of New France", and
many places, streets, and structures in northeastern North America
bear his name, or have monuments established in his memory.
The most
notable of these is Lake Champlain
, which straddles the border between the United States
and Canada
.
In 1609 he
led an expedition up the Richelieu
River and explored a long, narrow lake situated between the
Green Mountains of present-day
Vermont
and the
Adirondack Mountains of
present-day New
York
; he named the lake after himself as the first
European to map and describe it.
Early years
Champlain
was born to Antoine Champlain (also written Anthoine
Chappelain in some records) and Marguerite Le Roy, most likely
in the port town of Brouage
, in the
French
Province of
Saintonge. The exact date and location of Champlain's
birth are unknown, and all the vital records of Brouage were lost
in a fire in 1690. In his 1851 book, Pierre Damien Rainguet, a
Catholic priest in Saintonge, estimated Champlain's birth year to
be 1567, without giving any reference or raw data he used for his
estimate. In 1870, the Canadian Catholic priest Laverdière, in the
first chapter of his
Œuvres de Champlain, accepted
Rainguet's estimate and tried to give details justifying it, but
his calculations were based on many assumptions now believed or
proven to be incorrect. Although Léopold Delayant (member,
secretary, then president of
l'Académie des belles-lettres,
sciences et arts de La Rochelle) wrote as early as 1867 that
Rainguet's estimation was wrong, the books of Rainguet and
Laverdière have had a significant influence: the 1567 date was
carved on numerous monuments dedicated to Champlain, and has been
widely republished as true. In the first half of the 20th century,
some authors disagreed and chose 1570 or 1575 instead of 1567. In
1978 Jean Liebel published groundbreaking research about these
estimates of Champlain's birth year and concluded, "Samuel
Champlain was born about 1580 in Brouage." Liebel asserts that some
authors, including the Catholic Priests Rainguet and Laverdière,
preferred years when Brouage was under Catholic control (which
include 1567, 1570, and 1575).
Champlain claimed to be from Brouage in the title of his 1603 book,
and to be
Saintongeois in the title of his second book
(1613). He belonged to either a
Protestant family, or a tolerant
Roman Catholic one, since Brouage was most of
the time a Catholic city in a Protestant region, and his
Old Testament first name (Samuel) was not
usually given to Catholic children.
The exact location of his birth is thus
also not known with certainty, but at the time of his birth his
parents were living in Brouage, near Rochefort
in the French
province of Saintonge.
Born into a family of mariners (both his father and uncle-in-law
were sailors, or navigators), Samuel Champlain learned to navigate,
draw, make
nautical charts, and write
practical reports. His education did not include
Ancient Greek or
Latin,
so he did not read or learn from any ancient literature. As each
French fleet had to assure its own defense at sea, Champlain sought
to learn fighting with the firearms of his time: he acquired this
practical knowledge when serving with the army of
King Henry IV during the later stages of
France's religious wars in
Brittany from 1594 or 1595 to 1598,
beginning as a quartermaster responsible for the feeding and care
of horses. During this time he claimed to go on a "certain secret
voyage" for the king, and saw combat (including maybe the
Siege of Fort Crozon, at the end of
1594). By 1597 he was a "capitaine d'une compagnie" serving in a
garrison near
Quimper.
Early travels
In 1598
his uncle-in-law, a navigator whose ship Saint-Julien was
chartered to transport Spanish troops to Cadiz
pursuant to
the Treaty of Vervins, gave
Champlain the opportunity to accompany him. After a difficult
passage, he spent some time in Cadiz before his uncle, whose ship
was then chartered to accompany a large Spanish fleet to the
West
Indies
, again offered in a place on the ship. His
uncle, who gave command of the ship to Jeronimo de Vallebrera,
instructed the young Champlain to watch over the ship.
This journey lasted
two years, and gave Champlain the opportunity to see or hear about
Spanish holdings from the Caribbean to Mexico City
. Along the way he took detailed notes, and
wrote an illustrated report on what he learned on this trip, and
gave this secret report to King Henry, who rewarded Champlain with
an annual pension. Secret, this report was very late published for
the first time (it was in 1870 by Laverdière), as
Brief
Discours des Choses plus remarquables que Sammuel Champlain de
Brouage a reconneues aux Indes Occidentalles au voiage qu'il en a
faict en icettes en l'année 1599 et en l'année 1601, comme
ensuite (and in English as
Narrative of a Voyage to the
West Indies and Mexico 1599–1602). The authenticity of this
account as a work written by Champlain has frequently been
questioned, due to inaccuracies and discrepancies with other
sources on a number of points; however, recent scholarship
indicates that the work probably was authored by Champlain.
On Champlain's return to Cadiz in August 1600, his uncle, who had
fallen ill, asked him to look after his business affairs. This
Champlain did, and when his uncle died in June 1601, Champlain
inherited his substantial estate.
It included an estate near La Rochelle
, commercial properties in Spain, and a 150-ton
merchant ship. This inheritance, combined with the king's
annual pension, gave the young explorer a great deal of
independence, as he was not dependent on the financial backing of
merchants and other investors. From 1601 to 1603 Champlain served
as a geographer in the court of King Henry.
As part of his duties
he traveled to French ports and learned much about North America from the fishermen that
seasonally traveled to coastal areas from Nantucket
to Newfoundland
to capitalize on the rich fishing grounds
there. He also made a study of previous French
failures at colonization in the area, including that of Pierre de Chauvin at Tadoussac
. When Chauvin forfeited his monopoly on fur
trade in North America in 1602, responsibility for renewing the
trade was given to
Aymar de Chaste.
Champlain approached de Chaste about a position on the first
voyage, which he received with the king's assent.
Champlain's first trip to
North
America was as an observer on a fur-trading expedition led by
François Gravé Du
Pont. Du Pont was a navigator and merchant who had been a
ship's captain on Chauvin's expedition, and with whom Champlain
established a firm life-long friendship.
He educated Champlain
about navigation in North America, including the Saint
Lawrence River
, and in dealing with the natives there (and in
Acadia after). The
Bonne-Renommée (the
Good Fame) arrived at
Tadoussac on March 15, 1603. Champlain was anxious to see for
himself all of the places that
Jacques
Cartier had seen and described about sixty years earlier, and
wanted to go even further than Cartier, if possible.
Champlain created a
map of the St. Lawrence
River on this trip and, after his return to France on
September 20, published an account as Des Sauvages: ou voyage
de Samuel Champlain, de Brouages, faite en la France nouvelle l'an
1603 ("Concerning the Savages: or travels of Samuel Champlain
of Brouages, made in New France in the
year 1603"). Included in his account were meetings with
Begourat, a chief of the
Montagnais at Tadoussac, in which positive
relationships were established between the French and the many
Montagnais gathered there, with some
Algonquin friends.
Promising to King Henry to report on further discoveries, Champlain
joined a second expedition to New France in the spring of 1604.
This trip, once again an exploratory journey without women and
children, lasted several years, and focused on areas south of the
St. Lawrence River, in what later became known as
Acadia. It was led by
Pierre Dugua de Mons, a noble
and Protestant merchant who had been given a fur trading monopoly
in New France by the king. Dugua asked Champlain to find a site for
winter settlement.
After exploring possible sites in the
Bay of
Fundy
, Champlain selected Saint Croix
Island
in the St. Croix
River as the site of the expedition's first winter
settlement. After enduring a harsh winter on the island
the settlement was relocated across the bay where they established
Port
Royal
. Until 1607, Champlain used that definitive
site as his base, while he explored the Atlantic coast. Dugua was
forced to leave the settlement for France in September 1605,
because he learned that his monopoly was at risk. His monopoly was
rescinded by the king in July 1607 under pressure from other
merchants and proponents of free trade, leading to the abandonment
of the settlement.
In 1605
and 1606, Champlain explored the North American coast as far south
as Cape
Cod
, searching for sites for a permanent
settlement. Small skirmishes with the resident Nausets dissuaded him from the idea of establishing
one near present-day Chatham, Massachusetts
. He named the area Mallebar ("bad
bar").
Founding of Quebec City
In Honfleur, remaining of Champlain's
departures
In the spring of 1608, Dugua wanted Champlain to start a new French
colony on the shores of the St. Lawrence.
Dugua equipped, at
his own expense, a fleet of three ships with workers, that left the
French port of Honfleur
. The main ship, called the
Don-de-Dieu (the
Gift of God), was commanded by
Champlain. Another ship, the
Lévrier (the
Hunt
Dog), was commanded by his friend Du Pont.
The small group of
male settlers arrived at Tadoussac
on the lower St. Lawrence in June.
Because
of the dangerous strength of the Saguenay River
ending there, they left the ships and continued up
the "Big River" in small boats bringing the men and the
materials.
On July 3, 1608, Champlain landed at the "point of Quebec" and set
about fortifying the area by the erection of three main wooden
buildings, each two stories tall, that he collectively called the
"Habitation", with a wooden
stockade and a
moat wide surrounding them.
This was the very beginning of Quebec City. Gardening, exploring, and fortifying this
place became great passions of Champlain for the rest of his
life.
In the 1620s, the
Habitation at Quebec was mainly a store
for the
Compagnie des Marchands (Traders Company), and
Champlain lived in the wooden
Fort Saint Louis newly built
up the hill (south from the present-day
Château Frontenac
Hotel), near the only two houses built by the two settler families
(the ones of
Louis Hébert and
Guillaume Couillard, his
son-in-law).
Murder of the King
In May 1610, King Henry was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic, and
rule fell to his wife,
Marie de'
Medici, as
regent for the nine-year-old
Louis XIII. Marie was a staunch
Catholic with little interest in New France, and many of
Champlain's Protestant financial supporters, including Pierre
Dugua, were denied access to court. Champlain, on hearing the news,
returned to France in September 1610 to establish new political
connections in support of efforts at colonization.
Marriage
One route Champlain may have chosen to improve his access to the
court of the regent was his decision to enter into marriage with
the twelve year old Hélène Boullé. She was the daughter of Nicolas
Boullé, a man charged with carrying out royal decisions at court.
The marriage contract was signed on December 27, 1610 in presence
of Dugua, who had dealt with the father (a Protestant like him),
and the couple were married three days later. The terms of the
contract called for the marriage to be consummated two years
later.
Champlain's marriage was initially quite troubled, as Hélène
rebelled when she was told to join him in August 1613. Their
relationship, while it apparently lacked any physical connection,
recovered and was apparently good for many years. Hélène lived in
Quebec for several years, but returned to Paris and eventually
decided to enter a convent. The couple had no children, although
Champlain did adopt three Montagnais girls named Faith, Hope, and
Charity in the winter of 1627-8.
Relations and war with natives
During the summer of 1609 Champlain attempted to form better
relations with the local
native
tribes.
He made alliances with the Wendat (called Huron by the French) and with
the Algonquin, the Montagnais and the Etchemin, who lived in the
area of the St.
Lawrence River. These tribes demanded that Champlain help
them in their war against the
Iroquois, who
lived further south.
Champlain set off with 9 French soldiers and
300 natives to explore the Rivière des Iroquois (now known
as the Richelieu River), and became
the first European to map Lake Champlain. Having had no encounters with the Iroquois
at this point many of the men headed back, leaving Champlain with
only 2 Frenchmen and 60 natives.
On July
29, somewhere in the area near Ticonderoga
and Crown Point, New York
(historians are not sure which of these two places,
but Fort
Ticonderoga
claims that it occurred near its site), Champlain
and his party encountered a group of Iroquois. A battle
began the next day. Two hundred Iroquois advanced on Champlain's
position, and one of his guides pointed out the 3 Iroquois chiefs.
Champlain fired his
arquebus, killing two
of them with a single shot, and one of his men killed the third.
The Iroquois turned and fled. This action set the tone for
French-Iroquois relations for rest of the century.
Champlain returned to France in an unsuccessful attempt, with
Dugua, to renew their fur trade monopoly.
They did, however,
reach an agreement with some merchants from Rouen
, in which
Quebec became an exclusive warehouse for their fur trade and, in
return, the Rouen merchants supported the settlement.
Exploration of New France
On March 29, 1613, arrived back in New France, he first ensured
that his new royal commission be
proclaimed.
Champlain set out on May 27 to continue his
exploration of the Huron country and in hopes of finding the
"northern sea" he had heard about (probably Hudson Bay
). He traveled the
Ottawa River, later giving the first
description of this area.
It was in June that he met with Tessouat, the Algonquin chief of Allumettes
Island
, and offered to build the tribe a fort if they were
to move from the area they occupied, with its poor soil, to the
locality of the Lachine Rapids.
By August
26 Champlain was back in Saint-Malo
. There he wrote an account of his life from
1604 to 1612 and his journey up the Ottawa river, his
Voyages and published another map of New France. In 1614
he formed the "Compagnie des Marchands de Rouen et de Saint-Malo"
and "Compagnie de Champlain", which bound the Rouen and Saint-Malo
merchants for eleven years. He returned to New France in the spring
of 1615 with four
Recollects in order to
further religious life in the new colony. The
Roman Catholic Church was eventually
given
en
seigneurie large and valuable tracts of land estimated at
nearly 30% of all the lands granted by the
French Crown in
New
France.
Champlain continued to work to improve relations with the natives
promising to help them in their struggles against the Iroquois.
With his
native guides he explored further up the Ottawa River and reached Lake Nipissing. He then followed the French River until he reached the
fresh-water sea he called Lac Attigouautau (now Lake Huron
).
In 1615,
Champlain was escorted through the area that is now Peterborough, Ontario
by a group of Hurons. He used the ancient
portage between Chemong Lake and Little Lake (now Chemong Road),
and stayed for a short period of time near what is now
Bridgenorth.
Military expedition
On
September 1, at Cahiagué (A Huron community on what is now called
Lake
Simcoe
), he and the northern tribes started a military
expedition against the Iroquois. The party passed
Lake
Ontario
at its eastern tip where they hid their canoes and
continued their journey by land. They followed the
Oneida River until they arrived at the main
Onondaga fort. Pressured by the Hurons to attack prematurely, the
assault failed. Champlain was wounded twice in the leg by arrows,
one in his knee. The attack lasted three hours until they were
forced to flee.
Although he did not want to, the Hurons insisted that Champlain
spend the winter with them. During his stay he set off with them in
their great deer hunt, during which he became lost and was forced
to wander for three days living off game and sleeping under trees
until he met up with a band of aboriginals by chance. He spent the
rest of the winter learning "their country, their manners, customs,
modes of life". On May 22, 1616, he left the Huron country and
returned to Quebec before heading back to France on July 2.
Improving administration in New France
Champlain returned to New France in 1620 and was to spend the rest
of his life focusing on administration of the territory rather than
exploration. Champlain spent the winter building Fort Saint-Louis
on top of Cape Diamond. By mid-May he learned that the fur trading
monopoly had been handed over to another company led by the Caen
brothers. After some tense negotiations, it was decided to merge
the two companies under the direction of the Caens. Champlain
continued to work on relations with the natives and managed to
impose on them a chief of his choice. He also negotiated a peace
treaty with the Iroquois.
Champlain continued to work on the fortifications of what became
Quebec City, laying the first stone on May 6, 1624. On August 15 he
once again returned to France where he was encouraged to continue
his work as well as to continue looking for a passage to China,
something widely believed to exist at the time. By July 5 he was
back at Quebec and continued expanding the city.
In 1627 the Caen brothers' company lost its monopoly on the fur
trade, and
Cardinal Richelieu
(who had joined the Royal Council in 1624 and rose rapidly to a
position of dominance in French politics that he would hold until
his death in 1642) formed the
Compagnie des Cent-Associés
(the Hundred Associates) to manage the fur trade. Champlain was one
of the 100 investors, and its first fleet, loaded with colonists
and supplies, set sail in April 1628.
Champlain had overwintered in Quebec.
Supplies were low,
and English merchants pillaged Cap Tourmente
in early July 1628. A war had broken out between
France and England, and
Charles I
of England had issued
letters of
marque that authorized the capture of French shipping and its
colonies in North America. Champlain received a summons to
surrender on July 10 from some heavily-armed English merchants, the
Kirke brothers. Champlain refused to
deal with them, misleading them to believe that Quebec's defenses
were better than they actually were (Champlain had only 50 pounds
of gunpowder to defend the community). Successfully bluffed, the
English withdrew, but encountered and captured the French supply
fleet, cutting off that year's supplies to the colony. By the
spring of 1629 supplies were dangerously low and Champlain was
forced to send people to
Gaspé and into
Indian communities to conserve rations. On July 19, the Kirke
brothers arrived before Quebec after intercepting Champlain's plea
for help, and Champlain was forced to surrender the colony. Many
colonists were taken first to England and then France by the
Kirkes, but Champlain remained in London to begin the process of
regaining the colony. A
peace treaty had
been signed in April 1629, three months before the surrender,
and, under the terms of that treaty, Quebec and other prizes taken
by the Kirkes after the treaty were supposed to be returned. It was
not until the
1632 Treaty of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye that Quebec was formally given back to
France.
(David Kirke was rewarded when Charles I
knighted him and gave him a charter for Newfoundland.) Champlain reclaimed his role as commander of New
France on behalf of Richelieu on March 1, 1633, having served in
the intervening years as commander in New France "in the absence of
my Lord the Cardinal de
Richelieu" from 1629 to 1635. In 1632 Champlain
published
Voyages de la Nouvelle France, which was
dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, and
Traitté de la marine et du
devoir d’un bon marinier, a treatise on leadership,
seamanship, and navigation. (Champlain made more than twenty-five
round-trip crossings of the Atlantic in his lifetime, without
losing a single ship.)
Last return, and last years working in Quebec
Champlain returned to Quebec on May 22, 1633, after an absence of
four years. Richelieu gave him a commission as
Lieutenant General of New
France, along with other titles and responsibilities, but not
that of
Governor. Despite
this lack of formal status, many colonists, French merchants, and
Indians treated him as if he had the title; writings survive in
which he is referred to as "our governor". On August 18, 1634, he
sent a report to Richelieu stating that he had rebuilt on the ruins
of Quebec, enlarged its fortifications, and established two more
habitations.
One was 15 leagues upstream, and the other
was at Trois-Rivières
. He also began an offensive against the
Iroquois, reporting that he wanted them either wiped out or
"brought to reason".
Illness, last wills, death, and burying
19th century artist's conception of
Champlain by E.
Champlain suffered a severe
stroke in October
1635, and died on 25 December 1635, leaving no immediate heirs.
Jesuit records tell us he died in the care of
his friend and confessor
Charles
Lallemant.
While his wills (drafted in November, 17, 1635) gave much of his
French property to his wife Hélène, he made significant bequests to
the Catholic missions and to individuals in the colony of Quebec.
However, a cousin girl challenged the wills in Paris (Marie
Camaret, wife of Jacques Hersant, daughter of George Camaret, a
capitaine, and Françoise Le Roy, a sister of Champlain’s mother)
and had them successfully overturned. It is unclear exactly what
happened to his estate.
He was temporarily buried in the church while a standalone chapel
was built to hold his remains in the upper part of the city.
Unfortunately, this small building, along many others, was
destroyed by a large fire in 1640. Though immediately rebuilt, no
traces of it exist anymore: his exact burial site is still unknown,
despite much research since about 1850, including several
archaeological digs in the city.
There is general agreement that the
previous Champlain chapel site, and the remains of Champlain,
should be somewhere near the Notre-Dame
de Québec Cathedral
. Time Periods - Life and Death of Champlain
For a detailed report on the research: La chapelle et le tombeau de Champlain : état de la
quesion
Memorials
Many
sites and landmarks have been named to honour Champlain, who
remains, to this day, a prominent historical figure in many parts
of Acadia, Ontario
, Quebec
, New York, and Vermont. They include:
- Champlain Bridge
, which connects the island of
Montreal
to Brossard, Quebec
across the St. Lawrence.
- Champlain Bridge
, which connects the cities of Ottawa
, Ontario
and Gatineau
, Quebec.
- Fort
Champlain, a dormitory at the Royal
Military College of Canada
in Kingston, Ontario
; named in his honour in 1965, it houses the 10th
cadet squadron.
- Champlain Trail Public School in Mississauga, Ontario. A school
named after Samuel de Champlain for grades K-5.
- A
French school in Saint John, New Brunswick
; Champlain College
, in Burlington, Vermont
; and Champlain Regional College, a
CEGEP with three campuses in
Quebec.
- Champlain Commons, a shopping center in St. Albans, Vermont.
- Marriott Château Champlain hotel, in Montreal.
- Streets named Champlain in numerous cities,
including Quebec, Shawinigan
and no less than eleven communities in northwestern
Vermont.
- A
memorial statue on Cumberland Avenue in Plattsburgh,
New York
on the shores of Lake Champlain.
- A
memorial statue in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada in Queen Square that commemorates his
discovery of the Saint John River
.
- A
memorial statue in Isle La Motte, Vermont
, on the shore of Lake Champlain.
- The
lighthouse at Crown Point,
New York features a statue of Champlain by Carl Augustus Heber.
- A commemorative stamp issue
in May 2006 jointly by the United States Postal Service
and Canada Post.
- A
statue in Ticonderoga, New York, unveiled in 2009 to commemorate the 400th
anniversary of Champlain's exploration of Lake
Champlain.
- A
statue in Orillia,
Ontario
at Couchiching Park
on Lake
Couchiching
.
Bibliography
These are works that are either known to have been written by
Champlain:
- Brief Discours des Choses plus remarquables que Sammuel
Champlain de Brouage a reconneues aux Indes Occidentalles au voiage
qu'il en a faict en icettes en l'année 1599 et en l'année 1601,
comme ensuite (first French publication 1870, first English
publication 1859 as Narrative of a Voyage to the West Indies and Mexico
1599–1602)
- Des Sauvages: ou voyage de Samuel Champlain, de Brouages,
faite en la France nouvelle l'an 1603 (first French
publication 1604, first English publication 1625)
- Voyages de la Nouvelle France (first French
publication 1632)
- Traitté de la marine et du devoir d’un bon marinier
(first French publication 1632)
Notes
- See discussion in "Early years" on Champlain's
birth year.
- Denis
Vaugeois (lors du 133e congrès du comtié des travaux
historiques et scientifiques (CTHS) à Québec le 2 juin 2008),
Champlain et Dupont Gravé en
contexte.
- Thanks to Pierre Dugua de Mons, who fully
financed (loosing money) these man-only first years of both French
settlements in North America (first in Acadia, then at Quebec).
- Some say that the King of France made him his "royal
geographer", but it is unproven and may only come from
Marc
Lescarbot books: Champlain never used that title. The honorific
"de" was only added to his name from 1610, when he was
already well-known, right after his patron, King Henry IV, was
murdered. This usage by a non-noble was tolerated so that he would
continue to gain access to the court during the long regency of
King Louis XIII (who was only nine
years old at the death of his father). Champlain received the
official title of "lieutenant" (adjunct representative) of the, one
after the other, noble designated as Viceroy of New France, the first being
Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons.
From 1629 Champlain was named "commandant" under the authority of
the King Minister, Richelieu. It is Champlain's successor at
Quebec City, Charles Jacques Huault
de Montmagny, who was the first to be formally named as the
governor of New France and Quebec City, where he moved in 1636,
being the first noble to live there in that century.
- Pierre Damien Rainguet, Biographie
saintongeaise ou Dictionnaire historique de tous les personnages
qui se sont illustrés dans les anciennes provinces de Saintonge et
d'Aunis jusqu'à nos jours, 1851, pages: 140- 141
- Liebel, Jean (1978). On a vieilli Champlain (They
made Champlain older), in la Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique
française, 32 (2): 236
- Liebel, 229-237.
- According to many modern historians, including Alain Laberge,
the 2008 Chair of the History Department at Quebec City's Laval University, a
specialist in the history of New France, Champlain could have been
born a Protestant.
A guest on the February 6, 2008 CBC radio program, Sounds Like
Canada, Professor Laberge said that the fact of
Champlain's Protestantism would have been downplayed or omitted
from educational materials in Quebec by the Roman
Catholic Church, who controlled Quebec's education system from 1627 until 1962.
- However, Champlain was born in or near a time when the city was
taken by Protestants, but Brouage became a royal fortress and its
governor, from 1627 until his death in 1642, was Cardinal
Richelieu, a strong anti-Protestant, wanting to stop the
Religion Wars in France, and chosing to promote Catholicism only
because every King of France had to be a Catholic, even if having
been first a Protestant, like Henri the last king.
- Britannica.com; his family lived in Brouage at
the time of his birth; the exact place and date of his birth are
unknown.
- Fischer, p. 62
- Fischer, p. 65
- Samuel de Champlain, (sculpture)
- Vaugeois, p. 87
- Three different handwritten copies of this report still exist.
One of them is at the John Carter Brown Library at
Brown
University.
- For a detailed treatment of claims against Champlain's
authorship, see the chapter by François-Marc Gagnon in Vaugeois,
pp. 84ff. Fischer, pp. 586ff, also addresses these claims, and
accepts Champlain's authorship.
- Fischer, pp. 98-99
- Fischer, p. 100
- Fischer, pp. 100-117
- Fischer, pp. 121-123
- Champlain did not begin using the honorific de in his
name until at least 1610, when he married, the year King Henry was
murdered. A reprint of this book in 1612 was credited to "sieur
de Champlain. [1].
- Only at his last arrival (in 1633), Champlain did not left the
ships at Tadoussac but arrived directly to Quebec City with
them.
- Fischer, pp. 282-285
- Fischer, pp. 287-288
- Fischer, pp. 313-316
- Fischer, pp. 374-5
- Fischer, pp. 399-400
- Fischer, p. 3
- In 1701, The Great Peace Treaty was signed in
Montreal, involving the French and every native nation coming or
living on the shores of the Saint Lawrence River except maybe in
wintertime.
- In 1953, a rock was found at a location now known as the
Champlain lookout, which bore the
inscription "Champlain juin 2, 1613". What about this finding?
- Les voyages du Sieur de Champlain, Saintangeois, capitaine
ordinaire pour le Roy en la Marine.
- Dalton, Roy. The Jesuit Estates Question 1760-88, p.
60. University of Toronto Press,
1968.
- Fischer, pp. 404-410
- Fischer, pp. 410-412
- Fischer, p. 409
- Fischer, pp. 412-415
- Fischer, pp. 418-420
- Fischer, p. 421
- Fischer, p. 428
- Trudel
- Fischer, p. 447
- Fischer, pp. 445-446
- François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, A Popular History of France
from the Earliest Times Vol. 6, Chapter 53, (Boston: Dana Estes
& Charles E. Lauriat (Imp.), 19th C.), 190.
- Fischer, p. 520
- Photocopy of the Last Wills of Champlain (6
pages) (by Archives Canada-France).
- Conrad E. Heidenreich: Who was Champlain?
His Family and Early Life. (Métis sur mer; August 8,
2008). — As said into a note to this text, "this
lecture is based on parts of a book by Conrad E.
Heidenreich and K. Janet Ritch soon to by published by The
Champlain Society, provisionally entitled: The Works of Samuel de
Champlain: Des Sauvages and other Documents Related to the Period
before 1604".
- Robert Le Blant: Le triste veuvage d’Hélène Boullé
(Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, 18 (3), 1964,
pp 425-437).
- History of Acadia National Park
- Saint John Additional Information
References
- Fischer, David Hackett,
Champlain's Dream, (Simon and Schuster, 2008), ISBN
9781416593324
- Morison, Samuel Eliot,
Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France (Little Brown,
1972) ISBN 0-316-58399-5
- - Last edition: not yet all translated in
english.
- Vaugeois, Denis; Litalien,
Raymonde (eds); Roth, Käthe (trans), Champlain : the birth of
French America (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004) ISBN
0-7735-2850-4
Further reading
- A six-volume set of Champlain's writings, translated into
English.
External links
- which he first observed in 1604.
and village
in New York, as well as a township in
Ontario
and a municipality in Quebec
.
, a provincial park
in northern Ontario near the town of Mattawa
.
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