Champlain's Dream

A few years ago I read a fascinating history book titled Washington's Crossing that was incredibly thorough on the subject at hand. The author was David Hackett Fischer, and his succeeding volume, Champlain's Dream, is similarly exhaustive. More than that, it is engagingly written--rigorous in its scholarship, but entertaining to a general audience.

Essentially, the book is a biography of Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer and geographer who almost single-handedly was responsible for the French settlement of Quebec. Those of us in the U.S., if we know of him, it is for the lake nestled between New York and Vermont that bears his name, but in the grand scheme of the establishment of a European presence in North America, he is a key figure.

Champlain led an extraordinarily adventurous life. Born circa 1570, as a young man he was a soldier in a series of religious civil wars in France, between Catholic and Protestant factions. Fischer raises the possibility that Champlain, a commoner by birth, may have been the bastard son of the eventual king, Henri IV, but doesn't declare this definitively. Henri changed from Catholic to Protestant and back again like he was changing shirts, and France was torn apart by the wars.

Champlain had the itch to travel, and made a long journey through the Caribbean. He was put off by slavery, though, and ended up forming the dream of the title--a New France--to be settled in northern climes. He traveled down the St. Lawrence River, mapped the coast of Acadia (today what is Nova Scotia down to Maine) and got as far as Lake Huron to the west, but decided the best place to raise a settlement was in what is today the city of Quebec.

It was not a dream shared by all. The initial start of the settlement was in 1603, but it wasn't until the late 1620s that Quebec began to have a significant population. Champlain was adroit dealing with the court intrigues of France. His benefactor Henri was assassinated in 1610. His son, Louis XIII, was only nine years old, so his mother, Maria de Medici, served as regent. Later, Champlain had to deal with Cardinal Richelieu, who was always trying to remove him, but eventually named him governor.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Champlain was his attitude about Indians. Fischer puts it thus: "The French deliberately settled very near the Indians and were comfortable in their presence. In a country of enormous size, they did not attempt to drive the Indians off the land or to push them away...It was very different from the English in Massachusetts and Virginia, who settled apart from the Indians, kept them at a distance, annexed large tracts of land, and cultivated an attitude of trust and contempt." Champlain even encouraged inter-marriage between European and Indian, and the results were the Metis, an ethnic group that still is a significant part of Canadian demographics. Much of today's Canada can be traced to those early settlers: "The French population of Quebec and its kin in North America now number in the millions. One careful study of this large population finds that it grew from a small genetic base. More than two-thirds are descendants of 1,100 French women who came to Quebec between 1630 and 1680."

Champlain's Indian allies were the Montagnais, the Algonquins, and the Hurons, but not the nations of the Iroquois, who were at constant war with their neighbors (Iroquois is a word taken from their enemies which means "killing people"). Champlain participated in some adventurous campaigns against them, particularly a battle with the Mohawks. It was on this campaign that he explored and named the lake named after him.

Much of Fischer's research was aided by Champlain himself, who wrote of his adventures and published a popular account. He was an interesting writer, and Fischer begins many of the chapters with Champlain's words that indicate he was quite the aphorist. I liked these two: "Those that know the least shout the loudest," and "The advice I give to all adventurers is this: seek a place where you can sleep in safety."

As with Washington's Crossing, Fischer has included copious information in a multitude of appendices. He writes a detailed history of the memory of Champlain throughout the succeeding years (including a section of the statuary depicting him throughout Canada and northern New York), an examination of the evidence of when Champlain was born, a careful listing of all Indian nations in the area, and a log of all of Champlain's voyages. The man crossed the Atlantic close to thirty times and never lost a ship, which may be his most remarkable distinction.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in early-American history.