Champlain (1613)
Champlain, Samuel de (1570?-1635). Les Voyages du sieur de Champlain, Xaintongeois, capitaine ordinaire pour le Roy en la marine [...]. Paris: Iean Berjon, 1613.
Considered by historians as the founder of New France, the explorer and colonizer Samuel de Champlain was born in Brouage, France around 1570, but very little is known about him before his first voyage to North America in 1603.
From 1603 to 1612 Champlain visited America on five occasions. During his first stay in 1603, he managed to guess the existence of Hudson Bay by questioning the Indians of the Saint Lawrence Valley, seven years before its discovery by the English explorer Henry Hudson. Thanks to the same sources, Champlain also succeeded in piecing together the Great Lakes network with surprising accuracy. During his subsequent voyages he accurately mapped the entire Atlantic seaboard from Cape Breton to Cape Cod, thus becoming the first cartographer of New England. He also went up the Saint Lawrence and then the Richelieu to discover that impressive lake which today separates the states of New York and Vermont and now bears his name.
During the same decade, Champlain also laid the foundations of what was to become New France. From 1604 to 1607, while working in the pay of merchants interested in the fur trade, he took part in an attempt to colonize Acadia, an attempt which was ultimately abandoned. In July 1608 he presided over the founding of the first permanent settlement in the Saint Lawrence Valley, Quebec City. Its beginnings were very modest: the settlement contained at first only a warehouse for provisions and three main buildings, all of this surrounded by a moat and a stockade. In addition, Champlain had the settlers sow wheat and rye, plant vines, and put in a vegetable garden.
However, the merchants interested in the fur trade took a dim view of this initiative and tried in various ways to prevent Champlain from continuing his work. But in the autumn of 1612 the King of France put him in command of the newly established colony; even though he did not have the title, he did at least have the powers of a governor. A few months later, at the beginning of 1612, he published the account of his travels and then embarked again for Quebec City.
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