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Champlain (1627-1632)Champlain, Samuel de (1570?-1635). Voyages et descouvertures faites en la Nouvelle France, depuis l'année 1615, jusques à la fin de l'année 1618 [...]. Paris: Claude de Collet, 1627. Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France occidentale, dicte Canada, faits par le Sr de Champlain [...] depuis l'an 1603 jusques en l'an 1629 [...]. Paris: Louis Sevestre, 1632.
From 1613 until his death in Quebec City on December 25, 1635, Samuel de Champlain pursued his double career of explorer and colonizer. In 1613 he went up part of the Ottawa River and became the first European to describe this waterway, which was to serve for close to two centuries as the main trade route to the Canadian West. Two years later, Champlain went to Huron country on the Georgian Bay via the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing and French River. During the same voyage he also crossed the Trent River Valley and then Lake Ontario to make a brief incursion into Iroquois country north of the present state of New York. Champlain profited from his stay among the Huron, studying "their country, mores, customs and way of life," and leaving us a detailed description of them. However, from 1618 on, Champlain devoted the bulk of his energies to colonization. The merchants interested in the fur trade still continued to oppose such a project, and Champlain spent several years trying to convince the French authorities of its advantages. At the same time, he managed the demographic and material growth of New France, while making a major contribution to setting up the fur trade network, the first economic backbone of the present Canada. Even though he wrote a lot, Champlain remains an enigma, because he revealed practically nothing of his private life; being first and foremost a man of action, he confined himself to telling what he had done and describing what he had seen. His care for detail, together with an almost total absence of value judgments and personal opinions, makes his work as a whole the best account we have of the beginnings of Canadian history.
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