Published in 1632, three years before the explorer’s death, this map by Samuel de Champlain is startlingly accurate. In just thirty years the essential geography of Canada from Newfoundland to the Great Lakes had been established—mostly by Champlain himself. Also indicated are the areas where the various Indian tribes of the period lived. Map printed from copperplate, in Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la NouvelleFrance occidentale, dicte Canada...(Paris: C. Collet, 1632).
SAMUEL DE Champlain, founder andcommander of New France, died on Christmas Day of 1635 at Quebec. Virtually the entire colony could attend his funeral, for after twenty-seven years of colonial settlement the European population of New France was barely three hundred people, many of them recent arrivals. At the end of his life, Champlain’s achievement lay not in the size of his colony, which remained tiny, but in the fact that it had endured.
Since its founding in 1608, the settlement at Quebec had been constantly endangered: by starvation and scurvy, by commercial rivalries, by uncertain support from France, by the opposition of vastly more powerful Native nations, and by English military attack. Champlain was hardly the only backer the colony had, but his tenacious advocacy had played a vital role in keeping it in being. In Champlain’s time, in fact, a decisive change had been engineered in European involvement with the lands and people of northeastern North America. Europeans had been crossing the Atlantic since 1000 ad, and there had been a century of regular visits to Canada before 1608. But Champlain had transformed transient contact into a permanent European presence in Canada.
World History
