VOYAGES OF SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN.
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
By CHARLES POMEROY OTIS, Ph.D.
WITH HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS, and a MEMOIR
By the REV. EDMUND F. SLAFTER, A.M.
VOL. I. 1567-1635
FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS.
Editor: The REV EDMUND F SLAFTER, A.M.
PREFACE
The labors and achievements of the navigators and explorers, who visited our coasts between the last years of the fifteenth and the early years of the seventeenth centuries, were naturally enough not fully appreciated by their contemporaries, nor were their relations to the future growth of European interests and races on this continent comprehended in the age in which they lived. Numberless events in which they were actors, and personal characteristics which might have illustrated and enriched their history, were therefore never placed upon record. In intimate connection with the career of Cabot, Cartier, Roberval, Ribaut, Laudonnière, Gosnold, Pring, and Smith, there were vast domains of personal incident and interesting fact over which the waves of oblivion have passed forever. Nor has Champlain been more fortunate than the rest. In studying his life and character, we are constantly finding ourselves longing to know much where we are permitted to know but little. His early years, the processes of his education, his home virtues, his filial affection and duty, his social and domestic habits and mode of life, we know imperfectly; gathering only a few rays of light here and there in numerous directions, as we follow him along his lengthened career. The reader will therefore fail to find very much that he might well desire to know, and that I should have been but too happy to embody in this work. In the positive absence of knowledge, this want could only be supplied from the field of pure imagination. To draw from this source would have been alien both to my judgment and to my taste.