Voyages of Samuel De Champlain — Volume 01

by Samuel de Champlain

Champlain was a pioneer in the exploration of the Atlantic coast of New England and the eastern provinces of Canada, From the Strait of Canseau, at the northeastern extremity of Nova Scotia, to the Vineyard Sound, on the southern limits of Massachusetts, he made a thorough survey of the coast in 1605 and 1606, personally examining its most important harbors, bays, and rivers, mounting its headlands, penetrating its forests, carefully observing and elaborately describing its soil, its products, and its native inhabitants. Besides lucid and definite descriptions of the coast, he executed topographical drawings of numerous points of interest along our shores, as Plymouth harbor, Nauset Bay, Stage Harbor at Chatham, Gloucester Bay, the Bay of Baco, with the long stretch of Old Orchard Beach and its interspersed islands, the mouth of the Kennebec, and as many more on the coast of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. To these he added descriptions, more or less definite, of the harbors of Barnstable, Wellfleet, Boston, of the headland of Cape Anne, Merrimac Bay, the Isles of Shoals, Cape Porpoise, Richmond's Island, Mount Desert, Isle Haute, Seguin, and the numberless other islands that adorn the exquisite sea-coast of Maine, as jewels that add a new lustre to the beauty of a peerless goddess.

Other navigators had coasted along our shores. Some of them had touched at single points, of which they made meagre and unsatisfactory surveys. Gosnold had, in 1602, discovered Savage Rock, but it was so indefinitely located and described that it cannot even at this day be identified. Resolving to make a settlement on one of the barren islands forming the group named in honor of Queen Elizabeth and still bearing her name; after some weeks spent in erecting a storehouse, and in collecting a cargo of "furrs, skyns, saxafras, and other commodities," the project of a settlement was abandoned and he returned to England, leaving, however, two permanent memorials of his voyage, in the names which he gave respectively to Martha's Vineyard and to the headland of Cape Cod.

Captain Martin Pring came to our shores in 1603, in search of a cargo of sassafras. There are indications that he entered the Penobscot. He afterward paid his respects to Savage Rock, the undefined bonanza of his predecessor. He soon found his desired cargo on the Vineyard Islands, and hastily returned to England.

Captain George Weymouth, in 1605, was on the coast of Maine concurrently, or nearly so, with Champlain, where he passed a month, explored a river, set up a cross, and took possession of the country in the name of the king. But where these transactions took place is still in dispute, so indefinitely does his journalist describe them.

Captain John Smith, eight years later than Champlain, surveyed the coast of New England while his men were collecting a cargo of furs and fish. He wrote a description of it from memory, part or all of it while a prisoner on board a French ship of war off Fayall, and executed a map, both valuable, but nevertheless exceedingly indefinite and general in their character.

These flying visits to our shores were not unimportant, and must not be undervalued. They were necessary steps in the progress of the grand historical events that followed. But they were meagre and hasty and superficial, when compared to the careful, deliberate, extensive, and thorough, not to say exhaustive, explorations made by Champlain.

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Cartier had preceded Champlain by a period of more than sixty years. During this long, dreary half-century the stillness of the primeval forest had not been disturbed by the woodman's axe. When Champlain's eyes fell upon it, it was still the same wild, unfrequented, unredeemed region that it had been to its first discoverer. The rivers, bays, and islands described by Cartier were identified by Champlain, and the names they had already received were permanently fixed by his added authority. The whole gulf and river were re-examined and described anew in his journal. The exploration of the Richelieu and of Lake Champlain was pushed into the interior three hundred miles from his base at Quebec. It reached into a wilderness and along gentle waters never before seen by any civilized race. It was at once fascinating and hazardous, environed as it was by vigilant and ferocious savages, who guarded its gates with the sleepless watchfulness of the fabled Cerberus.

The courage, endurance, and heroism of Champlain were tested in the still greater-exploration of 1615. It extended from Montreal, the whole length of the Ottawa, to Lake Nipissing, the Georgian Bay, Simcoe, the system of small lakes on the south, across the Ontario, and finally ending in the interior of the State of New York, a journey through tangled forests and broken water-courses of more than a thousand miles, occupying nearly a year, executed in the face of physical suffering and hardship before which a nature less intrepid and determined, less loyal to his great purpose, less generous and unselfish, would have yielded at the outset. These journeys into the interior, along the courses of navigable rivers and lakes, and through the primitive forests, laid open to the knowledge of the French a domain vast and indefinite in extent, on which an empire broader and far richer in resources than the old Gallic France might have been successfully reared.

The personal explorations of Champlain in the West Indies, on the Atlantic coast, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in the State of New York and of Vermont, and among the lakes in Canada and those that divide the Dominion from the United States, including the full, explicit, and detailed journals which he wrote concerning them, place Champlain undeniably not merely in the front rank, but at the head of the long list of explorers and navigators, who early visited this part of the continent of North America.

Champlain's literary labors are interesting and important. They were not professional, but incidental, and the natural outgrowth of the career to which he devoted his life. He had the sagacity to see that the fields which he entered as an explorer were new and important, that the aspect of every thing which he then saw would, under the influence and progress of civilization, soon be changed, and that it was historically important that a portrait Sketched by an eyewitness should be handed down to other generations. It was likewise necessary for the immediate and successful planting of colonies, that those who engaged in the undertaking should have before them full information of all the conditions on which they were to build their hopes of final success.