In this doorstop-sized book, David Hackett Fischer presents the most complete biography of Samuel de Champlain (circa 1570-1635) to date. The subject of Champlain’s Dream is, of course, the great mariner, explorer, and founder of Quebec, which celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2008.
Fischer, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his 2004 book Washington’s Crossing, brings a generous and expansive approach to this most recent attempt to find out who Champlain was and what he was responsible for. In nearly 650 pages of text, including sixteen informative appendices, Fischer presents a highly attractive Samuel de Champlain as a “visionary” whose lengthy career made him not only the “Father of French Canada” but also the provider of an ethical and humanist path for development of French North America.
Fischer situates his study between what he describes as the hagiographical and the iconoclastic poles of Champlain scholarship. He seeks to understand Champlain in his context, and provides valuable insight into his place of origin, his early experiences, and his situation as a representative of commercial, religious, and above all royal authority in the nascent New France colony.
For Fischer, Champlain reflected the peace-loving qualities of the people of his home pays of Saintonge, in the coastal west of France. Champlain grew up in the “Atlantic world”: he moved easily between Spanish and French ports, and acquired extensive knowledge of the New World from English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Castilian fellow seamen. Observant always, Champlain shaped his own techniques of both seamanship and New World leadership on the basis of what he had encountered in the wider Atlantic world.
In addition to his tremendous skill as a mariner (Champlain made more than twenty-five successful and often very speedy crossings of the Atlantic, never losing a ship), Champlain is seen by Fischer as exponent of a humane, tolerant, and pluralistically minded colonialism in the northern part of North America. This is not a new idea: John Ralston Saul, in his Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997), describes the idea of East-West, tolerant, and multi-ethnic dynamism as the heart of the Canadian experience. Saul placed Champlain at the very foundation of this dynamic, which was given life at the tabagie, or great gathering of Montagnais, Algonquin, and French on the beach at Tadoussac in 1603.
Fischer, describing the Tadoussac meeting as “the seat of the nation,” further develops the idea of Champlain as a tolerant, ethically enlightened, and far-sighted nation-builder. Champlain respected his native counterparts and sought to draw them into closer bonds of affinity with the French. He projected force where he felt necessary, but did not act in an arbitrary way. He led wars, such as the 1609 campaign against the Mohawks, but also carried out successful negotiations, such as the peaceful surrender of the Quebec settlement in 1629. He worked to curb French abuse of natives, but also sought to temper the revenge ethos and the brutal treatment, including torture and ritual cannibalism of prisoners, practised by some indigenous peoples.
Fischer’s deeply researched book, well-adorned with useful maps, charts, and illustrations, thus establishes a convincing portrait of an ideal colonial leader, who, having witnessed the brutality of the Inquisition in New Spain as a young mariner, vowed to provide a better example of government to the New World peoples of the North. This book provides a strong statement of what was a good, if tardy, start to French colonization, one which, however, did not in the end prevail.
Of course, Champlain’s dream is also an enduring Canadian dream — of a pluralistic, East-West, tolerant, just-minded, and multilingual polity. Professor Fischer provides a resource for the Canadian imagination, as well as a splendid quadricentennial tribute to perhaps our most likeable hero.
— Peter Goddard (Read bio)
Peter Goddard has written about the missionaries who came to New France with Samuel de Champlain.