The enduring enigma of Samuel de Champlain

Four hundred years ago this fall, Samuel de Champlain, in the company of an Algonquin and Wendat war party and a dozen fellow Frenchmen, travelled east through the Kawartha Lakes region of southern Ontario and down to the Bay of Quinte. The warriors were headed for upstate New York, where, in mid-October, they laid siege to an Iroquois village.

The attempt to destroy the settlement was unsuccessful, and when reinforcements failed to arrive, the allies retreated to Huronia. There Champlain passed the winter before returning to Quebec.

Although he would never return to the land of the Wendat, he went on to describe and illustrate the encounter for a French audience in his 1619 Voyages et Descouvertes, and the episode has become one of the touchstone events in accounts of the explorer's life.

The anniversary of this raid was the occasion for a recent Champlain Society-sponsored event at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, part of the current “Ontario 400” celebration of four centuries of francophone presence in the province.

Moderated by Champlain Society President Patrice Dutil, the evening featured the insights of three speakers: author Douglas Hunter, whose 2008 volume God’s Mercies treats Champlain and Henry Hudson, historian José António Brandão, whose primary study is the seventeenth-century Iroquois, and Chief Kirby Whiteduck of the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, an authority on the traditional Algonquin culture of the Ottawa Valley.

There is probably no more monolithic figure in our history than Champlain (fittingly, as Dutil pointed out, a stone sculpture of the "Father of New France" adorns the façade of the ROM’s former Canadiana collection).

Champlain looms so great not only because of his accomplishments as an explorer, cartographer and administrator, but also because of the sheer heft of his writings. The “enigma” of Champlain, though, is the frequent ambiguity of his testimony. As Brandão put it, “He left a lot of writings, but not necessarily the kind of thing that allows us to come to firm conclusions.” Our picture of Champlain is further complicated by the almost complete absence of testimony from those who surrounded him.

Recalling his years as a journalist, Hunter said, “Whenever you write about someone you want to hear other perspectives,” but these are almost nonexistent for Champlain.

Still, despite this “silence of his contemporaries,” each of the evening’s three speakers opened other perspectives on the legacy of Champlain, and of the 1615 mission, from a range of sources: archaeological findings, linguistic analysis, traditions of his Native collaborators, and even voices embedded within Champlain’s own works. A picture emerged of a Champlain who is less the heroic solitary figure represented in his own self-portrait (see illustration), than a man intimately connected and often subservient to other players in the world of early New France, both European and Aboriginal.

Hunter undercut the impression that Champlain gives of being virtually the sole trader meeting with Natives at Tadoussac and up the St. Lawrence; a growing body of archaeological evidence reveals that dozens of other French and Basques were engaged in the same commerce, and that goods were making their way into the interior long before the explorer's time. The merchants of St. Malo went so far as to draft a formal complaint about the upstart, noting that he was but one among “an infinity of people from all regions of France.”

Brandão characterized the 1615 raid as a microcosm of the enigma of Champlain, noting wryly that, “It has been so hotly debated for so long that more ink has been spilled discussing the raid than was actual blood at the event.” According to some traditional interpretations, the raid led to generations of enmity between the French and the Iroquois. But Brandão described the event as a relatively minor affair, one of hundreds of such engagements during these years; Champlain's descriptions are so difficult to untangle that we don’t know where the village was located, how many casualties there were, nor just which branch of the Iroquois lived there (while most historians have identified the inhabitants as Onondaga, linguistic evidence suggests that they may have been Seneca).

In fact, the Algonquin and the Wendat were the true protagonists of the event, for the raid was their initiative, and not Champlain’s. Chief Whiteduck, focusing on the relationship between Champlain and the Algonquin chief Tessouat, described the strategies employed by the explorer’s Native allies. In 1613 Tessouat had deflected Champlain in his attempt to ascend the Ottawa, skilfully preserving his own control of the upper reaches of the river. When he did allow Champlain to proceed to Huronia in 1615, it was on Algonquin terms. Champlain’s primary motivation was to explore trade routes westward toward Asia, and to assess the economic potential of the land for the French crown; his participation in the raid on the Iroquois was the price he had to pay for passage. Here Champlain is not an intrepid master of alliances, but rather the servant of his Algonquin and Wendat allies.

In concluding his contribution, Whiteduck, like Tessouat before him, affirmed the place of the Algonquin in these events. Noting that no treaty was ever signed with his people, and recalling the long-term legacy of the colonization of Canada, he concluded: “We were asked ... to be involved in the celebration of Champlain’s journey, and we said that we’re not going to celebrate it, but we'll participate because we want to raise the profile of the Algonquin and the role the Algonquin had. Champlain didn’t single-handedly come over here and create New France.”

Bill Moreau is the editor of the three-volume Writings of David Thompson published in 2009 and teaches at Dunlace Public School in North York, Ontario.