Samuel de Champlain before 1604: Des Sauvages and Other Documents Related to the Period (review)

Behind this volume lies a wish to contribute to the 400th-anniversary celebrations surrounding Samuel de Champlain and the founding of Quebec in 1608. Rather than rush to make the party, however, Professors Conrad Heidenreich and K. Janet Ritch lingered over their labour of love, which focuses mainly, in any case, on Champlain’s first voyage to the Saint Lawrence Valley in 1603. Co-published by the Champlain Society and McGill-Queen’s University Press, the result is an erudite, bilingual, critical edition of Champlain’s first book, Des Sauvages, ou Voyage de Samuel Champlain, de Brouage, fait en la France nouvelle, l’an mil six cens trois, and of several other carefully chosen documents, including a previously unknown Spanish-language power of attorney. This work will be of great interest not just to scholars of early Canada, but to those concerned about early modern Atlantic worlds more broadly.

Heidenreich and Ritch effectively update volume one of the six-volume Champlain Society edition of the explorer’s works, which appeared between 1922 and 1936. Errors of transcription and translation are here corrected as well as recorded, and two new introductory essays (the first, more biographical and historical, the second more literary and linguistic) crisply contextualize the documents and their new translations. Unlike H.P. Biggar, this editorial team mainly omits the tantalizing ‘Brief discours,’ first published in 1870. Though there is little doubt that Samuel de Champlain travelled to the West Indies and perhaps to Mexico in 1599 under the Spanish flag, as three known extant manuscripts suggest, debates over Champlain’s authorship and penmanship continue. After reviewing the controversy, Heidenreich and Ritch ultimately exclude the overseas portions of the narrative (not to mention its extraordinary illustrations), on the grounds that they do not, in their estimation, ‘relate to Champlain’s later Canadian career’ (xiv). Disrupting national meta-narratives surrounding Champlain as ‘founder,’ one gets the sense, is not a priority. Neither is the inclusion of visual material. Pre-empted by the book’s periodization (and perhaps by expense), no maps appear among the formally presented documents. This is a mild pity, given Heidenreich’s great expertise in Champlain’s cartography, certainly on display in the editorial essays. The editors are deeply concerned, however, with providing an exhaustive bibliographic apparatus, which in the case of Des sauvages includes an invaluable printing history of its two original editions, not to mention such details as call numbers and descriptions of physical condition. For this painstaking work, scholars of many stripes – historians of colonialism, ethnohistorians, historical geographers, literary scholars, historians of the book to name a few – will indeed be eternally grateful. Rules of transcription are also enunciated in transparent detail, which socio-linguists and historians of language and literature more generally will also applaud.

The selection and presentation of textual material beyond Des Sauvages is also judicious. The earliest known documents mentioning Champlain by name, dated 1595 and 1597, are included here, for example. They record his pay as fourrier to Henri iv’s garrison in Brittany during the final stages of France’s religious civil wars. Champlain’s consequential early career, we are reminded, occurred on land, not at sea, as the new, and only recently Catholic, king attempted to regain control over Protestant strongholds. As fourrier, Champlain would have helped plan and survey routes to be taken by Henri and his army, identifying supply locations along the way. In a discussion that historians of science will certainly appreciate, the editors try to reconstruct what prior training in surveying and draftsmanship Champlain may have had. Heidenreich’s colleague in the history of cartography, David Buisseret, has elsewhere reinforced the sense that Champlain’s early stint in the army lodgings’ service was probably crucial to his distinctive mapping techniques, pointing to parallels between maps of Brittany produced by his immediate...