Problems of Accuracy and Authenticity
For half a century, scholars in six countries have debated the accuracy and authenticity of Champlain’s Brief Discours, a report about his travels in the Spanish Empire from 1598 to 1601. At issue is not only the document itself, but the character of Champlain and our judgment of his life and work.
The Brief Discours is problematic in many ways, not least because Champlain did not publish it in his own time. At least three early manuscript copies survive. None are in Champlain’s hand, but all bear his name on the first page. The most complete manuscript is in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Its provenance is a saga in its own right. In 1884, an agent for the library bought the manuscript from a respected dealer, the Librairie Maisonneuve in Paris, which had acquired it from the estate of P. J. Féret, a collector in Dieppe who was a collateral descendant of Aymar de Chaste, governor of Dieppe, supporter of New France, and friend of Champlain in the years 1602–03. De Chaste or his family are thought to have deposited this copy for a time in the custody of the Couvent des Minimes in Dieppe. We have a chain of custody that reaches back to Champlain himself.
Another manuscript copy—less complete, and variant in detail—is in the library of the University of Bologna, and appears to be approximately contemporary with the Brown manuscript. A third copy has been found in the Archivio di Stato at Turin. Their dates are uncertain and their provenance is unclear. All three copies are incomplete, with breaks in the text and references to missing illustrations, but the Brown text includes more material than any other, with sixty-two illustrations, plans, and charts. Some scholars believe that the Brown manuscript may have been the original, but each copy has elements that are missing in the other two, and textual analysis turns up strong evidence that all three copies derive from an original that has not yet been found. It might have gone to Henri IV, or remained with Champlain. These are the conclusions of a careful study of the three manuscripts by Laura Giraudo, an historian at the University of Milan.1
Published Editions and Editorial Judgments
The Brief Discours was first printed not in its original French but in a high-quality English translation by Alice Wilmere and Norton Shaw for the Hakluyt Society in 1859. The first French edition was published in 1870, as part of Charles-Honoré Laverdière’s excellent collection of the Oeuvres de Champlain. A third text was published in the Champlain Society’s bilingual edition of Champlain’s works, with a French text collated from the Brown manuscript, and an English translation by a team of editors including H. P. Biggar, H. H. Langton, W. F. Ganong, and J. Home Cameron.
The editors of all three printed editions discovered many inaccuracies in the Brief Discours. They added copious notes on “confusions of dates,” errors in spelling, mistakes of geography, garbled names, and mistakes in descriptions of events, flora, and fauna. But all the editors accepted the manuscript as authentic, agreed that Champlain was its author, and believed that he actually made a voyage through Spanish America, more or less as described in the Discours.2
Judgments of Early Biographers
Before 1950, Champlain’s French Canadian biographers also generally agreed that the Brief Discours was authentic, and in most cases accepted it as literal fact. This was so especially for N-E. Dionne, Gabriel Gravier, and H. R. Casgrain.3
Anglophone biographers took a different view. Francis Parkman wrote: “At Dieppe there is a curious old manuscript, in clear, decisive and somewhat formal handwriting of the sixteenth century, garnished with 61 colored pictures, in a style of art which a child of ten might emulate…. Here too are descriptions of natural objects, each with its own illustrative sketch, some drawn from life and some from memory—as, for example, a chameleon with two legs; others from hearsay, among which is a portrait of the griffin said to haunt certain districts of Mexico—a monster with the wings of a bat, the head of an eagle, and the tail of an alligator. This is Champlain’s journal.”
Parkman greatly admired Champlain, and believed that the Brief Discours was authentic, but he read it as a work of fantasy, and studied it as a clue to the character of “a true hero, after the chivalrous medieval type” and a personality “dashed largely with the spirit of romance.” Parkman explained: “Though earnest, sagacious, and penetrating, he leaned to the marvelous; and the faith which was the life of his hard career was somewhat prone to overstep the bounds of reason and invade the domain of fancy. Hence the erratic character of some of his exploits, and hence his simple faith in the Mexican griffin.” This was a misunderstanding of Champlain, who was very far from being a medieval man. But at the same time, Parkman was the first reader to observe that the flaws and inaccuracies in the Brief Discours are evidence of its authenticity.4
Another anglophone biographer was Morris Bishop, author of Champlain: The Life of Fortitude (1948) and a professor of romance languages at Cornell University. He decided to check the Brief Discours against Spanish records in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the first scholar to do so. Bishop hired a researcher, who reported that he “failed to reveal Champlain’s name on the manifests of Don Francisco Coloma’s convoy of 1599, or any mention of him in accessory documents.” Bishop wondered if he might have used a false name. “He must have made the journey,” he wrote, “for he could have copied his errors nowhere.” Bishop was very conscious of inaccuracies in the work, but like Parkman took them as evidence of its authenticity. He too thought that the errors were clues to the character of the author.5
The First Attacks on the Brief Discours
After Morris Bishop’s book appeared in 1948, three iconoclastic writers in Canada and France saw an opportunity to attack Champlain by impugning the accuracy of the Brief Discours. All assumed that he had written it, and attacked his veracity in a general way.
In 1950, Canadian writer Jean Bruchési published an article with the sensational title, “Champlain a-t-il menti? Did Champlain Lie?” Bruchési suggested that Champlain falsified the record of his military service in Brittany, falsely claimed to have been captain of the San Julien, never made a voyage to the West Indies, and used Captain Provençal’s logbooks “to write under his own name, an account of a voyage that he did not make.”6 This criticism was offered as a hypothesis, not as a firm conclusion. But nearly all the hypothesizing was on one side of the question, and was severely hostile both to the document and to Champlain.
Much of this thesis was quickly proven to be false. Champlain’s military service was confirmed by Robert Le Blant’s research and by documents published in 1967. And even a cursory reading of the Brief Discours shows that Champlain never claimed to be captain of the San Julien. Even so, the charge in Bruchési’s title, that Champlain was a liar, traveled farther than the corrections, and was repeated by others.
Canadian archivist Claude Bonnault adopted Bruchési’s hypothesis and added his own arguments that Champlain was never in Blavet, that he had invented the story of Captain Provençal, and that he was not in the West Indies at all; Bonnault topped it off with a conspiracy theory that the Brief Discours may have been concocted in 1612 as a political document to support the comte de Soissons and the prince de Condé against the queen’s Spanish party in France, and to support a rapprochement with England. He concluded that the entire Brief Discours was an “histoire fantaisiste,” and false in the first degree—a willful and premeditated falsehood by Champlain for his own gain. This argument, coming from a prominent Canadian archivist, had a long reach.7
These judgments were amplified by Hubert Deschamps, editor of another edition Champlain’s works, Les voyages de Samuel de Champlain, saintongeais (1951). Deschamps was no iconoclast. In many ways he admired Champlain, and celebrated his career in New France. But he rejected the Brief Discours as a fraud. On the basis of Bruchési’s work, he wrote, “This voyage appears most doubtful; probably it was only a compilation of accounts by other voyagers.”8
A Botanist Finds Evidence of Authenticity
Not everyone was convinced that Champlain was a liar. Bruchési’s attack inspired another critique that yielded an opposite conclusion. In 1951, a distinguished French botanist, Jacques Rousseau, studied the botanical descriptions that made up a quarter of the Brief Discours. He approached the work in a scientific spirit and analyzed its wealth of botanical information. Rousseau found some of it to be very confused and clearly mistaken. He came to believe that it was written by a “voyageur de passage,” who was passing quickly through a country he did not know, obliged to make conjectures, and forced to trust too much to memory. But Rousseau concluded that the errors in the work were themselves evidence of its authenticity. He found that the botanical descriptions, despite their imperfections, “were made directly from nature” and could only have been made by a Frenchman who “actually made a voyage in the Antilles and Mexico,” and who had come from Saintonge, for he “used many Saintongeais terms.” In short, Rousseau’s botanical analysis identified many inaccuracies in the Brief Discours but confirmed its authenticity and found strong internal evidence that Champlain himself was the author.9
A Mixed Verdict: Vigneras
Yet another scholar launched a search of Spanish records, and reached a different result. L. A. Vigneras spent many months in the Archivo General de Indias at Seville and the Archivo de Simanca. In 1957, he published his findings in an article that is an important, detailed, and fair-minded critique of high value to any serious student of Champlain. Like Bishop’s researcher, Vigneras was unable to find any explicit reference to Champlain in records of the Spanish treasure fleets from 1599 to 1601. He documented many errors of fact, dates, times, and confusions of chronology in the Brief Discours, but also confirmed the substantive accuracy of large parts of the work and concluded that whoever wrote them was an actual eyewitness to many of the events and scenes in the work.
Specifically, Vigneras confirmed the accuracy of the first parts of the Brief Discours about the Treaty of Vervins, the charter of Captain Provençal’s ship, and its voyage from Blavet to Spain. He corroborated many movements of the San Julien just as Champlain described them, confirmed Champlain’s statement that each galleon was assigned a patache, and that the San Julien was paired with the patache Sandoval, which was sent to collect pearls at Margarita Island.10 But Vigneras believed that Champlain’s accounts of his visit to Guadeloupe, the trip to Margarita Island, and his claim to have visited Mexico City and Portobello were impossible or very doubtful.
Altogether, Vigneras felt unable to confirm or deny the accuracy of the Brief Discours. In a mixed and tentative conclusion, he suggested that Champlain might have made the voyage as a clandestine passenger, or might have based his narrative on interviews with others who had actually been to the West Indies and Mexico. Vigneras appealed for further research, restraint in judgment, and respect for the memory of Champlain, who should not be condemned for “a possible error of youth.”11
The Discours Defended: Bishop, Morison, and Trudel
In response to these various critiques, other writers defended Champlain. Morris Bishop wrote a measured reply to Bruchési, Bonnault, Vigneras, and others, referring to them as “some Canadian historians who have been treating the Father of Canada most unfilially, giving him, in fact the lie.” Bishop noted that all of them, even the most hostile, had “greatly enlarged our knowledge” in substantive ways. Bruchési discovered that Guillermo Eleno was the same man as Captain Provençal. Bonnault found the Turin manuscript of the Brief Discours. Vigneras first reported the Bologna manuscript and found much new information in Spanish archives.
But Bishop observed that the critics of Champlain had made errors of their own, and were unable to resolve the central questions for a Champlain biographer. Did he make the journey himself? Did he represent the experience of others as his own? Did he lie? Bishop argued that these questions should be answered not only from an analysis of theBrief Discours itself but also from “our experience of life, our knowledge of men and their behavior.” Bishop wrote that Champlain was not only an honest man but one who “always regarded the lie with horror.” He offered examples, and added: “For Champlain, as for the Indians, the lie was the worst of offenses. In my study of Champlain, I have never caught him in a lie. Inadvertences, certainly; errors, often; lapses of memory, commonly. But never an outright lie. Add to this the universal chorus of his contemporaries, who acclaim his rectitude, conscience, uprightness of spirit.” Bishop added an argument that Champlain had little to gain and much to lose from creating a “clumsy, dangerous falsification.” On this basis, he ended with a firm conclusion: “Champlain did not lie.” Bishop’s essay was graceful, witty, and wise, but it lacked a foundation in empirical fact and had no effect on the iconoclasts, whom he called the “misocamplanites.”12
Another line of defense appeared in Samuel Eliot Morison’s biography of Champlain. Morison had an intimate knowledge of the waters of the West Indies and North America. He formed a high respect for Champlain’s veracity, and wrote with disdain of the critics: “Vigneras finds so many inaccuracies in the Brief Discours as to suggest that Champlain never left Spain and composed it ashore by picking the brains of sailors! That hypothesis to my mind is refuted by the quality of the colored sketches which (excepting some of the bird’s eye views of towns) could not possibly have been copied from existing books, and are obviously from the same hand as those of Champlain’s books on Canada. I conclude that, as a Frenchman in a ticklish situation (the Inquisition was already well established in Mexico and his very presence there was illegal) he dared not take notes or make sketches, but wrote his text and painted the illustrations from memory after his return to France. That would explain his sometimes mixing up characteristics of two different plants in one painting. The style of Champlain’s work is evidently based on that of Théodore de Bry, some of whose illustrated works on the New World came out early enough to have been seen, or even owned, by him.”13
A third defence appears in the judgment of Marcel Trudel. The first volume of Trudel’s excellent Histoire de la Nouvelle-France includes a brief but balanced discussion that takes seriously the problems that critics found in the text of the Brief Discours, but argues that the drawings are probably Champlain’s work. He suggests ways in which the inaccuracies can be understood without condemning the text or the author in a rounded way.14
Attacks Repeated and Amplified: Liebel and Codignola
In Canada and France, attacks on the Brief Discours continued during the late twentieth century. An interpretation hostile to Champlain appeared in the work of Jean Liebel, a Saintongeais historian who published an important biography of Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, with much new and useful evidence, and argued that Champlain’s importance had been exaggerated at the expense of de Mons. He severely condemned the Brief Discours as a work “of doubtful origin, published long after the death of Champlain,” and full of “numerous errors and improbabilities which lead one to think that it was surely not written by Champlain.” He argued that Champlain “would not have allowed himself to mislead the reader with falsehoods as gross as those of the Brief Discours; this was an honnête homme.”15
Yet another critic extended Liebel’s argument in a new direction. Luca Codignola, an Italian scholar of Canadian studies, published two essays that argued that Champlain did in fact visit the Indies before 1601, but condemned the Brief Discours as an account of a “prétendu voyage” that is “completely useless,” and “full of all sorts of errors.” Codignola suggested that the Discours was not the work of Champlain at all, but a forgery commissioned by a collector of “exotic memorabilia,” perhaps the “most celebrated among passionate collectors in Champlain’s epoque, the scholar and savant Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc.” Codignola observed that his idea was only “in the domain of speculation.”
There is no evidence to support this hypothesis, and indeed much to contradict it. Peiresc left a large body of papers that made no reference to the Brief Discours. He was respected as a scrupulously honest and honorable man. The provenance of the Dieppe manuscript falsified this interpretation, but its effect was to reinforce the mood of skepticism about the Brief Discours and Champlain himself, which was growing in the late twentieth century.16
New Archival Material: Armstrong
More positive was the response of Joe C. W. Armstrong in his Champlain, which first published an important piece of new evidence: the last will and covenant of Champlain’s uncle Captain Provençal in Cadiz, written on June 26, 1601. This document had been in the collection of the Archivo Historico Provincial in Cadiz, and a copy was given to the National Archives of Canada, now Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa in 1975. It proved that Champlain was present on that occasion and that he signed the document as “Champlain.” The Spanish “public writer” named Marcos Rivera who drafted the document wrote Champlain’s name as “Samuel Zamplen,” a variant that may help to explain why no reference has been found to Champlain in Spanish archives.17
This discovery clearly established the nature of the relationship between Champlain and his uncle, which had been challenged by several iconoclasts. It confirmed Champlain’s account of it, described the movements of the San Julien in 1598–99, placed Champlain in Cadiz for an extended period during the spring of 1601, and explained why he was there, looking after his uncle. The will named Champlain as sole heir to a large estate in Spain and France.18 Armstrong also made another contribution. He studied Champlain’s references to Florida and suggested that he made a clandestine visit to Florida during the last part of his visit to the New Spain. He concluded: “It is reasonable to assume that Champlain was a bona fide explorer of the Florida coast.” Altogether, Armstrong published a major new piece of supporting evidence for Champlain’s Brief Discours.19
New Archival Material: Giraudo
Two research projects by Laura Giraudo were also positive in their result. In the first, she made a rigorous comparative study of the three manuscript copies of the Brief Discours and found that copyists were responsible for some of the errors that had been attributed to Champlain. Giraudo also published a second essay that reported a further round of research in Spanish archives: once more in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville (which Vigneras had searched); and for the first time the Archivo Ducal de Medina Sidonia (which Vigneras had not been allowed to use). She also found no explicit reference to Champlain’s presence in the Spanish treasure fleet, but she turned up evidence that corroborated Champlain on the movements of the treasure ships themselves, the role of Pedro de Zubiaur and Francisco Coloma, the contracts with Champlain’s Uncle Provençal, the charter of San Julian, the route from Spain to America, events in Puerto Rico, the movements of the San Julian from San Juan to Santo Domingo and Vera Cruz, and events along the way. She also found evidence that supported the possibility of Champlain’s visit to Mexico City, found supporting evidence for the voyage of the San Julian from Mexico to Cuba, and documented other events that Champlain observed in the Caribbean and the return to Spain. Giraudo concluded that the probability that Champlain was a clandestine passenger in the San Julian “appears more and more likely.” She also believed that further research in Spanish archives could be still more fruitful.20
Positive Assessments and Mature Judgments: Gagnon and Glénisson
An important contribution of another kind was made by François-Marc Gagnon. It was an explication de texte, a critique of critics. Gagnon found more errors in the works of Bruchési, Bonnault, and Vigneras. He also began to explore possibilities for reconciling the testimony of Champlain with documentary evidence from materials in other sources, especially the Spanish archives. This approach suggested an important and useful way forward in Champlain studies.21
Yet another contribution appeared in 2004. Raymonde Litalien published an interview with a highly respected French scholar, Jean Glénisson, who was asked his opinion of the Brief Discours. “In my view,” he answered, “there is absolutely no reason to doubt the authenticity of Champlain’s voyage to Spanish America.” Glénisson observed that Champlain “did not have permission to divulge information he had gathered on his trip, because the Spanish were very discreet about their wealthy colonies in America. The Brief Discours given to Henri IV was therefore clandestine. It greatly resembles an espionage report.” Glénisson went on to note that Champlain confirmed the fact that he made the journey and referred to it “a number of times” in other works and in a request that he made to Louis XIII in 1630. Moreover, the contents of his report were consistent with those writings in substantive ways.22
The Approach in this Volume
After this long controversy, how do we judge the Brief Discours? The first step is to ask what sort of text it was. As Morison and Glénisson pointed out, it was not a journal or diary or logbook. Also, it was not called a Voyage of Champlain, but rather a Brief Discours on “the most remarkable things that Samuel Champlain of Brouage observed in the West Indies.” It was also an espionage report, written for presentation to Henri IV.23
Further, we should also ask how the Brief Discours was compiled. An important clue is its chronology. Champlain’s Discours and Spanish records used different ways of timekeeping. The Spanish record-keepers worked from documents and used calendar dates. Champlain worked from memory and reckoned time not by fixed dates but by intervals of weeks and months. He rarely referred to the calendar, and then only with vague references and never exact dates. In the absence of a log or journal, reliance on memory led to many errors, and also caused bias in time estimates. Throughout the Brief Discours Champlain tended to overestimate the length of time intervals in the past, a clear pattern of memory distortion. For example, he remembered the passage from Blavet to Vigo Bay as lasting eleven days; Spanish records showed that the voyage lasted five days. This sort of error occurred frequently in the manuscript. Champlain was unable to keep notes or diaries or records of any kind, and the entire work was drafted after his return from America. Here is more evidence that he was a clandestine passenger, as were at least six people aboard the San Julian.
With these patterns in mind, we might approach Champlain’s manuscript in a constructively critical spirit. We might begin by comparing Champlain’s Brief Discours with other evidence. To do so is to find and correct many errors of dating and mistakes of other kinds. But instead of merely compiling a list of discrepancies as hostile critics did, a more useful step is to try to reconstruct Champlain’s travels in the West Indies in a coherent way that reconciles the main lines of his account with the evidence of other sources. The result of that effort appears in chapter 5 above. “A Spy in New Spain” is that sort of reconstruction, cast in the form of a narrative, with issues of interpretation discussed and documented in the notes, and historiography in this appendix.
When that work was done, it was clear that the Brief Discours is frequently inaccurate but entirely authentic, and its main lines are consistent with evidence found by other scholars in Spanish archives. The Brief Discours is precisely what it purports to be: a manuscript by Samuel Champlain, a Frenchman of Saintonge, who made a report for his king of “the most remarkable things” he observed with his own eyes in Spanish America.
The next step is to look at it yet again and ask what this document has to tell us about Champlain himself. The answer is that it is an important and revealing source. The Brief Discours is informative about his purposes and the process of his development. We find in it a consuming curiosity about the world, a fascination with other people, a strong interest in the native people of America and in African slaves, and an attitude of sympathy and respect. Champlain was a man of deep and abiding Christian faith. He was appalled by the cruelty of the Spanish conquest, horrified by the behavior of some Spanish clergy, and shocked by atrocities committed in the name of Christ. We see Champlain’s developing interest in settling close to native people, and his indifference to the pursuit of gold, silver, pearls, and precious gems. We also see his humane spirit and his ethical purpose in the world. In short the Brief Discours is not only an authentic work, but also a vitally important key to an understanding of Champlain himself.