A Question of Authorship
Several writers have called into question the authenticity of Champlain’s voyages, and in particular his last book, Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France … (Paris, 1632). The Abbé Laverdière believed that Jesuits changed the text of this work, removed references to the Récollets, and added a celebration of their own order. “Not only had someone reviewed or even made alterations to the text of Champlain,” he complained, “but we can be certain that this work was done either by a Jesuit or by a friend of the members of that order.”1
Other historians have disagreed. Biggar wrote: “As to the theory which has been advanced that the Jesuits had a hand in the production of this edition, I cannot find any grounds for accepting it. The few mistakes cited by the Abbé Laverdière are apt to occur in any large work of this kind and are doubtless chiefly printer’s errors.” Biggar believed that Champlain himself curtailed pas sages to the Récollets for two reasons. He was giving a résumé of his earlier works, and also he “no longer bore towards them the same friendly feelings as formerly, as a consequence of the conduct of Récollet father Georges in 1621 when Champlain thought that he had sent forged letters to the King.”2
Biggar concluded that the 1632 edition reflected the judgment of Champlain himself, and that its strength and importance flowed from Champlain’s high integrity. “Champlain’s writings,” Biggar wrote, “are a source of the first value and however much one may regret the years he passes over in silence, yet this very loss enhances the value of the remainder by proving that it contains nothing but what was actually seen or experienced by himself.”3
Secular scholars in the twentieth century have also doubted the authenticity of a pietistic tone that grew strong in Champlain’s later works. But his unpublished writings and his essays in the Mercure François showed the same interpretive patterns as the Voyages. One prime example is the manuscript text of his will. It is a stronger statement of Champlain’s growing faith than any published work that might have been altered by Jesuits or others.
A third line of criticism in the late twentieth century came from iconoclasts who argued that Champlain’s published works were shameless acts of self-promotion. How can we assess these and other lines of criticism, as well as the works themselves? The first step is to consider the purpose of these works. If we study the unpublished “Brief Discours” of 1601 and four major volumes that Champlain published in 1603, 1613, 1619, and 1632, we find several patterns. All Champlain’s publications were works of promotion, but not self-promotion. Their primary purpose was to promote a grand design for New France, more than to advertise Champlain himself. In that respect we might compare them with the works of Captain John Smith, who embellished his maps and books with a large self-portrait. Nothing like that appears in Champlain. As many scholars have noted, Champlain is also very taciturn about himself, his thoughts, and his feelings. This is not the style of a self-promoter. He is also very candid about failures and errors—for example, the decision to settle Sainte-Croix Island.
Another clue appears in the rhythm and timing of these publications. These works were written and published at pivotal moments when the future of New France was hanging very much in the balance: the winter of 1603–04, the winter of 1612–13, the winter and spring of 1618–19, and the winter and spring of 1631–32. In moments of particular danger and opportunity, all of them promoted Champlain’s grand dessein, his great vision for New France.
Further, Champlain’s promotional efforts centered on the French court and particularly on the monarch. His major books are dedicated to figures who were in a positions of power: Charles de Montmorency (admiral of France in 1603, and uncle of the future viceroy); Marie de Medici, the queen regent in 1612–13; the young King Louis XIII, who was taking power in 1618–19; and Cardinal Richelieu in 1631–32.
The works changed not because the Jesuits were rewriting the later ones, but because Champlain was trying to reach powerful people who had different values and purposes. His books combined two themes. One was a theme of continuity in steadfast support for the grand design. The other was a theme of change in tone and substance, from attention to the values of Henri IV in the Brief Discours (1601) and Des Sauvages (1603) to concern for the attitudes of Marie de Medici in the Voyages of 1613. Later works gave more attention to the purposes of Louis XIII in the Voyages of 1619, and Richelieu in the Voyages of 1632. These promotional efforts were successful. They helped Champlain to sustain his great project.
On the question of accuracy, Champlain’s published works all contain small errors, misstatements of fact, and confusions of dates. In moments of crisis they were rushed to the press, and have the appearance of haste in their composition. Some parts were clearly based on logs and journals. Biggar believed: “He must have kept a diary, and in several places the existence of some such source is betrayed. Thus at the end of the last chapter of the first part of the edition of 1613, there is an account of what occurred almost every day during the month of September 1607. This could not have been given unless he kept a diary of what took place.” Biggar observes that “a very faithful journal of observations was made” in that part of the book. In other passages, Champlain was writing from memory and errors crept in, as in the Brief Discours. But always Champlain was trying to be careful with his facts and usually tells us about his sources. Biggar found that Champlain “does little more than describe events of which he himself was an eyewitness and in which he usually took a very prominent part.” When he had a different source, he was usually careful to inform the reader, or add a disclaimer.4
In our own time, it is increasingly possible to test the accuracy of much of Champlain’s Voyages against other sources in great variety. For the voyage in 1603 we have interlocking documentation from port records, the letters and edicts of Henri IV, and interviews later conducted by Marc Lescarbot for his history of New France. For the explorations of the Acadian coast in 1604, we have oral history from the Mi’kmaq which is consistent with French records. For the settlements at Sainte-Croix Island and Quebec, we have an extraordinary abundance of archaeological evidence. For the Port-Royal Colony, Marc Lescarbot confirmed the accuracy of Champlain’s texts in every important way, even when the two authors had turned against each other. Lescarbot did the same for the military campaign against the Mohawk. The more research is undertaken, the more corroboratory evidence we find for events in France, England, and America. The writings of Récollets and Jesuits, and pieces published in the Mercure François confirm the accuracy of Champlain’s voyages at almost every point where they can be compared. Increasingly, state papers and documents have been found to do the same. This evidence frequently corrects small mistakes in dates (a confusion of months was a common problem). Champlain also had strong biases and powerful purposes. But these are the writings of an honest and honorable man.
APPENDIX E
CHAMPLAIN’S TRAITTÉ DE LA MARINE
An Essay on Leadership
Near the end of his life, Champlain wrote a small treatise explicitly on the subject of how he went about the task of leading others. He published it with his last volume of Voyages in 1632 as a long appendix, but it is really a separate work with its own title page and theme. He called it a Traitté de la marine, et du devoir d’un bon mariner, aTreatise on Maritime Affairs, and the Duty of a Good Mariner. It is most accessible in the bilingual text edited by H. P. Biggar in his edition of Champlain’s major works.1
Scholars have studied it in different ways. Morris Bishop, a scholar of French literature, read it as “Champlain’s most important literary achievement,” in which he made his “only effort to rise above the day-to-day journal, and create a work of conscious literary art.” Bishop thought of it as a work of “self-revelation” in which the “good navigator” is “the man he aspired to be.”2 Joe Armstrong, a Canadian businessman and map collector, interpreted it as a work “full of confidence, life and buoyancy of language,” and a key to “his contribution as a geographer, naturalist, and cartographer.3 Samuel Eliot Morison, a maritime historian and small boat sailor, studied it as “a seaman’s manual on the handling and navigation of ships.” Morison was specially impressed by Champlain’s “feel for the sea,” and translated excerpts for the instruction of young sailors in every generation.4
The book belonged to a very large literature on seamanship and navigation in Champlain’s era. He lived at a time when the art of navigation became a science. Its most important contribution was not any particular discovery, but the invention of a process by which discoveries are made and shared with others. To that end, its most useful instrument was not a ship or cross-staff or astrolabe, but a printing press. Historian D. W. Waters has identified 203 treatises on navigation that were printed by Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English authors before 1640.5 Some of these books were technical manuals on the tools of navigation. Others were textbooks on mathematics, or monographs on astronomy, or workbooks on logarithms, trigonometry, spherical geometry, cartography, and various special subjects. Chief among them was Pedro de Medina’s Arte de navegar (Seville, 1545), an excellent manual on methods of finding latitude from the sun and stars, with a very accurate table of the sun’s declination. It was translated by John Frampton as The Arte of navigation…. made by Master Peter de Medina (London, 1581). It also appeared in French, Italian, and Dutch editions, and was widely used throughout the world. The Dutch explorer William Barents carried Medina’s Arte de navegar on his last arctic voyage, and his copy was found in the nineteenth century, preserved in polar ice. Frobisher and Drake also used Medina’s book, and Champlain read it closely.6
Other navigation books took the form of what would be called today Sailing Directions, or Pilots. Among the most important of that genre was Lucas Janszoon Wagenaer, T’eerste Deel Vande Spieghel der Zeevaerdt vandde Navigatie der Westersche Zee, “The First Part of the Mirror of the Navigation for Sailing the Western Sea.”7 It was translated into English as The Mariner’s Mirror. The title pages of the Dutch and English editions both show a group of seamen and scholars studying a globe which is also a spherical mirror that reflected the images of the men who sailed it.
A third genre was favored by English explorers who created discursive dictionaries of navigation terms. The leading examples were two books by Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame. Smith’s first volume, in the words of its modern editor, is “little more than an omnium gatherum of names for the appurtenances and people that make up a ship and her crew.” His second is basically the same sort of work as the first, much enlarged. Other works of a similar nature included John Davis, The Seaman’s Secrets, in Albert Hastings Markham, ed., The Voyages and Works of John Davis, the Navigator; and also in Sir Henry Mainwaring’s “The Seaman’s Dictionary,” in G. E. Mainwaring and W. G. Perrin, eds., The Life and Works of Sir Henry Mainwaring (vols. 54 and 56). None are like Champlain’s Traitté.8
Champlain read these works in a professional way and wrote of “the special pleasure” he had derived from “the perusal of books on this subject.” But he wanted to write another kind of book “for those who may be curious to learn more especially on those matters of which I have not found an account elsewhere.”9
To study these other works and then to read Champlain’s Traitté is to discover that his book had a special character that set it apart from the field. By comparison, Champlain’s Traitté de la marine stands out as a book about how to lead men in extreme conditions, on dangerous ventures “into distant and unknown regions.” More than that, it became a treatise on leadership, based on many years of personal experience.
Champlain began by addressing the reader as a comrade or colleague, amy lecteur, in an amiable tone that was fundamental to his style of leadership. He tells us that he had spent thirty-eight years making sea voyages, and had run many risks and been in many dangers, “from which God had preserved me.” He wrote of the pleasure that he found in his work, “having always been fond of making voyages to distant and unknown regions, and wherein I had great enjoyment principally in relation to navigation, learning by experience and by the teaching of many good navigators, as well as through the special pleasure I have described from reading books on the subject.” His purpose, he wrote, was to compose for his own satisfaction, a little treatise “on the qualities one should possess” to be a good mariner and an effective leader.10
Religion, Morality and Self-Discipline
For Champlain, the first requirement of a good leader was to be “above all a good, God-fearing man.” This phrase had several meanings for him. It meant “not allowing God’s name to be blasphemed, always to have prayers morning and night, and if possible to take along a man of the Church or of a religious order to help the soldiers and seamen and take their confessions and keep them in fear of God.”11
He believed that leadership also entailed a quality of trustworthiness. “Above all,” Champlain wrote, a good leader “keeps his word in any agreement; for anyone who does not keep his word is looked upon as a coward, and forfeits his honor and reputation, however valiant a fighter he may be, and no confidence is ever placed in him.” He is always faithful and loyal to his men, and looks after them. “Before sailing it is necessary to have everything requisite for giving necessary aid to the men.”12
Champlain also thought that a good leader required strength, stamina, discipline—and most of all sobriety. A commander, in his judgment, “should live plainly, and accustom himself to hard conditions” and “not be delicate in his eating or drinking, adapting to places in which he finds himself.” He should be “robust and alert,” with good sea legs(le pied marin, literally, “sea foot”). He must be “inured to hardship and heavy labor, so that whatever happens he may be able to stay on deck, and in a strong voice give orders to each one as to what to do.” Most of all, “he should not allow himself to be overcome by wine; for when a captain or a seaman is a drunkard, it is not good to entrust him with command or control, for accidents are likely to happen while he is sleeping like a pig, or has lost all judgment and reason.”13
Ways of Working with Others
Also important was the way one treated others. Champlain wrote that a good leader should be “pleasant and affable in his conversation, absolute in his orders, and he should not talk too familiarly with his companions, except those who share in command. Otherwise a feeling of contempt for him might arise over time.” He works alongside his men but remains clearly in command. “Sometimes he must not be above lending a hand to work himself, in order to make the sailors more prompt in their vigilance and to prevent confusion.”
Always he should be strict, but kind: “A good leader should severely chastise malefactors, and make much of good men, being kind to them and gratifying them with some gesture, praising them and not neglecting others, so as not to give occasion for envy, which is often the source of bad feeling, much like a gangrene that little by little corrupts and destroys the body. Want of early attention to this sometimes leads to conspiracies, divisions and factions, which often cause the most promising enterprises to fail.”14
Champlain believed that a good leader must seek to learn from others: “A wise and vigilant captain should take into consideration everything that makes for his advantage and get the opinion of the most experienced men, so as to carry it out with the means he judges to be necessary and advantageous.”15 He added: “A sage and cautious mariner ought not to trust too much in his own judgment when in an urgent need to take some important step, or deviate from a position, or change a dangerous course. He should take counsel of those who he knows to be the most wise, notably ancient navigators who have had most experience with the fortunes of the sea, and have escaped dangers and perils.” Champlain advised a commander: “Let him weigh well the reasons that they advance, for it is not often that one head holds everything.” But he added that after a leader consults with others, he must make the major decisions, and once a decision is made, “he should be the only one to speak, lest differing orders in doubtful situations cause the execution of one maneuver instead of another.”16
Prudence and Prévoyance, Especially in Bold Enterprises
A good leader is prudent, Champlain said, especially in bold enterprises. He “should be wary, and hold back rather than run too many risks, whether in sighting land, particularly in foggy weather when he will bring his vessel to, or stand off [as] in the fog or darkness nobody is a pilot.” He “must not carry too much sail with the idea of driving ahead; this often dismasts the ship…. The prudent seaman ought to be just as apprehensive of other difficulties that may occur as [of mistakes] in respect to his reckoning.”17
A good leader must always be alert, he wrote, and must insist on alertness in others. He needs to be especially alert “if he is finding himself in ordinary perils, be it by accident, or sometimes through ignorance or rashness, as when you run before a wind inshore, or doggedly try to double a cape, or steer a dangerous course at night among sandbanks, shoals, reefs, islands, rocks, or ice.”18 At sea, Champlain recommended, a leader “should make the day his night, and be awake the greater part of the night, always sleep in his clothes, so as to be promptly on hand.” He should get his sleep “more in the daytime than the night.”
Champlain wrote that a good leader must be prévoyant. This quality was not a power to know the future in advance, but a determination to prepare for the unexpected in the future by remembering the past. A prévoyant leader plans ahead, and takes precautions. He should “be careful to take soundings off all coasts, roadsteads.” He should have a good memory for recognizing landfalls, capes, mountains and coastlines, tidal currents and their bearings, wherever he has been.”19
A prévoyant commander “should not be slow in striking sail, when he sees a great wind gathering on the horizon.” He “should take care when a storm arrives, that the ship is lying to, to take down the small spars, to lower yards and have them made fast, as well as all the other rigging, to have the guns run in, so that in a rough sea they would not be under strain and break their tackle.”20
Courage and Resolve
Champlain’s good leader was a man of courage, ready to fight if attacked, and he should be an example to his men in battle. Champlain detested war, but he believed that some evils were worse than war, and a man of peace must be ready to fight. He wrote: “When ill-fortune brings you to such a pass it is necessary to display manly courage, to make light of death even as it confronts you, and with a steady voice and a cheerful resolution urge everyone to take heart and do what must be done to escape danger, and thus to dispel fear from the most cowardly bosoms, for when they find themselves in a hazardous situation, everyone looks to the man who is thought to have experience…. If he is seen to blanch and give orders in a shaky and uncertain voice, all the others lose courage and it is often that ships are lost in places from which they might have escaped, if they had seen their captain brave and resolute, issuing his commands boldly with authority.” In battle, “the commander must always be on the alert, sometimes in one place, sometimes in another, so as to encourage every man in doing his duty.”21
Champlain learned early in life that courage was required of a leader. The French had many words for this quality, and each of them had a different meaning. Courage, from coeur, was a quality of the heart. It meant an inner depth of physical or moral courage. Bravoure, bravery, was an outer display: a crying child is told to be brave, and is taught to act bravely. But that posture could be carried to excess and become bravade, or bravado. Galanterie, gallantry, was the ability to show manners and courtesy and grace under pressure. To do something with élan was to do it with dash and flair. To be intrépide was to act as if one had no fear. To show effronterie was to put up a bold front. Défiancewas being on one’s guard. In all these ways, Champlain wrote, a leader should show courage in the face of danger, resolve in adversity, and magnanimity in victory.
Humanity, Honesty, and Honor
Champlain insisted that a good leader must treat enemies, friends, and strangers with humanity. He wrote that a principled leader “should be liberal according to his opportunities, and courteous to defeated enemies, granting them all the rights of belligerents. Moreover, he should not practice cruelty or vengeance, like those who are accustomed to inhumane acts, and show themselves to be savages (barbares) rather than Christians, but if on the contrary he makes use of his victory with courtesy and moderation, he will be esteemed by all, even his enemies who will pay him all honor and respect.”22
Most of all, a good leader is honest and honorable. Champlain’s long career of exploration and discovery may be thought of as a moral navigation. He always steered his course by a constellation of values that would shine more brightly against the darkness, violence, and cruelty that surrounded him in an age of religious war and political strife.
At the center of this constellation was one very bright star, which Champlain called by a single old-fashioned word. It was absolutely fundamental to Champlain’s sense of himself. In his last years, he wrote simply, “Ie suis honneste homme; I am an honest man.”23 He spelled it in the old-fashioned way that was close to its simple Latin root,honestas, but there was nothing simple about its meaning. In French it inspired a vocabulary of related words: honneste, honnête, honnêteté. As in English it meant speaking truthfully, not only in a sense of telling no lies, but also with a broader sense of speaking candidly. Honesty was also a form of conduct. It meant acting fairly and reasonably, and not taking advantage of another person. “Honnête” also had another meaning in Champlain’s French. “Honnête homme” is defined in Le Grand Robert as an homme du monde, agréable et distingué par les manières comme par l’esprit; a man of the world, agreeable and distinguished by his manners as well as by his spirit.24
This quality had a special prominence in the thinking of Champlain’s younger French contemporaries. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) wrote of another in his Pensées, “He is an honnête homme; only this universal quality pleases me.” Another French writer explained, “L’honnête homme est à sa place partout; the honest man is at home everywhere.” He acquits himself in everything with a superiority that has no technique or artifice about it, but is always natural and easy.
An honnête homme was also a man of honneur, an even more complex idea. On one level, “honneur” meant a pride of reputation for doing the right thing in the right way. But more than that, it spoke of a person of any rank or gender who always tried to act in such a way as to deserve a reputation for doing the right thing. Most of all, it was an idea of integrity of such strength that one always tried to act in an upright way, even though one often fell short. To study Champlain’s Voyages with this treatise in mind is to discover the integrity of this ethical ideal, and the strength of his determination to serve it.