In addition to the small self-portrait in Champlain’s “Defeat of the Iroquois” from 1609, a few other sketches also appear in engravings for his books. One such image appears in his drawing of the attack on the Iroquois forest fort at Sorel in 1610. It is a figure, very similar to eight other French arquebusiers and is labeled as Champlain, but it is so small and crude that it reveals nothing beyond what can be seen in the “Defeat of the Iroquois.” A third engraving, an illustration of the attack on the Onondaga town in 1615, shows twelve small French figures. One of them presumably is Champlain, but which? All are equally indistinct.
Other images appear on Champlain’s maps. Two in particular have been discussed by Marcel Trudel. These are round faces, set within a compass rose on Champlain’s maps of 1612 and 1632. Trudel suggests that they may reveal to us the face of Champlain in his maturity. Other scholars disagree. François Marc Gagnon and Denis Martin note that many cartographers decorated their maps with round “sun-faces,” which were highly conventional on seventeenth-century maps.1
One other full-face sketch has passed unnoticed by his biographers. It appears on the only manuscript map that survives from Champlain’s hand and with a signature: his “Descr[i]psion des costs p[or]ts, rades, Illes de la novvele france …” It is dated 1606 and corrected to 1607 by a heavier hand, and is in the map division of the Library of Congress, where it is cherished as one of the great treasures of that collection. It is very handsome in the original manuscript. Most reproductions distort its color and do not bring out the fine detail of the drawings.
In an elaborate border around the map’s cartouche, Champlain added two good-humored sketches of a beardless young man, and a wild-haired and bearded older man. They are very small cartoons, and their purpose is not clear. Perhaps they are merely meant to be abstract images of youth and age. They might also be something more and other than that. One wonders if the younger figure is a self-portrait of the artist in his youth. The other face might perhaps represent an older man of some importance in his life. It could possibly represent the sieur de Mons. If so, this would be our only representation of him.
The hypothesis that the young man is a self-portrait of Champlain meets two difficulties. The figures are stylized in bizarre ways; and in 1609, Champlain wore a beard and represented himself as a man of mature years. The youthful, beardless face in the map cartouche was drawn only one or two years earlier. But these are not conventional images, like the sun-faces that appear on his other maps. They have very distinct features, and appear to be representative images. But who do they represent? Here is a question for further study.2