A masterful approach to mapping Canada
How explorer Samuel de Champlain drew surprisingly accurate maps
Author/geographer Adam Shoalts delves into the history of Canada and the fearlessness and ingenuity of its explorers. Perhaps none were as influential — or skilled at map-making — as Samuel de Champlain, who as a young boy in France learned from his father how to read currents and navigate by the stars.
In the early 17th century, he began expeditions to what’s now eastern Canada and founded the town of Quebec. The dangers were far from over.
While Champlain could smooth over, at least temporarily, differences between the Algonquin and Mohawk, England remained a bigger problem. In 1628, when English privateers led by the three Kirke brothers arrived at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, they pillaged and burned the French farmsteads there. They then turned their attention to Quebec itself, sending a messenger demanding that Champlain surrender the fort to them. The winter had been a particularly harsh one and Champlain’s band was running desperately low on food and gunpowder. But Champlain had devoted his life to founding Quebec, and he wasn’t about to hand it over to a bunch of English pirates. He refused their demand.
The pirates weren’t stupid — they knew it was better to starve out the French than fight them. They waited in their ships at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, keeping an eye out for the expected relief ships from France that would be carrying provisions and more settlers. When the sails of these French vessels loomed into sight, the English pirates opened fire with their cannons and quickly captured the unsuspecting, outgunned ships. In all, they captured over a dozen French ships and took some 400 prisoners. Well satisfied with their prize, they left Quebec and sailed back to England.
This put Champlain and his settlers in a desperate plight. Already low on food, they would have to last another winter without any resupply — and were reduced to living off a tiny morsel of beans and peas rationed out per day, which they turned into a thin soup.
Outside the fort’s walls, they dug up roots and scrounged around for whatever berries they could find. They bartered for food with their Montagnais and other Algonquin friends — mostly eels and moose meat — but the natives themselves had precious little to spare. By the time the snows melted the next spring, the situation at Quebec was becoming horrendous.
Their only hope was the arrival of French relief ships, but their hearts sank when they learned that the first sails spotted on the horizon were more English privateers — all five of the Kirke brothers this time. Their fleet had swelled to six heavily armed ships and some 600 men, vastly outnumbering Champlain’s little settlement.
Starving as they were, further resistance was futile. When faced with a renewed demand to surrender, Champlain grudgingly capitulated to the privateers. The Kirke brothers took the celebrated explorer on board their flagship as a worthy prize and planned to sail back to England with him. But in the waters off the Gaspé Peninsula, the English encountered their own surprise — an incoming French ship. The English and French ships exchanged fire; one cannonball took the head clean off an English sailor. But the French ship, outnumbered and outgunned, soon surrendered.
The English sailed on to Tadoussac to pillage there and round up as many furs as they could lay their hands on. Here, Champlain met with a shock. His chief scout, (Étienne) Brûlé, whom he’d once looked upon almost as a son, treasonously agreed to help the English. The English were in need of Brûlé’s skills — he’d now lived most of his life as a native, and was fluent in several native languages. Champlain denounced Brûlé and warned him that traitors got their just deserts. Brûlé ultimately met a fate worse than what Champlain probably had in mind — if the stories are to be believed, the Bear clan of the Wendat, knowing of Brûlé’s treason, slowly tortured, killed and cannibalized him.
Champlain was taken to London on board the Kirkes’ flagship. But by the time they reached Europe, peace had been signed between England and France, which made Champlain a free man. Back in Paris, he argued strenuously in favour of Canada’s long-term potential and pressed the French king to demand its return. It took three years, but finally, in 1632, the English Crown agreed to give back Quebec to the French. Champlain was overjoyed, and as soon as he could he set sail for Canada.
He found it in need of much work, but with the energy that always characterized his actions, he threw himself into it. Champlain oversaw the building of new fortifications and buildings, dispatched more of his scouts to explore the interior and provide reports, and put in motion plans to establish habitations at TroisRivières and other strategic points along the St. Lawrence. But he was no longer the young, seemingly invincible explorer who had survived war wounds, Atlantic gales, scurvy, disease, frostbite and whitewater rapids.
Champlain’s health, as he turned 65, declined rapidly. On Christmas Day 1635, he died in his bed — a rare achievement for a man of action in his era. His death was greatly mourned, not only by the French colonists, but also by dozens of northern native nations from the Wendat to the Mi’kmaq — who had seen in Champlain an honest and brave man, and a loyal friend. They would not soon see his like again. The founder of Quebec was buried inside the town’s walls.
Champlain had successfully crossed the dangerous Atlantic some 27 times, never once losing a ship. He travelled and explored widely, saw two great lakes, ran rapids in a canoe in a manner no European aside from Brûlé and a few of his other scouts had previously dared, fought in wars on two continents and planted the first permanent seed of European colonies in Canada. He was, as French Canadians later named him, le père du Canada —“the Father of Canada.”
His legacy is perhaps most fully told in the maps he left behind — maps many consider to be among the greatest ever made by any single explorer. Looking at Champlain’s maps today, one is struck by their accuracy: they represent a great leap forward over all previous maps of North America. His masterful maps were the result of a complex, multi-layered approach that combined geographic data from many sources.
First of all, Champlain had the maps of his predecessors to guide him — they were often crude and full of errors, but still provided a rudimentary base map. To these, Champlain could add his own detailed observations and corrections, the result of his many sea voyages to the waters off Newfoundland, Acadia as far south as Cape Cod, and all through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as well as his many canoe journeys. With his astrolabe and knack for celestial navigation, he recorded hundreds of sun and star observations that gave him his latitude. This helped fill in the details of his maps and correct previous errors. But most of his mapping remained essentially intuitive — sketching features that he saw from the deck of a ship or the bow of a canoe. It took a trained eye to pull that off with the degree of accuracy Champlain managed.
He had ventured far in his travels in the interior — all the way up the St. Lawrence from its mouth to the island of Mont Royal. He’d ranged southward to Lake Champlain and had seen the peaks of the Adirondacks; northward he had struggled up the Ottawa River and over the height of land to Lake Huron. He journeyed through much of what is now central Ontario and across part of Lake Ontario and south into Iroquois territory.
All these lands he mapped as he explored them — pausing whenever he could to take readings with his astrolabe. And what Champlain wasn’t able to explore himself he dispatched his scouts — the coureurs de bois — to explore and report back on. He also incorporated into his maps the charts of other contemporary European explorers — like those of the English, who were busy exploring the Arctic regions in their quest for a northwest passage.
Last, but certainly not least, Champlain drew from the knowledge of his aboriginal allies, whom he almost constantly asked about geographical matters. Several times he noted asking his native friends to draw birchbark maps for him. Undoubtedly, these maps filled in many of the final details on his charts.
Champlain was always revising his maps. His final version of his map of North America, published in 1632, shortly before his death, is a magnificent accomplishment. It reveals the outline of much of northeastern North America, from Baffin Island in the north to Chesapeake Bay in the south, and west to the Great Lakes. The Atlantic seaboard is charted in impressive detail; earlier errors are gone from his map and we can see clearly now the Bay of Fundy, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, the Gaspé, Anticosti and Newfoundland.
The St. Lawrence River is mapped from its wide mouth all the way to its headwaters on Lake Ontario. The Ottawa is mapped northward, not only as far as Champlain made it, but also, on the basis of his aboriginal reports, beyond. Lake Huron and Superior — here labelled as “Mer douce ” and “Grand Lac” — appear for the first time on a European map. They are large and not particularly well defined — since Champlain never saw Superior and only paddled Lake Huron’s eastern shoreline through Georgian Bay’s Thirty Thousand Islands.
He didn’t know about lakes Michigan or Erie — but he conjectured, from his native reports and Brûlé, that Huron drained through some unknown watercourse eventually into Lake Ontario.
Of particular note is how Champlain paid great attention to labelling the homelands of many different aboriginal nations — indicating their villages with drawings of their longhouses. And for a lifelong sailor, it’s not surprising that Champlain liberally illustrated his map with sea creatures and ships under sail. On the technical side, he included an accurate scale and lines of latitude and longitude that correspond impressively to the measurements found on modern maps.
But although he set a new standard for accuracy, there remained much that Champlain didn’t know — much in fact that no one really knew. What lay beyond the Great Lakes to the west was a complete mystery to Champlain — even the Wendat had been unable to tell him anything about these lands — and he still wondered whether there might yet prove to be a passage to China. The northern seas beyond James Bay were also unknown to Champlain. These were questions other explorers would have to answer.
The founder of Quebec — the consummate seafarer, explorer, soldier and mapmaker that was Samuel de Champlain — had done his part by founding an enduring French colony in the wilderness of the New World. To explore and map more of it would be a task taken up by the children and grandchildren of those first hardy settlers who managed to survive the winters — settlers who would, starting in the mid-1600s, refer to themselves increasingly as “Canadiens” and think of their country no longer as France, but as Canada. Excerpted from the book A History of Canada in Ten Maps by Adam Shoalts. Copyright © 2017 by Adam Shoalts. Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Limited. All rights reserved.