THE FOUNDER OF CANADA.*
TICE study of early Canadian history has been much facilitated during the past fifteen- years by the Champlain Society of Toronto, which has printed excellent editions of Lescarbot's chronicle, of Knox's journal of the British conquest in 1757-60, of Hearne's account of his journey northward from Hudson Bay in 1769, and of other interesting works. The society has now undertaken what promises to be a first-rate edition, in English and French, of the complete works of Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec, whose accounts of the coasts which he had explored and mapped gave a great '• The Works of Samuel de Champlain. In Six Volumes. Edited by 11. P. Biggar. 'Vol I.. 1508-11307. With a Portfolio of _Plato.. Toronto : Champlain Society. impetus to the colonization of New France in the opening years ' of the seventeenth century. That competent scholar, Mr. B. P. Biggar, is the general editor. Professor Home Cameron, a Toronto, has revised the French texts, while Mr. Langton, pf Toronto, and Professor Ganong, of Smith College, Massa- chusetts, have made the translations. Furthermore, Pro- fessor Ganong, from his intimate knowledge of the coasts of Maine and Nova Scotia, has elucidated Champlain's narrative and supplied modern plans of the harbours which the old French seaman first charted three hundred years ago. The book is charmingly printed, and in a portfolio there are, besides maps, sixty reproductions of the interesting plans of harbours and sketches of trees, animals and birds that Champlain inserted in the manuscript log of his first voyage—to the West Indies in 1599—which is preserved in the Library of Congress. Champlain's maps of 1607 and 16-13, showing the details of the coasts of New England and Eastern Canada, should disabuse readers of the idea still current that the Pilgrim. Fathers discovered the place where they settled in 1620. Champlain had visited the site of the future New Plymouth in 1606, and marked it in his 1607 map as Cap St. Louis, and English sailors had possibly preceded and certainly followed him along the New England coast, which was well known to mariners and merchants by the time the * Mayflower ' sailed.
Champlain was a native of Brouage, a decayed seaport near Rochefort, and served as a quartermaster in Henry of Navarre's Breton campaign. When the war ended in 1598 he reverted to what must have been his original occupation and took a post in a Spanish transport, under his uncle, who was, he says, ' one of France's first-rate seamen." A year later he was put in command of the ship and sailed in her with the annual Spanish Flota to the West Indies. His illustrated account of what he saw and heard is extremely interesting, for Champ- lain was a keen observer and noted not merely professional details about rocks and shoals and currents, but also the many strange plants and animals and the manners of the Caribs who still survived in the islands. The editor rightly remarks on the general accuracy of Champlain's descriptions ; the sailor felt bound, no doubt, to mention dragons, which were figured on all the old charts, but he was careful not to say that he had seen one. In 1603 Champlain made his first voyage to New France, and sailed up the St. Lawrence, as Cartier had done some sixty years earlier, to the site of the future city of Montreal. " The further we went," he says, l;` the finer was the country," and his graphic narrative, published late in the same year, must have convinced many 'Frenchmen that Canada was worth colonizing. Champlain 'and his men had no difficulties with the Indians, whom they treated tactfully ; he took home with him the son of a chief from Lower Canada, and also an Iroquois woman, whom, he 'says, the Montagnais " were intending to eat." He gives an amusing account, from hearsay, of a dreadful monster called ," Gougou," like a gigantic woman, who lived on an island near
• Chaleur Bay and devoured passers-by. A French prospector told Champlain that, when sailing past the island, he had heard " Gougou " hissing, but Champlain himself was not fortunate enough to see or hear this Canadian Scylla. After a brief 'holiday at home, Champlain crossed the Atlantic again in '1604, and was for three years busily employed in charting the coast from Cape Breton down to Nantucket. The first part of his Voyages of 1613, describing his explorations in careful detail, fills the rest of this volume. Professor Ganong points out that Champlain's maps, though inaccurate as judged by ; 'modern standards, were the first in which navigators could repose any confidence, and were not superseded for more than is century. In the succeeding volumes of this edition we are romised Champlain's account of the founding of Quebec 'n 1608, and of the progress of the new colony. Champlain
to surrender Quebec to an English expedition in 1629, ut he did not lose heart. He went home to publish a collected
1,3d edition of his discoveries in 1632, and had in the same year the satisfaction of seeing his infant colony restored to France, ;through Richelieu's insistence. Champlain returned to Canada 'for the last time in 1633, and died at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1685. The resolute old sailor inspires in his readers both respect and affection, and we must congratulate the Canadian Society on producing what should be the best edition of the works- of a great man in whom both Canada and France may sake a pride.
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