46 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The map of “The North Part of America” by Henry
Briggs on the previous page framed the hope of a
Northwest Passage through an English imperial lens.
The French were equally committed to finding a route
across the continent to the Far East. The first wave of
French explorers in the sixteenth century focused on
the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which carried them well
into the interior. The second wave was led by Samuel
de Champlain, who crossed the Atlantic dozens of
times between 1598 and 1633. He sailed down the
Atlantic coast to Cape Cod in 1605 and 1606, well
before Henry Hudson explored New York Harbor
or the Puritans settled Plymouth.
The French goals in the New World were
commercial networks rather than settled colonies. To
this end, Champlain was sent back to North America
in 1608 to found and fortify Quebec as a trading post.
With only twenty-eight men, he had no choice but
to develop alliances with the local tribes. In 1609
he ventured south to explore what would become
upstate New York and Vermont, including the large
and narrow lake between those states that later bore
his name. In his most challenging trek of 1615, he
traveled 700 miles up the Ottawa River, which took
him well into Iroquois territory.
All these travels brought him into regular and
sustained contact with the tribes of the Great Lakes,
and he formed especially strong relationships with
the Algonquin, Huron, and Montagnai tribes. These
alliances gave him unrivaled access to indigenous
geographical knowledge, but they also necessarily
pitted him against the Iroquois Confederacy. Once
he returned to Paris in September 1616, Champlain
combined this indigenous knowledge with his own
reconnaissance to draw one of the earliest European
maps of the Upper Midwest and Far Northeast. The
level of detail on Champlain’s map far exceeds that
of Henry Briggs, and is just one indication of the
superiority of French geographical knowledge at
that time.
Champlain intended to publish the map in a 1619
volume detailing his voyages. But the map was not
published, and the engraving lay unused until it
was rediscovered in the 1650s by Pierre DuVal. After
adding new information that had been accumulated
in the interim, DuVal printed the map in 1653. The
result is a picture of contemporary geographical
knowledge that also captured emerging imperial
THE FRENCH EXPLORE AMERICA
Samuel de Champlain, “Le Canada,”
1653 [1616]
claims. A portion of that map is enlarged here, with
the entire map reproduced on the next page.
Champlain’s geographical contribution grew
from his extensive exploration of the Saint Lawrence
Seaway and its tributaries, as well as the information
he gathered from Native Americans. In 1615, he set
out upriver from Quebec, marked as a fort in red
along the Seaway. At the Isle of Montreal, numbered
32 on the detail here, he moved up the delta marked
“R. des Prairies ou des Algonquins.” From there
he continued—slowly—up what would be named
the Ottawa River, identified with the number 8 on
the detail. This trek ultimately brought Champlain
southwest to Lake Huron, named “Mer Douce” on the
left edge of this image. Champlain's was the earliest
European record of this lake, as well as one of the
earliest efforts to map Lake Ontario just to the south,
named here as “Lac St. Louis.”
Champlain’s extensive expeditions formed the
foundation—and the limits—of this map. On the
next page, notice that Champlain ends the map
in the west in the middle of a lake, leaving open
the possibility of a passage to the Pacific Ocean.
This also reveals that he had no knowledge of Lake
Michigan. Moreover, to map other areas that he
had not seen firsthand, Champlain relied on Native
American knowledge, such as the area around St.
James Bay and portions of the Great Lakes. More
generally, the presence of native tribes is prominently
acknowledged throughout the map. From the
“Nations du Nort” to the Iroquois “Nation du Chat”
just south of Lake Erie, Champlain took pains to
identify the many tribes that inhabited the greater
region, and shaped his own experience in North
America.
Champlain served as the de facto governor of New
France until his death in 1635, when the population
of Quebec remained small, at about 300. In that
time, great changes had taken place further south
along the Atlantic. The depiction of the Chesapeake
Bay closely follows that of John Smith’s map of
Virginia (page 40). To finish the map, DuVal identified
settlements that had developed since Champlain’s
original engraving: New “Angleterre,” New
“Hollande,” Virginie, Spanish Florida, and of course
“New France.” Soon after the map was published,
the next generation of French explorers—Louis
Jolliet, Jacques Marquette, and Robert de La Salle—
extended the French realm even further into what
would become the United States, moving south
from the Great Lakes and, simultaneously, north
from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River
and its tributaries.