Champlain Founds Quebec — New France Established
Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec on 3 July 1608, at a narrowing of the St Lawrence where the river could be controlled, with twenty-eight men. Nine survived the first winter, most of the rest dying of scurvy and dysentery. He had been to the region repeatedly since 1603 and had mapped the coast as far as Cape Cod. His judgment, against the prevailing view in France, was that a permanent settlement inland was necessary rather than seasonal trading posts, because the fur trade required standing relationships with the peoples who supplied it. Those relationships defined New France. Champlain allied with the Huron-Wendat, the Algonquin and the Innu, which was the only way to reach the interior — and which enrolled the French in their existing war with the Haudenosaunee confederacy to the south. He fought alongside them at Lake Champlain in 1609 and killed two Mohawk chiefs with one shot from an arquebus. The Haudenosaunee turned to the Dutch and then the English for firearms, and the alignment held for a century and a half. He also sent young men to live among the allied nations, learn the languages and adopt their ways — the coureurs de bois — which gave the French an intelligence and diplomatic reach far beyond their numbers. The colony grew very slowly. New France had about 3,000 settlers by 1663 against some 80,000 in the English colonies. Champlain died at Quebec in 1635, and his burial place has never been found. That disparity in numbers is the reason France lost North America in 1763, having explored and mapped most of it.
- Year: 1608 CE
- Category: Political
