Samuel de Champlain
Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec and mapped the north-eastern coast of North America. Born at Brouage on the French Atlantic coast around 1567, probably to a Protestant family, he served in the army during the wars of religion and then sailed to the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico, producing an illustrated report for Henry IV. He made his first voyage to the St Lawrence in 1603 and thereafter crossed the Atlantic more than twenty times. He spent three years surveying the coast from Nova Scotia to Cape Cod, and his charts were the best available for a century. In July 1608 he founded a habitation at the narrowing of the river the Algonquin called Kebec. Of the twenty-eight men who wintered there, twenty died of scurvy and dysentery. He built the colony on alliance rather than conquest, and it is the central difference between New France and its neighbours. He allied with the Huron-Wendat, the Algonquin and the Montagnais, learned their languages and geography, and sent young Frenchmen to live among them as interpreters. The price was the enmity of the Iroquois. In 1609 he accompanied a war party south to the lake that carries his name, and killed two Mohawk chiefs with a single arquebus shot, which set the pattern of a conflict that ran for a century. He explored the Ottawa River and reached Lake Huron in 1615. He governed the colony in all but name, lost it briefly to English privateers in 1629, and recovered it in 1632. He died at Quebec on Christmas Day 1635.
- Lived: 1567 CE – 1635 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: explorer, colonial_administrator, navigator
