Champlain's Dream (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: river barque, pidgin speech, small shallop, New France, North America, Lawrence River (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Fischer, Pulitzer Prize–winner for Washington's Crossing, has produced the definitive biography of Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635): spy, explorer, courtier, soldier, sailor, ethnologist, mapmaker, and founder and governor of New France (today's Quebec), which he founded in 1608. This extraordinary and flawed individual was a man of war who dreamed of establishing a peaceful nation in the New World. Fischer once again displays a staggering and wide research, lightly worn, including no fewer than 16 fascinating appendixes covering everything from the Indian Nations in Champlain's World, 1603–35 to Champlain's preferred firearm. The bibliography is equally impressive, and the same should be said of Fischer's literary skills and approach. He does not have a thesis, or a theory, or an ideology, but instead answers questions (Who was this man? What did he do? Why should we care?) to weave together his epic story. With 2008 the 400th anniversary of the foundation of New France, the time is ripe for this outstanding work. 16 pages of color photos; b&w photos, maps. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Tony Horwitz Samuel de Champlain is little known to most Americans, except as the namesake of a frigid lake. Generally speaking, we're biased against the French and bored by Canada. In school books, France's role in the making of our nation doesn't extend much beyond Lafayette, the French-and-Indian War and the Louisiana Purchase. So it may surprise American readers that Champlain not only founded Quebec City but reached Plymouth Harbor 15 years before the Pilgrims. He explored Cape Cod and Maine and probed upstate New York as far inland as Syracuse. Millions of Americans descend from early settlers who followed Champlain to New France, a domain that in his day extended from Canada to Philadelphia. Champlain also stands out for the stunning breadth and drama of his career. This is a man who never learned to swim, yet shot American rapids in bark canoes and crossed the Atlantic 27 times without losing a ship. He sought peace with Indians but marched on the Mohawk, defeating them in battle while plucking an arrow from his neck. He was also a talented spy, mapmaker, artist, naturalist and writer -- as well as a gourmand who founded the first gastronomic society in America, the Ordre de Bon Temps. In short, it's hard to imagine a more appealing biographical subject than this French action-figure with high ideals and a taste for moose meat and beaver tail. It's also hard to conjure a historian better suited to reintroducing Champlain to U.S. readers than David Hackett Fischer, the acclaimed author of several works on colonial America and trans-Atlantic history (his last, Washington's Crossing, won a Pulitzer Prize). In his exhaustively researched new book, Champlain's Dream, Fischer depicts the French explorer as the rare European who genuinely believed in coexisting peacefully with natives, through trade alliances, cultural tolerance and intermarriage. This distinguished Champlain from his Spanish contemporaries, who routinely enslaved and slaughtered Indians, and from early English colonists, who generally lived apart from natives and drove them from their land. To a remarkable degree, Champlain lived up to his ideals and realized the dream of colonizing New France without brute conquest. This contributes, however, to a disappointing biography. Fischer is so admiring of his subject that he presents Champlain as more monument than man. The Frenchman appears almost perfect, and perfectly dull. Fischer's skills as a narrative historian also seem to have deserted him. In earlier books, Fischer focused tightly on dramatic events such as Paul Revere's ride and Washington's crossing of the Delaware. Here, he works in wide-angle, panning across continents and decades. This approach cries out for ruthless editing, which he fails to provide. Champlain's Dream is dense with extraneous characters and detail, and very slow going for anyone but a devoted student of the subject (for whom Fischer tacks on 200 pages of appendices and notes). Fischer's failure to give pace to his story or life to his protagonist is a disservice not only to the reader but to Champlain, whose own writing is rich with adventure and keen observation. Fischer sometimes quotes Champlain to effect, but too often he substitutes his own cliché-ridden and generic prose: "Champlain's most important school was the sea itself." "He took pleasure in the discovery of humanity with all its infinite variety." France's royal court "teemed with life and throbbed with energy." The author even undercuts Champlain's graphic and disapproving tales of Indian torture and cannibalism: "Scholars have explained this ancient custom," Fischer writes, "as a ceremony or ritual, rooted in cultural practice and religious belief." Fischer also deals skittishly with Champlain's love life, or lack thereof. He claims that Champlain "was strongly attracted to women," but the evidence he provides suggests otherwise. Champlain's only documented attachment was to a well-connected French girl he wed when she was 12 and he at least 40. The union brought with it a large dowry and an agreement that the marriage not be consummated for two years. When that time came, the teenaged bride fled Champlain, and though she returned, "One wonders if they were living as man and wife," Fischer writes. She later fled their childless union to enter a convent. Champlain apparently kept chaste with Indians, too, despite frank approaches by native women during his three decades in America. Of this, Fischer writes only that Champlain "acted like a holy man," in contrast to other Frenchmen, adding that his abstinence enhanced his "spiritual power" among Indians. To ignore the possibility that Champlain was homosexual seems an odd bit of coyness in the 21st century. Fischer strikes another fogey note by telling us repeatedly how much Native Americans loved Champlain. (The sources for these flattering anecdotes are, inescapably, European accounts, since contact-era Indians left no written record.) He is likewise at pains to exonerate Champlain for his attacks on the Iroquois. By mowing down these troublesome Indians with his musket, he writes, Champlain sought "a middle way of peace through the carefully calibrated use of limited force." Fischer deals only briefly and belatedly with the devastating impact of European diseases on Indians. Then, in the book's conclusion, he cites the autobiography of Black Hawk, written two centuries after Champlain's death, to remind us yet again how much Indians admired "the great white general" who treated natives "as kin." The best chapters of Fischer's book come near the end, when Champlain is mostly off stage. Here, Fischer gives a fascinating survey of immigrants to French Canada and the hybrid culture they and their descendants created. Words that have vanished in France still endure in North America, while others blend the New World and Old: For instance, the dogsled command Mush! derives from the French "Marche!" Fischer also tells of the many people who bridged French and Indian culture, thanks to an early form of student-exchange program. Champlain often placed young men with Indian tribes to learn their language and ways, while he took in native children himself. A number of these truchements, or interpreters, became explorers, and the French fur traders who followed often took Indian wives. Today, the mixed-race descendants of these voyagers and French-Indian settlers may number 12 million -- a statistic that speaks more eloquently to Champlain's dream than the 500 pages of hagiography that precede it.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 848 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1 edition (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416593322
• ISBN-13: 978-1416593324
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #105,300 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanist Founding Father of French Canada, December 8, 2008

By	Big Dave (Boise, Idaho) - See all my reviews

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This is a biography of epic cultural and geographic sweep. It entwines itself into the histories of France, England and North America, illuminating by countless fascinating details while never losing the thread of its larger narrative.

The subject is Samuel de Champlain (~1570 to 1635), soldier, explorer, colonizer, diplomat and leader of men. In recounting the facts and deeds of Champlain's life, Fischer finds a theme in Champlain's humanism, in his strong Christian piety with very little ecclesiology and in his dream of la Nouvelle France as the place where men would grow beyond the wars of religion that devastated the France of Champlain's youth. The facts alone are gripping (Champlain made dozens of voyages to North America, was an intimate of two French kings, fought corporate board battles as well as hostile Mohawks, made a fortune, gave it away, founded the city of Montreal, explored and mapped much of what is now eastern Canada and New England, etc., etc.) and Fischer's thematic thread gives it a very inspirational cast without ever flinching from Champlain's errors and weaknesses.

Part of the book's charm is in its incidental illumination of other historical personages (Henri IV of France, for instance, and Cardinal Richelieu). Also delightful is the detail of its minor, surprising episodes; for instance, the account of Champlain's 1609 battle with Montagnais, Huron and Algonquin allies against Mohawk foes, clad in wooden armor and marching in close formation, or Champlain's use of siege engines against an Onandaga fortress in 1615.

Fischer's prose is lucid and never distracting. The book is profusely illustrated with maps, sketches, paintings and photographs that together give the reader a very strong sense of having been a witness.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Massive, Rollicking Portrait Painted on a Vast Canvas, November 29, 2008

By	Daniel Bay Gibbons (Salt Lake City, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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David Hackett Fischer's new full-length biography of Samuel de Champlain is pure nectar to the serious reader of history. Full of life, vivid, entertaining, fascinating and full of insight, this is biography at its best. Painted on the vast canvas of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe and North America, we see a fully developed portrait of a fascinating and complex individual who played such a key role in the unfolding of North American culture and civilization.

This biography is worthy to stand beside the best of our generation: John Adams, The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1), The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932. Oddly, it also calls to mind the fictional work of Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1), The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) and The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3) by Neal Stephenson with its fascinating scope and historical detail.

Among the plethora of insights gleaned from Fischer is his description of the French quality of "prevoyance," which has no exact corrollary in English. Prevoyance is not so much the ability to foresee the future as the ability to prepare for the unexpected in a world of danger, complexity and uncertainty. Champlain is the prime example of the quality of "prevoyance," Fischer shows. We follow this prevoyant man from boyhood in the harbor towns of the Gulf of Saintonge in the Bay of Biscay, with its teeming, crowded ports full of people of all nations, where he is exposed to many different economies, cultures and languages. We accompany him later in his years of soldiering and participation in the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth century, then on the quasi-military exploring expeditions to the New World with Frobisher, where Champlain is deeply offended by the atrocities committed upon the native peoples (chronicled, by the way, in a series of remarkable paintings produced by Champlain and included in full color in this beautifully produced volume). Later, we follow Champlain in his adventures in Paris court of Henri IV, where Champlain held the title of "royal geographer" as he worked in the basement of the Louvre. And finally, we return over the Atlantic with Champlain where he takes up his lifework of building New France and founding the great French capitols of the New World.

This book amply testifies of the arrival of Fischer in the topmost rung of working biographers not only of our day but perhaps of the last century. He not only has the archivist's mastery of the vast corpus of source documents, but the rare talent to create a man out of the sources. Reading this book is as transporting and joyful an enterprise as reading a great novel. Worthy of five stars, and more!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Information-Packed, Laudatory History of Champlain's Founding of New France., February 19, 2009

By	mirasreviews (McLean, VA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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On the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain's founding of the first successful French colonies in North America, historian David Hackett Fischer takes on the sensitive subject of a European's dream for the New World. To create a New French nation that would be a tolerant, productive and improved version of Old France was not just Champlain's dream; it was his obsession. His persistence in the face of near-constant political and environmental obstacles and the degree to which he achieved harmony and integration with the Indian populations are extraordinary. "Champlain's Dream" attempts to reconstruct the life and values of this man who was a soldier, mariner, explorer, cartographer, writer, painter, ethnographer, naturalist, courtier, and, above all the Father of French Canada.

Remarkably, Champlain excelled at most of those things, yet we don't know what he looked like or have more than an inkling of his personal life. He wrote volumes about his voyages and observations of North America, enthusiastically promoting his vision for New France, so we are left to understand the man from what he said about the people and places around him. Fischer's diligence in describing the physical environment of his locations begins with Champlain's home town of Brouage in Saintonge, where he was born around 1570 to a haute bourgeois sea captain. This descriptive prose is a recurring feature, perhaps inspired by Champlain's tendency to do the same.

Champlain first visited the New World as an agent of King Henri IV, for whom he gathered information about New Spain. In 1600, he traveled the rivers of what is now Quebec to establish contact with the Indians and document the land, with a mind to establishing a settlement, the first attempt at which would be in Acadia in 1604. A great deal of detail is devoted to the rigors the colonists faced, the carefully-maintained relations with Indian tribes, and Champlain's exploratory voyages. Focus shifts back and forth from those activities in New France and Champlain and his sponsors' tireless efforts to secure trading monopolies and support from three successive monarchs in France: King Henri IV, Queen Regent Marie de Medici, and King Louis XIII.

Some readers will find the detail about European politics, Indian politics, and every person or place that Champlain met excessive. I appreciated the information, and I found Champlain's ability to avoid an endless cycle of retaliatory violence with the Indians particularly fascinating. I am more familiar with British-Indian relations, and my tendency has been to consider the European and Indian concepts of justice mutually exclusive, leaving all options either unconscionable or unfeasible when an incident occurs. But Champlain was able to find solutions that were acceptable to both cultures, even as the Europeans held to the concept of trial and punishment and the Indians to law of retribution. To me, this indicates that Champlain understood the Indians and was respected by them. It takes no small amount of intelligence and confidence to mediate such delicate situations, where emotions run high, and consequences can be dire.

David Hackett Fischer set out to find a middle path between hagiographers and debunkers with his study of Champlain. I don't think he quite succeeds, because he idolizes Champlain and expresses that too often. But Champlain accomplished a great deal, and "Champlain's Dream" is an information-packed account of his deeds. The man, himself, remains distant, but I suppose that's inevitable. The supplementary material is a treasure trove of information as well. The biography is followed by "Memories of Champlain", which discusses how his many biographers and critics have viewed Champlain through the centuries. There are 16 Appendixes, including an a chronology of voyages, views of Champlain's writing, viceroys and generals of New France, trading companies, Indian nations, ships and boats, and more. There are 16 pages of color plates and black-and-white illustrations throughout the book.