A 1574 baptismal record from a Protestant temple suggests Samuel de Champlain, from Brouage in Aunis, was younger than long believed and born Protestant in a France torn by the Wars of Religion. Trained in navigation and drafting by a family of mariners, he handled supplies for Henry IV, reported on a two-year voyage to the West Indies and Mexico, and gained a royal pension plus an uncle’s estate including a 150-ton ship. On Pierre Dugua’s Acadia venture from 1604, half the men died of scurvy on St. Croix Island before the move to Port Royal, and Champlain charted the coast to Cape Cod.
In 1608 he founded Quebec at a narrowing of the St. Lawrence, foiled locksmith Jean Duval’s plot to kill him and sell the post to Basque or Spanish ships, and displayed Duval’s head on a pike. Allied with the Wendat, Algonquin and Innu, he killed two Haudenosaunee chiefs with one arquebus shot in 1609 near Lake Champlain, but took two arrows in the leg in 1615. In 1629 David Kirke’s privateers forced Quebec to surrender after Champlain’s bluff, backed by 50 pounds of gunpowder, ran out. The 1632 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye returned Quebec, and he died there on Christmas Day 1635.
- Skirmishes with the Nauset on Cape Cod led him to name the area for its bad sandbar and decline to settle.
- In 1610, at 36, he married 12-year-old Hélène Boullé, whose father carried out royal decisions at court.
- He adopted three Montagnais girls and named them Faith, Hope and Charity.
- After getting lost for three days on a deer hunt, he wintered among the Wendat and wrote about their society.
- A cousin overturned his will, and his grave, in a chapel that burned in 1640, has never been found.
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