SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN was the first
explorer to make a detailed examination of the coast of New England and
Nova Scotia and to prepare a full and accurate report of his observations.
To him, likewise, we are indebted for our earliest exact accounts of the
Indians of New England, eastern Canada and New York. To the Canadian he
is more than the explorer and the acute observer of the native life; he
is the founder of New France and at the same time the chief of its early
historians. To the student of history today, in addition to all this, he
stands forth as perhaps the ablest of the earlier makers of America, a
leader of indefatigable energy and sterling character, a Frenchman who
devoted his life to extending the name and power of France and the civilizing
influences of the Church. His fame is impregnably established and grows
with the lapse of time and the extension of knowledge of his work. . .
. If we compare him with the other explorers and founders of that age he
stands above them all in the range of his achievement. The explorations
of De Soto and Coronado surpass those of Champlain in the extent of territory
covered and in magnitude, but the results fall short of his in accuracy
of detail and in permanent positive contribution to knowledge. The figure
of La Salle is more brilliant on the page of the historian, but he was
inferior to Champlain as a leader, and, like De Soto and Coronado, he ranks
as an explorer only; Champlain, on the other hand, was not only an explorer
who "threw light into the dark places of American geography and brought
order out of chaos of American cartography," [Parkman] he was also the
historian of his expeditions and of the early days of Quebec, and in addition
to that the most indefatigable promoter of French colonization and the
first French writer to discuss the principles of colonial policy. In France,
he undertook the work to which Raleigh and Hakluyt in England devoted themselves
with such assiduity. Of the English explorers who were also writers, Captain
John Smith has attained the widest celebrity. That his explorations should
rank with Champlain’s will hardly be pretended by his most enthusiastic
admirers. On the other hand, his writings are too full of the air of romance,
if not of its substance, for him to be taken as a serious historian of
his own career; and his services as an administrator in Virginia, considerable
as they were, extended over too short a time to rival Champlain’s at Quebec.
Of English founders and governors of colonies who have also recorded the
history of such beginnings, William Bradford and John Winthrop unquestionably
stand first in this period, and a comparison of their work with that of
"The Father of New France" suggests itself. In literary quality Bradford’s
History of Plimouth Plantation surpasses anything that Champlain wrote,
and the community over which Winthrop presided so many years and whose
story he told with such candor has played a far larger part in American
history and life than fell to the fortune of the people of New France,
yet the outlook and range of Champlain’s achievements are far more comprehensive
than those of either Bradford or Winthrop. Neither of them was an explorer,
nor did either become a sympathetic and observing student of Indian life.
Thus, in some one or two of the many fields of his activity, others have
surpassed Champlain, but no other Frenchman and no Spaniard or Englishman
has attained his high level and wide range. His fame is steadily increasing,
and the two races who dwell in the scene of his labors, however antagonistic
in other things, unite in a friendly rivalry in rendering homage to his
name.
--from Introduction by Edward
Gaylord Bourne