Champlain's Dream | 
 enlarge | Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
Buy New: $24.13
You Save: $15.87 (40%)
New (41) Used (11) Collectible (2) from $23.95
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 793
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 848
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.8
ISBN: 1416593322
Dewey Decimal Number: 971.0113092
EAN: 9781416593324
ASIN: 1416593322
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In this sweeping, enthralling biography, acclaimed historian David Hackett Fischer brings to life the remarkable Samuel de Champlain -- soldier, spy, master mariner, explorer, cartographer, artist, and Father of New France.Born on France's Atlantic coast, Champlain grew to manhood in a country riven by religious warfare. The historical record is unclear on whether Champlain was baptized Protestant or Catholic, but he fought in France's religious wars for the man who would become Henri IV, one of France's greatest kings, and like Henri, he was religiously tolerant in an age of murderous sectarianism. Champlain was also a brilliant navigator. He went to sea as a boy and over time acquired the skills that allowed him to make twenty-seven Atlantic crossings without losing a ship. But we remember Champlain mainly as a great explorer. On foot and by ship and canoe, he traveled through what are now six Canadian provinces and five American states. Over more than thirty years he founded, colonized, and administered French settlements in North America. Sailing frequently between France and Canada, he maneuvered through court intrigue in Paris and negotiated among more than a dozen Indian nations in North America to establish New France. Champlain had early support from Henri IV and later Louis XIII, but the Queen Regent Marie de Medici and Cardinal Richelieu opposed his efforts. Despite much resistance and many defeats, Champlain, by his astonishing dedication and stamina, finally established France's New World colony. He tried constantly to maintain peace among Indian nations that were sometimes at war with one another, but when he had to, he took up arms and forcefully imposed a new balance of power, proving himself a formidable strategist and warrior. Throughout his three decades in North America, Champlain remained committed to a remarkable vision, a Grand Design for France's colony. He encouraged intermarriage among the French colonists and the natives, and he insisted on tolerance for Protestants. He was a visionary leader, especially when compared to his English and Spanish contemporaries -- a man who dreamed of humanity and peace in a world of cruelty and violence. This superb biography, the first in decades, is as dramatic and exciting as the life it portrays. Deeply researched, it is illustrated throughout with many contemporary images and maps, including several drawn by Champlain himself.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Fischer Continuing His Award Winning Writing December 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
David Hackett Fischer, previous winner for his writings on American History, continues his winning ways with this book about the early French explorer of early post-Colombian America. This book is a window into a little examined or understood period in the discovery of America. I highly recommend this book.
 Exhaustive and valuable hagiography November 30, 2008
This authoritative and often engaging biography of a figure today who is relatively little known, French explorer Samuel de Champlain, would translate into a wonderful Hollywood film, with the protagonist shooting rapids in a birchbark canoe, hunting with the Algonquin, Huron and Montagnais Indians and accompanying them on war parties against the Iroquois tribes and then returning to France to conduct a different kind of warfare in the courts of Henri IV and Louis XIII in hopes of expanding his beloved New France on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.
Of course, the author has another goal in mind. Eminent historian David Hackett Fischer's goal (or one of them) is to salvage Champlain's reputation. The seaman and explorer, he insists, was not among those who wantonly wreaked havoc on native religions, cultures, economic and political organizations as did the Spanish through Central and South America and later arrivals everywhere from the St. Lawrence down to the coast of Florida. Rather, Fischer insists and largely demonstrates, Champlain was a different breed, a man for whom shared humanity and mutual respect mattered more than the differences between the Europeans and the Indians.
Fischer proves his point to a great degree, but in doing so he distorts the narrative in ways that undermine the book's utility as a biography. Early on, he is prone to sweeping statements about Champlain and his environment for which there appears to be little evidence (or at least, nothing that is cited.) Just one example "He was not a man who would have been content to remain in the rear echelon." That may be true, given his later adventures, but early on in the narrative, we are being asked to take the biographer's word for this and other such sweeping statements on Champlain's character.
Over and over and over, Fischer tells us how fascinated Champlain was by the lives of the many different tribes he encountered. In many of those cases, the evidence speaks for itself, and the repeated editorialization becomes tedious in the same way that an old man recounting the same war story at every family gathering over decades becomes a bore over time.
At times, Fischer's obvious affection for and defense of Champlain does seem to cross the line from biography to hagiography. A key issue is Champlain's response to the tortures to which his Huron and Algonquin allies subjected their Iroquois captives. He deplored it, but almost never intervened. Here Fischer seems to want to have and eat his cake, simultaneously. Should Champlain have intervened more forcibly? By contemporary Western standards, certainly. But from the native perspective, it would have been (and may still be viewed as) an unwarranted intrusion by a Westerner into their time-honored traditions. How to dispose of this tricky issue? Fischer makes a vague gesture in the direction of mentioning Indian spiritual practices and the role torture may have played in this (without giving the reader enough of a context to understand this fully or judge). This emerges on a broader scale when Fischer deals with Champlain's judgment of the Indians as having "ni foi, ni loi, ni roi" -- neither faith, law or kin -- and doesn't question in any meaningful way that conclusion, on which Champlain based most of his broader ideals and policy. I suspect that those who have studied the belief systems of the Iroquois and other tribes would differ with this analysis and argue that simply because the faith, systems of law or governance could not be understood by Champlain does not mean they didn't exist.
Those flaws aside, this book is an admirable accomplishment and will be of great interest to anyone interested in the earliest systematic voyages of exploration by Europeans in North America, those which led directly to the earliest settlements from Quebec southward to Florida. Yes, Champlain's discoveries largely revolved around geographical territory that is now Canada, but his voyages took him to New Spain and he explored the coasts of Maine and Massachussets in the earliest days. His detailed observations of the lands he encountered were some of the most systematic and analytical to reach Europe, and weren't filtered through the prism of religion or economic opportunity.
Highly recommended for anyone who isn't worried by the author's unabashed partiality for his subject. Anyone interested in learning about the later clashes between the settlers that Champlain and his heirs introduced to New France -- later known as 'pure laine' (literally pure wool) Quebeckers -- should turn to the lively polemic by Mordecai Richler that tackles the legacy of the Quebec myths and reality in the 20th century and onward. Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country
Massive, Rollicking Portrait Painted on a Vast Canvas November 29, 2008
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!
The Father of New France November 18, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This year - 2008 - marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec or New France, as it was called then. There is an exhibition in Quebec commemorating the founding called Champlain's Dream, appropriately named after this book, an excellent biography of the founding father. David Hackett Fischer is an historian who, though not exactly popular, is widely read outside academia. His most famous work is Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History), a very interesting study of the American appropriation of certain Britsh subcultures during the 17th century (Puritan, Scots-Irish, etc.) In the present work he tells the story of Samuel de Champlain and his attempts to create an enlightened New France. Champlain was a polymath: a soldier, a sailor, cartographer, ethnographer, naturalist, artist, writer, and political leader. It could be said that he was a Renaissance Man who was well on his to becoming a man of the Enlightenment.
Champlain was born in the "cosmopolitan town" of Brouage on the west coast of France. He was born into a wealthy Protestant merchant family and lived at peace with Catholics, even during the religious wars. He had learned tolerance growing up in this milieu. French king Henri IV, with whom the family had ties, was also a Prostestant and favored religious tolerance. It was not until the invasion of France by Spanish Catholic extremists that both Champlain and Henri IV were forced to convert to Catholicism. Their new faith was not dogmatic but rather a Christian humanism that was receptive to new ideas and the pursuit of knowledge in order to better serve God.
The second most influential event in Champlain's early life was the opportunity to accompany a Spanish fleet to New Spain. There he witnessed firsthand the cruelty with which the Spanish treated the Indian population. He was determined that New France would treat its subjects with more dignity and respect.
It was in 1608 - 400 hundred years ago - that he was recruited by Henri IV - due to his considerable polymathic talents - to explore the waterways of the St. Lawrence and establish the colony of New France. He quickly established ties with the local tribes: the Montagnais, the Algonquin, and the Huron. This, however, incurred the wrath of the enemies of those tribes: the Iroquois League. There were numerous battles between the French and the Indians in which Champlain participated. Fischer's account of Champlain's arquebus (primitive shotgun) is very good. It was a muzzle-loaded hand-cannon that scared the daylights out of the Iroquois. Champlain was more interested in scaring them off than conquering them.
Although Champlain was tolerant and humane for a person of his place and time, he was still a colonialist who demanded that the Indians become Christians and that they submit to the French political system. Champlain's dream of bringing Enlightenment values to the New World failed because Enlightenment never completely took hold in France, nor had he himself completely accepted them.
History Like It Ought to Be October 31, 2008
17 out of 22 found this review helpful
I appreciate his narrative style, without an agenda or ax to grind. This history is not for the ideological nor the squeamish. It's one of those books that you don't want to end. It made me wish I could have seen North America as Champlain did--wild, fertile, a truly New World. Highly recommended. Also recommended by the author: Washington's Crossing.
|
|
|
