December 31, 2008     Reported By: Tom Porter

2008 was a year for North America's French-speaking population, including those in Maine, to celebrate.  It's the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec by Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer and writer who arguably did more than anyone to establish a French presence in North America.  He made at least 27 Atlantic crossings, and between 1603 and 1616 he traveled through the St. Lawrence River valley in search of the elusive Northwest passage.  Lake Champlain, which borders Vermont, New York and Quebec, was named for him in 1609.  To commemorate his travels, the University of Maine's Canadian Studies Center has released a narrative map, retracing the steps of Champlain.

The 5 foot by 3 foot map, which took a year to complete, was developed by the Center's senior cartographer Michael Hermann.  "All we know of Champlain is what was written by him, and to a lesser extent what was written about him by his contemporaries.  There aren't even any portraits of him to make judgments from.  So I think for us what resonated with us as we read his journals, as fellow mapmakers and geographers, really was just his core curiosity, his thirst for exploration that continually drove him to see what was around the next corner."

"The map is one large poster.. it's 40 inches high and about 5 feet long," says Ohio University geography professor Margaret Pearce, who also worked on the project.  "What we've done is we've created one main map through the center of this poster that compiles all seven of Champlain's journeys between 1603 and 1616, with stories along the way so you can see all of them at once, and see that the path that he took is actually rather a narrow path through that broad expanse of land from the Gaspe peninsula in the east all the way to the Georgian Bay and down into Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes."

The bilingual map, which is English on one side and French on the other, aims to help students keep track of Champlain's progress year-by-year.  Pearce and Herman created five insets at places of particular intererst.  But Pearce says these are no ordinary insets.

"Instead of what you would conventionally do with an historical map which is to take that place and make one large inset showing the details of that place, as you would normally expect to find on a map.  We found that too limiting because we had many years of stories to tell at that particular place, so what we did was we created these sequential panels through the insets that allows stories to unfold over time, so that was a pretty exciting element of the map for us."

This is the opening sequence of 6 panels (of a total of 37) which set the stage for one of Champlain's most compelling stories: that of his compatriot Nicholas de Vignau, whom Champlain introduces as an 'imposter'. This series illustrates the narrative aspect of the project, where the reader is provided with multiple voices: the cartographers, Champlain, and Natives, each with their own typography. Color is used to illustrate the drama and tensions of the moment: as the story gets darker, the hues in the maps shift to a darker palette.

"You read this map more akin to the way you'd read a book," says Michael Herman.  He says the map was created using a variety of sources, including the explorer's own extensive writings, plus up-to-date research about the native tribes he interacted with.
The aim:  to bring Champlain's journeys alive for the reader.  "I think it really challenges people, when they see it they're drawn into it in a way that they haven't been drawn into maps before.  So in some cases, I mean, we call it a map because essentially it can be defined as a map, but I think people are finding it to be much more than that and they're treating it more as a book."

Born in the small French seaport of Brouage, around 1567, Samuel de Champlain came of age during one of the most violent eras in history:  the French religious wars, during which as many as 4 million people died.  That's a quarter of the population. As a young man Champlain was a soldier, and some historians have concluded that the horrors he witnessed during these times turned him against intolerance and cruelty.  He joined a growing circle of French humanists, led by King Henri the 4th, who encouraged Champlain to explore the New World. 

Pulltizer prize-winning historian and biographer David Hackett Fischer, says that while Champlain was no saint, his experiences made him much more enlightened and humane than many other colonizers, who routinely subjugated the native cultures they encountered.  "The critical word was co-habitation, very different from what happened in most of the English colonies and in New Spain as well.  And what he did was to form alliances, I think with more than 50 Indian nations."

Much of Champlain's success depended on promises between himself and Natives. This is the closing panel in the Tadoussac Stories series (a total of 27) where Champlain is summarizing the summer of 1610. His mental map of the area has expanded greatly, and he wants to see both the Inland Sea (James and Hudson Bay) to the north, and the great lakes he has heard of to the west. He has made promises with two tribes, and uses a metaphor to describe his plans "Hence I had two strings to my bow, and if one failed the other might stay taught."  The maps show a partial view of the geographies in question, and center on the region between Quebec and Montreal which serves as Champlain's gateway west. Two maps of James Bay anchor each side, in glowing yellow and orange, to represent Champlain's dream of reaching that "inland sea."

Champlain left his mark clearly here in Maine.  He was the first European to produce detailed maps of the Maine coast, and in 1604 he gave Mount Desert Island its name.  But, says Fischer, Champlain's legacy extends well beyond the shores of New England.  "He planted three Francophone cultures in North America:  Quebecois, Acadien, and the Metis.  And all of them were very distinct, one from another; they had different dialects of French. Those three cultures now number their descendants in the millions. They are his most enduring legacy."

The narrative map, entitled, "They Would Not Take Me There: People, Places and Stories from Champlain's travels in Canada, 1603-1616," is produced by the Universirty of Maine's Canadian-American center, and is available via its website, www.umaine.edu/canam.