What I particularly enjoy about David Hackett Fischer’s books is that he is a practitioner of what I like to call “thick history”. On the one hand, he is a throwback to older generations of historians who wrote history as the acts of remarkable individuals – heroes. The Samuel de Champlain who emerges from the pages of this book is definitely that. At the same time, Fischer is informed by the broad range of developments in the practice and writing of history that emerged during the course of the twentieth century: the new social history, ethnography, economic history, and so on. Whatever his topic, he has an eye for the role of folkways, of speech patterns, and styles of architecture in recovering the past. On top of this, he is unabashed in his devotion to what some feel is an irreconcilable pair of opposites, “the study of the past on its own terms and at the same time [to] link it with the present” (p. 567).
The “dream” at the core of this book is Champlain’s humanistic vision of a world of tolerance and cooperation in the North American forest, as different as possible from the world of cruelty and religious intolerance into which he was born in France. An early assignment as an intelligence agent (= “spy”) in New Spain showed him one possible way of dealing with the native populations of the western hemisphere, and it appalled him. From his first voyage along the St. Lawrence River, his approach was unusual. He was vitally interested in the native population. While there were aspects of their lives that met with his disapproval, there was much more that he found to admire. In return, the natives experienced in Champlain a man unlike many of those they would encounter: a man who listened, who sought to understand, and one who kept his word. He was not the only one, but there were too few like him.
There is a sense of tragedy in the account, not only in the tale of a man whose devotion to his goal and his manifold skills in pursuing it enabled him to overcome many obstacles and reversals, both in the New World and back home in the Old. More than that, there is the sense of a missed opportunity, a sense that Champlain’s dream died with him. Yet this reader was left wondering what chance the dream had of fulfilment. Champlain avoided violence against the native inhabitants, certainly laudable, yet the diseases carried by the settlers he imported proved as deadly as any weapons he could have wielded. He had the fortune of dying of a stroke before epidemics ravaged the Huron nation. What were the real prospects for the achievement of his dream, even had his masters back home, Louis XIII and Richelieu, subscribed to it? Of course we cannot know. Nevertheless it remains incontestable that Champlain accomplished much; more important than the amount of his achievement or its permanence, however, was the way he achieved what he did. The age in which he lived would have made it easier for him to act very differently than he did – less honorably, less peaceably, less tolerantly. What I felt ennobling in reading this book was that, by doing things in the way he did, Champlain met with more success than those who employed more conventional methods.
Symptomatic of the thoroughness of Fischer’s approach is a section he wedges between the final chapter of his text and the sixteen appendices that follow, entitled Memories of Champlain. In it, he surveys the historiography of Champlain over four centuries. He shows a virtuostic mastery of the material; more than that, a magnanimous spirit that values the achievement of various schools and tendencies, even those with which he disagrees. In this way, Fischer is not unlike Champlain.
Highly recommended. ( )

I haven't read any other biographies of Champlain, perhaps the author is retreading well trod ground, but he does an admirable job of showing Champlain's outstanding, even heroic character: his long separation from wife and family, his devotion to king and country despite his religious differences, his compassion over the condition of the native people he encountered that could easily have turned into prejudice and intolerance. The author also puts Champlain into context with the other Frenchmen who have entered the historical record of North American exploration. ( )

Terrific read on an historical person.

A vivid portrayal of this time, I felt like I was with the explorers seeing North America wilderness for the first time, meeting tribes of Indians. And meeting this extraordinary man who brought it aĺl off. ( )

Fascinating ( )