Near the center of this region, we followed the old D6 road as it veered past a copse of trees. Suddenly we came upon a walled town of very strange appearance. It was the object of our journey, and yet it took us by surprise. Rising before us was an old seaport that lies far from the sea. Its massive stone fortifications were once washed by the tide. Today they are a mile inland, surrounded by pastures and grazing cattle.
Four centuries ago, this little town was an important center of Atlantic trade. In the year 1581, a visitor from the rival port of La Rochelle described it as “without doubt the most beautiful harbor in France,” and one of the busiest. Today it is still a place of striking beauty, but its harbor has nearly disappeared. Broad streets that were built for commerce were empty when we walked there, and our footsteps echoed in the silence of an empty town. We climbed its stone battlements and found them carpeted with wild flowers, blooming abundantly in the bright Biscayan sun.
This is the town of Brouage, where Samuel de Champlain lived as a child. Its colorful history was the salty broth in which our hero was cooked.2
* * *
In the time of the Romans, the land around the present site of Brouage lay under water, submerged beneath the great gulf of Saintonge. The coast of France was nine miles away, on a ring of rising land to the east. As the gulf receded, it left a muddy mix of water and clay that was called broue. The lowlands that emerged from the sea were called brouage, which came to mean an area of mudflats and salt marsh.3
From an early date, villages began to rise on this new land, and one of them was also called Brouage. It was a small trading town, and its most valuable commodity was salt—a gift of the sea and the sun to the people of this region. Salt was mined from deposits in coastal marshes, and evaporated from brine in open pans. It was vital for the preservation of food, and so much in demand that it was called the “white gold” of medieval Europe. Salt also became important in another way. Monarchs were quick to discover that it could easily be taxed. The result was the hated gabelle, the infamous salt tax that became a major source of revenue for the old regime in France, and a leading cause of revolution in 1789.4
The salt of this region was known for its color, variety, quality, and price. The Île d’Oléron produced a white salt of great refinement, as “white as snow.” Périgord and Limousin yielded salt that was red or gray. Brouage had the most valuable commodity, a black salt that was favored on royal tables after François I made a gift of it to England’s Henry VIII. The black salt of Brouage looked very handsome in the beautiful gold salt vessels of the celebrated artist Benvenuto Cellini. In the rank-bound world of early modern Europe, salt became important in yet another way as an emblem of hierarchy. Those of lower rank were said to sit below the salt.5
All this was good for business in Brouage, and the salt trade expanded rapidly. As early as the fifteenth century, sailing charts began to mark the harbor of Brouage in red ink as a place of particular importance.6 Vessels large and small sailed to Brouage from many lands. In 1474, a fleet of twenty-six cogs arrived from the German city of Danzig (now the Polish Gdansk) and loaded salt for the Baltic herring industry.7 Then came the discovery of the North American fishing grounds, and salt was needed more urgently than ever. In 1525, the Norman port of Le Havre alone sent thirty-five vessels to buy salt at Brouage for the American fisheries. That trade brought great wealth to little ports along the gulf of Saintonge. Their prosperity appears in handsome old buildings that still survive.8
Ships that anchored in the harbor of Brouage made room to take on cargoes of salt by dumping piles of ballast stones at the water’s edge. In 1555 or thereabout a local entrepreneur named Jacques de Pons decided to rebuild the town on a foundation of discarded ballast stones. People called the place Jacqueville, or Jacopolis-sur-Brouage, or simply Brouage. Charles IX, king of France from 1560 to 1574, dredged a harbor deep enough for large ships. Italian military engineers, the best in the world, constructed ditches, ramparts, and watchtowers.9
The new Brouage was designed as a handsome Renaissance ville carrée, a perfectly square town just over four hundred yards to a side. It was also built as a place forte, fortified against attack by land and sea, with round bastions at every corner, a massive stone gate, and a double wooden drawbridge. The elegant fortifications that stand today were the work of many generations. They were begun before Champlain was born, improved throughout his youth, and massively rebuilt by Cardinal Richelieu in Champlain’s old age. Its approaches were expanded by great French military architects.10
Champlain witnessed much of this construction in his youth. A detailed manuscript map survives from about 1570, very near the time of his birth. It shows that Brouage was very much a work in progress when he lived there. Crenellated stone walls had been raised around part of the town; the rest was protected by a wood palisade improvised from old masts and fir planks.11 The setting was as handsome as it is today, but life was difficult for families who lived there. One visitor wrote in 1581, “This place seems to have been hard-won from the water, which covered the entire place, and even now during the great floods in winter, the streets and the lower floors of the houses are all full of water.”12
Brouage in a manuscript dated 1570, near the time of Champlain’s birth. The town was a work in progress, with half-finished walls and water-logged lots. But its marshes were crowded with saltworks, the harbor teemed with ships, and streets were lined with stone houses. His family’s home still stands on the rue Champlain.
Even so, money could be made in Brouage, and business was booming. By the time of Champlain’s birth, the town was packed with people. The land inside the walls was divided into very small building lots, some merely twenty-five feet wide by a hundred feet deep with an annual ground rent of 36 livres. On the 1570 map, every street was completely lined with stone-built private houses. Around the town, the surrounding marshes were divided into saltworks, each with its own pans and cottages for the free-spirited saulniers, who managed the marshland and brought the salt to town by boat. The map of 1570 shows a harbor crowded with large ships, flying the ensigns of many nations. Historian Natalie Fiquet wrote that the “town’s port was large and teeming: Scottish seacoal, Dutch tallow, cordage, herring, dry cod, iron and wood” were exchanged for barge-loads of wine, grain, and especially salt.13
Surviving records of trade describe an astonishing range of origins and destinations, even clearance papers from Brouage for Peru in the year 1570. Complex triangular and quadrilateral trades developed. One example was a voyage that began on April 26, 1602. The captain’s orders were to sail from Rouen to Brouage, take aboard a cargo of salt, proceed to the Gaspésie in America and barter the salt for cod, return to Spain and exchange the cod for a cargo of general merchandise, carry those goods to Marseilles and replace them with Mediterranean freight for Le Havre and Rouen, then back to Brouage once more.14
Brouage was a cosmopolitan town. A visitor described it as a “Babel where people speak twenty languages.” A few doors away from the home of the Champlain family is a small stone house that was built by a Dutchman. Its stone lintel still bears the inscription that he carved in his native tongue, when young Champlain was living on the same street:
1585
Wol Gode Betrout Die Heft Wolgebout
It might be translated, “He who puts his trust in God has built well,” or “Qui place sa confiance en Dieu a bien construit.” This near neighbor came from a distant land and spoke a different language, but he worshipped the same God and engaged in the same global commerce.15
The new town of Brouage was a bundle of paradoxes. It was a modern entrepôt on an ancient foundation, a small town but cosmopolitan, a fortified town but insecure. After the Protestant Reformation it was caught between warring Calvinists and Catholics. Jacques de Pons and his sons chose the Protestant side, as did most of Jacopolis. In 1559, Royal troops seized the town, and many of its inhabitants became Roman Catholic. Eleven years later it was besieged by Protestant troops from La
Rochelle, and the strife continued for many years.
Rivalries of trade reinforced conflicts of religion. The people of La Rochelle thought of Brouage as their competitor and seized an opportunity to destroy a rival port. In 1586, the Rochelais sent twenty-one barges filled with sand and rock in an attempt to block the channel that led to Brouage. The port never fully recovered from this blow. Its harbor slowly filled with silt, and the expanding salt marshes that had been the source of the town’s prosperity became a factor in its decline. After Cardinal Richelieu defeated the Protestants of La Rochelle in 1628, the Catholic rulers of France made Brouage into a garrison town. They reinforced its walls, and added an arsenal and barracks to control this restless region. Its inhabitants looked with hope to the sea—and with deep suspicion toward their rulers in Paris.16
In the midst of this turmoil, Champlain lived his formative years. Like many men of action in the early modern era, the evidence of his early life is lost in obscurity. We have no record of his baptism, perhaps because a fire in the late seventeenth century burned some of the records of Brouage, or because he was baptized in the Protestant Church, or for other reasons as we shall see. We cannot be certain that he was born in Brouage, but he was raised in this town, and he presented himself to the world as “Samuel Champlain, of Brouage.”17
The stone battlements and lanterns of Brouage were begun in Champlain’s time and rebuilt by Richelieu and others. Today small canals and ponds are all that remain of its once busy harbor.
Champlain was born around the year 1570. A local antiquarian wrote in the nineteenth century that his date of birth was 1567. A modern historian has argued that he was born as late as 1580. A close look at clues that Champlain scattered through his writings (four sets of clues in particular) indicates that the earliest suggested date is improbable and the later date is impossible. The best estimate is about 1570, for reasons discussed in the first appendix to this book.18
We know next to nothing about Champlain’s mother. Her name later appeared in Samuel de Champlain’s marriage contract as Margueritte Le Roy. The local antiquarian wrote that she came from a family of fishermen, but we have no other evidence one way or the other. Margueritte Le Roy had a sister who also lived in Brouage, married a sea captain there, and had relatives in La Rochelle. For many years this was all that historians knew about Margueritte Le Roy Champlain. More recently, American genealogists have turned up information about the Le Roy family in La Rochelle and nearby towns. Some were prosperous lawyers and merchants with country estates and a coat of arms that they shared with other Le Roys in Niort and Poitiers. These Rochelais Le Roys were mostly Huguenots. Many would migrate to the Netherlands, England, and America in the French Protestant diaspora that contributed an important population to the United States. Probably Champlain’s mother had relatives in fishing ports and trading towns throughout the region.19
Champlain’s father left more traces. His name was spelled creatively in several records as Anthoyne Chapellin and in his own legible hand as Anthine Chappelain. Other legal documents called him Anthoine de Complain or Antoine de Champlain.20 If we study these scattered sources in a systematic way and order them in time, an interesting pattern begins to emerge. They describe the arc of a career that reveals many things about this family. According to the memory of a local scholar, Antoine de Champlain, like Marguerite Le Roy, was descended from families of fishing folk. He earned his living from the sea, and scattered pieces of archival evidence show him working his way up. A document in 1573 identified him as a pilotte de navires, a pilot of large ships. Pilotte had a particular meaning in the sixteenth century. A maritime historian writes that in this period “all pilots came from the ranks of the able-bodied sailors” and had an elementary education. They learned to manage a ship by long experience before the mast, and they had schooling enough to read and write, and to master the “art of navigation” both at sea and in coastal waters. A pilot was perceived to be an artisan, and he lived “from day to day” on his wages. It was written in the mid-sixteenth century that “most of the pilots are married and they have a house and a wife and children and family, and it takes everything they earn to provide for them.”21
This appears to have been Antoine Champlain’s condition when Samuel Champlain was an infant. In the years that followed, Antoine moved upward from pilot to the rank of master. This advance increased his salary and improved the status of his family. More than that, he became “the administrator of all the economic resources on board the ship, and that gave him extra income…. Whoever acceded to the charge of master crossed the frontier that separated salaried workers from those who handled and administered capital.”22
Then Antoine Champlain moved up again, from master to the rank of captain. A later record identifies him as capitaine de navires, a commander of large ships who stood high above the condition of a pilot or master. This title was also a quasi-military rank. A man who held it was expected to lead in time of war or mortal danger. A captain of a large ship was regarded as a man of honor and was treated as a gentleman, even if he came from humble origins.23 Antoine also went up another step, and received a commission from Henri IV as a naval captain. His son later described him as captain in the King’s Marine, and called him Antoine de Complain, with the particule de noblesse, a mark of distinction though not usually of nobility.
At the same time Antoine was also getting ahead in yet another way. He became a shipowner, buying small shares in several vessels, as even large investors did, to spread the risk in a dangerous business. This put him on yet another level and took his family to a different place. Owners were the men who hired the crew and employed the officers of their ships. They acquired the cargo and took the lion’s share of the profit. Owners were called “ship lords” by seamen and officers. When an owner went to sea, he had the best accommodations on board. The officers deferred to him. Even the captain who had command authority, the master who sailed the ship, and the pilot who was skilled in seamanship and navigation, gave way before a “ship lord.”24
These few legal documents tell us that Antoine de Champlain succeeded in rising from humble beginnings to high rank in maritime France. He also did well in another way, increasing his income from investments in ships and voyages. Samuel de Champlain always wrote of him with pride and respect. In Brouage, Antoine de Champlain became a man of property. The Champlain family moved to one of the larger houses in the town. They also acquired a second house, and then a third. They were not of the nobility, and their houses were nothing like the home of Christophe Depoy, sieur d’Aguerres and governor of Brouage, whose estate occupied a corner of the town, with its own gardens, fountains, and a fine view of the harbor.25 The Champlain’s were not of Depoy’s rank but they were prosperous and flourishing. Others in the family were getting ahead in the same way. An uncle from Marseille also rose through the maritime ranks to become a man of property. Their cousins in La Rochelle were doing well too. All his life, even in very hard times, Samuel de Champlain had an optimistic way of thinking about the world, an attitude that comes easily to people whose families have been moving up, especially in their childhood.
Always at the center of Champlain’s life was his Christian faith. It appeared in his youthful writings as early as 1599, grew stronger through time, and became the passion of his old age. In difficult moments, it was the source of his inner strength. The roots of Champlain’s religion are lost in obscurity. His Catholic biographer N.-E. Dionne writes, “We know practically nothing of Champlain’s years in one of the most troubled periods in the history of France, that of the wars of religion.” We do not know with certainty if his family was Protestant or Catholic. The sources are not conclusive, but they offer many clues.
The first clue appears in his name, and the names of his parents. Samuel de Champlain was named for a hero of the Old Testament. The biblical Samuel was the first of the great Hebrew prophets, an upright judge of Israel known for his stern integrity. Samuel believed deeply in one God and th
e rule of law. He fought the Philistines, denounced false priests, and ordered the people of Israel to “put away strange Gods.” He also refused to take bribes, and did not hesitate to stand against men in power when they went against the law.26
Samuel’s combination of virtues appealed to Protestants in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Among English Puritans, one study finds that Samuel was the third most popular name for boys, exceeded only by John and Joseph. It was less common in high Anglican households, and rare among Roman Catholics. Champlain’s forename strongly suggests that he was baptized as a Protestant.27
Other clues appear in the names of his parents. Antoine and Margueritte Champlain were named after Catholic saints. The ascetic St. Anthony and the martyred St. Margaret were favorite namesakes among Roman Catholics, but rare among Protestants. Taken together, the evidence of names tells us that Champlain’s grandparents were probably Roman Catholic and baptized their children in a Catholic church. His parents likely became Protestants before 1570 and baptized their son in a Calvinist meetinghouse, perhaps the Huguenot “temple” that was known to have existed in Brouage at the time of his birth.28
More clues emerge from the history of the region where Champlain was raised. In the sixteenth century it was one of the most Protestant areas in France. Most towns granted to Protestants under the Edict of Nantes in 1589 were in the center-west of France, from La Rochelle south to the Gironde estuary.29 The greatest concentration was in the area around Brouage. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the coastal region near Brouage was said to be almost depopulated by the emigration of Huguenots for Britain and America. In Brouage today, an old forge still has graffiti that were carved into its walls by Protestants who were confined there later, when they tried to leave France in search of soul-freedom.30
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