Companions Of Champlain

The stories of the companions of Samuel de Champlain, the families who lives, worked, survived, and endured life at an isolated trading post in the strange New World-- these stories add flesh to the dry bones of the history of the seventeenth-century Age of Exploration.

This biography tells the remarkable story of Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer who founded Quebec and New France in the early 17th century. Born into a family of sailors, Champlain made between 21 and 29 trips across the Atlantic Ocean, exploring and mapping North America's coasts and waterways. He formed deep relationships with local tribes and learned their languages, publishing accounts of his ethnographic observations. Champlain oversaw the growth of New France and established trading companies, sending goods to France. Today, his legacy lives on in the many places and structures named after him in northeastern North America.

French-Canadian explorers, traders, and soldiers feature prominently in this country's storytelling, but little has been written about their female counterparts. In Along a River, award-winning historian Jan Noel shines a light on the lives of remarkable French-Canadian women — immigrant brides, nuns, tradeswomen, farmers, governors' wives, and even smugglers — during the period between the settlement of the St. Lawrence Lowlands and the Victorian era. Along a River builds the case that inside the cabins that stretched for miles along the shoreline, most early French-Canadian women retained old fashioned forms of economic production and customary rights over land ownership. Noel demonstrates how this continued even as the world changed around them by comparing their lives to those of their contemporaries in France, England, and New England.Exploring how the daughters and granddaughters of the filles du roi adapted to their terrain, turned their hands to trade, and even acquired surprising influence at the French court, Along a River is an innovative and engagingly written history.

Reproduction of the original: Voyages of Samuel de Champlain by Samuel de Champlain