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Updated: June 28, 2025
There are still to be seen, several feet below the surface, rings to which mariners and fishermen moored their boats they who used to come to Brouage for salt with which to cure their fish, they whose stories of the Newfoundland cod-banks stirred in the boy Champlain the desire for discovery beyond their fogs.
Again the fireflies light the meadow altar of Maisonneuve at Montreal on its birth- night. Again the gray gowns and the black, Le Caron, Brebeuf, Jogues, and Gamier, enter upon their glorious toils, their bare and sandalled feet, accustomed to the smooth walks of the convents of Brouage and Rheims and Paris, begin to climb the rough paths to the west, ad majorem Dei gloriam.
Samuel de Champlain du Brouage, born in 1567, a faithful soldier of the king's so long as the war lasted, was unable to endure the indolence of peace.
These letters informed me that, since my departure from Court, God had dealt favourably with my brother, and enabled him to acquit himself of the command of the army confided to him, greatly to the benefit of the King's service; so that he had taken all the towns and driven the Huguenots out of the provinces, agreeably to the design for which the army was raised; that he had returned to the Court at Poitiers, where the King stayed during the siege of Brouage, to be near to M. de Mayenne, in order to afford him whatever succours he stood in need of; that, as the Court is a Proteus, forever putting on a new face, he had found it entirely changed, so that he had been no more considered than if he had done the King no service whatever; and that Bussi, who had been so graciously looked upon before and during this last war, had done great personal service, and had lost a brother at the storming of Issoire, was very coolly received, and even as maliciously persecuted as in the time of Le Guast; in consequence of which either he or Bussi experienced some indignity or other.
There was a trait of restlessness that would not down, and in 1616 the little shop again put up its shutters. Hebert had joined Champlain in the Brouage navigator's first voyage to the St Lawrence. This time the apothecary burned his bridges behind him, for he took his family along, and with them all his worldly effects. The family consisted of his wife, two daughters, and a young son.
The King and the Queen my mother set out for Poitiers, to be near the army of M. de Mayenne, then besieging Brouage, which place being reduced, it was intended to march into Gascony and attack the King my husband. My brother had the command of another army, ordered to besiege Issoire and some other towns, which he soon after took.
It was a bitter disappointment when, in 1629, he was carried away by the English from his infant mission to spend his latter days far from his savage converts, perhaps in his whitewashed cell in the convent of Brouage, and to administer before an altar where it was not necessary to have neophytes wave green boughs to drive off the mosquitoes those pestiferous insects from whose persecutions a brother Recollet said he suffered his "worst martyrdom" in America.
Before long the English could not harbor a doubt but that the king's army had recovered its real heads: a grand expedition was preparing to attack them in the Island of Re, and the cardinal had gone in person to Oleron and to Le Brouage in order to see to the embarkation of the troops.
In short, Champlain by birth was neither a peasant nor a noble, but issued from a middle-class family; and his eyes turned towards the sea because his father was a mariner dwelling in the small seaport of Brouage. Thus when a boy Champlain doubtless had lessons in navigation, but he did not become a sailor in the larger sense until he had first been a soldier.
Champlain was born in 1567 at the seaport of Brouage, on the Bay of Biscay, so that he was only thirty-six years of age when he set out on his first voyage to America. His forbears belonged to the lesser gentry of Saintonge, and from them he inherited a roving strain.
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