The reader below holds the 1878
translation of the 1613 Voyages, and in it are eleven leaves describing a lake he had been on
for about a week. This page takes every measurable claim in that passage and sets it beside the
lake as it is. How accurate each figure is depends on
where he states he got it.
He is careful about that: say
eighty leagues, as I judge twenty-five, as the people told me eight feet, I saw
five.
The book itself, opened at the leaf where his account of the lake begins. Leaf 309 is the second leaf
of the chapter in which he comes down the river of the Iroquois and finds the lake. Drag a corner
or use the arrows to turn it, search the whole book from the box, and open the contents for the
rest of the volume. Every quotation on this page carries the leaf it was taken from; clicking that
leaf turns the book to it here. The reader also stands on its own at
Champlain’s Voyages, 1878.
Champlain's stated distances in kilometers, against the surveyed figures. Amber is his figure;
blue is the modern one. Each of his is a range rather than a point, because the league is not a
fixed unit — the conversion spans the lieue commune at 4.4448 km (2.76 miles) and the lieue
marine at 5.556 km (3.45 miles), both plausible for a French navigator in 1613. Picking one would
invent a precision the source has not got.
The four distances he gave in leagues
Three observations
The voyage itself
Five weeks, Quebec to a cape on the western shore of this lake and most of the way
back, in a little over two minutes. Every caption is his own sentence, with the leaf it sits on —
click it and the reader above turns to the page. The positions are an interpretation: he gives no
latitude and no bearing anywhere on the route, so this is his account laid onto the water.
▶ RUN THE VOYAGE
NAMES
NARRATOR
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—
What the marks are. Gold is Champlain. Blue is the war party — a shallop
with his own men in it as far as the fall at Chambly, and canoes after that, one mark to a canoe.
Gray marks turning north are the ones who went home: a part of the alliance at the mouth of the
Richelieu, and then his own shallop, his pilot and nine men at the fall. Cranberry is the Iroquois
party at the cape, and the three larger marks in front of it are the chiefs he was told to kill.
At the cape, watch the shoreline. They lie on the water off the point through the night,
two canoes cross in the dark to ask whether the Iroquois want a battle, and at first light the
rest land: the fight is on the ground, both sides ashore, with the thirty paces between the two
fronts and the twenty he walked out in front of his own drawn at the scale he gives. Neither side
is drawn in ranks, because neither side fought in ranks. The three chiefs go down on the one shot — two dead, and
the third, mortally wounded, a moment after. The point is a spit forty meters wide, too narrow for the sixty-meter outline to hold: these four phases use a finer coastline.
The canoes
The party is counted in canoes above — twenty-four of them, sixty men. He describes
the craft in the same book.