David Hackett Fischer · 2008 · sea

David Hackett Fischer's life of Samuel de Champlain, who founded Quebec, mapped the northeast coast, and spent thirty years building alliances with peoples every other European power was busy fighting. From a salt port in Saintonge to a grave in Quebec that nobody has been able to find.

1. 1
   Brouage

   A salt port in Saintonge, and a childhood in a town that changed hands four times in the wars of religion - which Fischer argues is the making of a man who spent his life trying to get people to live together.

2. 2
   Cadiz

   Two and a half years in the Spanish Indies on a relative's ship, seeing at first hand how Spain ran an empire - and writing a report on it that reads as a list of things not to do again.

3. 3
   Tadoussac

   1603, and the first voyage up the St Lawrence: a trading post at the Saguenay mouth, and a formal alliance with the Innu, Algonquin and Huron that Champlain would spend thirty years keeping.

4. 4
   Port Royal

   Acadia, and three winters of trying to make a settlement work - the Order of Good Cheer invented to keep men alive through the scurvy months, which is the first recorded social club in North America.

5. 5
   Quebec

   1608, and the Habitation built where the river narrows - twenty-eight men in the first winter and eight alive in the spring, which is the founding of Canada as it actually happened.

6. 6
   Ticonderoga

   July 1609, south up the lake with a Huron and Algonquin war party - and an arquebus fired into a Mohawk line that had never seen one, which bought the alliance and cost the French the next century.

7. 7
   Huronia

   1615, wintering inland among the Huron between the lakes - learning the language, mapping the country, and being carried wounded in a basket after a failed attack on an Iroquois town.

8. 8
   Quebec

   Surrendered to English privateers in 1629 and handed back by treaty in 1632, and Champlain governing until his death on Christmas Day 1635 - buried in a chapel whose location has been lost ever since.