Samuel de Champlain

Samuel de Champlain was a French navigator, cartographer, soldier, and colonial administrator active in the early exploration and settlement of northeastern North America. After military service in the French Wars of Religion and an early voyage to Spanish America, he made numerous transatlantic crossings from 1603 onward, charting the Atlantic coast and the St. Lawrence. He helped establish a settlement at Port-Royal in Acadia and in 1608 founded a habitation at Quebec, which he administered for much of the following decades. He formed alliances with several Indigenous nations, produced detailed maps and written accounts of the region, and died at Quebec in 1635.