Word: champlain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN...
More than any other man Samuel de Champlain helped create Quebec as a bastion of French commitment to the New World. He made 23 perilous voyages from France to Canada in the years just after the turn of the 17th century. He navigated the coast of New England down as far as Cape Cod, and pursued inland lakes and rivers to their sources exploring New France. He could not swim. He never managed to learn any Indian language. He had almost no sex life. But he could digest anything. He was also brave and resourceful, as well as the best...
...Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, a World War II admiral and a private yachtsman, Champlain would be a hero for the last two qualities alone. Like Francis Parkman, who tried to traverse all the lands and waters he wrote histories about, Morison has retraced Champlain's paths, starting as a young man in 1906 when he sailed along the French explorer's routes off Nova Scotia and down the New England coast, growing more and more admiring as he remarked how accurate Champlain's soundings and descriptions of such harbors as Plymouth and Gloucester still were after...
...also served as a director of Symmes Hospital in Arlington, the Arlington Development Board, the Robbins Library in Arlington, and Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont...
...Morison still sails. He rides horseback, too, and occasionally shows up at his office in Harvard's Widener Memorial Library in his riding britches, looking more like a pukka-sahib colonel than a professor or an admiral. At present he is working on a biography of Samuel de Champlain as well as a sequel to his present volume. When his own time comes, the admiral will be able to say, as another of his favorites, John Davis, said to his men off the fearsome Strait of Magellan: if it be God's will "that our mortall being shal...