Saturday, December 31, 2016

Champlain

Here was a real man, a true power, an originator. Compare him with any explorer and see them pale. Within Champlain there is vivacity, veracity, true visionary strength. More of an overall force than any particular type of brilliance. There is no secret to his success, just an overwhelming drive to discover, become, validate New France, an imaginary kind of place in the beginning, a wilderness without boundaries, a window so many other windows, infinite possibility, a door through which to dream up space. “But how carefully he had noted every island, every tree almost upon the way and how his imagination has run west and south and north with the stories of Indians, surmising peoples, mountains, lakes, some day to be discovered, with the greatest accuracy.” A sort of scientist bent on calculation and measurement. A new kind of American.

His father was a sailor, (supposedly) an admiral in the navy of Henry of Navarre. So he was bred on the sea, born into it. Prepared by birth to navigate the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to find the link between the Great Lakes and grand continents, to communicate openly and honestly with natives, to trace the flowering course of wanderings – “penetrating as far as the location of the city he would found [Quebec], trading, making maps, charting the coast and drawing colored pictures of everything.” This would have been 1603.

He knew the North Atlantic seaboard better than anybody; moving through Boston Harbor, noting islands, the trees that grew on them, the wildlife; passing Plymouth before the Pilgrims arrived. An extraordinary energy. Charts, maps, colored renderings, the future.

Exclude the splendors of Tenochtitlan, the vision of the Panama Canal, the power and wonder of Niagara Falls. Having studied the West Indies, Mexico and Panama first-hand around 1600, the Caribbean was not enough for him, his vision. New France would have to be north where game thrived, where the cold was enough to put anybody down, where Cartier was running around. America would really be the embodiment of his imagination. What he believed he created. What could be more beautiful?

An American in the perfect sense, to say nothing of his relations with natives, the Algonquin and Huron. Becoming, in a way, a part of them, learning their languages, trusting their resourcefulness, their approach, adopting it, the way they lived, making it his own. Fighting with them against the Iroquois. The continent opened itself up to him to set precedents. Nietzsche chose Frederick II, “the first European according to my taste” (Beyond Good and Evil 200). I choose Champlain, an American of the first order. The ashes of Tenochtitlan still fresh with the founding of Quebec.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt he said, “all great thing come from the East.” What he meant was that the West benefited and prospered tremendously through the centuries in the cultural interchange with the East. The synthesis of this exchange resulted in developments with everything from architecture to religion. A perfect example of this synthesis would be Frederick II, 1194 – 1250. King of Sicily from 1198, king of Germany from 1212, “emperor of the West” from 1220. He took part in the sixth crusade and conquered Jerusalem without bloodshed by negotiating with the Muslims instead of fighting them. His court in Sicily was the most cultured place in Europe. Although the “German Christian emperor,” he was more Muslim than Christian, and more Italian than German. He spoke seven languages, encouraged the development of poetry and sculpture and wrote a book on falcons still used by experts today. He established the University of Naples and made the University of Salerno the best school of medicine in Europe. A true innovator of his time.

There is less to be said of the cultural exchange between the West and the Americas. Culturally, native North Americans inspired Europeans more than what has generally been admitted. The history of this synthesis is yet to be written really, but it is there. And Champlain, if anything, took part in it with an open-mind. He embraced the divide and showed the ages a way to settle, explore and discover, without bloodshed, enslavement and exploitation. Human understanding.

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