Samuel de Champlain

Samuel de Champlain was a French navigator, soldier and mapmaker who crossed the Atlantic more than twenty times. On July 3, 1608, he founded Quebec, the first lasting settlement of New France, and his maps of the northeast coast and the Great Lakes gave Europeans their first accurate picture of the region, drawn partly from what Indigenous guides told him.

In Quebec City, Place Royale stands on the ground of his first settlement, and the lane below Dufferin Terrace is named Rue du Petit-Champlain. In Ottawa, his statue stands on the point above the river holding an astrolabe, a navigator's instrument, and it is holding it upside down. An astrolabe dated 1603 that he may have lost near the Ottawa River in 1613 was found by a farm boy in 1867, though scholars still argue over whether it was really his.