names of his father and mother,
but dismisses his first twenty years in twenty lines, which say little
more than that he learned letters and religion from the parish priest
and a love of the sea from his father. Nor is it easy to enlarge these
statements unless one chooses to make guesses as to whether or not
Champlain's parents were Huguenots because he was called Samuel, a
favourite name with French Protestants. And this question is not worth
discussion, since no one has, or can, cast a doubt upon the sincerity
of his own devotion to the Catholic faith.

In short, Champlain by birth was neither a peasant nor a noble, but
issued from a middle-class family; and his eyes turned towards the sea
because his father was a mariner dwelling in the small seaport of
Brouage.

Thus when a boy Champlain doubtless had lessons in navigation, but he
did not become a sailor in the larger sense until he had first {6} been
a soldier. His youth fell in the midst of the Catholic Revival, when
the Church of Rome, having for fifty years been sore beset by Lutherans
and Calvinists, began to display a reserve strength which enabled her
to reclaim from them a large part of the ground she had lost. But this
result was not gained without the bitterest and most envenomed
struggle. If doctrinal divergence had quickened human hatreds before
the Council of Trent, it drove them to fury during the thirty years
that followed. At the time of the Massacre of St Bartholomew Champlain
was five years old. He was seventeen when William the Silent was
assassinated; twenty when Mary Stuart was executed at Fotheringay;
twenty-one when the Spanish Armada sailed against England and when the
Guises were murdered at Blois by order of Henry III; twenty-two when
Henry III himself fell under the dagger of Jacques Clement. The bare
enumeration of these events shows that Champlain was nurtured in an age
of blood and iron rather than amid those humanitarian sentiments which
prevail in an age of religious toleration.

Finding his country a camp, or rather two camps, he became a soldier,
and fought for ten {7} years in the wretched strife to which both
Leaguers and Huguenots so often sacrificed their love of country. With
Henry of Valois, Henry of Navarre, and Henry of Guise as personal foes
and political rivals, it was hard to know where the right line of faith
and loyalty lay; but Champlain was both a Catholic and a king's man,
for whom all things issued well