PROVINCETOWN. 
213 
made another for us, which only our late Coast Survey 
has superseded. Most of the maps of this coast made 
for a long time after betray their indebtedness to Cham¬ 
plain. He was a skilful navigator, a man of science, and 
geographer to the King of France. He crossed the 
Atlantic about twenty times, and made nothing of it; 
often in a small vessel in which few would dare to go 
to sea to-day; and on one occasion making the voyage 
from Tadoussac to St. Malo in eighteen days. He was 
in this neighborhood, that is, betAveen Annapolis, Nova 
Scotia, and Cape Cod, observing the land and its inhab¬ 
itants, and making a map of the coast, from May, 1604, 
to September, 1607, or about three and a half years^ and 
he has described minutely his method of surveying har¬ 
bors. By his own account, a part of his map was en¬ 
graved in 1604 (?). When Pont-Gravd and others 
returned to France in 1606, he remained at Port Royal 
Avith Poitrincourt, in order,” says he, “ by the aid of 
God, to finish the chart of the coasts which I had 
begun”; and again in his volume, printed before John 
Smith visited this part of America, he says: “ It seems 
to me that I have done my duty as far as I could, if I 
have not forgotten to put in my said chart whatever 
I saw, and give a particular knowledge to the public 
of Avhat had never been described nor discovered so 
particularly as I have done it, although some other may 
have heretofore written of it; but it was a very small 
afikir in comparison with what we have discovered 
within the last ten years.” 
It is not generally remembered, if known, by the 
descendants of the Pilgrims, that when their forefathers 
were spending their first memorable winter in the New 
World, they had for neighbors a colony of French no 
