Mapping Champlain's Travels: Restorative Techniques for Historical Cartography

Samuel de Champlain's travels through what would become New France have been extensively documented and mapped by geographers and historians today. As conventional cartographic depictions of the routes of a European explorer and colonizer, these maps portray the locational details of Champlain's journeys but omit the emotional geographies and the sense of place evoked in his journals, as well as the Indigenous geographies interwoven with Champlain's story. This article suggests techniques for restoring multiple experiences and multiple voices to the historical cartography of Champlain's travels, including the expressive use of colour and type, the blending of spatial and temporal scales in sequential insets, the incorporation of mental maps and dream geographies, and the representation of Native voices through place names and imagined dialogue. In so doing, the authors reimagine historical cartography for the representation of place rather than space by taking a narrative approach to cartographic language.