Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec, mapped the Atlantic coast from Cape Cod to Lake Huron, and envisioned a New France that would coexist with Indigenous peoples rather than displace them. David Hackett Fischer's biography recovers this Renaissance figure in full, revealing a man whose combination of practical skill, intellectual curiosity, and humanitarian vision has few parallels in the history of colonization. Champlain served as soldier, spy, navigator, cartographer, ethnographer, writer, and administrator over a career spanning four decades. Fischer, the author of acclaimed works on Paul Revere and Washington's crossing of the Delaware, draws on French, Spanish, and Native American sources to reconstruct Champlain's world. He shows how Champlain learned from Indigenous peoples, adopting their diplomatic protocols and forming alliances that shaped North American history. Where English and Spanish colonizers often sought to dominate or exterminate, Champlain imagined intermarriage and cultural exchange, a hybrid society that would combine European and Native ways. The vision was never fully realized, but its traces persisted in the distinctive culture of New France. Fischer does not romanticize Champlain, acknowledging his participation in violence and his inability to prevent the exploitation that followed European contact. But he argues that Champlain's example suggests roads not taken, alternatives to the brutality that often characterized colonial encounter.