The scientific exploration and mapping of New France began with the work of Samuel de Champlain, whose exceedingly rare depictions of the American Northeast are the most important and accurate seventeenth-century maps of the vast region. Champlain based his maps on his own early discoveries in New France and New England in the early 1600s and published them to accompany the accounts of his voyages. His explorations were the first of the seventeenth century to have a major effect on contemporary cartography, and Champlain's terrestrial in the New World helped establish French possession of the area.

This important map of Port St. Louis is complete with a comprehensive key that Patricia Scott Deetz and Christopher Fennell of the Plymouth Colony Archive Project have provided the following interpretation to: A. 'Anchorage,' with his pinnace; B. 'The Channel'(to the inner harbor); C. 'Two Islands' (Clark Island, where members of the third exploration party spent their first night ashore in 1620, and Sasquish Head); D. 'Sand Dunes' (stretching along Duxbury Beach to the Gurnet); E. 'Mud Flats' and a much foreshortened Duxbury Bay; F. 'Cabins where the savages till the soil.', G. 'Spot where our pinnace ran aground' (Brown's Bank, adjacent to Long Beach). H. 'The Gurnet.'