Samuel de Champlain was a French explorer who made several expeditions to North America before founding Quebec in 1608 with 32 colonists. He discovered Lake Champlain in 1609 and made other explorations of what are now northern New York, the Ottawa River, and the eastern Great Lakes. Champlain also explored the Iroquois River (now called the Richelieu), which led him on the fourteenth of July, 1609, to the lake which would later bear his name. He documented the European discovery of the Kennebec, Penobscot, and Saco rivers and Mt. Desert Island in Maine, and Plymouth Harbor and Cape Cod in Massachusetts fifteen years before the English established their own colony there. Champlain recommended further exploration and settlement of St. Lawrence area to allow the French to take advantage of the river for the valuable fur trade. He founded Quebec in 1608, and made his famous explorations in present-day New York State and on Lake Huron and Lake Ontario in 1615. Champlain is known as the “Father of New France” and is remembered as one of the greatest pioneers of French expansion in North America.