Pierre-François Xavier de Charlevoix is regarded as the first historian of New France, the French-held territories in Canada and Louisiana in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A Jesuit missionary, de Charlevoix briefly trained in Quebec from 1705–9, before travelling to Japan where he established the first Roman Catholic church in the country. He returned to Canada in 1720 where he was to preach to Indigenous people throughout New France while secretly surveying the land for a navigable route to the Pacific Ocean.

During his travels de Charlevoix sailed up the St Lawrence River, along the shore of Lake Michigan and down the Mississippi River, before attempting to sail to the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) from New Orleans. The final part of the journey was a failure and de Charlevoix was shipwrecked and forced to travel across Florida back towards the Mississippi.

Returning to France in 1724, de Charlevoix reported on his expeditions and began compiling supplementary information into a work which he hoped would serve as an encyclopaedia of the world beyond Europe. These three volumes form his History of New France and provide a history and geography of the colony.