A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
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peoples to the west and Algonquian communities to the north were represented as being mastered by, rather than masters of, their environments.160 Champlain, for example, compared the ordinary indigenous preparation of dried fruit for winter to the practice of Lent in France; the power of abstinence during Lent is of course its voluntary nature but here in a land that seemed capable of supporting great ecological diversity, such a fast was a necessity.161 Even as the seasonality of the continent’s climate encouraged his vision of an agricultural empire, the frequent migrations of indigenous communities such as the Odawa berry gatherers who Champlain encountered in 1615 seemed dependent upon fruit that was “manna,” or a gift from God, rather than the product of their own labors.162 Even the Wendat peoples with whom Champlain had frequent cause to winter—admirable agriculturalists though they were—were found lacking. “Their life is miserable when compared with ours,” he wrote, “but happy among them because they have not tasted better.”163 Land was cleared “with great costs” and labored by women, and it produced dishes that “we would give to pigs to eat.164
In this way, sauvage became a term that as both noun and adjective described and explained the uncanny character of northeastern North American places and peoples. As an adjective, the sauvage laid claim to an essential biological equality between the flora and environments of New France and Europe. As a noun, it argued that indigenous peoples were unable to claim the requisite distance from their natural world required of civilized people. Together, they diagnosed place and people in tandem. Both were in a state of wildness, subject to the excesses and insufficiencies of the other.
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When early authors—colonists, missionaries, and explorers such as Gabriel Sagard, Samuel de Champlain, Marc Lescarbot, and Paul Le Jeune—arrived in northeastern North America, they were drawn to a natural world that they called sauvage. They carefully recorded each encounter and experience with new places and new plants, arguing that, adequately understood, the nature of these regions would provide insight into how French colonialism could take root there. The political ecology of French colonialism in seventeenth-century North America translated the region’s distinctive environmental history into evidence for the need for French intervention. In the same breath, colonial authors highlighted both affinities and differences between European and American environments. Floral and ecological similarities offered proof of an essential resemblance and unity, while real differences legitimized French efforts to marginalize indigenous ecological knowledge and ignore the sovereignty of the aboriginal communities who had long lived in what soon became New France.
The first narratives of exploration, evangelization, and settlement therefore moved consciously toward accounts of the region that were both human and natural histories. Gabriel Sagard, when he delighted in the gardens of his order at Québec, understood French intervention in northeastern environments as the fulfillment of a providential history that offered the promise that the sauvage nature he described could be perfected. Champlain, when he described early efforts to cultivate American grapes at his habitation, suggested that French colonialism would tap the region’s unfulfilled potential. Close study and careful attention to the distribution of temperate flora provided proponents of French colonialism with a purpose for New France. As letters, narratives, specimens, and samples crossed the Atlantic in the first decades of the seventeenth century, understanding the environments of northeastern North America became central to France’s colonial project.
CHAPTER 2
Communicating Cultivation
When Marc Lescarbot recounted his own experiences during the first years of Acadian settlement, he wrote from Paris with the benefit of hindsight and a lingering sense of loss. Both are obvious from his frequent and loving accounts of farming in northeastern North America. We know, for example, that the settlement on Île Sainte-Croix in what is now Maine lasted one harsh winter, but for Lescarbot what was worth remembering was “the nature of the land.” It was, he promised, “very good and pleasantly abundant.” He knew this from his own experience because their leader, Pierre du Gua, the Sieur de Monts, “had ordered several sections of land cultivated there” that soon revealed its promise—its nature—and demonstrated the power of French labor to plant agricultural lands that produced “marvelously.”1 The apothecary Louis Hébert had planned to work with local grapes at Port Royal, and, at what is now Canso, Nova Scotia, Lescarbot cultivated “his garden of wheat as beautiful as one knows in France.”2 The moral and legal legitimacy of French colonialism was established through efforts to turn over soils, to prune and graft indigenous and introduced flora, and to announce the success of French horticultural practices in a New World.
Lescarbot’s account synthesized a century of French experience in North America but routinely highlighted the power of moments such as these where he or other colonists and explorers had worked closely with American environments. Cultivation was “likely the only innocent vocation,” Lescarbot wrote, and failure to embrace it had doomed the French in Florida and the Iberian powers whose empires in the Americas remained instead extractive and exploitative.3 Agricultural labor, we learn, was valued as much in classical tradition as it was commanded by God. Clearing land was dangerous but pleasing work that opened dangerous airs that had been trapped in the soil but also promised pleasures that made him confident that “he would never return to France.”4 It was through these efforts that Lescarbot learned the local climate, the proper seasons to plant, and the best means to realize the potential of local environments.5 Cultivation was, in effect, the means through which Lescarbot came to understand the continent to which he had come and to appreciate the transformation that French colonialism could reap in American landscapes and indigenous lives.
Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle-France was an enormous book, but he remained consistent in his argument that the lands that French colonists had claimed in northeastern North America were uncultivated and sauvage. He acknowledged the differences between France and the country to which he had come. He found particular inspiration in Deuteronomy, where Moses had explained to his followers that “the country to which you go to possess is not like Egypt from which you are leaving, where you have sown your seeds and watered with the labor of your feet.” Instead, “the country to which you go to possess is a land of mountains and plains and is watered as it pleases heaven.”6 Lescarbot therefore represented a landscape in natural simplicity, labored only by a beneficial God and awaiting a people who would come to take and improve upon the gifts that God had seen fit to bestow. He transmitted his experience of this place in a detailed narrative that, while routinely citing classical and contemporary authorities, foregrounded the knowledge acquired through the labor of his own hands and cemented as he reflected upon his close encounter with American environments.
As both place and people were diagnosed as sauvage, French plans for their salvation were inseparable parts of a worldview that, anachronistically, we might call ecological. Colonization, conceptualized as a form of cultivation, would draw out the potential of every facet of American environments. The scale and ambitions of French colonialism increased with its geographic footprint. In 1634, French settlement pushed west to Trois-Rivières, and in 1642 Montréal was established where over a century earlier Jacques Cartier had gazed upon an Iroquoian village. Colonists followed in the wake of missionaries who had traveled westward to establish themselves among Great Lakes communities within a decade of the founding of Québec. When, in the late seventeenth century, the explorer Henri Joutel described the western country that he had discovered as a participant in the explorations of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, he wrote tellingly that “one finds there vine that is lacking only a little culture.”7 His call found echoes in other writings by missionaries and colonists and reveals the extent to which a French colonial political ecology that transmuted the visible differences between American and European flora into the difference between the sauvage and the cultivated shaped environmental encounters across seventeenth-century North America. Like Lescarbot, Joutel was participating in a broader theorization of empire itself as a form of cultivation, as a rehabilitative enterprise in early America that targeted