A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
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Making the case for cultivation required forms of communication that transported French audiences into the gardens and missions of northeastern North America. These were not claims that could be communicated through botanical specimens, nor could they be captured through the presentation of rare species of novel plants or animals to Parisian collectors. It was one thing to note the biological affinities between temperate ecosystems and flora that shared evolutionary histories, but the transition to identifying the environmental differences between New France and Old as remediable defects demanded rhetoric that foregrounded the firsthand experience of the authors who made the claim and narratives that could simultaneously describe the natural world and confidently diagnose it as deficient. While there was much about which Lescarbot and other colonial authors disagreed, they shared a common understanding that the act of cultivation would reveal the true—French—nature of the places and peoples of northeastern North America. It was an active process that demanded strength of character and clarity of purpose, but it was an enterprise that had been commanded by God and that promised real pleasure for those willing to take up the task. The cultivated spaces of French North America became opportunities to display a stewardship associated with the management of a landed estate.9 This was an ideology that therefore valorized environmental practice as much as it offered a convenient metaphor to conceptualize the conversion of indigenous peoples; it authorized the claims of authors such as Lescarbot through a celebration of their labors and rooted claims of French sovereignty through the imposition of European horticultural regimes in American landscapes.10
The cultivated spaces of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley in this way became privileged sites from which to lay claims to know and to own New France, but the success of these claims was dependent upon the means through which they were communicated to France. The rhetorical strategies of explorers such as Champlain, missionaries such as Sagard, and colonists such as Lescarbot did not rely upon an abstracting science but on immersive forms of writing that mediated the intellectual and geographical distance that separated New France from the Old. They presented North American environments as complex wholes best knowable through their own lived experiences. Just as the landscapes that they cultivated promiscuously blended elements of introduced and indigenous flora as witnesses to their own ability to channel the productive energies of colonial soils and environments, they were similarly promiscuous in their choice of forms and genres in which they wrote. Across the seventeenth century, the authors who communicated New World environments to French audiences did so in travel narratives, administrative documents, natural histories, and modes that blurred distinctions between personal accounts, colonialist propaganda, and protoscientific genres. In fact, the only consistent feature across these texts was a focus on emphasizing the essential familiarity of New World places and certainty in the promise that cultivation would produce a New France in northeastern North America.
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As Samuel de Champlain expanded the French presence in Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley in the seventeenth century, he frequently created experimental sites to test the planting of French species and ecological practices. In both written texts and accompanying images, cultivated spaces functioned as visible beachheads for European ecological practice and species. As the habitation at Québec was being built in 1608, Champlain “had all the rest cleared so as to make gardens in which to sow seeds to see how they succeed.”11 He continued experimental plantings as he turned his attention west in the following years. In 1611, while waiting for the aboriginal guides who would lead him into the interior, he wrote that “I had two gardens made, one in the prairie and the other in the woods … and the second of June I sowed some seeds that grew in all perfection and in little time, that demonstrated the bounty of the land.”12 Even the crops of failed colonial endeavors such as those at Île Sainte-Croix offered evidence of the promise of the region—and the need for French colonization.13 French travelers and colonists therefore drew a mandate from their experience cultivating northeastern environments.
Cultivation implied specific ecological practices as well as gesturing toward a larger organizing ideology. It meant, for example, clearing the land of woods and opening the soils to the warming sun through French labor. Gold and silver might be found, wrote Lescarbot, but “the first mine to have is bread and wine, and livestock.”14 Le Jeune explained this necessity was also an obligation when he wrote that “New France will someday be a terrestrial Paradise if our Lord continues to bestow upon it his blessings, both material and spiritual. But, meanwhile, its first inhabitants must do to it what Adam was commanded to do in that one which he lost by his own fault. God had placed him there to fertilize it by his own work and to preserve it by his vigilance, and not to stay there and do nothing.”15 Even if accomplishments were admittedly modest in the first decades of French colonization, with the colonization of Acadia suffering repeated setbacks during intermittent power struggles and residents of Québec having cleared only “18 or 20 acres at the most” by 1627, early advocates of both mission and colonization looked to early crops and assessments of American environments as evidence of a bright agricultural future.16 Colonists and missionaries cleared land, sowed crops, and learned the seasons. In such a manner colonists came to understand what one Jesuit referred to in 1643 as “the spirit [génie] of this place.”17
Gardens of necessity, those that fed colonists and established a visible claim to only newly settled lands, were also pleasure gardens.18 As Lescarbot explained, “I can say without lying that I have never worked my body so hard, for the pleasure that I took to lay out and cultivate my gardens … to make parterres, to align the allées, to build the cabinets, to sow wheat, barley, oats, beans, peas, garden herbs and to water them, such was my desire to recognize [reconoitre] the land through my own experience.”19 For as much as the horrors of scurvy and frigid isolation shaped the experience of early colonists such as Lescarbot and Champlain, the simple act of setting roots—both figurative and real—in New France was a reassuring one. Cultivated spaces became sites in which to experience a harmony only possible as the result of a concerted effort by skilled husbandmen and an experience of desire and pleasure made possible by the fulfillment of a duty to cultivate place and people.
Lescarbot was particularly concerned with foregrounding this “little labor” that “God has blessed” in his accounts, but he was not unusual in his efforts to claim that agricultural labor provided an authority that was both moral and epistemological. As the Protestant polymath Bernard Palissy explained in the sixteenth century, the labor of cultivation was inspired by both God and Roman precedent. It was in the classical era that people had
wisely set themselves to plant, sow and cultivate to aid nature, which is why the first inventors of something good, to aid nature, have been so esteemed by our predecessors, they were reputed to have been participants in the spirit of God. Ceres who advised us to sow and cultivate wheat was called a goddess; the good man Bacchus (not at all a drunkard as the painters have made him) was exulted because he advised us to plant and cultivate the vine: … Bacchus had found sauvage grapes, Ceres had found sauvage wheat; but these were insufficient to feed them as well as when they were transplanted. From this we know that God wants us to work to aid nature.20
It was through labor that the productive essence of sauvage plants was revealed and the foundations for European civilization laid.
Authors were inspired by developments in the evolution of renaissance gardens that created spaces in which the natural and artificial were intentionally blurred to demonstrate the skillful labor of a benevolent patriarchal authority.21 In a description worth quoting at length, Champlain hinted that rich landscapes that aimed to blend human and natural agencies were as important in North America:
As soon as the said Sieur de Monts had departed, some of the forty or forty-five who stayed behind began to make gardens. I also, in order not to remain idle, made one which I surrounded with ditches full of water wherein I placed some very fine trout; and through it flowed three brooks of very clear running water from which the greater part of our settlement was supplied. I constructed it near the seashore a little sluiceway, to draw off the water whenever I desired. This spot was completely surrounded by meadows, and there I arranged a summer-house with fine trees, in order that I might enjoy the