A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
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in the interior of North America, we might easily pick Jean de Brébeuf. Arriving initially in New France in 1625, he is best remembered for his exploration of the Great Lakes and his residence among the Wendat people in what is now Ontario. Brébeuf traveled widely throughout Wendat territory and was an early and authoritative source of information about the region that would become the pays d’en haut. About his life among the Wendat he wrote:
We live on the shore of a great Lake, which affords as good fish as I have ever seen or eaten in France; true, as I have said, we do not ordinarily procure them, and still less do we get meat, which is even more rarely seen here. Fruits even, according to the season, provided the year be somewhat favorable, are not lacking to us; strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries are to be found in almost incredible quantities. We gather plenty of grapes, which are fairly good; the squashes last sometimes four and five months, and are so abundant that they are to be had almost for nothing, and so good that, on being cooked in the ashes, they are eaten as apples are in France. Consequently, to tell the truth, as regards provisions, the change from France is not very great; the only grain of the Country is a sufficient nourishment, when one is somewhat accustomed to it. The Sauvages prepare it in more than twenty ways and yet employ only fire and water; it is true that the best sauce is that which it carries with it.76
Like the Relations more broadly, this is a complicated text that transitions cleanly between a single authorial voice and a “we” that spoke to both his fellow travelers and his readers. Brébeuf acknowledged both the limits of his own experience (“we do not ordinarily procure them”) and his reliance upon indigenous knowledge and labor.77 He nonetheless confidently named types of edible plants that he clearly knew intimately and expected his readers to know as well.
We can see then how such narratives were a deceptively simple formal strategy for describing newly discovered places and evoking the promise of colonialism to draw out latent possibilities in places and peoples. Even as the decades passed and the geographical reach of missionary authors increased, travel narratives presented their authors with an effective means to translate their experiences in a manner meant both to entice support and to assuage any concerns about the illegibility of new flora and environments. Writing about a Mascouten village in the western Great Lakes to which he had traveled in 1673, for example, Jacques Marquette wrote that “I took pleasure in observing the situation of this village. It is beautiful and very pleasing; For, from an Eminence upon which it is placed, one beholds on every side prairies, extending farther than the eye can see, interspersed with groves or with lofty trees. The soil is very fertile, and yields much Indian corn. The sauvages gather quantities of plums and grapes, wherewith much wine could be made, if desired.”78 Like Brébeuf, Marquette acknowledged aboriginal presence but confidently anticipated the expansion of French colonialism that would enrich the agricultural and ecological productivity of the region. Marquette assured his readers that familiar plants dotted the landscape, but he also introduced his own aesthetic judgments to provide an assessment of the innate beauty of the region and possibilities for French improvement.
The centrality of cultivation to the propagandistic quality of these writings is marked. In the 1632 edition of his Voyages, for example, Samuel de Champlain promised Richelieu an account of “lands no less than four times the size of France, as well as the progress in the conversion of the sauvages, the clearings of some of these lands whereby you will perceive that in no respect are they less fertile than that of France; and finally the settlements and forts that have been built there in the name of France.”79 It was a project that he summarized as aiming to “restore and retain possession of this New Land by the settlements and colonies which will be found necessary there.”80 Discussions of a sauvage country implied that conditions that might be claimed to be defining features of these newly explored and settled regions of Acadia and Québec were in fact remediable defects. The ambition of this era was perhaps best captured by the Jesuit Pierre Biard, however, who wrote that “there is no reason why the soil should not be equally fertile, if the cultivation of the plains were long continued upon to lands, and if it were not for the dense shades of the almost unbroken forests.”81 New France offered nothing less, he wrote, than “another France … to be cultivated.”82
Communicating American flora in print was therefore not an exercise in abstraction. Descriptive detail in these accounts gathered where authors allowed themselves to inhabit a place or to imagine it in the not-too-distant colonial future. The organization of these accounts was therefore both spatial and temporal, offering experience of linear itineraries and selected sites that were transmuted into representative samples of larger American environments.83 Scholars of the literatures of encounter in French North America have often emphasized the distinction between colonial and missionary texts of this early period, yet the shared reliance on chronologically organized narratives produced similar descriptions of early American places.84 They were accounts that often provided brief descriptions, offering the perspective of a traveler who could only catch glimpses of complex ecologies from canoes or on foot and who often relied on guides as they traveled into the heart of the continent. These were environments that were peopled, either by living indigenous communities or by the specter of future colonial development. Authors explicitly presented spaces in which they had dwelled; they foregrounded their own experience and knowledge produced through their physical presence in American cultural and ecological settings.85 Embedded in descriptions of unfamiliar peoples and landscapes, narratives such as these highlighted the presence of recognizable French plants such as oak, grapevine, strawberries, and grains that anchored readers and travelers alike, continuing to offer promises of an essential familiarity behind apparent difference.
In effect, plants and American environments continued to be known as they were lived, and the immersive perspective of early authors such as Champlain, Sagard, and Le Jeune continued throughout the century. North American plants could be identified by functional roles they shared with European counterparts, an essence defined, at least in part, by how French communities could live with a plant. Describing Acadia in his 1672 Histoire naturelle, the colonial promoter and landowner Nicolas Denys wrote, “There are also pine for making planks, good for making decks, and fir for ornaments … pine, little spruce and fir are also found in the forests of this country which serve for tar the qualities of which I have already spoken.”86 If the American wilderness was perceived through a lens that favored extractive enterprise and the transformation of botanical resources into commodities, seventeenth-century texts from French North America suggest that colonists and missionaries also looked at North American flora with an eye to transplanting European ecological relationships into new soils. More than a mercantilist gaze, this was an understanding of botanical identity that saw latent or potential utility as a constitutive facet of a plant’s identity.87 The adoption of the natural historical genre allowed even greater flexibility to include knowledge acquired from decades of colonial experience. It meant that even the imposing forests of New France were seen to support the efforts by colonial authors who understood that this flora would be called upon through cultivation of French colonial spaces and lives.88
Plants in print—those that arrived as descriptions in travel narratives, histories, natural histories, and personal correspondence—therefore contributed far more to an emerging awareness of Acadian and Laurentian places and peoples than the specimens that grew in French gardens. Sagard wrote in 1632 that some of his fellow missionaries had brought “some Martagons” to France, “with some cardinal plants as rare flowers, but they did not profit there, nor did they reach their perfection, as they do in their own climate and native soil.”89 He juxtaposed this anecdote with his description of the landscapes of the early seventeenth-century Saint Lawrence Valley, suggesting that he hoped instead to offer his French readers a virtual experience of the plant’s “native soil” through his text.90 Not only were written descriptions better able to survive transit and inform a broader audience in France, they did the additional work of bringing whole environments to life, rather than single specimens.
Like Poutrincourt’s presentation of wheat, authors such as Lescarbot and Champlain took presentations of American flora—both native and introduced—as opportunities to valorize experiential ways of knowing these newly colonized places that made