A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
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the early Relations from the 1630s, for instance, Jesuits such as Paul Le Jeune established themselves as both collectors of testimony and witnesses in their own right.115 Le Jeune wrote in 1633, for example, that “on the 28th [of October], some French hunters, returning from the islands which are in the great St. Lawrence River, told us … that there were apples in those islands, very sweet but very small; and that they had eaten plums which would not be in any way inferior to our apricots in France if the trees were cultivated.”116 When Jacques Bruyas wrote in a letter from the mission to the Haudenosaunee at Saint François-Xavier in 1668 that “apple, plum, and chestnut trees are seen here,” he provided little sense of when or by whom they were seen.117 These movements between firsthand observation and gathered testimony served to foreground the author as expert and broaden the field of observation to verify observed and expected facts.118 Colonial authorities such as Champlain similarly translated their social privilege into epistemological authority that enabled him to speak of and on behalf of New France.119 A counterpart to his dual role in New France as a civil authority and an explorer, Champlain switched readily between his own experiences and those of others over whom he governed in his various Voyages.120 We can read as easily, for example, about his winter experiences among the Wendat or his explorations of the Ottawa River as we can his summaries of the experiences of colonists such as Louis Hébert who are otherwise silent.121 Jesuit and colonial authors communicated experience of American flora as a composite of multiple experiences by multiple authors and witnesses.122
Whether forwarding gathered testimony or relating their own considerable experience, the authors of natural histories and travel accounts to New France such as Champlain and Jesuit missionaries favored narratives that resisted reducing botanical knowledge to the description of plant morphology. Visual observation was privileged, but sight as it was increasingly used within contemporary European science was rarely deemed sufficient in and of itself. Renaissance and early modern natural history focused relentlessly on the visible characteristics of plants, and the growing use of textual descriptions and dried herbarium specimens in lieu of direct experience of living plants marginalized descriptions of what we might call their ecological contexts. In contrast, North America–based authors continued to situate novel flora in narratives that immersed their readers in complex and irreducible ecosystems.123 Both authors of early seventeenth-century travel narratives and authors of later natural histories such as Nicolas Denys and Louis Nicolas clearly appreciated the visible qualities of American flora, yet they rarely failed to also reference the tastes, smells, and aboriginal uses of new plants and foods. Even as empirical experience was central to French accounts, then, the field of experience and the types of knowledge presented remained self-consciously broad.
The result was that where modern readers might expect botanical descriptions that focus on morphology, other qualifications were frequently interwoven into narratives that drew upon multiple senses and that blended ethnographic and botanical observations. Take, for instance, the following account of a new plant described by Louis Nicolas in his Histoire naturelle, written around 1675. Nicolas named the plant simply “another black fruit.”124 This, in itself, was neither out of the ordinary for natural historical texts nor particularly informative. When he later added that Europeans could not accustom themselves to its taste, however, he took what might seem to be a strange rhetorical turn, writing that “it seems that these strange people have an aversion to everything that we like, and prize everything that we despise; they cannot bear our best smells, and say that they smell bad.”125 Investigations of plant life invited commentary on local cultures, and vice versa. This is not to suggest that missionary authors elided natural and cultural descriptions, categories that for missionaries and their readers meant little at the time.126 Rather, it hinted at the belief in a complex web of relations between people and place. As Jesuits worked to convert souls and colonists worked to transform place, they became aware of the importance of flora as emblematic of broader features of the North American natural and cultural landscape.
Narratives that recounted experience of peopled landscapes made the colonialist intent of natural description particularly clear; French texts could provide both experience of new flora and judgments about the inadequacy of indigenous ecological knowledge. In 1639, for example, as the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune sought to provide his readers with insights into the “superstitions” and “customs” of the Algonquian speakers whom the missionaries were actively trying to settle at Québec in agricultural communities, he took what might seem to us a strange turn. As he proceeded “first, as to what concerns their belief,” he soon wrote as much about fruit as he did about peoples. He explained:
Some of them imagine a Paradise abounding in blueberries; these are little blue fruits, the berries of which are as large as the largest grapes. I have not seen any of them in France. They have a tolerably good flavor, and for this reason the souls like them very much. Others say that the souls do nothing but dance after their departure from this life: there are some who admit the transmigration of souls, as Pythagoras did; and the majority of them imagine that the soul is insensible after it has left the body: as a general thing, all believe that it is immortal…. In fact, I have heard some of them assert that they have no souls; they hear people talk about these attendant forms, and sometimes persuade themselves that they possess them,—the Devil employing their imagination and their passions, or their melancholy, to bring about some results that appear to them extraordinary.127
Le Jeune’s description of the blueberry functioned as a means to explore and explain aboriginal conceptions of the soul to his European readers and hinted at the possibility of diabolical influence in indigenous religions.
First-person narratives permitted moving seamlessly between the botanical and ethnographic description that enabled authors to both catalogue American flora and diagnose it as deficient.128 Writing from Wendat territory in 1653, for instance, Bressani declared that “there are some wild vines, but in small quantity, nor are they esteemed by the Barbarians themselves; but they do esteem highly a certain fruit of violet color, the size of a juniper berry which I have never seen in these countries. I have also seen, once, a plant similar to the Melon of India, with fruit the size of a small lime.”129 Writing from the mission at Kahnawake, Jacques Frémin similarly wrote: “And besides the grapes, plums, apples, and other fruits, which would be fairly good if the Sauvages had patience to let them ripen, there also grows on the prairies a kind of lime resembling that of France.”130 Jesuits presented cultural and natural environments that were defined by aboriginal ecological practice. Even where authors such as Frémin and Bressani added their own observations, they were assembled from personal experiences that were couched in wider discussions of aboriginal ecological lives.
Subjective experiences therefore became the primary registers for explaining these new foods, plants, and animals. Encounters with indigenous food provoked few of the anxieties that wracked English and Spanish explorers who feared that changes to their humoral complexion would result from consuming foreign foodstuffs.131 The primary challenge was the disgust and discomfort that were prominent in written accounts of Native foodways. Sagard’s description of a dish of fermented corn among the Wendat, for example, evoked a plate “very stinky and more rotten than even the gutters.”132 Among the Innu, Paul Le Jeune blurred natural history and a description of indigenous foods when he gave an account of “the meats and other dishes which the sauvages eat, their seasoning, and their drinks.” He noted that
among their terrestrial animals they have the Elk, which is here generally called the Moose; Castors, which the English call Beavers; Caribou by some called the Wild ass; they also have Bears, Badgers, Porcupines, Foxes, Hares, Whistler or Nightingale,—this is an animal larger than a Hare; they eat also Martens, and three kinds of Squirrels. As to birds, they have Bustards, white and gray Geese, several species of Ducks, Teals, Ospreys and several kinds of Divers. These are all river birds. They also catch Partridges or gray Hazel-hens, Woodcocks and Snipe of many kinds, Turtle doves, etc. As to Fish, they catch, in the season, different kinds of Salmon, Seals, Pike, Carp, and Sturgeon of various sorts; Whitefish, Goldfish, Barbels, Eels, Lampreys, Smelt, Turtles, and others. They eat, besides some small ground fruits, such as raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, nuts which have very little meat, hazelnuts, wild