A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
familiarity was increased because of nearly a century of contact with American flora that had arrived as part of a broader Columbian Exchange.113 American plants such as corn, pumpkins, sunflowers, and beans—widely sown in indigenous landscapes and a regular feature of travel accounts and natural history—were, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, relatively well-known in France. A recent analysis of the Grandes heures of Anne of Brittany, produced between 1503 and 1508, revealed the introduction, already by this early date, of a North American squash into cultivated landscapes in the Loire Valley. Botanical analysis of the “Quegourdes de Turquie” illustrated in the text suggests that it was an example of Cucurbita pepo, subspecies texana that was likely originally collected from the northern coasts of the Gulf of Mexico.114 This is a variant of the same species that was represented in frescoes at the Villa Farnesina in Rome between 1515 and 1518, where the South American species C. maxima also appeared.115 The eighteenth-century botanist Antoine de Jussieu also identified an American bean now known as Phaseolus vulgaris in the Grandes Heures.116 How these plants arrived in the Loire Valley by 1508 and how they came to grow in the garden of Anne of Brittany, then queen of France, remains an open question, although the queen’s strong personal ties to the papacy and Spanish crown may have inserted her into networks of botanical circulation that quickly diffused newly discovered American plants throughout Europe in the decades after first contact.117
There is little doubt that the squash in Anne’s gardens were valued as a curiosity, but American flora became more economically significant and more widely grown as the century progressed. Charles Estienne, the author of the influential sixteenth-century L’Agriculture et maison rustique, wrote that “Turkish wheat [blé de Turquie], so called, or rather Indian wheat [blé d’Inde], … came originally from the west indies, then from Turkey and from there into France, not that it was cultivated for pleasure, or for the admiration of foreign things, of which the French give great weight.”118 Providing insights into the cultivation of the crop, he also offered advice on assimilating it into French lives. “It has a similar temperament to our wheat,” he wrote, “always hotter, recognizable by the softness of the bread that is made with it.”119 Corn spread throughout Europe quickly in the wake of Spanish explorations of the Caribbean and American mainland, although recent research into the genetics of European corn populations suggests that the spread of the crop into northern Europe awaited a second introduction from North America.120 The diffusion of corn within France was slower than in contemporary Spain or Italy, but by the turn of the seventeenth century the crop was beginning to gain traction in rural regions such as Bresse.121 Estienne likewise discussed the domestic cultivation of the pumpkins that Anne of Brittany had likely grown as a curiosity.122 By the early seventeenth century, new editions of the Maison rustique also introduced tobacco as a valuable crop for landowners in France.123 Champlain, Lescarbot, Biard, and Sagard had each left a France that was already home to many of the most widely cultivated American plants that they would find in New France.
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The relatedness of French and northeastern North American environments was therefore frequently as obvious to seventeenth-century authors as it is to contemporary natural scientists. Accounting for this uncanny relatedness—a simultaneous recognition of difference and affinity—was the intellectual challenge for explorers, settlers, and missionaries who traveled and settled in the Saint Lawrence Valley and Acadia. It was neither possible nor preferable to completely ignore the differences that existed between European and American plants or the diversity that existed within North American plant populations. Adding additional information on cultural and religious significance or ecological and morphological distinctions, colonial authors modified generic botanical types to create what ethnobotanists refer to as folk specifics or folk varietals. This is obvious, for instance, when authors described white pine or red cedar. Assuming a shared body of characteristics (pine-ness or cedarness, in this case), authors could incorporate new flora with the greatest possible economy of description and communicate more effectively with their French audiences. The Jesuit Louis Nicolas wrote that there were three façons (later using the word “species” as well). The smallest type was not even given a name, and as for the difference between the red and white species, he wrote that they “differ only in the color of their bark.”124 While there were moments where these comparisons seem infelicitous, such as when Sagard described the Tupinambour (Sunchoke or Jerusalem Artichoke) as the “apple of Canada,” they more often pointed to an acknowledgment of real botanical continuities that we now use evolutionary science to explain.125
Contact with indigenous cultures could provide colonists and explorers with new names for American plants and knowledge about their possible uses. Lescarbot related, for example, the vain search for the plant Annedda that had—a century earlier—cured Jacques Cartier’s men of scurvy as an instance where this dependence meant death. “As to the tree Annedda to which Cartier has made mention,” he wrote, “the Sauvages of these lands do not know it at all.”126 Cartier had described the miraculous plant only as “large and as tall as any I ever saw” but lavished attention on its powers and, it seems, brought specimens of the tree that were soon growing in the gardens at Fontainebleau. It “produced such a result,” he wrote, “that had all the doctors of Louvain and Montpellier been there, with all the drugs of Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as did this tree in eight days.”127 The most obvious lesson from the incident for seventeenth-century colonists was to turn to indigenous peoples and ask for the curing plant. Champlain, when he discovered a Native near Tadoussac with the name “Aneda,” seemed sure that “by this name was the one of his race who had found the herb Aneda known,” even if “the sauvages do not know this herb at all.”128 Many of these truly novel plants, however, were presented to European audiences without names, such as those presumably edible roots that featured on Champlain’s 1613 map.129
The use of indigenous names did not, however, universally imply a respect for indigenous knowledge or a lasting connection to specific indigenous communities. Atoca (cranberry), for example, was known by variants on this Wendat name after it was first described by Gabriel Sagard, but the name became generalized and lost its association to any specific community.130 This missionary first transcribed the name as “toca” and wrote that with “neither pit nor seed, the Hurons [Wendat] eat it raw, and also put it in their little loaves,” demonstrating the interwoven nature of botanical and cultural exchange.131 The Jesuit Paul Le Jeune also recorded the fruit among the Haudenosaunee. He explained to his readers that “the young people went to gather it in the neighboring meadows, and, although it is neither palatable nor substantial, hunger made us find it excellent. It is almost of the color and size of a small cherry.”132 It was not just the French who appreciated the fruit. Le Jeune’s confrère Louis Nicolas wrote that English colonists used the plant in place of verjuice, which was normally produced from unripe grapes.133 Over time these references to the indigenous peoples who harvested this plant would decline, but the name, standardized as Atoca, remained the same.134 The engineer Gédéon de Catalogne wrote that it was used to make preserves in 1712.135 Antoine-Denis Raudot added that it was useful against dysentery, and the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix suggested its use for digestive ailments.136 Orthography, descriptions of morphology, and the expected effects of the plants became fixed as names such as Atoca became part of a French Atlantic taxonomy. Linguistically, plants such as this retained their linkage to American soils, but, like the originally indigenous words “barbecue” and “canoe,” their connection to any specific indigenous language was severed.137
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Among multiple strategies for naming the simultaneous familiarity and foreignness of plants and places, describing the nature of New France as sauvage became a particularly powerful tool that both affirmed similarity and stigmatized difference. In many cases, morphological differences between European and American species of plants were considered red herrings, more apparent than real. When colonial authors described various American plants such as lemons, cherries, and oats as sauvage, they implicitly suggested that