A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
offered opportunities to convey personal experience of American places. By the time that missionary relations and the récits de voyage of explorers presented New France to European readers, travel narratives were well established as a privileged genre for carrying experiences of the new worlds Europeans discovered around the globe back to reading publics in Europe.91 In the representation of New France, the travel narrative provided authors with an opportunity to meditate on the most prosaic fixtures of American landscapes, establishing familiarity and engendering confidence in the success of French colonialism to make them more familiar still.92 Even as authors began to call their accounts natural histories by midcentury, a strong authorial presence remained, along with considerable reliance on narratives that warranted descriptions as the product of firsthand experience. Narratives allowed authors to seamlessly move between empirical observations of real environments and imagine a not-too-distant promised future.93 The movement between these two tenses both legitimated colonial authors as experts and imaginatively engaged readers in the cultivation of an empire in northeastern North America.
The genres favored by colonial authors were the most capacious, and accounts of early American environments featured a variety of written forms.94 If the forms were fluid, however, the function remained consistent: to capture not only the experience of a New World but the affinities that connected New France and Old and that transcended the physical distance of the ocean that separated them. Textual features such as lists, indigenous-language dictionaries, and specific sections that dealt with natural historical subjects hint at the variety of information that could be contained within texts that modestly claimed to be simple accounts of circumscribed travel.95 For example, the dictionary included in Sagard’s Grand Voyage, like the chapter devoted to plants, offered Native terms for plants seemingly abstracted from their local cultural or ecological context alongside vocabulary related to the consumption of tobacco and other foods, farming, and the medicinal use of local plants.96 In this, Sagard joined other authors such as Lescarbot in a willingness to enrich their own narratives with features common to other genres. The Acadian lawyer’s Histoire, for example, combined a first-person narrative of early maritime colonization with an anthology of previous and contemporary French efforts in the region. In the process, his text became a palimpsest of forms and narrative techniques that converged to make New France legible as a colonial space.97
As part of a broader effort to centralize his authority, in 1663 Louis XIV took direct control of New France and reorganized its government. As the king’s interest in France’s colonial possessions grew, Pierre Boucher, Nicolas Denys, Louis Nicolas, and other authors expanded the effort to explain New France to multiple and more popular audiences across the Atlantic. The justifications for these efforts varied. Some, such as Louis Nicolas, had left New France behind and sought to use knowledge acquired there to build a life and reputation for themselves across the Atlantic.98 Others, such as the landowners and promoters Nicolas Denys and Pierre Boucher, while likewise staking a claim to authority based on their considerable firsthand experience, claimed that they did so to counter false testimony that had degraded the image of New France and that had undermined the appeal of colonization there. Boucher claimed the goal of telling his readers “the truth with the greatest naïveté that is possible, and the briefest that I can.”99 Nicolas Denys likewise sought to “disabuse” his readers of pernicious false opinions that he himself had been subject to before his arrival in Acadia.100 In this they implicitly joined the efforts of their colonial predecessors, yet they did so in a genre that had thus far had little role in the works of those authors who related New France. The genre that Denys, Nicolas, and Boucher chose was the natural history.
Like travel narratives, the genre of the natural history was in flux during this period.101 The major impact of the natural historical texts that described New France was to remove the chronological and linear focus that had defined earlier accounts. In his Histoire veritable, for example, Boucher organized many of his chapters around specific kinds of life recognizable to seventeenth-century authors, such as trees, animals, birds, and fish, but also included chapters devoted to particular regions such as Québec and others that addressed indigenous peoples.102 Thus even where the descriptions of plants seem haphazard and chaotic to the modern reader, for early modern audiences they assumed a familiarity with organizing categories such as trees, grasses, or bushes common in contemporary botanical texts; their inclusion in texts about North American flora argued for the existence of fundamental similarities between North American and European plants.103 Louis Nicolas, for example, divided his descriptions of over two hundred plants from sections on fish, birds, mammals, and aboriginal peoples and provided smaller sections that divided trees from shrubs and grasses from fruits.104 Other natural histories were similarly organized.
At least some travel narrative authors similarly sought to escape, at least temporarily, the linearity of their narratives to linger on a discussion of regions in an abstract language that could encompass spaces broader than they might otherwise be able to include. Narratives such as Louis Hennepin’s 1683 Description de la Louisiane, for example, seemed willing to blend formal elements of both narrative and natural history.105 The first sections of the book included information presented in a manner that would have been familiar to readers of the Relations or Champlain’s Voyages. His description of a Detroit “covered by forests, fruit trees such as walnut, chestnuts, prune trees, apple trees, [and] sauvage vines, charged with grapes,” was introduced alongside the information that he and his fellow travelers were “fortunate enough to have arrived at the entrance of Détroit on the tenth in the morning, the feast day of Saint Lawrence.”106 These economical descriptions were complemented, however, by an appended text titled Les moeurs des sauvages that also included an introductory chapter on the “fertility of the country of the Sauvages.”107
In place of an emphasis on the different genres in which authors such as Champlain, Lescarbot, Boucher, and Denys wrote, we should instead emphasize both a common epistemology and shared formal promiscuity. Lists appeared within narratives, and accounts of travel punctuated natural historical texts. Consistently, however, these authors rarely failed to establish their authority as firsthand observers who knew the places that they described through their own labors of cultivation and experimentation.
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Authors such as Champlain, Lescarbot, and Biard established themselves as experts on American environments and made effective use of genres that privileged their own experience and knowledge. Champlain’s various Voyages and Lescarbot’s editions of the Histoire de la Nouvelle-France focused primary attention on the significant firsthand experience that they had acquired in the colony.108 While both Biard’s and Gabriel Sagard’s accounts of their missions to American indigenous peoples were interested in the invisible and otherworldly, their narratives revolved around their explorations—around their actions and experiences.109 Sagard promised, for example, that “I speak only of what I am assured.”110 Chronologically organized accounts emphasized the complexity of American environments and privileged the expertise of authors who had spent considerable time in New France.111 Descriptions of the weather, for example, became opportunities both to relate empirically observed facts and to remind readers of the length and breadth of an author’s experience. Foregrounding his experience of both Frances, Biard wrote, for example, that “I noticed once, that two February days, the 26th and 27th, were as beautiful, mild, and spring-like as are those in France about that time; nevertheless, the third day after, it snowed a little and the cold returned. Sometimes in summer the heat is as intolerable, or more so than it is in France; but it does not last long, and soon the sky begins to be overcast.”112 Champlain recounted successful experiments with spring and winter plantings, and Lescarbot reported that promoters had brought back some samples of Old World crops grown in Acadia to accompany his written account of the fecundity and—more important—the reliability and predictability of American climates.113 Each emphasized the empirical foundation of their knowledge and used their own experienced bodies as a metric for their readers, who were instructed how to appreciate the similarities between France and New France.114
Narrators also claimed a role as guarantors of testimony