A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
Whether in Québec or Paris, knowing New France meant engaging with a multicultural, epistemologically diverse Atlantic world. The obvious failure of efforts to weed out the features that made the environments of New France different from those that colonists had left behind also created new intellectual and cultural spaces in which indigenous knowledge was interrogated and integrated. Ultimately, French knowledge was always produced in dialogue with indigenous knowledge, whether colonial accounts explicitly praised or critiqued indigenous practice and even if they rendered aboriginal cultures invisible in celebrating the heroism of borderland scientists.51
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Decades before the Comte de Buffon and Thomas Jefferson took up the infamous “Dispute of the New World,” authors on both sides of the French Atlantic world were engaged in a vigorous debate about Americanness.52 Colonist-authors, administrators, scientists, and missionaries studied and hypothesized the depth and cause of this increasingly undeniable difference. Was New France more new or more French? The simple repetition of the appellation “New France” in historical accounts and recent scholarship obscures the fact that it was the tension between these two terms that animated colonial and transatlantic debates about the nature of empire in the French North Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the century and a half of French colonialism in North America, investigations of the environments of New France were integral to these broader considerations, providing a space for colonial and metropolitan methods to assay otherwise ineffable questions of cultural transfer from one continent to another, of the conversion of novel places and peoples, and, in effect, of France’s ability to extend and replicate itself beyond its shores.
CHAPTER 1
Discovering a Not-So-New World
In 1623, the Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard’s first glimpse of the nascent New France to which he had come was a garden. At the mouth of the Saint Lawrence, near Mont-Sainte-Anne in Gaspé Bay, he encountered a landscape that he described as “very mountainous and elevated almost everywhere, disagreeable and sterile.” He was disappointed to see “nothing but fir trees, birch, and little other wood.”1 These were the lands of the Canadian Shield, scraped bare of much of their soil by millennia of glacial movement and home to boreal forests.2 Yet he was soon to find that “in front of the harbor, in a slightly elevated place, a garden was made that the sailors cultivated when they arrived there, they sowed sorrel, and other little herbs there, with which they make soup.”3 Amid seemingly endless forests, in a frequently harsh and forbidding landscape, he had found a garden; it was a locus amoenus in a New World otherwise unknown to him.
Sagard’s encounter with the garden changed the tenor of his descriptions and marked a new relationship between the author and the environments he now set about to explore. As he passed into the Saint Lawrence, the Récollet encountered far more familiar and pleasing landscapes, with recognizable geology, weather, and flora.4 Rough similarities in rainfall, in seasonality, and in ecological organization make western Europe and eastern North America the heart of a region identified by environmental scientists as the temperate forest biome.5 Sagard would have seen large swaths of deciduous forests but with prominent stands of coniferous trees throughout.6 The unique climates of the Saint Lawrence Valley made the region home to multiple plant communities that blended boreal elements with analogues in Scandinavia and the Baltic and genuinely temperate plants that were close relatives of those found throughout Atlantic France. Populations of familiar plants were particularly prominent where indigenous cultures had aided their establishment over the previous centuries.7 The missionary reached the heart of French settlement in the region at Québec by traveling through the mixed landscapes of the upper Saint Lawrence that he found “agreeable in several places” and even “very pleasant.”8
Sagard reveled in describing flora for his French readers.9 In a later chapter of his 1632 Grand Voyage dedicated to the “fruits, plants, trees & riches of the country,” his familiarity with the environments of this New France became clear. He confidently named and described cedar, oak, wild cherries, onions, raspberries, grapes, and lilies.10 He was uniquely attentive to indigenous names and knowledge of these plants, but even in these moments he highlighted an essential similarity that transcended cultural differences in use and identification. If Sagard named the carnivorous pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) “Angyahouiche Orichya, which is to say, turtle’s stocking,” for example, he included indigenous names more often as an opportunity to reassure his readers that these were simply new names for old plants.11 He described, for example, “Cedars, named Asquata,” and “Roses, that they call Eindauhatayon.”12 Sagard and the other French merchants, missionaries, and explorers who traveled to northeastern North America in the early seventeenth century were confident that they had discovered a not-so-New World, recognizable with existing names and amenable to French uses.
Sagard showed little disorientation, nor did he give any hint that the ecological novelty of North America might pose a significant challenge to Aristotelian intellectual traditions.13 Instead, even if the geographical distance that the Récollet traveled was remarkable, it seems obvious that nowhere else could Europeans have traveled so far to find environments so familiar.14 In northeastern North America, common ecological and evolutionary histories meant that the environments to which the French had come shared a great deal with those they had left.15 American maples looked much like those of France (and the same was as true of plants as large and as common as birch as it was for more locally available strawberries, raspberries, and grapes), but they nonetheless differed substantially. We would now recognize them as different species of related botanical genera and families, but early colonists mapped these differences onto a distinction between the sauvage (wild) and cultivated. Close encounter and empirical engagement with these new places and new plants facilitated French efforts to plant an empire in seventeenth-century North America. The nature of New France was uncanny—simultaneously familiar and foreign—and naming the sauvage inspired confidence that this tension could be overcome and managed (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Louis Nicolas, “Sauvages plants,” Codex Canadensis, ca. 1674–80. Gilcrease Museum. Acc. 4726.7. Courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Sagard’s encounter suggests the need to weigh the effect of the cultural or mental “baggage” that explorers, colonists, and missionaries brought with them to the Americas in environments that shared common natural histories with Europe and that, in effect, were far more familiar than foreign for early modern explorers.16 Sagard’s lack of confusion can seem surprising if we expect European explorers utterly unmoored by the newness of the Americas. J. H. Elliott’s argument that the impact of the New World on the Old was “disappointingly muted and slow in materializing” has encouraged a generation of scholars to debate the cause of a “blunted impact” that seems to echo in Sagard’s confidence.17 As the inheritors of decades of scholarly investigation of narratives of travel and exploration that in extremis claim that “we can be certain only that European representations of the New World tell us something about the European practice of representation,” we are justly skeptical of authors such as Sagard, Champlain, and other settlers and missionaries in northeastern North America who demonstrate a considerable familiarity with what we know were new places.18 At its most innocent, the failure of authors such as Sagard to recognize the novelty of American environments can seem a confusion of kinds and an inability to comprehend how the distance that they had traveled had translated into real biological and ecological differences.19 Yet Sagard seemed reassured by what he found, and he saw in New France environments that were more French than new.20
Appreciating the colonialist intent of explorers such as Sagard who arrived with the explicit purpose of subverting indigenous cultures demands that we recognize that the