Professional Documents
Culture Documents
EDITED BY
Germaine Warkentin
Carolyn Podruchny
Illustrations on the part-title pages and the cover are used with the permission of the
Canadian Museum of Civilization, images numbers 82000-7483, 82000-7484, 82000-
7485.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing pro-
gram of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social
Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activ-
ities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Develop-
ment Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Part I: Methods
Polarities, Hybridities: What Strategies for Decentring? 19
Natalie Zemon Davis
Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of Difference: Native and
Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History, and Change 33
Deborah Doxtator
Plunder or Harmony? On Merging European and Native Views of
Early Contact 48
Toby Morantz
Memoria as the Place of Fabrication of the New World 68
Giles Therien
Part V: Afterword
Amerindians and the Horizon of Modernity 305
Denys Deldge and Jean-Philippe Warren
The papers that follow range widely through the documents and litera-
ture of the period 1500-1700, besides including much modern literary,
historical, and scientific material. We have systematized this varying
material as follows: citations from manuscript and unpublished material
are located in the notes that appear at the end of each essay; references
to printed material appear as author-date citations in the text. All pub-
lished sources cited in the text appear at the end of the volume in the
extensive list of works cited, which is intended to be a helpful contribu-
tion to further work in the area. To that end, in the works cited and the
in-text citations we have generally included the original date of publica-
tion in square brackets, in addition to the modern edition being
referred to. The exceptions are Christopher Columbus, Jacques Cartier,
Richard Hakluyt, and Samuel de Champlain, where the textual record is
complicated and established modern editions have been cited, and well-
known poets such as Donne, Drayton, and Yeats. In referring to early
printed material all citations have been compared with the original
texts; the use of i/j and u/v has been regularized and intensive italiciza-
tion ignored.
DECENTRING THE RENAISSANCE
Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective,
1500-1700
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction:
'Other Land Existing'
Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny
In the traditional story outlining the founding of the Confederacy, the Onon-
daga word for nation is tsyakauhwetsya'atta'shu', or 'earth, land be one,'
implying that, in order to be a nation, a group of people must fundamentally
share the same land. The term for nations outside the Confederacy of shared
lands is thihotiohwentayatenyo, literally 'other land existing.'
Deborah Doxtator
north we can see a vaguely similar pattern where Cabot's voyage from
Bristol in 1497 and the English and French enterprise that followed can be
regarded as an overseas thrust by these peoples beyond their centuries-old
Celtic frontiers. Viewed more closely ... the actual patterns fail to sustain so
simple a relationship, or indeed any close similarities to Iberia ... The long
delays and difficulties in getting anything firmly under way in the New
World from this part of the Old hardly represent an explosive expansion
but rather contrast starkly with the Iberian conquest of half the Americas in
half a century. (Meinig 1986, 4)
The second argument stems from the history of Canada itself, where
the much weaker effect of both the Enlightenment of eighteenth-
century Europe and the revolutionary fervour of the period 1776-1848
has meant that certain features of that slow and tentative early cultural
formation remain in place. Themes of obedience and deference still
play a role in the analysis of Canadian cultural politics, and Canada is
sometimes described as a country that has not yet had its revolution. The
great economic historian Harold Innis observed that 'fundamentally,
the civilization of North America is the civilization of Europe.' Though
one of Innis's aims in The Fur Trade in Canadawas 'to show the effects of
a vast new land area on European civilization' (Innis 1956, 385), it was
with the deep resemblance he saw between the two that he began.
Thus Canada has been in the past, and remains today, peculiarly vul-
nerable to the centre-periphery model exemplified by the Renaissance.
Either its chattering classes struggle interminably with the problem of
'Canadian identity' or - as in Innis's staple theory or the related work of
Donald Creighton in The Commercial Empire of the St Lawrence, 1760-1850
(!937) ~ tropes of imperial outreach, long severed from their Renais-
sance and Early Modern context, are domesticated in the great valley of
the St Lawrence River, or preserved with animosity on the Western prai-
ries.4 Despite this vulnerability, the formation of Canadian theories
about ourselves (a richly paradoxical subject) has generally ignored as a
shaping force the specifically cultural significance of the period 1400-
1700 on perceptions of the country. The famous depiction of Hochelaga
with which Ramusio illustrated his text of Carder (figure i) is topo-
graphically correct (Larouche 1992, 130-40) but, as Andre Corboz has
shown, it also has its precedent in the Italian tradition of ideal town
plans.5 And when the explorers Radisson and Groseilliers participated
in diplomatic negotiations at a 'Feast of the Dead' near Lake Superior
in 1660, it was to Renaissance court progresses that Radisson compared
the ceremonies he witnessed (Warkentin 1996). Possibly we have not
paused often enough to attempt the act of historical imagination invited
by such comparisons: envisioning Canada through the eyes of the peo-
ple of the Renaissance who came here from France, England, Spain,
Portugal, and Italy between 1497 and about 1700, and for whom Renais-
sance court display (to take only one example) was a familiar mode of
public discourse.
Indeed, it is only recently that we have attempted to do so from the
point of view of the Native peoples who were living here when the Euro-
peans arrived, inhabiting the same historical epoch but with very differ-
Introduction: 'Other Land Existing' 11
ent ideas of its history. The gulf between modern Canadians of aboriginal
descent and those of European origin is notoriously unbridged. One of
the most important essays comes from the late Deborah Doxtator, who,
from the dual perspective of a Mohawk of the Tyendinaga reserve and a
professor of English at York University in Toronto, considers the phe-
nomenon of European historiography as it rewrites, but cannot change,
the historiography of peoples unwillingly caught in the project of expan-
sion. It was in reading works such as Olive Dickason's The Myth of the Sav-
age and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in theAmericas (1984; translated
as Le Mythe du Sauvage, 1993) and Denys Delage's L^e Pays renverse (1985,
translated as The Bitter Feast, 1993) that many of us first recognized the
need to pose about Canada and its peoples at the time of contact the
question that Edmundo O'Gorman had posed about the Americas three
decades ago - 'whether or not the idea that America was "discovered" was
acceptable as a satisfactory way of explaining its appearance on the his-
torical scene of Western culture' (O'Gorman 1961, 45).
12 Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny
the Renaissance, and they represented modernity in their time, but for
them metissage, the weaving of contrary truths into a new fabric, was
impossible - though some of the Native people Therien discusses found
a diplomatic way around the problem in conducting their own affairs.
'The notion of mentality,' Therien shrewdly observes, 'is not in itself
without confusion,' a complexity we have suggested with a double title for
section two: the Ojibwa word for mentalites would probably be 'debwewin,'
'the truth.' Here, we examine four case histories - two including exam-
ples from further south - that suggest the various and paradoxical ways in
which Renaissance and Early Modern mentalites operated in the setting of
early Canada. Olive Dickason considers the by no means simple history of
the French vision of empire, comparing events in Canada, Brazil, and
Florida. Selma Barkham complicates our understanding of 'contact' by
describing a situation in which Europeans and Native people seem to
have engaged in little conflict, in part because of the values that the Euro-
peans - the Basques she has studied so closely- brought with them. Anne
Lake Prescott continues this investigation of values and objectives by
looking at the mental universe of the English poet and essayist William
Vaughan, who, though he probably never visited Newfoundland, was cer-
tain he could write with authority about it. Mary Fuller also has something
to say about Vaughan, as she compares the differing notions of settle-
ment that shaped sixteenth-century visions of Virginia and Newfound-
land. Concluding this section, Real Ouellet and Mylene Tremblay look at
how two important rhetorical topoi of exploration writing, those of the
Good Savage and the Degenerate Indian, actually evolved in French writ-
ing about the new world.
In section 3, Translatio fide, one of the great themes of early writing
about Canada - the translation of a universalizing faith to a distant and,
to many Europeans, unappealing region of empire — is put under the
microscope, with unexpected results. Luca Codignola re-examines the
image of the religious orders in the history of New France, provides sur-
prising statistics on their small numbers, and shows with what difficulty
the missions in New France were developed in the context of Jesuit mis-
sions worldwide. Peter Goddard considers some of the reasons why the
accepted picture of the divine imperative to send missionaries to Can-
ada needs re-evaluation. Andre Sanfacon studies the painstaking repli-
cation of Italy's Holy House of Loreto at Notre Dame de Lorette in New
France, bringing the resources of Church history, material culture, and
gender studies to bear on the actual operation of the translatio fide in the
lives of both Jesuits and Hurons.
14 Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny
NOTES
1 See Greenblatt 1990, 1991, 1993; Pagden 1987, 1993, 1995; Mignolo 1995.
2 William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming' (1921); Yeats 1950, 210-11, 11. 22,
15
l6 Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny
One day when I was in a village, my moussacat (he who had received me into
his house) entreated me to show him evetything I had in my caramemo, that
is, in my leather sack. He had brought to me a fine big earthen vessel in
which I arranged all my effects. Marvelling at the sight, he immediately
called the other savages and said to them: 'I pray you, my friends, consider
what a personage I have in my house for since he has so many riches, must
he not be a great lord?' And yet, as I said, laughing with a companion of
mine who was there with me, what this savage held in such high esteem was
in sum five or six knives with different kinds of handles, and as many combs,
mirrors, and other small objects that would not have been worth two
testoons in Paris ... They love above all those who show liberality; since I
wanted to exalt myself even more than he had done, I gave him freely and
publicly, in front of everyone, the biggest and handsomest of my knives,
which he set as much store by as might someone in our France who had just
received a golden chain worth a hundred crowns. (Lery [1578] 1990, 169)
was the name of the last Inca king who had resisted the Spanish, and his
name would be taken again in subsequent revolts.
In seventeenth-century Quebec, the Ursuline Marie de 1'Incarnation
has left us a picture of another kind of resisting woman. A Wendat
(Huron), 'one of the oldest and most notable of [her] nation,' rose up at
a village assembly to explain why her people were dying of a new disease:
It's the Black Robes who are making us die by their spells. Listen to me, I
will prove it by reasons that you will recognize as true. They set themselves
up in a village where everyone is feeling fine; no sooner are they there but
everyone dies except for three or four people. They move to another place,
and the same thing happens. They visit cabins in other villages, and only
those where they have not entered are exempt from death and illness.
Don't you see that when they move their lips in what they call prayer, spells
are coming out of their mouths? It's the same when they read their books.
They have big pieces of wood in their cabins [guns, Marie explains
parenthetically] by which they make noise and send their magic every-
where. If they are not promptly put to death, they will end up ruining the
country, and no one will be left, young or old.
[1696] 1940, 239-335). Here was a form of women's communal life with-
out the Catholic enclosure of the Ursulines and without the sexuality of
the longhouse (Shoemaker 1995, 61-6).
Gift exchange and barter also can be examined in terms of the cre-
ation of a middle ground and system of common practices. In 1623,
according to Gabriel Sagard's description of the Huron, they lacked the
wariness that Taignoagny and Domagaya had urged upon the St
Lawrence Iroquoians a century before. To show how gallant they are,
[the Huron] do not willingly bargain and will be satisfied with what one
gives them honestly and reasonably, despising the ways of our mer-
chants, who will bargain for an hour about the sale of a beaver skin'
(Sagard [1632] 1990, 22O, my translation). Not many years later, with the
increase in French settlement and fur traders, the Amerindians had
become familiar with an exchange system different from both their fes-
tive and neighbourly gifts to each other and from the formal donations
of their diplomacy. Now when the Algonquins assembled with their bea-
ver pelts at Tadoussac, they refused to trade with the first French boats
that arrived, waiting for other merchants to see who would give them
the best exchange (Ray and Freeman 1978, 20).
On the French side, we also see the adaptation of certain Amerindian
styles. In France, a would-be recipient could ask for a gift, but, in princi-
ple, a donor was not to specify to a recipient what precise return was
expected on a gift. That would be a form of bribery. In Canada, as we
know, the presentation of wampum belts and furs as part of diplomacy
or for reparation for bloodshed was always accompanied by requests for
specific outcomes, phrased with the high rhetorical skills of the wood-
lands. So the tall Kiotseaeton, orator for the Mohawk, Keepers of the
Eastern Door, presented wampum belts at a 1645 peacemaking assembly
with Algonquin, Montagnais, Attikamegue, and French, whom he in-
vited to visit the Iroquois. As Marie de 1'Incarnation relates, he said
'I have seen people perish in these bubbling waters. This [wampum belt] is
to appease them.' And with his hands he stopped the torrents and subdued
them into tranquillity.
'And this one is to calm the great lake of Saint Louis and render it as
smooth as ice, and appease the anger of the winds, the tempests and
waters' ... And attaching the present to the arm of a Frenchman, he drew
him straight to the middle of the stage to show that our canoes could go to
their ports without difficulty.
Then, opening the trail by land ... he cut down trees, broke off branches,
What Strategies for Decentring? 29
pushed back forests, and filled valleys with earth. 'There! The whole trail is
clean and smooth.' And he lowered himself to the ground to flatten all the
countryside ... and see if there was any stone or piece of wood that could
hinder walking. 'Now you'll be able to see the smoke in our villages all the
way from Quebec.' (Guyart [1626-72] 1971, no. 92, 256; my translation)3
NOTES
l In describing the desperation to which he, his fellow passengers, and the crew
were reduced on the return voyage from Brazil to France because of lack of pro-
visions, Lery mentioned the cannibalism by a Protestant family of Sancerre dur-
ing the seige of that Reformed town in 1574 (212). The 'brutal action' of the
'savages' he compared to the brutality of Catholics, the 'denaturing' of his
European shipmates to the denatured behaviour of Protestants.
32 Natalie Zemon Davis
2 'Les deulx meschans que [nous] avyons apportez leur disoient et donnoyent a
entendre que ce que nous leur baillons ne vailloit riens, et qu'ilz auroyent aus-
sitost des hachotz comme des couteaulx pour ce qu'ilz nous bailloyent.' And
'Cela ne vault rien, Sahauty quahonquey' (187-8; my translations).
3 Even in the mediated French version presented by Marie de 1'Incarnation and
in the Jesuit and other reports she is recording, one can get some sense of the
power and drama of the original version.
4 The contrast between Amerindian and Jesuit eloquence in the course of gift
bestowal is evident in the Jesuits'journal, where quotations are recorded from
both sides; see for example LeJournal [1871] 1893, 193-226.
5 See Trudy C. Nicks and Ruth Phillips, 'Decolonizing the Wampums: Living
History from Dead Letters.' Paper presented at the conference 'Decentring
the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1350-
1700,' Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 7-10 March 1996.
Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of
Difference: Native and Euro-Based
Concepts of Time, History, and Change
Deborah Doxtator
the stories and customs of the Huron and others, did so in order to
better debunk them as 'superstition' and fallacies (Grant 1984, 32, 34).
Laurie Anne Whitt has argued that, even into the twentieth century,
'the dominant knowledge system of the West' has often viewed indige-
nous knowledge systems as '"tainted" with a normative and spiritual
component' that renders them 'mere superstition, the very antithesis of
knowledge' (Whitt 1995, 236).
Recent scholarship about South American indigenous history has
begun to question assumptions that 'pre-literate societies' lack historical
consciousness. As Terence Turner argues, the structuralist idea that
indigenous societies see themselves as having 'static social systems,' with
'myth' but not 'history,' needs revision (Turner ig88a, 195-6). Yet the
perception of the basis and structures of 'history' among indigenous
peoples does differ dramatically from Euro-based concepts. Indigenous
conceptualizations of history are not the same as those that came out of
a European tradition. Turner argues that European history is based on a
tradition that stems from Thucydides' emphasis upon retelling events in
a chronological sequence as part of one universal history, but that other
kinds of history order events as episodes, not strictly connected to one
another in a set chronology (Turner I988b, 249-50). Alcida Ramos fur-
ther argues that the separation of myth from history is part of a process
of compartmentalization that is unnecessary in indigenous thought
but essential to European-based ideas of rationalism and empiricism
(Ramos 1988, 229).
However, European-based histories are just as informed by their own
cultural myths and symbols as are indigenous oral traditions — albeit per-
haps less overtly. The twentieth-century assumption that historians must
not make direct reference to their own myths is in itself a kind of cul-
tural belief system. As Turner points out, cultural myth is usually com-
patible with, mutually informing of, and complementary to, narrative
forms of history (Turner ig88b, 237). Narrative histories written now,
like the accounts constructed in the time of first contact between Native
peoples and Europeans, reflect differing cultural systems. Does this then
mean that they are incompatible with one another?
Centuries of syncretic adaptation of European-based ideologies and
structures to Native knowledge systems by Native peoples would indicate
otherwise. Renaissance explorers such as Champlain relied heavily upon
Montagnais and Huron conceptual maps and geopolitical interpreta-
tions of their territories to make their own maps. In an essay elsewhere
in this volume, Conrad Heidenreich argues that Champlain was success-
36 Deborah Doxtator
'Canada' did not exist during the Renaissance, yet no one has any diffi-
culty discussing this topic since the continuities seem apparent and use-
ful for organizing discussion.
Although Rotinonhsyonni concepts of time present no gulf between
time periods, they do not imply a static lack of change any more than
Euro-based concepts do. In fact in Rotinonhsyonni thought there is con-
tinual movement, not stasis. The creation story itself emphasizes this
continual movement. For a while there is movement towards enlarging
life (Spring) by Sapling, the elder brother of twins. This is followed by
movement for a time back towards contraction (Winter), brought about
by Flint, the younger of the twins. Although this cyclical movement is
balanced, it is not productive of stasis. Each seasonal cycle is never
exactly the same, and the overall result of varied repetition of cycles is
the gradual growth, layering, and development of the earth - a contin-
ual state of change and transformation brought about by balanced
forces interacting with one another.
This Rotinonhsyonni idea that change is the product of repeated
activities consolidating and subsuming interrelated structures is ex-
plained in a discussion of social change given by Cayuga linguist and
ritualist Reg Henry:
At the beginning ... when the Creator created this earth, somebody had
to be responsible for the environment, for this earth, to keep it going, so
he created a man to do this ... Later on he as looking at this man, seeing
how he was doing ... in time, he seemed lost, had his head down and the
Creator said, well, it seems like I'll have to get a companion for this man
and see if that helps. Needless to say it did perk up the man quite a bit.
They seemed to be getting on well, so the Creator said now I can officially
put you together as man and wife; they give birth to children, a lot of
children, and everything went well... there was sort of a large population of
Indians then. Later on ... Creator was looking down and there was
something wrong with these people. They were wandering around aimlessly,
not really organized in what they were doing.
And the Creator said, what I will do is give them clans. And since all their
lives revolved around the woods, the clans were based on animals in the
woods. So then they can start to organize and do for each other what was to
be done ... so that was the beginning.3
Law (the Great Peace) and the introduction of the Four Ceremonies
further organizes the connections of mankind to the natural world and
to the Creator (Hewitt 1928, 558, 570; Wallace 1946, 5, 7). In this narra-
tive, like many other Rotinonhsyonni representations of history, cyclical
patterns continue their accumulative effect until change occurs as a
result of those very patterns. No level of organization actually disap-
pears: each is incorporated within institutions with larger and larger
spatial contexts. History is an additive process, building upon what has
gone before in a kind of consciously constructed continuity.
In the creation story, the descendants of Odendoonniha and Awen-
haniyonda, the first man and first woman, follow repeatedly the instruc-
tions of De'haen'hiyawa'kho - 'Sky Grasper' or the 'Creator' or 'he who
finished our bodies' - until there are a great many people on the earth
and it becomes apparent that an uneasy 'unfinished' situation has
arisen in their relationships with one another: 'There was, as it were,
absolute silence; they had no ceremony which they should have been
performing, also no business that they should have been attending to;
everything was just neglected, all was silent; they traveled about with
their ohwachira [families]; it was so that one would think they only
went about standing in different places' (Hewitt 1928, 558). Then
De'haen'hiyawa'kho or 'Sky-Grasper' returns and establishes the Four
Ceremonies (the Great Feather Dance, the Skin Dance, the personal
chants, and the Betting Game). Added to and incorporated with the
earlier idea of families travelling about is the idea of organized group
activities centred on the change in seasons. To the initial idea of differ-
ence is added the idea that two things differing 'among themselves'
bring contentment to the mind when they have reciprocal responsibili-
ties to one another. The new pattern of the four ceremonies incorpo-
rates and centres on the concept of complementary differences between
groups of people, between men and women, and between winter and
spring. In adding the four ceremonies, nothing is lost or taken away: all
is incorporated within the next addition, and differences actually func-
tion not to separate but to unify groups (Hewitt 1928, 605-7).
The mysterious young man Ho'nigo'heowa'nen,' or 'His-Mind-Is-
Great,' then introduces the idea of clans. Taking the ideas of family, dif-
ference, and reciprocal relationship among different groups, he creates
groups of families or clans, separating them into two moieties that have
reciprocal relations to one another. He recreates a 'middle' line
between the two groups of clans. In so doing, he creates reciprocal rela-
tionships between the groups; these join everyone together into a whole
4O Deborah Doxtator
and yet keep them spatially distinct and separate from one another
(Hewitt 1928, 605-7). Society is organized on the idea of unified differ-
ence on many different levels from the family to the moiety. Reciprocal
relationships among family members are not repudiated by the larger
clan moiety structure but rather are subsumed by it. Change, in this con-
ceptualization of time and history, is not replacement, but incorpora-
tion and subsuming the structures of the past. Continuity without
separating gaps is central to this view of history.
The type of story discussed here is only one of the many different
kinds of historical narratives that form part of Native conceptualizations
of history. They provide the elements of how the world is structured;
others tell of actual living people, movements, and interactions. In
Native perceptions of history as continually moving continuities, oral
traditions are ideally suited to recording and recounting these histories.
During the diplomacy of the seventeenth century, Rotinonhsyonni and
other Native peoples used councils to recount and continually update
histories of interactions between nations (Druke 1987, 37-9). Knowl-
edge was stored in symbolic form using images on wampum belts, birch-
bark, and fur pelt drawings, utilizing images that evoked concepts
rather than reproducing spoken language. Richard Preston, as part of
his work with Cree elders, has outlined two different kinds of Cree sto-
ries that make up their conceptualization of history: atiukan, or mythic
stories about the creation of the world, and tipachimun, or stories of
actual human beings in their everyday life (Preston 1975, 292).
Historians have been most interested in the latter kind of oral narra-
tives. In her essay in this volume, Toby Morantz invokes Elizabeth
Tonkin's admonition to scholars to not pick out the currants and ignore
the cake in their quest to find useful 'evidence' to corroborate their own
culturally based perspectives (Tonkin 1992, 6). Without distortion of
information it's not possible simply to pick out the types of historical
narrative that look the most like Euro-based ideas of empirical, compart-
mentalized descriptions of actual events and include them as 'another
perspective' in chronological Euro-focused histories. In any case,
detailed accounts of events in the Renaissance period from the point
of view of Native peoples are nearly non-existent in the seventeenth-
century European record (Trigger 1985, 125). In part this may be
because seventeenth-century chroniclers could not see beyond their
own cultures and the supposed 'lack' of organized law, government, his-
tory, and culture of Native groups. For example, Champlain concludes
his lengthy description of Huron customs with the dismissive phrase
Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History, and Change 41
'this is all I have been able to learn about their brutish beliefs' (Cham-
plain 1922-36, 4:52). Radisson, for all his empathy, in the end saw the
customs and ideas that he so carefully described as 'fabulous beleafes of
those poore People' (Warkentin 1996, 59). Even the observant and cul-
turally curious Moravians, who, like the Jesuits, learned Native lan-
guages, did not think it necessary to give more than passing reference to
the 'Cayuga archives.' These 'pictures hanging in the trees' describing
war exploits on the way to Onondaga were not seen as real history
(Beauchamp 1916, 41).
Further, seventeenth-century record keepers failed to recognize that
wampum belts and pictographs were valid kinds of recording systems. In
the minutes of innumerable council meetings with Native nations, only
passing mention is made of wampum belts, and although the writer may
indicate that these belts were hung up during a speech, they are almost
never described in any detail or given much consideration in the written
record. For instance, in records of seventeenth-century treaties made
with John Livingston, the British Secretary for Indian Affairs, references
to wampum are more concerned with quantity than in the patterns or
intellectual imagery of the belts and strings. Frequent reference is made
to 'a fathom of wampum' or 'a hank of wampum.' In 1683 at a treaty
negotiation between the governor of New York and the Oneida, the
record describes 'a belt 12 deep'; at the record of an Albany conference
in 1704, the point is made that there were 'seven hands of wampum'
(Leder 1956, 36, 39, 91, 197). Furthermore, in mid-eighteenth-century
treaties with the Iroquois, kept by Sir William Johnson, the British
Indian commissioner in the colony of New York, strings of wampum or
wampum belts are mentioned but never described in terms of their pat-
terns or intellectual imagery.4 Thus, any attempt to include Native-
authored material in non-Native histories of the Renaissance period
in North America is by necessity based on nineteenth- and twentieth-
century oral traditions.
To try to distil from Native oral traditions narratives describing events
that happened in the seventeenth century, or in other words to convert
Native knowledge into something closer to what western historians con-
sider knowledge, is to distort the information that these narratives con-
tain. Usually this is a very difficult task in any case, as oral traditions do
not normally contain conveniently dated signposts. In about 1825 David
Cusick, a Tuscarora historian, attempted to write a chronological Six
Nations history up to the arrival of Columbus in North America, based
on nineteenth-century oral tradition. As he stated in his preface, it was
42 Deborah Doxtator
inscription, or, as some have argued, the 'taming' of the voice (Mignolo
1994,293-4).
Still, European culture did have many other forms of record keeping
than the written or printed word. In the early period of mapping North
America, Native and European ideas were not incompatible. Renais-
sance cartographers reworked Native descriptions and maps that, like
oral traditions, set out cosmologies, histories, and politics in a record of
landmarks and landscapes. Early European maps were not precisely
drafted on mathematical grids of scale and, with their illustrations mak-
ing reference to classical myth, resembled Native maps and conceptual-
izations of the landscape that incorporated mythological, religious,
historical, and political information (Brotherston 1992, 82). The differ-
ence, of course, was that although map making was a collaborative pro-
cess, it was never acknowledged by Europeans as such.
Again, the perception of difference as necessitating separation, and
the necessity of European superiority to further their goal of coloniza-
tion, coloured Renaissance Europeans' dealings with Native intellectual
contributions to European records and constructions of knowledge
about North America. The legacy of these ideas continues to influence
contemporary ideas about the incompatibility of Native and Euro-based
concepts of history.
Jacques Derrida has challenged the fallacy that written text can ever
stand alone or that oral and written script are mutually exclusive (Broth-
erston 1992, 42). Euro-based history is based upon its own mythologies,
icons, and metaphors just as much as Native history. It also bends time
to emphasize certain culturally important continuities but finds it diffi-
cult to accept Native continuities that stress different versions and struc-
tures of history. In Native world-views, such as the Rotinonhsyonni one
briefly alluded to above, difference is inclusive in that relationships and
interactions exist because of difference, not its absence.
Native concepts of forming and transferring knowledge are based on
kinds of concrete conceptual thinking that individualize or 'personal-
ize' knowledge. These are not, as Champlain thought, just a case that
each 'prayfsj in his heart as he thought good' (Champlain 1922-36,
1:117). How a person knows something is very important to its credibil-
ity to others. To speak from personal experience, as Robin Ridington
writes, is to know with authority a complete but small part of the whole
world (Ridington 1990, xv). In the Rotinonhsyonni conceptual world, to
know something one must interact directly with a world that incorpo-
rates rather than separates out the mythic. Reality is experienced in an
Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History, and Change 45
assumed they have been and always will be. As Alcida Ramos reflects, 'to
insist on dividing "primitive" from "historical" societies is to add to the
intellectual apparatus of domination, to build a sort of indigenist Orien-
talism' (Ramos 1988, 230).
Native intellectual traditions and Euro-based traditions need not
operate in isolation because they are deemed mutually unintelligible to
each other. If one looks at the Renaissance, it is possible to conclude
that Europeans and Native peoples successfully communicated ideas
and concepts across cultures. In the twentieth century, Louis Owens,
writing about Native literatures, has observed that Native concepts of
identity and of the essential dialogic nature of the world coincide with
many of the tenets of western postmodern theory (Owens 1992, 6-12).
Yet the discourse surrounding the history and interaction between cul-
tures remains founded on oppression, bounded by ideas of a 'domi-
nant' and 'subordinate' narrative. Ironically, this continued focus on
the 'dominance' of the colonizer often serves to support the inequality
being repudiated in the first place. If the primary basis for denying the
equal compatibility of two knowledge systems is that Native concepts are
different from western history's culturally determined categories, then
perhaps the categories of history need to be re-examined, revised, and
enlarged. Rather than trying to fit Native information into Euro-based
structures of history, perhaps the interrelationships between Native and
European histories need to be more closely examined. How could two
groups of people have lived together for 500 years and not have influ-
enced one another's thinking or have communicated with one another?
Is the ambivalence of the Renaissance writer who painstakingly de-
scribes Native ideas and customs only to dismiss them as unimportant
and uninfluential to his own thinking, part of the contemporary prob-
lem of perceiving how Native intellectual concepts relate to the writing
of history in North America?
Although not an intellectual impossibility, a true synthesis of tradi-
tions does not appear to have been historically sought out by either side.
On the Native side, nations such as the Mohawk articulated the ideal of
peaceful coexistence and non-interference with one another in the Kah-
swentha (Two Row Wampum), a seventeenth-century agreement made
with the Dutch traders to ensure that neither side interfered with the
other's customs (Ratelle 1992). This did not mean that there was no
relationship between the two peoples. In fact the opposite was intended:
it meant that the two would interact as equals. The European mythology
of Native inferiority and the idea of 'primitivism' underlay nineteenth-
Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History, and Change 47
NOTES
1 This is the Mohawk word for Iroquois. Unless otherwise stated, all terms will
be in Mohawk.
2 Missionaries made good use of points of convergence in Native and European
ideas in order to explain their faith and persuade people to convert; see
Grant 1984.
3 Sam Cronk, 'Reg Henry's Cultural Discussion at Cayuga Language Class, May
*5 199°> Six Nations, Ontario.' Recorded by Sam Cronk (unpublished manu-
script).
4 Johnson 1921-65, 3: 782-91; 4: 466-9, 'three strings,' 'A bunch of black
Wampum'; 471, 'A Belt.'
5 Each of these words is in the language of the nation naming itself; the
spellings are mine, not Brodhead's.
Plunder or Harmony?
On Merging European and
Native Views of Early Contact
Toby Morantz
Contact, direct face-to-face contact, between the Cree of James Bay and
Europeans happened in the spring of 1611 somewhere near the mouth
of the Rupert River. This was during Henry Hudson's voyage of discov-
ery from England, which had begun the previous summer. A Cree man
visited the ship while it was ice-bound. On their return voyage, the crew
mutinied, and Hudson, his son, and others were set adrift in a small
boat to perish. Nevertheless, an account of this first recorded meeting
was left by a member of the crew, Abacuk Pricket. In Pricket's version,
the Cree visitor to the ship gratefully ('thankefully') receives from Hud-
son 'a knife, a looking-glass and buttons,' returning the next day with
two caribou skins and two beaver skins. The Cree man presented Hud-
son with the beaver skins in exchange for the items he had received the
previous day. Pricket relates, 'then the master shewed him an hatchet,
for which hee would have given the master one of his deere skinnes, but
our master would have them both, and so hee had, although not will-
ingly' (Asher 1860, 114).
The Cree oral account provides us with a different view of this meet-
ing. Rather than the Native visitors to the ship (in this account, a hus-
band and wife) being grateful or delighted with the exchange (or
greedy), it is the English who sound thrilled (or greedy) and the Cree
amused. This story was originally told to anthropologist Colin Scott in
1979 at Wemindji, James Bay, by Geordie Georgekish:
Their jackets were made of fur from animals that he trapped. So people on
the ship gave them some other clothes to wear. 'Take your clothes off they
were told, and they understood what they were told. Tut these clothes on'
they were told. (Narrator's aside: I guess they took their clothes off where
On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact 49
nobody could see them. There must have been a small room where they
could undress.) So the woman, whose pants were made of muskrat fur,
removed her pants. And they went home wearing the clothes that the
people from the ship had given them. (Scott 1983, 230)'
Although these two versions of first contact in James Bay are recogniz-
able as describing the same encounter, it is apparent each brings to the
fore a different perspective.
The English account emphasizes the Cree's delight with things the
English would consider trifling items, while the Cree narration men-
tions nothing of such goods. Instead, it highlights their amusement with
the English desire for their clothes, no doubt trifling items, as well, for
the Cree. On the surface, then, there is a paradoxical concordance
between these western and non-western versions of an event that is
important in North American history. However, much like the icebergs
that Hudson must have encountered, only a small fraction of the Cree
story is apparent to the western-trained mind; most of the messages and
lessons to be conveyed remain submerged, and consequently out of our
view.
The Cree of eastern James Bay are Algonquian speakers who have
occupied this territory for several thousand years. Upon its creation in
1670, the Hudson's Bay Company began to establish fur trade posts in
Cree territory, locating them at favoured Native meeting places. Today,
the Cree are settled in nine villages on these same meeting sites. Before
adopting village life, the Cree lived in small extended family groups,
hunting, trapping, and fishing (Francis and Morantz 1983). It was within
these family settings, around the campfire, that the elders would tell sto-
ries that encompassed their knowledge of Cree cosmology, history, and
values. Can this oral tradition be used to construct a unified history of
the relations of these two groups? Will academic historians ever be able
to write the history of the first encounters (or any other encounters)
between the Cree and the new arrivals that conveys, in the telling of
such events, the intent, substance, and lessons intrinsic to both the Cree
and Euro-Canadians? Can there be a single history that reflects both
perspectives? The one draws on a rich, ancient oral tradition, and the
other on an equally rich, relatively ancient recorded one, but each is
embedded in radically different cultural contexts. This paper explores
whether there is enough common ground between the two to create a
single narrative that adequately reflects the actions, judgments, feelings,
convictions, values, and ideas of both sets of actors. History, we are told,
5O Toby Morantz
Different Histories
believe a storyteller would see the line between the two as clearly as he
does. Stan Cuthand, a Cree linguist from Saskatchewan, would agree.
He notes a very strong relationship between Cree myths and Cree soci-
ety: 'The stories of the mythical beings reinforced socially beneficial
behaviour' (Cuthand 1988, 195).
In Preston's analysis of both types of Cree narratives, he found five
concepts that he suggests convey, to the Crees, notions of their past or
history - that is, the foundations of their historical consciousness. Cree
narratives convey local knowledge that presents a record of the recent
past. They also impart a sense of continuity, of how the Cree people,
through their competency, have been able to maintain their way of life.
Two other functions of their narratives are to present their cosmology -
which describes their environment and their place within it - and their
moral teachings. Lastly, he sees the notion of evolution or change also
embodied in the atiukan stories, though this focus is reserved for
explaining how, in terms of the relationship between humans and ani-
mals, the world of very long ago changed into what it presently is. One
story alone would not suffice to teach all these elements, but a number
heard over time would.
Some of these features are shared with the Western historical tradition,
but not all, as we can see in the differences Preston emphasizes. The
reckoning of time is often a concept that distinguishes western history
from other histories (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob 1994, 71-2). The western
tradition is represented as having a linear concept of time, and other peo-
ples represented as having a circular or cyclical concept, though Preston
suspects that all societies combine elements of both, as even ours recog-
nizes seasonal and life cycles. He has identified in the Cree tipachiman sto-
ries this dual reckoning of time, for the telling of the stories is situated as
occurring 'long ago' or 'when I was a boy,' but their content is more cycli-
cal, recounting perhaps what people were doing in a certain winter sea-
son. However, as must be evident, the Cree stories do not mark the linear
progression of time as starkly as in western history. The role of the indi-
vidual in the narrative also differs in the Cree historical tradition. Preston
comments that western values make much of some individuals, but Cree
stories 'are not so concerned with prominence as with the action and
what happened as a consequence of the action.'6
Another dimension to 'reading' time differently is the categorization
of time, so necessary to locating events in time. In a combined history,
whose categorization is used? The standard western one has been based
on ethnocentric classifications: 'prehistory' and 'history,' or 'precontact'
On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact 55
so she asked the translator to inform the hunter that 'in the West 200
years ago, the fur trader would make the Indians drunk so that they
would steal some of the furs.' The hunter rejected this version, but went
on to explain that the Reverend Walton (the Anglican priest in the area
from 1892 to 1924) had told them that the people in the south got rich
from 'the Indians' furs.' Once again he was presented with the visiting
anthropologist's version: 'it's not the government that got rich, it was
the Hudson [sic] Bay Company.'15 Thus, attention must also be paid to
how the narratives were collected, whether the stories were ones the
elders wanted to tell or were responses to structured questions formu-
lated by the anthropologist. These two methods of collection result in
essentially different sources, of varying interest to historians; they are
what Tonkin labels 'popular memory' (an individual's recall) and 'col-
lective memory' (the community's version) (1992, 132).
Yet even this distinction is clouded. Interviewer bias in the accounts
collected at Whapmagoostui is quite evident, but in Regina Flannery's
life history of the Cree woman Ellen Smallboy is seemingly much less so.
Flannery's methodological approach was to approach her subject by
'introducing a topic and letting her proceed with as few interruptions as
possible' (Flannery 1995, 7). Ellen Smallboy told the stories she deemed
important, but the general subject matter was still generated to satisfy
academic interests. Similarly, in a life history that Sarah Preston wrote
down for Alice Jacob, a Cree woman from Waskaganish, Preston
remarked that she drew counsel from the observation of Paul Radin
(S. Preston 1986, 14) that 'the ideal collectors of [ethnological] data are
the natives themselves and that the more the [ethnologist] keeps in
the background, the more accurate and authentic will the archives of
aboriginal culture ultimately become' (Radin 1933, 70-1).
Translation from the indigenous language to English significantly
lessens the accuracy and authenticity of the original account. Cruik-
shank (1991, 19) demonstrates how the structure of language introduces
notions in one tongue that cannot be easily expressed in another; in my
experience the absence of trained translators for much of the work
done on oral tradition in James Bay has made problematic the English
versions of Cree oral tradition.
Yet another problem is that historians and anthropologists, in their
respective fields, class some pieces of information as 'better' than others
(Tonkin 1992, 54). Accordingly, one has to weigh the use of a popular
western historical genre, such as autobiography, which, in the interests
of representation, gives prominence to the story of one individual in
On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact 59
possible this first contact story did not originate with the Cree but was
told to them by a white man? Such is Pierre Trudel's attribution of a
very similar story relating the first Cree-English contact, one told to him
at Whapmagoostui, which is on the eastern coast of Hudson Bay, north
of Wemindji, where the first contact occurred. John Kawapit, the Cree
elder who narrated this story, told Trudel he had heard it from Harold
Udgarden, a 'mixed blood' who worked at Whapmagoostui as a clerk
for about fifty years, beginning in the late iSoos (P. Trudel 1992, 68).
An initial comparison of the Georgekish and Pricket accounts of the
'first meeting' provides highly important, culturally embedded under-
standings of process that inform us, not only about the contrasting views
of the Cree and the English, but also about the value in demonstrating
both these perspectives in any historical account. Yet we would be
deceived if we thought that the tipachiman story informs us of anything
but early-twentieth-century Cree representations of the encounter.
In most cases of first or early contact, the Native side of the story has
been lost to history because their understanding of the events was never
recorded. This is a loss we must accept in probably all encounters,
because preserving the Native response was not a seventeenth-century
European concern. In 1668 and 1670 Captain Zachariah Gillam, captain
of the trading ship the Nonsuch, responded to a questionnaire from the
newly formed Royal Society of London, which had been distributed to
all 'seamen bound for far voyages.' His testimony was read to Royal Soci-
ety members on 19 May 1670 (Birch 1756-7, 2: 436, cited in Morantz
1992, 172). The account is important because it provides details about
Cree religion, government, subsistence, trade, and numbers (Morantz
1992, 188-93). However, of the twenty-two questions to which Gillam
was responding, nineteen were about the land and the voyage; only
three gave him scope to comment on the local inhabitants. Not one of
these three questions inquired about the views of the Natives they
encountered or about the English reactions to them. By contrast, what
interests us today are not the events themselves, but the way 'Natives'
think, feel, and perceive, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz (1983, 56). If, by
some stroke of luck, Gillam had thought to reflect on what his voyages
meant to the Cree he met at Charles Fort (Rupert House or Waskaga-
nish), these views still would not be entirely acceptable today, having
been filtered through late-seventeenth-century European thinking.
The conventions used in Cree narrative also pose special problems in
consolidating the two kinds of history. As was mentioned earlier, the
story of the first meeting with the white man contains reference to the
On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact 61
find the different versions informative for the different cultural values
they reveal. Thus, the 'first white man' story is told differently among the
Algonquins living south of the James Bay area in the Abitibi region of
Quebec. John T. MacPherson recorded a story that began in a similar way
but then tells how the white sailors thought they would have some fun
with the lone Native who greeted them. They gave him some firewater
and left him in a drunken stupor. As his companions were about to bury
him, he came to, much to everyone's surprise. Following this episode, the
Natives thought the white men were gods 'because they had a juice that
would cause one to die and come to life again.'20This version offers its lis-
teners a different lesson than the Nottoway stories and is a good example
of the focus on process rather than event, on the relationships rather
than the objects. But how, then, does one bridge the gap between process
and event in a combined history?
We have much more to learn about Native societies, now that oral tradi-
tion has been drawn in as a valued source. However, my objective here is
not to champion the cause of oral tradition, for Julie Cruikshank has
ably done that in her studies of oral tradition in Athapaskan and
Tlinglit-speaking societies (Cruikshank 1990, 1996). Rather, I have tried
to examine the possibility of a history that serves, in one text, the various
functions each society, Native and non-Native, expects from its own his-
tory. In the process, I looked for histories written by non-Native academ-
ics that bring together archival and oral records. Two of the most
innovative are by the anthropologists Richard Price on the Saramaka of
Surinam (1983), and Joanne Rappaport on the Cumbe of Colombia
(1994). Each work provides striking insights into a period in a people's
history and how that history is transformed and viewed. In Price's study
of the Saramaka he alternates oral texts, as given him, with the docu-
mentary history he unearthed in the archives and with his commentary,
often on the same page. The texts and commentary provide very rich
insights into Saramaka thinking, which is framed by the details found in
the archival records. Rappaport's history is similar, although in this
study the Cumbe people themselves have consulted the documents and
absorbed some of their contents into the oral history. It, too, provides
fascinating insights into the interpretations the Cumbe give to specific
historic conditions as well as how they 'resisted, capitulated, and accom-
modated to the state' (Rappaport 1994, 8).
On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact 63
are cognitive models embedded in the oral tradition that do not have
their counterparts in mainstream history; these cognitive models them-
selves reveal to the listener understandings that are not easily decoded by
the non-Native. As well, beasts and spirits and man-animals float in and
out of the narratives. These structures and beings are intrinsic to the tell-
ing of the story. If they are dislodged from their context or ignored, the
story cannot impart the same meaning. This was evident almost thirty
years ago to the anthropologist Catharine McClellan, who, Cruikshank
tells us, argued convincingly 'that such narratives cannot be pulled out of
context and have to be understood in relation to the total bodies of oral
literature in which they appear' (McClellan 1970 in Cruikshank 1996,
443). This position is endorsed today by Cruikshank (and see Cohen
!989), who warns that, however well intentioned, the 'uncritical use of
oral traditions developed in one cultural context as though they can be
equated with tangible historical evidence may lead to misinterpretation
of more complex messages in narrative' (Cruikshank 1990, 346).
Sylvie Vincent, whose research on Innu oral tradition also goes back
almost three decades and who has recently been writing texts on Native
history, has similarly concluded in a paper presented at a 1996 confer-
ence precisely addressed to this issue that it is impossible to harmonize
the two traditions of history.*2 She argues that the obstacles are not the
contradictory, irreconcilable interpretations, for those could be pre-
sented in the same text, but rather the differing conceptual and meth-
odological frameworks. In the Innu stories she studies, both time and
story (process rather than event) are fluid and based in analogy, com-
pared to the precision and factuality of western history. How does one
draw into a combined history the Native people's relations with non-
human inhabitants so fundamental to their understanding of their past?
Similar epistemological concerns are expressed by Homi Bhabha, who
writes that 'cultural translation is not simply appropriation or adapta-
tion; it is a process through which cultures are required to revise their
own systems of reference, norms and values, by departing from their
habitual or "inbred" rules of transformation' (Bhabha 1997, 14).
Conclusions
around a single issue that has cast the local people into a confrontation
with the larger society and thus produces histories more amenable to
types of narrative that confirm the conventions of western discourse. To
write a history that tries to find a correspondence between the full body
of oral tradition and the archival records would only destroy what is left
of the Cree notions of their past. It would be the last act of the almost
completed assimilation process, a dismanding of the last bastion of a
unique Cree outlook. It needs no belabouring of the point to argue that
such a history, written by western-trained academics for an essentially
western-trained readership, would distort and destroy the depiction of
the relationships, the symbolism, the patterning, and the integrity of the
Cree oral tradition. As for the interpretation of the oral tradition's
coded messages - revealed as they are through the performance of a
number of stories - the western historian's method of producing repre-
sentation through selecting a few examples would undermine the inter-
pretation and additionally lose for the Cree much of their oral tradition.
There is a political dimension to the use of oral tradition. Writing in
the University of British Columbia Law Review, Cynthia Callison argues for
restitution for and the protection of the oral tradition of Native peoples
through copyright. Her desire is to protect the oral tradition and pre-
vent its appropriation, for she sees cultural appropriation as the exercis-
ing of the power to dominate possessed by the larger society. Such an
act threatens the distinct identity of aboriginal peoples and, along with
it, their integrity and dignity (Callison 1995, 170, 165).
This is not a call for Canadian history to abandon the views and les-
sons learned from analysing the oral tradition. Far from it. Rather, it is a
call to recognize that Canadian historians' use of oral tradition, though
important, is limited. Oral tradition can be put to use, invaluably so, but
this use is inevitably a form of 'plunder,' taking from the oral tradition
what is needed to fit the Euro-Canadian view that history is structured,
chronological, and progressive. Although Tonkin cautions that profes-
sional historians who use the recollections of others 'cannot just scan
them for useful facts to pick out, like currants from a cake' (Tonkin
1992, 6), I am not sure historians can do anything else. Historians have
to abandon all notions of writing a truly multicultural history that
includes Indian or Native history, and be content to ransack the oral tra-
dition for what suits their conceptual needs. Those of us writing ethno-
histories can have only the currants, not the cake. The different
interpretations of the exchange of trade items in the first meeting of the
Cree and English may not faithfully reflect the seventeenth-century
66 Toby Morantz
Cree view, but their version's demonstration of the white man's exuber-
ant materialism may well suit our time's postmodern views that history
functions as 'cultural myth' (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob 1994, 216).^
NOTES
Much has been written about the meeting of the European and the New
World. The leading ideologies, the power struggles, the seizures, have
all been duly noted. The communication problems, the confusions -
often unavoidable - between protagonists, have been stressed. Many
studies rely on the new history, on the study of documents according to
modern criteria of textual analysis. It seems to me that, in most cases, if
one understands only the confrontation of the two worlds, one limits
oneself in a rather distressing way to a binary opposition of mentalities.
The notion of mentality, moreover, is not in itself without confusion.
My own work is not that of an historian. I strive to understand the
interaction of sign systems, to understand their singularity and their
complexity. From this perspective, I will attempt to weave two series of
arguments. The first proposes the existence of a concrete memoria widely
different from the one traditional rhetoric has passed on to us; the sec-
ond examines the function and dysfunction of this memoria in the
specific framework of the fabrication of the New World. Traditional
memoria was generally defined by the rhetoricians of the Renaissance as
an art of memory, a way of ordering the world, and we can easily recog-
nize its effect in the systems of knowledge characteristic of that period.
Above all, it is a creation of the reasoning faculty. My memoria - concrete
memoria - is the scene, both individual and social, where we discover,
thanks to the imagination, our way of understanding the world. The two
forms of memoria contrast with each other, just as do reason and imagi-
nation or rational order and the actuality of experience.
I have chosen the year 1534 as a starting point because it metaphori-
Natural Rhetoric
memory; one called artificial memory, built on a set of rules. It does not
replace natural memory; it is merely a means of completing it.
In the writings of authors such as Cicero, Quintilian, and the anony-
mous creator of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, the notion of natural mem-
ory seems to have completely disappeared in favour of artificial
memory, and the focus is on the mnemonic arts that foster the develop-
ment of this artificial memory. In this framework, the forensic is privi-
leged, and so is eloquence, in as much as eloquence is the art of
addressing a public to convince it of an argument.
When the Renaissance rediscovered ancient authors, humanists were
confronted by two types of memories, but - in the Aristotelian-Thomis-
tic tradition represented by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, as
well as in the Platonic-Augustinian stream represented, among others,
by such authors as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola - natural
memory remained the foundation on which the art of artificial memory
could be built. Several authors, in the Renaissance and today, have had
the unfortunate tendency to forget natural memory and its founda-
tional role. They have been interested only in the arts of memory - the
mnemotechnics - as if these represented the totality of memorial activ-
ity. But the rhetoric we find in the Jesuits' Ratio Studiorum is concerned
with technique, with the rhetoric of figures, only in so far as it is useful
in supporting the central vision they had of the world that they sought
to reform or convert (Ratio Studiorum 1997).
Traditionally, the rhetoric of antiquity was divided in five successive
parts: inventio, elocutio, dispositio, memoria, and actio. The first three parts
have been generally understood as pertaining to discourse and its fabri-
cation, memory allowing one to remember an oration so as to be able to
recite it by heart, and action being the eloquent gestures accompanying
this recital. Interest in the mnemotechnic arts gradually waned and,
with it, interest in memory and gesture. Thus, we have arrived today at a
'limited' rhetoric (Barthes 1970; Genette 1972), a rhetoric that includes
only the three parts pertaining to speech and comes into question only
when rhetoric is perceived in terms of arguments or figures. This is
admittedly a rather brief summary of the neglect into which rhetoric has
fallen, but limited space precludes tracing the evolution of a rhetoric
that eventually will be used largely as a technique whose functioning can
be understood only from one or two tropes or one or two arguments.1
I will limit myself to describing the broad outline of another way of
understanding rhetoric. This latter is not merely an art of oratory, a
practice of eloquence. It is a way of expressing what comes from within.
Memoria as the Place of Fabrication of the New World 73
seems useful to see how two other important personages in the history
of New France expressed their own memoria. Their observations were
not entirely the same as those of the Jesuits, but they maintained some
features whose importance shows both the extent of flexibility or rigidity
in memoria and their own capacity to welcome or to modify themselves in
meeting the Other. Memoria was used to fabricate New France, and the
first obstacles on its path were, of course, the Natives.
The first example, Jacques Carder's visit to Hochelaga, is interesting
for several reasons, one of which is that it remains silent about what really
happened and even where it happened. Carder arrived at Hochelaga on
2 October 1535 and was joyfully welcomed by a crowd of more than one
thousand persons. After Carder exchanged a few gifts for some food, he
and his men retired to their long-boats for the night. The next day, he
marshalled some of his men in what looked like a military column while
the others watched the boats. All were armed. With the help of some of
the inhabitants of Hochelaga, he first went to an unknown place where a
Native, described by Carder as the seigneur of Hochelaga, harangued
him. More gifts were exchanged, and Carder was then taken to the gates
of a circular village 'enclosed by a wooden palisade in three tiers like a
pyramid' (Carder 1993,61). It was a fortified town, which one could enter
only by a single gate. Having entered, Carder found a central square
where the rest of the speeches took place. He counted some fifty long-
houses, whose interior he described, as well as some of the features of his
hosts' way of living.3 The French were made to sit down and a personage
Carder understood to be the ruler ('rof) and leader ('seigneur'} of Hoch-
elaga was brought out. Indeed, he wore a small fur crown. He showed his
paralysed arms and legs, and Carder set about to rub his limbs. All the
sick of the place were then brought out, after which Carder read from the
Gospel of St John and the Passion of our Lord, and again distributed gifts
among his hosts. Then, Carder ordered trumpets and other musical
instruments to be sounded, after which he took leave of them and went
to visit the adjacent mountain. The scene described was illustrated by
Giovanni Batdsta Ramusio in his Italian publicadon of the voyages of
Carder (Ramusio [1556] 1565). It shows a schematic representation of
Hochelaga and, at the bottom of the picture, two men shaking hands
courteously. The one on the left is Carder accompanied by his men; the
other is the ruler of Hochelaga with his (see figure i above, p 11).
The narrator of the second voyage, Carder or someone else, took it
upon himself to describe this event from the point of view of a Euro-
pean memoria. The choice of actions, of speeches, depended on his
imaginary vision of the situation or, at least, what he remembers of it.
Memoria as the Place of Fabrication of the New World 77
The meeting is described along two axes. The first is equivalent to the
meeting of a savage king, whom Cartier identifies as such because he is
carried by his men and adorned by what he calls a crown. What follows
illustrates the power of the European king, whom Cartier personifies
when he bestows the healing touch attributed to the King of France by
Christian tradition, as well as a certain type of blessing for the sick. Cart-
ier, instead of trying to understand what is really happening and to see
in the 'old' man offifty- he himself is forty-four years old - a shaman,
an ancient, an ambassador, or a council leader, and moreover a sick
one, quickly gives him the tide of king, a tide he did not give Donna-
cona. Was it the fortified village, the military aspect of the place, that
triggered in his imagination the notion of some palace or even some
capital? It is difficult to demonstrate absolutely, but the same scenario is
depicted in the print in Ramusio's book: some sort of equality exists
between the leaders, the visit of a 'king' to another 'king.'
The second axis deployed by a memoria that is strictly European is the
religious ceremony. Carder's visit to Hochelaga took place on a Sunday.
From all evidence, no priest accompanied the expedition. According to
his own account, Cartier performed for the savages, but one may be per-
mitted to think the actions were also for himself and his men, a sort of
ceremonial 'white mass' that comprised two parts: the reading of the
Gospel of St John, whose 'in principio' is named, and the Passion of our
Lord, which takes him about two hours to read. If one tries to imagine
the scene, it must be rather comical. Was the text read in Latin or
French? The account is unclear on this point, as it identifies St John's
text by its Latin incipit and the Passion in French. Be that as it may, one
can conclude that the Natives were unable to understand anything, and,
as the texts may have been read in Latin, neither would most of the
French. Yet, on that Sunday, 3 October 1535, a religious ceremony took
place in New France in front of savage peoples.
Carder's narratives are shot through with a European imaginary that
ignores nearly everything of what occurs in terra incognita except in the
very precise field of navigation and geographic 'discovery.' The memoria,
as progenitor of the discourse being elaborated, is extremely rigid. If
this rigidity is taken into consideration, we then understand why, in
Carder's accounts, the presence of the savages is accompanied by either
fear or a feeling of treason, despite the fact that the French are the only
ones who do the Natives injuries they do not comprehend, and who ulti-
mately betray their trust. The long-term failure of Carder's expeditions
is not surprising.
Champlain's attitude, as revealed through his travel narratives, is
78 Gilles Therien
totally different. I have chosen a short example from the 1609 expedi-
tion against the Iroquois, with allies that Champlain had difficulty iden-
tifying correctly. Champlain joined a group of Native warriors and
agreed to sail the River of the Iroquois (known today as the Richelieu)
with them. There were only a few Frenchmen in the boat and they sud-
denly found themselves unable to cross some rapids, perhaps those at
Chambly. Champlain decided to leave his boat and continue his journey
in the Native canoes with only two other Frenchmen, surrounded by
about sixty warriors, his new allies, whom he trusted. It was by this
means of transportation, seldom used by Europeans, that he discovered
the lake that bears his name, met the Iroquois warriors who had come
for the war, and took part in the battle, even if he did not understand its
geopolitical significance. Once the two 'armies' were present, they each
partook of a feast before engaging, the next morning, in a very short
battle during which the French fired their muskets, which immediately
ended the war.
Champlain was relatively serene in the face of all this. He trusted, he
learned, he took note, he did not take offence. Nor was he afraid when
he risked his life in situations where the balance of power was com-
pletely against him, something Carder had always avoided. Champlain
was not only a discoverer and a founder, but a colonizer - someone who
settles on lands already occupied and is ready to come to terms with the
new reality. His memoria, while nurtured in Europe, was open to a form
of imaginary metissage, and this flexibility played an important role in his
attitude towards the Natives.
Yet, his memoria was not always flexible, and this problem is a good
illustration of the equilibrium that attempts to establish itself when two
different memoria meet. During the same trip, on the way home, the war-
riors brought back prisoners. They began to torture one in a way that
Champlain found particularly cruel. Champlain, invited to take part in
the torture, recorded his response: 'I pointed out to them that we did
not commit such cruelties, but that we killed people outright, and that if
they wished me to shoot him with the arquebus, I should be glad to do
so' (Champlain 1922-36, 2: 102-3). The Natives continued their torture
but, when they realized that Champlain seemed displeased, allowed him
to kill the prisoner with his musket, which did not prevent them from
dismembering the body and performing cannibalistic rites.
In this rather violent episode, Champlain's desire to apply his own
rules in the treatment of prisoners is clear: one kills them; one does not
torment them. Such a conviction is part of his military code. He does
Memoria as the Place of Fabrication of the New World 79
The cabins of this country are neither Louvres nor Palaces, nor anything
like the buildings of our France, not even like the smallest cottages. They
are, nevertheless, somewhat better and more commodious than the hovels
of the Montagnais. I cannot better express the fashion of the Huron
dwellings than to compare them to bowers or garden arbors, some of
which, in place of branches and vegetation, are covered with cedar bark,
some others with large pieces of ash, elm, fir, or spruce bark ... There are
cains or arbors of various sizes, some two brasses [two spans] in length,
others of ten, others of twenty, of thirty, of forty; the usual width is about
four brasses, their height is about the same. There are no different stories;
there is no cellar, no chamber, no garret. It has neither window nor
8o Gilles Therien
chimney, only a miserable hole in the top of the cabin, left to permit the
smoke to escape. This is the way they built ours for us.
The people of Oenrio and of our village were employed at this, by means
of presents given them ... As to the interior, we have suited ourselves; so
that, even if it does not amount to much, the Savages never weary of
coming to see it, and, seeing it, to admire it. We have divided it into three
parts. The first compartment, nearest the door, serves as an ante-chamber,
as a storm door, and as a storeroom for our provisions, in the fashion of the
Savages. The second is that in which we live, and is our kitchen, our
carpenter shop, our mill, or place for grinding wheat, our Refectory, our
parlor and our bedroom. On both sides, in the fashion of the Hurons, are
two benches which they call Endicha, on which are boxes to hold our
clothes and other little conveniences; but below, in the place where the
Hurons keep their wood, we have contrived some little bunks to sleep in,
and to store away some of our clothing from the thievish hands of the
Hurons. They sleep beside the fire, but still they and we have only the earth
for bedstead; for mattress and pillows, some bark or boughs covered with a
rush mat; for sheets and coverings, our clothes and some skins do duty.
The third part of our cabin is also divided into two parts by means of a bit
of carpentry which gives it a fairly good appearance, and which is admired
here for its novelty. In the one is our little Chapel, in which we celebrate
every day holy Mass, and we retire there daily to pray to God. It is true that
the almost continual noise they make usually hinders us, - except in the
morning and evening when everybody has gone away, - and compels us to
go outside to say our prayers. In the other part we put our utensils. The
whole cabin is only six brasses long, and about three and a half wide. That
is how we are lodged, doubtless not so well that we may not have in this
abode a good share of rain, snow, and cold. (JR8: 1O4-9).4
As we can see, Brebeuf borrows the housing style of the Huron all the
while knowing that he will find neither the comfort of the city nor the
distress of the nomadic Montagnais' habitat. But once the shell is built,
he transforms the inside completely. It is no longer truly a Huron long-
house but a European house with subdivisions according to their uses.
From the outside, the observer might think it is a hut like any other, but
a visit inside will reveal the differences.
Memoria, whose most important topos is place, is used here as an
example of the blending that attempts to express itself in daily living.
The object is to be like the others, to be as little different as possible, to
Memoria as the Place of Fabrication of the New World 81
certain mistrust was evident, it was decided to agree for the sake of
agreeing. A ceremony then took place and was recorded with care by
the narrator, although, by his own admission, he did not quite under-
stand what was happening. But the people of Sillery were happy, and
that is all that mattered to Father le Mercier, who was concerned with
peace between the diverse Native nations.
The meeting with the ambassadors and the exhibition of the gifts
took place in a room of the Jesuit residence at Sillery. The presents were
laid out on a rope. There were collars, bracelets, earrings, and two calu-
mets. The most important ambassador then presented a collar, 'com-
posed of white and violet-coloured porcelain, so arranged as to form
figures, which this worthy man explained after his own fashion. "There,"
he said, "are the lakes, there are the rivers, there are the mountains and
valleys that must be passed; and there are the portages and waterfalls.
Note everything, to the end that, in the visits that we shall pay one
another, no one may get lost. The roads will be easy now, and no more
ambuscades will be feared. All persons who are met will be so many
friends'" (JR 40: 203-5). The ceremony ended in joy and joint demon-
strations of affection. The Jesuit narrator remains silent on the meaning
of the objects presented to the people of Sillery, in particular the great
necklace. It seems to me that we have here an example of very concrete
aspects of memoria that are totally indecipherable for the Jesuits. Isn't
the white and violet porcelain collar an exterior sign of this memoria that
both of the Native parties have agreed to recognize, to mingle in such a
way that an ancestral alliance, long forgotten, might be resurrected?
Perhaps the collar is merely a wampum destined to re-establish the bal-
ance between the two groups, but perhaps it is also, as the elder
explains, the map, abstract though it might be, of a far-away country
whose direction, roads, and codes had been lost. Evidently, the Native
gesture is to revive a memory, but the Jesuits do not understand.
This example illustrates the limits of the meeting of two memoria. The
fusion is not possible unless one memoria disappears within the other.
We are no longer speaking of exchange and sharing but of assimilation.
Metissage, as we know, is the common weaving of a new memoria, where
elements of each existing memoria find their importance, their useful-
ness, in a new arrangement, a new order. What we see from the collar
episode is a range of attitudes illustrating the successes or the failures of
such metissage, and sometime simply its mystery.
Rhetoric is intimately tied to the history of mentalities. The one we
have encountered in the events recounted here belongs particularly to
84 Gilles Therien
the Jesuits' universe, but, through European culture and the traditions
of Ratio Studiorum, it influences us also. It is not a technique that accom-
panies the faculty of memory, the plea for truth, or the evangelization in
the name of God. We are not in front of a sermon but of a narrative, the
relating of a meeting where the self and another must recognize each
other if a new world is to emerge out of this meeting. Rhetoric, in its
most noble meaning, is the work of singularizing speech from language
that, standardized in a dictionary, is by that fact incapable of producing
a single sentence that can touch us with its poetry or its emotional
charge. Rhetoric is also a recourse to everyone's complexity, giving birth
to a new understanding, a rich and powerful link that is perceptible
when one possesses the different imaginaries but never excludes the
possibility of a meeting. Memoria is the history of everyone as an individ-
ual and a people, a story one must know how to listen to, understand,
and complete with one's own story. The polemic that seems inherent to
rhetoric is the perversion into which it falls when discourse and thought
become homogeneous, and it has only one end: to impose itself as the
truth. You will understand, then, that my sole ambition in confronting
these examples has been to attempt to share my own memoria, and not to
convince anyone of its truth.
NOTES
1 For this usage of 'tropes,' see Groupe Mu (1970); for 'arguments,' see Perel-
man (1977) and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1970).
2 Jesuit rhetoric is pledged to the Spiritual Exercises; it is this essential dimension
that seems to be lacking in the otherwise remarkable work of Marc Fumaroli,
L 'Age de ['eloquence (1980).
3 As Michel Bideaux notes in his critical edition of the Relations of Jacques Cart-
ier (Carder 1986, 373), this part of the text does not seem to take place at the
same time as the Hochelaga visit.
4 Brebeuf is cited here from the English translation in JR. The only complete
edition of his writings is Jean de Brebeuf, Edits en Huronie, a modernized text
edited by Gilles Therien (Brebeuf 1996).
PART II
Mentalites / Debwewin
This page intentionally left blank
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision
of Empire: The Other Side of
Self-Determination
Olive Patricia Dickason
Columbus's discovery of the fourth part of the world in 1492, and the
Alexandrine bulls of the following year that divided these newly revealed
regions between Spain and Portugal, struck at the national self-esteem of
Francois i, King of France (1515-47). By what right was France, as Cath-
olic a power as Spain or Portugal, excluded from these newly discovered
regions? As the French royal cosmographer Andre Thevet (i5i7?-9O)
would later observe, those lands were large enough to accommodate the
ambitions of fifty Christian monarchs; not only did France have a 'right'
to colonize, it had a special responsibility to do so because of the civilizing
benefits that it could bring to indigenous peoples (Thevet 1575, i: 965).
In other words, 'self-determination,' although that expression was not yet
in use, was very much the order of the day for the French monarch,
indeed for all national monarchs capable of asserting it. In their view it
was their duty as rulers not only to ensure the right to independence of
their respective nation-state societies, but also to exercise their perceived
right to expand their power and influence over non-state societies, which
they did not see as having evolved sufficiently to claim independence.
Today, five centuries later, political thought has come full circle, and it is
now the once-colonized indigenous non-state nations that are demand-
ing 'self-determination,' which, without the expansionist aspect, has
come to be regarded as a right shared by all peoples, whatever their type
of political organization.
The two great happenings of sixteenth-century Europe - discoveries
in the New World and the Reformation - both brought challenges for
France, albeit in different spheres. As Spain and Portugal moved quickly
to establish imperial monopolies in the New World, France began a
long slide into a civil war (1562-98) that pitted Catholic against Protes-
88 Olive Patricia Dickason
tant. Embroiled as it was, France still moved to assert its 'right' to colo-
nies. It is small wonder that under these particular circumstances,
France's early attempts at realizing this goal fell short of success. During
the sixteenth century, the only French colony that maintained a con-
tinuing presence was in Algiers.1 The irony of this record is evident
when one considers France's subsequent reputation for being the most
successful of all European colonial powers in its relations with aborigi-
nal populations. It was a reputation built upon trading, rather than colo-
nial, relationships, although both were factors.
France had not lacked a sense of direction in the colonial sweep-
stakes. The famous challenge of Francois i to the Spanish ambassador
that he produce Adam's will in support of Spain's New World claims
(Gaffarel 1892, 2: 303; 1878, 20) was more than a diplomatic flourish; it
was an expression of popular national sentiment that strongly favoured
French imperial expansion. With that end in view, Francois turned to a
current theory, that permanent European settlement was necessary for
suzerainty to be established over newly claimed lands that were deemed
to be legally vacant because their Native inhabitants led migratory lives
and had not organized themselves into nation-states (Julien, Herval,
and Beauchesne 1946, 14). During the sixteenth century, the principal
exponents for a French overseas empire were the Huguenots, those who
had opted for the Reformed religion in the face of their country's offi-
cial Catholicism. In their search for a refuge that would be under the
French flag (Protestants were as fiercely nationalistic as their Catholic
compatriots), but also to take advantage of new commercial opportuni-
ties, the Huguenots looked to the Americas to realize their aspirations.
Thus, at this time, French colonial projects were largely, although not
exclusively, Huguenot enterprises (Lestringant 1990).
Four of these early attempts will be compared here: one in Canada,
two in Brazil, and one in what was to become the United States. Three
of the episodes took place in regions actively claimed by other Euro-
pean powers: Portugal in the case of the Brazilian plan, and Spain in
that of the United States. The situation was not so clear in Canada, as
neither Spain nor Portugal was actively colonizing that far north. The
latter had made a short-lived attempt along a coast, the location of
which is now unknown; all that remains is a skimpy and incomplete doc-
umentary record (Alfonse 1559, 28). Yet the Spanish and Portuguese
claims had the formidable weight of international sanction behind
them, backed as they were by the papal bulls of 1493 and reinforced by
the Treaty of Tordesillas of the following year.
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 89
The Setting
France at this time shared the general European view that those regions
of the Americas occupied by mobile hunters and gatherers (a large part
of the two continents) were res nullius- that is, legally vacant. This belief
was based on the notion that migratory peoples, living 'sans foi, sans loi,
sans roi,' and 'ranging the land like wild beasts,' were not legally inhab-
itants, and so did not qualify for dominium.2 In support of this position, a
leading scholastic theologian, John Major, provided an argument that
was destined to become a principal motor of colonialism. Major, a Scots
Dominican lecturing at the University of Paris, was an outspoken sup-
porter of the right of non-Christian societies to their own political
dominion. However, he did not think that Amerindians qualified for
such a right: the news from the Americas was that they were human
in form only, living according to nature. In that case, wrote Major,
Aristotle's doctrine of natural servitude, 'that some men are by nature
free and others servile,' would apply (Major 1510, dist. 44, quest. 3). In
sixteenth-century French thinking, Aristotle's hierarchy of superior and
inferior, and of the right of the superior to rule the inferior, was beyond
dispute. Its application to Amerindians appeared to be simply common
sense. A favourite adjective referring to the New World peoples was
'pauvre,' used in connection with both their spiritual and material
states. The Amerindians, for their part, considered that their lands must
be more bounteous than those of Europe - why else would Europeans
leave their countries for the Americas? While willing to cooperate and
share with the newcomers, they never doubted their rights to their own
lands, and they certainly never saw themselves as inferior to anyone.
The stage had been prepared for French colonial initiatives during
the first half of the sixteenth century, and the French moved with great
speed to take advantage of new economic opportunities. They exploited
the fisheries of the north Atlantic from the beginning of the century,
but it was the dyewood trade from the Brazilian coast that caught the
public imagination. In 1503 Captain Binot Paulmier de Gonneville of
Honfleur had sailed his ship, the Espoir, to Brazil, where he spent six
months trading among the Carijo, a branch of the Tupi-Guaram, semi-
sedentary agriculturalists who at that time occupied most of the Brazil-
ian Atlantic coast. The French were well prepared for the voyage, with
an appropriate assortment of trade goods, but the Carijo had previously
met Europeans and had reason to complain of their behaviour (Gaf-
farel 1892, 2: 335; Avezac-Macaya, 1869). The principal lure for Gonne-
go Olive Patricia Dickason
ville had been brazilwood, a source of red dye much sought after by
France's burgeoning textile industry, all the more because it was in very
short supply in Europe. Other items of interest included parrots (partic-
ularly valued if they could speak French), as well as monkeys, peppers,
cotton, and ocelot skins. Economically, the Brazilian trade brought
great prosperity to such Atlantic port cities as Rouen and Honfleur;
politically, it would point to away for the French to challenge the Portu-
guese in Brazil.
The problem was not simple. A head-on confrontation would not only
be expensive, it could be very risky. As it was, Portuguese opposition to
the French dyewood trade was exacting a high price in goods, ships, and
personnel (Asseline 1874, i: 348; La Ronciere 1899-1932; Dickason
ig84b, 34). To make counter-discovery claims was more successful in
arousing controversy than in establishing a point; French assertions that
Dieppois Jean Cousin had been the first European to reach Brazil, in
1488, convinced only the French themselves, not the international com-
munity. Instead, the French resorted to legal doctrines that were inter-
nationally recognized in principle, even if frequently contested in
specific cases. These doctrines were freedom of the seas and freedom of
trade, both of which were seen as arising from natural law, that of the
seas directly and that of trade indirectly through jus gentium (law of
nations). Dominican Francisco de Vitoria of the University of Sala-
manca, considered by many to be the father of international law, had
used both points to argue Spain's right in the Americas (Vitoria [1557]
!9i7. 151-2; Green and Dickason 1989, 187-8, 216-17, 244). There was a
catch to freedom of trade, however: it was deemed to apply in newly dis-
covered lands only until a European nation claimed exclusive rights.
That this left plenty of room for disagreement in particular instances
was only too evident along the Brazilian coast, where Portuguese claims
to suzerainty were not backed up with settlements, and so did not deter
French traders. In the hurly-burly of New World politics, legal principles
took second place to what one could get away with.
The French had another string to their legal bow, which they used
with considerable effect, and which suggested what would become the
most famous of their colonizing techniques. It was based on the Roman
legal maxim that had long since become established in canon law, quod
omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur (that which touches all is to be
approved by all). This was the doctrine of consent, which could be inter-
preted to mean that, in the eyes of the law, traders or colonizers could
operate in newly 'discovered' lands only if they had the consent of the
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 91
Despite the attractions of Brazil, it was Canada that offered the first
practical opportunity for the French to realize their 'dream of empire'
(Vachon, Chabot, and Desrosiers 1982). Although the fishing and whal-
ing activities of Bretons and Basques in the north Atlantic and the Gulf
of St Lawrence had not caught public imagination as had the Brazilian
trade, they were still yielding handsome profits. Bretons had been so
long on the scene that cartographers commonly included 'Tierra de los
bretones,' 'C. del Breton,' or variations thereof in their maps of the
region (Green and Dickason 1989, 217). However, European territorial
claims were not firmly established in the region. For one thing, it was
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 93
not yet clear where Canada lay in relation to the dividing line that Spain
and Portugal had agreed upon in 1494. Both powers were fully occupied
elsewhere, so that while they considered they had rights to the region,
neither was fully committed to asserting its claims. The situation was
such that Francois i felt free to take the initiative. In 1524 he sent Gio-
vanni da Verrazzano along the Atlantic coast to assess its potentialities;
this was followed by the commissioning of the St Malo capitain, Jacques
Carrier (1491-1557), to continue the explorations. Carder did this on
his first two voyages (1534, 1535-6), which led to the decision to attempt
a settlement on the St Lawrence, a 'well-populated' region, whose peo-
ple he found to be 'as obedient and friendly as possible, and just as
familiar as if they had been brought up with us forever' (Thevet 1986,
6). The land was teeming with wildlife; as Carder reported it, the river
was 'the richest in every kind of fish that any one remembers having
seen or heard of.' Even more intriguing were the stories the Nadve peo-
ples told of a faraway 'kingdom of the Saguenay' whose people pos-
sessed 'great store of gold and copper' (Carder 1993, 74-5). On all
counts, the occasion seemed made to order for France to launch its
American empire. In contrast to the other failed attempts that will be
dealt with here, religious considerations did not enter into this enter-
prise; missionaries were not included.
Elaborate preparations and considerable amounts of money were
lavished on France's first attempt to colonize in the Americas. Jean-
Francois de la Rocque de Roberval (c. 1500-60) was chosen to head the
colony, while Carder captained the fleet; the combined operation was
reported to have included about 900 persons, almost certainly an exag-
geration (Carder 1993, 154). For the Atlantic crossing, the fleet was split
between the two leaders. Both Carder and Roberval contributed finan-
cially to the venture. It was provisioned for two years, and included farm-
ing implements and animals - cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses - the
first Old World farm animals to be seen in the St Lawrence valley (Car-
tier 1993, 194; Trudel 1963-83, i: 138). Official and commercial enthusi-
asm for the venture did not percolate down to the lower orders of
French society, and consequently the body of the colonists was recruited
largely from prisons and among social outcasts (Carder 1993, 139-40).
In spite of the careful preparations, the enterprise did not plan for the
climate, more rigorous than the French were used to, even though this
was the period of the Little Ice Age in Europe (c. 1450-1850). Indeed,
the comparative severity of the Laurentian climate would soon present
them with subsistence and survival problems.
94 Olive Patricia Dickason
Roberval delayed the departure of his part of the fleet for the better
part of a year in order to indulge in privateering. Thus, it was only Car-
tier and his group who arrived on the St Lawrence in 1541 to establish a
French presence in lands 'uninhabited or not possessed or controlled
by a Christian prince.'3 He and his group remained for the first year in
the colony, which they named Charlesbourg-Royal; Roberval and his set-
tlers, arriving after Cartier and his group departed, continued it for
another year under the name of France-Roy. The people among whom
the French established themselves were St Lawrence Iroquois, farmer/
hunters whose villages were strung along the north shore of the river as
far as Hochelaga (Montreal). Thevet reported that they were more
advanced than the naked Brazilians because they dressed in skins, a cus-
tom he attributed to the cold, 'and for no other reason' (Thevet 1986,
11). Later, Roberval would have his own interpretation of the situation:
not considering skins as 'apparel,' in his eyes the Amerindians were 'all
naked,' even though they wore breeches (Cartier 1993, i l l ) . At least
one Frenchman thought that the St Lawrence Iroquois men looked
rather 'like the portraits of Hercules' (Thevet 1986, 12).
Whereas in Brazil the primacy of the dyewood trade and the presence
of the Portuguese had ensured that the French carefully cultivated alli-
ances with the Amerindians, on the St Lawrence the fur trade had not
yet come into its own, and colonial rivals did not openly contest French
activities. Consequently, there was no apparent need to be concerned
about the Amerindians, even though the colonists were dependent on
them for fresh food. The French came expecting to establish a settle-
ment on the Old Word model, taking neither the Amerindians nor New
World conditions into account.
Misunderstandings quickly led to antagonisms. For example, the
French, at first struck with wonder at the Amerindian gesture of hospi-
tality of carrying the newcomers on their backs as they entered their vil-
lage or when the French had difficulty in getting about,4 soon came to
expect the service. The story is told of one of the French who had devel-
oped the habit of asking a certain Amerindian to take him for walks in
this manner. On one such occasion, the Amerindian, with the French-
man on his back, slipped on the rocky path bordering the river, and the
Frenchman beat him with his cane. Without a word, the Amerindian
strangled the Frenchman and threw him in the water. When a nearby
Frenchman drew his sword, the Amerindian gave him the same treat-
ment.5 On other occasions, Amerindians were reported to have been
mutilated and killed 'for a pastime' by 'brainless' young members of the
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 95
cosmographer Andre Thevet, who stayed less than three months, and
later by bringing out Calvinist ministers, one of whom was Jean de Lery
(i534-i6n?), who stayed about ten months. Both of these men left
accounts of their Brazilian experiences that are important sources of
information for ethnographers today. Protestants were far more moti-
vated to join the enterprise than Catholics, particularly when Henri n
moved to extirpate 'heresy' in France. When Coligny emerged as the ven-
ture's principal backer, and clearly identified himself with the Protestant
cause in 1559, the colony's character seemed assured. The wild card was
Villegaignon himself: his early sympathies for Protestantism were not suf-
ficient to sustain his stance in favour of toleration once the battle lines
were drawn and positions became entrenched.8
The story of the colony's misfortunes began with the fact that very few
women joined the enterprise, and most of the men were more inter-
ested in striking it rich than in the hard work of establishing a perma-
nent settlement. Preparations were so inadequate that colonists came
without farming equipment and even without sufficient food. Once they
arrived at the bay the Native people called Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro),
Villegaignon did his best to isolate his colonists from the Tupinamba,
despite existing alliances and even though they were dependent on the
Natives for both labour and food. He alienated the Norman interpreters
by trying to regulate their lives, particularly in regard to women. These
moves, along with his attempts to interfere with Native customs, pleased
neither Amerindian allies nor settlers. As the colony struggled with its
problems, news came that the Catholics were gaining the upper hand in
France's civil war. Villegaignon immediately moved to prevent the Prot-
estants among the colonists from publicly practising their faith. This, of
course, gave rise to resentment, conspiracy, and revolt, particularly as
Villegaignon's governance became more repressive and cruel. This
extraordinary switch from his founding goals culminated in his precipi-
tous departure in 1559 for France to defend himself against charges of
maladministration, an apparent abandonment of the colony that has
been severely criticized.9 Even so, when the Portuguese finally located
the colony in 1560, the colonists put up a spirited, if hopeless, resis-
tance. Because of its religious aspects, the Villegaignon episode culmi-
nated in a virulent pamphlet war: of all France's colonial enterprises of
this period, it gave rise to the greatest number of publications.
The puzzle, at least with hindsight, is why the French appeared to
ignore fifty years of experience in Brazil to march straight into disaster.
Much attention has been paid to the character of Villegaignon, which
98 Olive Patricia Dickason
The high public profile of the Brazilian project came close to being
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 99
2 The Timucuan leader Athore greets Laudonniere and shows him a Huguenot
column asserting French rights to 'vacant lands,' erected by Laudonniere's col-
league, Ribault. Dietrich de Bry, after Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. From Rene
de Laudonniere, Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae provincia Gallis
acdderunt (1591). National Archives of Canada, neg. 0-116149.
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 101
French did not have an established trade in the region, they hoped that
Amerindian-Spanish hostility could be used to their advantage. In this
they were spurred by reports that the region was rich in precious miner-
als. The Floridian Natives, for their part, hoped for allies in their wars
against neighbouring enemies, as well as against the Spanish. The prin-
cipal point the French and Floridians had in common was their hatred
of Spain.
The Timucuans, among whom the French settled, were a matrilineal
agricultural people influenced by the Southeastern Ceremonial Com-
plex, which had connections with the Mississippian Mound Builders as
well as with the city-states of Mexico. The Timucuans were organized
into hierarchical chiefdoms, and lived in towns (sometimes palisaded)
that included ceremonial mounds around a central plaza. Although the
mounds were still in use when Europeans arrived, indications are that
they were no longer being built. Today, these people are extinct.
Good intentions on the part of the French were one thing; making
them work in practice quickly proved to be something else again. The
conquistador syndrome was all too prevalent among the colonists, the
least of whom thought himself superior to the most powerful cacique
(Gaffarel 1875, 89), an attitude which the Amerindians probably recip-
rocated, although we have no direct evidence of this among the Floridi-
ans.ia Laudonniere reported one occasion when some of his men
'exceedingly offended' a cacique by laughing during a solemn cere-
mony (Laudonniere [1586] I979a, 303). He himself was not free from
similar attitudes; when the cacique Satouriona acted contrary to his
wishes, the French leader's reaction was to consider 'howe I might be
revenged of this Savage, and to make him know how dearely this bolde
bravado of his should cost him' (Laudonniere [1586] I979b, 331). That
he made little effort to understand Amerindians is evidenced by his own
words: 'I never trusted them but upon good ground, as one that had dis-
covered a thousand of their crafts and subtilties, aswell by experience as
by reading of the histories of late yeres' (341). The room for misunder-
standing appeared endless.
It is not surprising that Laudonniere's alliances with Satouriona and
other caciques were uneasy. The Frenchman would have preferred neu-
trality, but found that this was impossible in the situation in which the
struggling colony found itself. Without provisions, with no supplies com-
ing from France, and with colonists who, after constructing their neces-
sary buildings, looked for treasure rather than clearing land and
planting, or even hunting or fishing, Laudonniere had to turn to Amer-
1O2 Olive Patricia Dickason
indians for food and services. These the Native people were willing to
provide in trade, but they considered that the French, in accepting their
help, had become their allies and had incurred the responsibility of
fighting with them in their wars. Laudonniere, of course, could not con-
ceive of the French playing a secondary role in Amerindian politics.
It was not only with Amerindians that Laudonniere experienced
mounting tensions and distrust. Perpetual food shortages, which at
times reached the point of famine, soured the colonists and contributed
to outright mutiny. A fortuitous chain of circumstances helped Laudon-
niere to control the revolt, but the provisioning situation remained out
of control. When the Amerindians mocked them for their continuing
inability to provide for themselves, the angry French took one of their
chiefs hostage in the hope of forcing more supplies from his people.
The stratagem didn't work as expected: the Amerindians, seeing the
French break their word as allies, expected they would kill the prisoner
in any event.
The long-promised reinforcements, in provisions and colonists,
finally arrived in 1565 under the leadership of Jean Ribault, who was
under orders to relieve Laudonniere of his command. Ribault never
had the opportunity to fulfil his commission: caught in a storm, most of
his convoy was driven ashore and into the arms of a Spanish expedition
that had been sent to root out the French. This the Spaniards accom-
plished with bloody thoroughness, an action in which they may have
been aided by Amerindians exasperated with the French.'s Satouriona
was reported to have sheltered a French lad from the slaughter, one of
the survivors who found refuge among the Amerindians (Maran 1943-
55. i: 33O). Laudonniere was among the few (as was also the artist
Jacques Lc Moyne de Morgues) who managed to return to France
aboard a French ship that had survived the storm. Fort Caroline was
renamed San Mateo by the Spanish.
As a leader, Laudonniere had been no more consistent than Villegai-
gnon, but along different lines. Where Villegaignon had become
embroiled in a murderous religious conflict, Laudonniere could not
organize his colony to provide for its basic needs, and so faced mutiny
and involuntary involvement in Amerindian wars. In personality, he was
more humane and less authoritarian than the stormy Knight of Malta,
but they shared an inability to break out of their cultural lexicons. Both
leaders (and Roberval as well) were aristocrats who expected others to
accommodate to them, not the reverse. None was capable of serious
negotiation or accommodation with Amerindians, despite avowed good
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 103
intentions. In this they were far from unique; their failings were those of
Europeans of their age.
Catherine de Medici had her own thoughts on the subject, which she
expressed in a letter to the French ambassador in Madrid in 1567: 'in
these discoveries and conquests it is not sufficient for a captain to be an
experienced soldier and good sailor, because beyond that it is necessary
to be politically wise and knowledgeable in many things in order to
found and build a new province and a totally new world' (Gaffarel 1878,
364-5; my translation). She obviously believed that faulty leadership was
at the root of French colonial problems. A seventeenth-century English
assessment was predictably harsher. It claimed the disasters were due to
the French being 'more in love with glorie then with vertue' and
'alwaies subject to divisions amongst themselves,' as well as being lazy
and unwilling to work (Alexander [1624] 1873, 2O3)- Nicolas Le
Challeux, a carpenter who had been with the colonists, uttered what
could well have been the last word on the affair: 'Qui veut aller a la
Floride, / Qu'il y aille j'y ay este' ('Whoever wants to go to Florida let
him go; / I have been there'; Le Challeux 1579, verso of title page).
Just as the Villegaignon episode spurred the Portuguese to validate
their territorial claims by intensifying colonization in Brazil, so in Flor-
ida the Spaniards reacted by establishing the first permanent European
colony north of Mexico - San Augustin, in 1565. Other Ribault-Laudon-
niere legacies were the introduction of sassafras to European medicine,
and the drawings of Le Moyne de Morgues, our earliest systematic por-
trayal of a North American people. Incidentally, the colonists had pro-
duced at least eight babies at Fort Caroline, who were thus the first
known children of European parentage to be born in what is now the
United States (Bennett 1964, 21). In Canada, that event had occurred
some 500 years earlier in the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows.
France's final attempt at realizing its colonial dream in Brazil took place
on an island called Maragnan in the mouth of the Amazon. It illustrated
a new stage in French imperial policy: only Roman Catholic missionar-
ies were allowed in the colonies. Despite its short life, the colony had
enduring consequences, as the Fort Saint Louis of the French grew into
today's city of San Luiz do Maranhao.
Although the project's principal backer, Daniel de la Tousche, Sieur
de La Ravardiere, was a Huguenot, its leader, Chevalier Francois de
1O4 Olive Patricia Dickason
nuns were allowed to see them (Mercure Francois 1617, 3: 164-5; Claude
d'Abbeville i6i4a, 367^-74'). While the event was spectacularly success-
ful, it was also a swan song: it did not save the colony. After a series of
bungles, the alarmed Portuguese managed to pull themselves together
and chase the French out of Maragnan. As at Guanabara Bay and in
Florida, there were complaints that France had let the colony down in
its hour of need.
Conclusion
The failures recounted in this essay gave rise to some serious soul-
searching on techniques of colonization. The French, signally adept at
trading in the New World, had not at first been able to transfer that suc-
cess to planting settlements. It had become obvious that while trading
and colonization might be linked, fundamentally they were separate
enterprises with distinct (and not always compatible) requirements. It
was generally agreed that leadership had failed in the attempts at coloni-
zation; among other lapses, it had not concentrated sufficiently on
establishing a secure subsistence base. For all the detailed and costly
preparations in the project of Cartier and Roberval, the rigours of the
northern climate had not been provided for, nor was a working relation-
ship with Amerindians developed. In the case of Villegaignon, religious
dissension had proved fatal; Laudonniere had fallen out with Amerin-
dian allies; and by the time of the Razilly-La Ravardiere attempt, the
Portuguese were too well established. In lands France would have pre-
ferred to colonize, imperial rivals gave the coup de grace to already falter-
ing attempts; in Canada, northern conditions discouraged colonial
rivalry, but presented challenges that at first overwhelmed inadequate
(or inappropriate) preparations and inexperience.
In no case had the colonists behaved wisely towards the Native peo-
ples. Montchrestien, for one, was strong on this point: the Amerindians,
he said, had demonstrated their willingness to cooperate; it was up to
the French to deal with them fairly, and not try to tyrannize them
(Montchrestien 1615, 218). Others, such as Razilly, did not accord so
much importance to Amerindians, and thought that successful coloniza-
tion depended rather upon cohesive leadership backed by sufficient
military and naval force ([Razilly] 1653, 374-83, 453-64). Cooperation
with Amerindians and even some adaptation to their ways had been
quickly accepted in trade, and would be more slowly accepted in war-
fare; but in the serious matter of imperial expansion, such flexibility was
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 107
NOTES
The research and preparation of this paper was assisted by a Rockefeller Fellow-
ship at the Newberry Library, Chicago. The paper extends and develops mate-
rial from Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of
French Colonialism in the Americas (1984).
1 The Algiers colony was the result of the initiative of two Marseilles merchants
(Gaffarel 1899, 11). For the difficulties of the French, as well as those of the
English, in establishing colonies, see Quinn 1979, 5: xviii-xix. While the
Spanish planted colonies with relative ease in the Caribbean as well as in
Central and South America, in North America they too found it difficult, a
situation about which there have been many theories but no convincing
arguments. The Spanish encomienda never became an institution north of the
Rio Grande.
2 For a latter-day argument supporting this doctrine, see Varnhagen 1858, 56;
Varnhagen held that the peoples occupying Brazil when Europeans arrived
io8 Olive Patricia Dickason
were mobile invaders, and so were not true proprietors of the soil. Besides,
he wrote, they were 'in a pitiable social state,' incapable of civilizing them-
selves.
3 On the legal theories behind that wording, see Green and Dickason 1989,
143-59,221.
4 This was one of the 'strange customs' reported from both North and South
America; Villegaignon's people experienced it in Brazil. Amerigo Vespucci
(1451-1512) wrote of South Americans, 'What greater wonder can I tell you
than that they thought themselves fortunate when, in passing a river, they
could carry us on their backs?' (Vespucci 1894, 16). In the Caribbean, Caribs
swam out to ships and carried the visitors ashore on their backs (Gullick
1985, 40; Gaffarel 1892, 2: 341).
5 Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Departement de Manuscrits, Fonds Francais,
Ms. 15452, 157, Andre Thevet, 'Le Grand Insulaire et Pilotage,' 1586[?].
6 Cartier 1993, 108. According to a Spanish account, the Stadaconans killed
more than thirty-five of Carder's men (166).
7 For a Spanish report that Cartier had returned 'very rich,' see Cartier 1993,
Appendix 17, 'Examination of Newfoundland sailors regarding Carder,'
23 September 1542 (163).
8 Janet Whatley has commented that while Villegaignon was probably sincere
in his desire to establish a haven where Catholics and Protestants could live
in peace, he does not appear to have been prepared for emerging doctrinal
restrictions, particularly those of the Calvinists, nor for the political risks that
even tolerance of their cause would entail; see her translation of Jean de
Lery (Lery [1578] 1990); see also Reverdin 1957.
9 See, for example, Gaffarel 1878, 294-9. Villegaignon had received a cold
reception at the French court, to the point of being shunned, so it was prob-
ably beyond his power to aid the colony (Heulhard 1897, 184-8).
10 Lery [1580] 1972, 14, my translation; Barre 1557, 23. When Villegaignon
returned to France in 1559, he took some fifty Amerindians with him, men,
women, and children, whom he distributed as gifts among friends and sup-
porters. Two of these Amerindians, both in their teens at the time, were
reported to have survived for about eight years in France (Haton [1601]
1857, 1:40).
11 On the other side of the picture, the prominent Huguenot historian, Henri
Lancelot-Voisin, Sieur de La Popeliniere, in his survey of imperial history,
Lea Trois Mondes (1582), did not mention the Villegaignon episode at all. He
did report on the Ribault-Laudonniere attempt, but only on its demise in
1565 and Dominique de Gourgues's revenge (La Popeliniere 1582, Bk. 2: 26-
40). For an examination of some of the consequences of the Florida enter-
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire 109
When talking about the contact period of the sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries, it is a relief to turn from discussion of the mentality of
the conquistadores and the merchants who fitted out voyages to the Car-
ibbean and Central America and to concentrate, instead, on the out-
look of Renaissance men from the Iberian Peninsula who promoted and
underwrote voyages to the northern part of the New World. It would be
wrong to imply that the men who organized voyages to Central America
were entirely different from those who were sailing mainly to the coasts
of Newfoundland and Labrador, because some of these merchants, par-
ticularly the Basque ones, played a double role; they had a deep interest
not only in the fish and furs of the north, but also in the gold and exotic
produce they had found in warmer climates. However, it must be
stressed that, unlike the motives that inspired many of the conquista-
dores in the south, for the majority of sixteenth-century merchant mari-
ners who made a good living from northern fishing voyages, any form of
year-round settlement or conquest in the New World was of no interest.
All those merchants required was a profitable return on their initial
investment in ships and provisions. Thus, though in both Central and
South America Basques can clearly not be exonerated from having par-
ticipated in some of the unpleasant excesses of the Conquest, on the
southern shores of Labrador events took a very different turn.
Even though there may well have been as many as two thousand men
using harbours every year along the Strait of Belle Isle during the sec-
ond half of the sixteenth century, it would seem that because contact
was mainly ship-based there was a minimum of negative interaction
between Basque fishermen and Innu (Montagnais) hunters. According
to Lope de Isasti, the Basques knew the Innu as both 'Montaneses'
The Men behind the Spanish Voyages to Terranova ill
For the thoughts of these Renaissance men, both mariners and mer-
chants, there is very little direct evidence in the form of letters or jour-
nals, but there are glimpses in their account books, in their lawsuits, and
in their notarial documents, which are helpful and revealing. Moreover,
by taking the advice given in contemporary moral guidebooks, which
describe how a good merchant ought to behave, and comparing it
with the evidence of how they actually did behave, as reflected in those
very detailed account books and lawsuits, we can achieve some idea of
whether or not they lived up to their moral precepts.
It is well worth reading a little book published in Medina del Campo
in 1544 by Doctor Saravia de la Calle Beronense, written for the instruc-
tion of merchants. It must have found a receptive audience, as a second
edition was printed in 1547. The author clearly knew how difficult it was
to achieve the delicate balance between financial and spiritual success:
Merchant... if you want to trade, confident in the good intention you have
of providing for the community and providing for your household -
remember you are starting out on a perilous profession, and in order not
to fall into any danger you will have to set forth well forewarned ... and, in
order for you to be guided through such an intricate labyrinth, make use of
this thread, spun by the fingers of very saintly and wise doctors ... which will
certainly lead you out of obscure and tortuous turns if you do not let it slip
out of your hand, or try to twist it to your own advantage, or pull it ... to
make it follow your own avaricious tendencies (La Calle Beronense 1544,
xxiiii v —xxv').
He ends by reminding the young merchant that he must deal with his
temporal wealth in such a way that he will not lose eternal riches. As we
shall see, this is the sort of advice that the majority of our Basque mer-
chants genuinely believed in, and the metaphor that Saravia de la Calle
uses, the intricate Labyrinth of Commerce, is one employed again and
again by other authors. The wealthier the merchant, the more compli-
cated were the problems of conscience he would have to wrestle with.
These Renaissance merchants were part of a tradition very different
from the 'look after yourself mentality of many modern businessmen.
Like all merchants and mariners, they kept a sharp eye on their profits,
but that was not their only goal. However interested in money these
Northern Spanish merchants were, they seem to have been almost
The Men behind the Spanish Voyages to Terranova 113
equally motivated by a sense of service, first to God and then to the king.
In wartime, of course, they showed their loyalty to the Crown by provid-
ing ships for the Royal Armadas, with an occasional bout of piracy
thrown in to discomfort the enemies of 'El Rey, nuestro Senor.' But in
daily life they realized that God's service required them above all to be
generous, and that they should not ignore the plight of their less fortu-
nate fellow citizens whether in prisons, hospitals, or elsewhere. For
instance, in nearly every last will and testament, even those written for
dying men on the coast of Labrador, there were clauses asking for some
bequest to be left for the ransom of captives in Moorish jails, or to help
one of the hospitals in their own towns.4
Apart from bequests in wills and testaments, there were other ways in
which merchants and shipowners felt that their profits could be shared.
A large majority of the early-sixteenth-century account books that I have
so far seen begin with a declaration such as the following (written in
Burgos in 1539): 'In the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
and of the Virgin, St. Mary, his mother, be all things dedicated to His
Holy Service. Amen.'5 Or in some cases one finds a shorter version, such
as Diego de Bernuy's: 'Manual of Purchases made in 1546 in which Our
Lord shall take part.'*' According to the account books, He did take part;
for shipowners, for instance, the normal way of contributing to a church
or to a charity was by a donation of at least 2 per cent of the value of the
cargo every time a ship came into port.
Whether they used a shorter or a longer version of the dedication in
their account books, or whether they gave smaller or larger contribu-
tions to church funds, a certain sense of reciprocity marked their
actions: they gave, but they also received. They always talked about 'La
ganancia que Dios nos diere' ('the profits that God shall give us'). For
example, when they were starting out on a voyage, however well provi-
sioned and prepared, they were aware that the element of good luck
would make or break their fortune, and good luck depended on God's
will (with a little extra protection from the saints). Spanish or Basque
shipowners would never have called their ships the Pelican, the Red Lion,
or the Mary and George, or the Mary Rose, even if those names sometimes
possessed a religious connotation. Nearly all Iberian owners called their
ships after saints (often the patron saint of the parish church or a local
hermitage), if they did not use either the name of Jesus, or the Trinity,
or the Three Kings, or the Conception, or the Assumption of the Virgin
Mary, and even if they sometimes abbreviated a name such as the
Buenaventura (from the official name 'Nuestra Seriora de Buenaven-
114 Selma Huxley Barkham
The first of two Burgos merchants whose mentalities I want to bring out
of semi-oblivion is Cristobal de Haro, mainly because of his enthusiastic
contribution to new geographical discoveries, but also because of his
sense of dedication to the Emperor Charles v and his sense of responsi-
bility for the men who served under him. He is one of the first Spanish
merchants who can be directly linked to early attempts at exploration of
the coasts and waters of eastern Canada. The Haro family, though based
in Burgos, had business partners or associates in all the large ports of
western Europe from Antwerp to Lisbon and Seville. So far, we know
very little about that family's activities in Flanders, where many other
Burgos merchants had representatives, but we do know that by about
1510 Cristobal de Haro had been sent to Lisbon, where he was involved
in ventures connected with the great German financiers, the Welsers
The Men behind the Spanish Voyages to Terranova 115
and the Fuggers. However, it appears that the most profitable acquain-
tanceship that Cristobal made in Lisbon was with Fernando de Magal-
lanes - Magellan, as we call him. When Magellan left Portugal for Spain
in 1517, it is clear that Cristobal de Haro took a considerable interest in
him and in his project. Haro became one of the principal investors,
along with the Bishop of Burgos, Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, in the voy-
age that set out from Seville in 1519 and made the first circumnavigation
of the globe.
It was probably thanks to that investment that Charles v appointed
Haro as his factor in the House of the Spice Trade, which was set up in
Corunna, and that he was thus in charge of dispensing part of the
precious cargo of spices that arrived back in Seville in September 1522
from the circumnavigation of Juan Sebastian de Elcano's little ship the
Victoria. As Haro appears to have invested more money than anyone else
except the Bishop of Burgos in that successful expedition, it is not sur-
prising that the emperor from then on counted on Haro for the organi-
zation of other expeditions. In 1523, Haro was already helping with the
preparations in Corunna for the next expedition, this time northward
from Cuba up the coast of North America as far as Newfoundland
(Vigneras 1957).
On 23 April of that year, a letter was sent from Charles v in Valladolid
to Haro, reiterating that, as an agreement had been made with Esteban
Gomez to discover a new way to the Spice Islands via 'Eastern Cathay'
(presumably somewhere to the west of the 'New-found-land'), a small
ship of fifty tons was being built for this purpose, and Haro was to be
responsible for the provisioning. Moreover, because it was the em-
peror's wish that the departure should take place as soon as possible,
Haro was charged to employ himself in that matter 'with much dili-
gence' (Biggar 1913, 154).
In fact, the ship was enlarged to seventy-five tons, and Gomez, with his
twenty-nine-man crew, did not leave Corunna until September 1524,
returning in the autumn of 1525. Yet it was by no means the last time that
Haro was encouraged by Charles v to 'employ himself with much dili-
gence.' During Haro's time in charge of the House of the Spice Trade in
Corunna, which coincided with the period when the famous cartogra-
pher Diego Rivero was living and working in that city, there are indica-
tions that Haro became personally interested in the region then known
as the land of'los Bacallaos' (the cod fish) (Biggar 1913,169), and he can
hardly have avoided seeing the maps of the area that Diego Rivero was
drawing. Nor could he have overlooked the 'Indians' that Gomez
116 Selma Huxley Barkham
Woad is a blue dye that was extracted by a long and complicated process
from the woad plant, hatis tinctoria, which was grown most successfully
and abundantly in the Provencal region of France near Toulouse and
Albi. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, branches of the Bernuy
family were comfortably ensconced both in Toulouse and in Burgos,
and had a network of agents who dealt with the export of woad particu-
larly to England and Flanders. Soon they were also importing woad
from the Azores. Because of the colossal quantity of seaborne merchan-
dise for which the Bernuys were responsible, the family (especially the
Burgos branch) became deeply involved in maritime insurance. Thus a
Burgos merchant, Diego de Bernuy, became the first man we know of to
insure voyages to Canada (Barkham 1980-1, 1992).
By 1547, when Bernuy signed the first known insurance policy for a
Terranova fishing voyage, the Bernuy family had had at least fifty years'
118 Selma Huxley Barkham
experience in the maritime insurance industry, and they had also devel-
oped a number of other financial interests. However, the reason that
prompted Bernuy to insure Terranova voyages (barely five years after
Carrier's last voyage to Canada) was not that he thought of the new
route as an exciting 'window of opportunity' but quite simply because
he wanted to do a favour for the French and Spanish Basque shipowners
whose masters and crews frequently transported his woad and other
merchandise up and down the Atlantic coast, mainly to ports between
Flanders and Seville. Because Bernuy's agents knew these mariners, who
were engaged both in coastal transport and in long-distance fishing voy-
ages, and they knew the need for insurance on transatlantic voyages,
they seem to have persuaded Bernuy to accept the new pioneer Terra-
nova route. In one case, Bernuy says in his account book that he agreed
to insure the ship of Martin Perez de Alcarreta because of his friendship
for Alcarreta's agent in Irun, Joan Perez de Berrotaran. Indeed, Bernuy
actually uses the phrase 'por el amor de el' - for his (i.e., Berrotaran's)
sake (Barkham 1994).
Many of the voyages that Bernuy insured were not just the simple
routes out to Terranova and straight back to the Basque coast. Some
were for cargoes of whale oil that were taken directly from Labrador to
London; the ship would then return to Bordeaux, San Sebastian, or
Pasajes with another cargo. One of the reasons that Basque merchants
were able to invest in long complicated voyages and were able to send
larger and better ships than other merchants for both cod fishing and
whaling in Terranova was because wealthy Burgos merchants were able
to make good any losses if a ship went down. The coverage that Bernuy
and his fellow underwriters pioneered was useful for nearly half a cen-
tury, until the effects of a disastrous financial slump in Burgos reduced
many of the brokers to bankruptcy.
According to contemporary moralists, the profession of insurance
broker was considered high on the list of meritorious ways of earning a
living. The higher the risk involved, the more a decent profit could be
justified. To quote the 1538 Ordinances of the Burgos Consulado:
'Insurance is a very necessary thing so that merchants are preserved
from harm and can be durable and permanent in their trade and com-
merce, and may have a fraternal unity of purpose among each other for
the betterment of all' (Garcia de Quevedo 1905, 151). However unfash-
ionable it may be nowadays to accept that the simple tenets of Christian-
ity had such power over men's minds, it is an inescapable fact that the
warnings of contemporary moralists were listened to and obeyed by
many, even if not all, sixteenth-century businessmen. Although power
The Men behind the Spanish Voyages to Terranova 119
seeking and a desire for upward mobility are often given as the main
incentives for merchant behaviour, another motivation cannot be suffi-
ciently stressed: a belief in the moral obligation of the rich to help the
poor, or, as can be seen in the actions of Haro and Bernuy, the obliga-
tion of the employer to help the people in his service, combined with an
overarching sense of the importance of finding a way to be useful to the
whole community.
Two brief examples illustrate the sort of practical generosity shown by
Burgos merchants. The first is a decree that affected all the members of
the merchants guild - that on the Feast Day of St Michael, the day that
the prior and the consuls of the Consulado were normally elected, the
traditional banquet should no longer take place. Instead, the money
formerly spent on copious quantities of food for an enormous feast was
to be better employed in a charitable way 'in the service of God,' provid-
ing food for the poor or the sick (Garcia de Quevedo 1905, 179). In a
similarly charitable spirit, Diego de Bernuy announced that he was
going to give something important to his city, and he built the largest
hospital in Burgos: the Hospital de la Concepcion. The preamble to the
official donation began in this way:
where the whale oil came from (Grand Bay). However it was not until
1571, when Esteban de Garibay's Compendia Historial was printed in
Antwerp, that a description was published in Spanish that mentioned
the Labrador whaling industry or the people who lived in Labrador.
Though contemporary descriptions of conditions in Labrador are few,
any references we have found clearly emphasize the peaceful coexist-
ence between Basques and Innu.
Between 1537, when Robert Lefant first met and talked with the Innu
on the St Paul River estuary, and 1625, when Lope de Isasti described
the Innu as being both 'Mountain people' and 'People of the Canal,'
there seems to have been extraordinary harmony between fishermen
and 'Yndios,' a harmony that seems to have extended happily into the
eighteenth century, when a Basque family from Bayonne, the Ber-
houagues, lived with a large encampment of Innu alongside their house
at Brador. So far, the only known exception to what appears to have
been a policy of intelligent friendship - and non-interference -
occurred when a merchant mariner, Captain Francisco de Sorarte, took
an Innu family back to Deva in the mid-seventeenth century (Esnaola
1927, 81-4). That was the first time we know of in more than a century
of cultural interchange that an active effort was made by Spanish
Basques to convert any Innu.
If there had been any other attempts at conversion before 1625, it is
almost certain that Lope de Isasti (a priest living in Lezo on the harbour
of Pasajes, where ships returning from Terranova were constantly being
moored) would have known about potential missionary activity and
would have expressed an opinion on the subject. Instead, he simply
wrote about the way the Montaneses helped the fishermen who were cur-
ing and drying fish on the beaches in return for some ship's biscuit and
cider (Isasti 1850, 154) .8 This is exactly the same sort of friendly inter-
change that Robert Lefant and Clemente de Odeliza had reported
when they were describing conditions in the Strait of Belle Isle in 1542
(Biggar 1930, 453, 462). The philosophy of 'do as you would be done by'
appears to have applied equally to the way both Native inhabitants and
Basque fishermen treated each other. For instance, the Innu always
came to warn the Basques if there was any danger of impending attack
by the 'Eskimaos.' This reciprocal action continued into the eighteenth
century, constituting two hundred years of cordial relations.
Although there certainly were occasional disagreements between
Basques in Labrador about who was the rightful owner of a mislaid shal-
lop or a dead whale, there seem to have been relatively few disturbing
disputes. Basque fishermen were not all angels, any more than all Bur-
122 Selma Huxley Barkham
gos merchants were saints, but when a modus vivendi broke down, prob-
lems were almost always reflected in a lawsuit, and the legal process
would appear to have been remarkably civilized. Because it was impor-
tant to be in a happy ship, Basque merchant mariners nearly always took
several members of their own family with them as part of the crew, and
there is only one known example of a mutiny. In that case, a crew
refused to stay on for the winter whaling season because of a disastrous
event during the previous winter of 1576-7: an unusually early onset of
winter conditions caught several ships in ice in Labrador harbours, and
a great many wintering fishermen died as a result. However, under nor-
mal circumstances the crews were always keen to join Terranova voy-
ages, which would appear to be another reason for supposing that the
long periods spent in Terranova were not unpleasant. As Montaigne
said of the need for harmony on shipboard, 'Marchants that travell by
sea, have reason to take heede, that those which goe in the same ship,
be not dissolute, blasphemers, and wicked, judging such companie
unfortunate' (Montaigne 1603, Bk. 1, 118). Montaigne would certainly
have known about conditions on transatlantic crossings. Basque mari-
ners took over to Terranova the ship that had been christened by-
Montaigne's sister-in-law, Seraine d'Esteve (Bernard 1968, 737). Indeed,
Montaigne had rather more in common with northern Spanish mer-
chants and mariners than his alliance with a family that owned cod-
fishing and whaling ships. Montaigne's mother, Antoinette Lopez de
Villanova or Villeneuve, was from a Spanish Converso Jewish family
quite similar to that of the Bernuys (who were also of Jewish origin),
while his father came from a long line of Bordeaux merchants.
If I may treat Montaigne as an honorary Spanish merchant, I shall
end on a comparison between his attitude to the people so often called
'savages,' and those of other Renaissance men, such as Robert Lefant
and Clemente de Odeliza, who had often met and talked with the
Montaneses in Labrador. After discussing the opinions expressed by the
'Indians' that Montaigne had met (probably Tupinambas in Rouen or
Bordeaux), he said he was grieved that by prying so narrowly into their
faults 'we are so blinded in ours.' Then, with his usual sense of humour,
he opined that their arguments were very sensible in spite of the fact
that they wore 'no kinde of breeches or hosen' (Montaigne 1603, Bk. i,
104, 107). His statements are almost identical to those of Clemente dc
Odeliza, who was most impressed by the fact that the Montaneses were
very intelligent and resourceful ... 'for men dressed in skins' (Biggar
1930, 462-3). Four centuries ago, the merchant mariners of northern
Spain and southwestern France were able to comment positively on the
The Men behind the Spanish Voyages to Terranova 123
3 Innu tents beside a Basque dwelling, Strait of Belle Isle. Detail from 'Carte
paticuliere depuis la riviere des Esquimaux jusqu'a la pointe Belsamon dans le
golfe de St Laurent a 50° '/> du nord.' France, Service Historique, de 1'Armee de
Terre (cote 7 b 67).
remarkable qualities of the men they had met on the south coast of
Labrador. Because those merchant mariners considered generosity and
a sense of service to be prime virtues, the same virtues were recognized
in the Innu - for instance, in the way the Innu shared food or collabo-
rated in some of the daily tasks of the Basque fishermen.
The remarkable harmony that still existed in the first half of the eigh-
teenth century between Innu hunters and Labrador fishermen - who
were still often, though not exclusively, Basque - is beautifully depicted
on the map from the Ministere de la Guerre in Paris, showing the north-
west corner of the Strait of Belle Isle (figure 3). On that map, two lines
of large Innu tents can be seen, labelled 'Cabanes des Sauvages.' They
look considerably more impressive than the little house of M. de Courte-
124 Selma Huxley Barkham
NOTES
1 'There is certainly no question that the Inuits' initial response to strangers was
immediate open attack or deadly ambush,' says Renee Fossett. 'The Inuit set-
tled into peaceful relations with strangers only after they were convinced that
they had more to gain economically by peaceful trade and welfare than they
had by snatch and grab tactics (personal communication).' See Fossett 2OO1.
2 Giving evidence about a last testament written in Carrol Cove on 24 Decem-
ber 1584, Domingo de Miranda explained that the will was written by the
ship's surgeon, Joan de Arriaga, because 'neither in the said ship nor in the
said harbour there was not any Royal Notary ... nor are there any in the
Province of Terranova because it is a land belonging to Savages' ([Barkham]
Huxley 1987, 117).
3 The Burgos merchants formed what they called the 'Consulado del Mar.' For
a catalogue of their archives see Pedraza Prades and Ballesteros Caballero
1990.
4 See the last will of J.M. de Larnime, Archive Historico de Protocolos de
Guipuzcoa, S.S. 1803, ff. 38-40*.
5 Burgos, Archive del Consulado de Burgos, Legajo 3, frontispiece.
6 Burgos, Archive del Consulado de Burgos, Legajo 4, frontispiece.
7 Archive Municipal de Burgos, No. 705 - H.C., 8 December 1561, my
translation.
8 Writing in about 1625, Isasti actually says that the Innu would not have known
what a priest was. This is surprising, as in the mid-sixteenth century several
priests are known to have been in Labrador as chaplains on whaling vessels
(Isasti 1850, 164).
Relocating Terra Firma:
William Vaughan's Newfoundland
Anne Lake Prescott
For the past few decades, scholars have been deducing from early mod-
ern texts the cultural myths sustaining or reflecting early modern explo-
ration and colonization.1 In much of this mythology the western
hemisphere is a transplanted Eden and a female body. Michael Drayton,
for example, calls Virginia 'earth's only paradise,' even as he mentions,
perhaps with irony, the English cannon roaring offshore; Walter
Ralegh, notoriously, declares that Guiana 'hath yet her maidenhead.'
For Robert Hayman, to whom Francis Drake once gave an orange when
the future governor of the Harbour Grace plantation was a boy in
Devonshire, Newfoundland is a scruffy wench who, with good hus-
bandry and terraforming, might be made comely.* Richard Whit-
bourne's A discourse and discovery of New-found-land (1620) is more
gallant: Newfoundland is our sweet 'Sister-land1 who 'lies, as it were,
with open armes towards England, offering it selfe to be imbraced, and
inhabited by us' (Cell 1982, 165, i l l ) . Such myths read America in
terms of a familiar sexual relation, but also in terms of ancient Euro-
pean or biblical places of beauty and safety, so that westward sailing
Europeans could find themselves, conceptually arid what one might call
geomythically, going east. The process, if not exactly a decentring, sug-
gests a more paradoxical orientation in time and space than we some-
times allow.
In this essay I will look at such acrobatics of the imagination in
the works of one would-be colonizer, the poet and essayist William
Vaughan, who early in the seventeenth century founded a settlement in
Whitbourne's 'Sister-land' (favoured, however, with few profitable
embracings) .3 His version of America is related to those of Drayton,
Ralegh, and others, but it bears his own stamp: largely unexcited by
126 Anne Lake Prescott
part of Newfoundland not a little bit of England but a little bit of Wales.
There is, however, another political perspective to note: when Vaughan
publicizes Newfoundland by treating it as a new Colchis, land of the
golden fleece and destination of Jason's heroic Argonauts, he appropri-
ates for Great Britain, and not just for Wales, imagery already exploited
by the Hapsburgs. As heirs of the Burgundian dukes, who founded the
chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece, Charles v and his successors had
called themselves newjasons who could send forth new Argosies to find
the New World gold that they claimed was rightly theirs as rulers of a west-
ward moving imperium inherited from Troy and Rome (M. Tanner 1993).
Vaughan, too, transports Colchis beyond the Pillars of Hercules, but he
also moves it well to the north of Spanish mines in the New World and
thus implicitly transfers a set of myths and claims from the Hapsburgs to
the Stuarts. Just as Francis Drake had diverted Spanish gold to English
purses, Vaughan redirects chivalric and imperial myths long cherished in
Burgundy, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain.
Vaughan was not alone in reading the New World in terms of older
books. As Anthony Grafton, among others, has demonstrated, Europe-
ans experienced the New World not only through a grid of cultural
assumptions but through familiar texts (Grafton, Shelford, and Siraisi
1992). But Vaughan's own geoliterary translation of a founding Euro-
pean myth is not just fancy allegorical drapery over ordinary woods,
rocks, and sea. For him, the myth is really history: he reads the Argosy
euhemeristically, as a veiled account of heroic Greek efforts to open up
new trade routes. Vaughan allegorizes his own historical moment by
attaching it to a myth that he reads as allegorizing an older but analo-
gous historical moment. Jason was an earlier William Vaughan, not a
fantasized and fantasizing romantic. As I will show, Vaughan in fact goes
out of his way to define his settlement as a non-Utopia, a non-Chimera.
Reimagining for Newfoundland a famous ancient voyage, he simulta-
neously claims that the New World wilderness is real estate in every
sense: its value lies precisely in its solidity compared to courtly fantasy,
poetic fictions, philosophical fancies, pipe dreams. Why settle for a
feigned Utopia if you can settle in Canada? Fantasy is a problematic and
dangerous part of the mind, apt to delude the commonwealth and dis-
tract the soul. Newfoundland is stable and offers room for Britain's
excess population, trees to make up for the deforestations Vaughan
laments, and substantial profits from fish. May the flighty gentlemen of
Britain take note and channel their energies towards a terra nova that is
terra firma. The paradox is worth emphasis because of its relevance to
128 Anne Lake Prescott
our own efforts to understand how early modern colonizers could imag-
ine their enterprises: for Vaughan, British hopes for Newfoundland cen-
tre on what feels firm, whereas life on his side of the ocean is too often
beset by illusion. It may be wise to remember this (illusory) conviction
that life in Canada would be somehow solider than in Britain, even if
also somehow glamorously golden and mythic, for we are seldom used
to thinking of reality as an escape from fantasy, and those studying Euro-
pean explorers often emphasize the role in their imaginations of mar-
vels and dreams.
Some facts: born in 1577 to a family with aristocratic ties (his older
brother was made Earl of Carbery and he himself was eventually
knighted), Vaughan attended Oxford, travelled on the Continent, and
developed strong opinions on everything from university tutors to the
medicinal value of garlic (Pritchard 1962, 6, 9-11; Cell 1982, 1-59;
Vaughan 1630, A5-A8). He began writing poetry early, publishing Latin
verses when he was twenty and eventually calling himself 'Orpheus Jun-
ior' after the poet who sangjason's Argonauts across the waves. In 1617,
soon after the Newfoundland Company was incorporated, he sponsored
a settlement on land in the southern part of the territory, not only call-
ing it 'Cambriola' in honour of Wales but putting a further impress on
the land, as is the privilege of a founder, by naming parts of it Vaughan's
Cove and Golden Grove (for his family's Welsh estate).
It may be that Vaughan did not see Newfoundland with his own eyes,
although the epigram by Robert Hayman that I quote below, sometimes
cited as proof of this, does not quite say that he never went there. But
even after the venture failed and the colony was reorganized in 1619, he
retained his enthusiasm and continued to publish works supporting the
settlement. In the mid-i620s he published two works that are part of a
small flurry of texts dealing with Newfoundland. One is Cambrensium
Carolda (1625), Latin verses on Charles j's marriage and other topics; it
includes a map drawn by John Mason, the Newfoundland Company's
second governor and future founder of New Hampshire (figure 4). The
other is The Golden Fleece (Vaughan i626a, recycling some of the earlier
work), which reports on the benefits to be found in that true Colchis,
Newfoundland - a prize to be won with the help of a king and his richer
subjects, but with no role in this revised myth for a Medea. Vaughan
must have been busy in those years, for he also did an adaptation of Tra-
jano Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnaso (Vaughan i626b).4 Then, in 1630,
he published The Newlanders cure, last in a series of medical texts. By 1641
he was dead.
William Vaughan's Newfoundland 129
diminish their number at home, and other lines praise the New World's
utilitas, its fish and wood, or speak slightingly of 'Aequivocata scholis'
and similar 'Chimeras' (E6-E8, F2). Newfoundland is not only spatially
more substantial than school paradoxes and the Chimera; it is also more
fully present temporally. In a version of the ubi sunt topos, one of
Vaughan's friends, addressing 'Orpheus Junior,' asks 'where are now to
be found the Colossus of Phoebus, the great Lighthouse, the temple of
Jove? Hardly a trace remains of Troy. And who will show you the first
Colchis or the Mausoleum? But happy thou, who offerest Colchis, this
Solomon's Ophir, to the king' (H3V-H4). Again, old European and bib-
lical localities are relocated, and resolidified, in time and space.
The three parts of Vaughan's Golden Fleece (i626a) recount conversa-
tions among such celebrities as the poets Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund
Spenser at the court of Apollo, the third part - to which those studying
early British colonization might pay more attention - being devoted to
Newfoundland. Apollo or no Apollo, Vaughan's sometimes engaging
work still shows the author's old distrust of fantasy. Again, Newfound-
land is real, material: 'This no Eutopia is, nor Common-wealth / Which
Plato faign'd,' he writes the king in a poem reworking one already pub-
lished in Cambrensium Caroleia, for 'Wee bring Your Kingdomes health /
By true Receits.' For good measure, the following poem says it again in
Latin: 'Non hie Eutopiam, non hie Phantasma Platonis, / Regi nil
pra[e]ter materiale damus' (here is no Eutopia or Platonic phantasm,
for we give the king nothing more than matter, substance; Vaughan
i626a, a2v-a3). And a wise king, Vaughan has just said, 'will preferre /
Of Practick Art before all Dreames, that erre' (a2). A preface complains
of life in Britain: idle, fashion-driven, and forgetful of social hierarchy
(Canada's wilderness held no egalitarian charms for Vaughan, who
liked his universe ranked in comely vertical strata). Vaughan's tripartite
tract, he explains, will tell first how 'to remove the Errours of Religion,'
next reform 'the Diseases of the Common-wealth,' and last 'discover the
certainty of the Golden Fleece, which shall restore us to all worldly Hap-
pinesse' (a4 v ).
After thus summoning the New World to the rescue and ransom of
the Old, Vaughan attacks his detractors as lazy cowards who prefer idle
thoughts or sensuous artifice to work and risk. In an energetic mixture
of common proverb and Greek mythology, he says to 'the uncharita-
ble Readers or Deriders of our Golden Fleece that they want 'to reape
the fruits of all painfull Trades without wetting your Cats feet, though
the Fish bee never so dearely prized.' But you
William Vaughan's Newfoundland 133
who repose your chiefest Felicitie in playing on the Violl of Fraud, and in
idealizing a painted Strumpet, come not at Colchos, nor presume yee
once, more then Tantalus, to touch the Golden Apples of our Hesperides.
There lies a Couple of Dragons in the way ... The Place is not for you. They
that labour not with sweate, shall not taste of our Sweete ... As a blacke
Sheepe among some of you is accounted a perillous beast; no lesse
offensive is the grimme Porter of the Golden He. Yea and the Ramme,
which beares the precious Fleece [the ocean, I assume], hath Homes more
piercing then Pikes to assault the assaylant Lozell. (Vaughan i6s6a, bi)
The inhabitants of Gotham, famed in legend and jest for nearly preter-
natural stupidity, are dolts, certainly, but also rustic: unlike the Argo-
nauts they stay blockishly at home.
Liminary poems by Vaughan's collaborators in the efforts to settle
Newfoundland confirm the text's sustaining myth: 'We need not now
complaine for want of Trade,' says John Guy,
And John Mason reports that his heart leaps to hear praises of 'That
hopefull Land, which Winters sixe I tri'd.' Suggesting the somewhat
contradictory aims 'of Fame, of quiet Life, or Gaine,' he urges us to
rich, employment for the poore, advantage for the Adventurers, and
encrease of Trade to all the subjects. A myne of Gold it is; the Myne is
deepe, the veines are great, the Oare is rare, the gold is pure, the extent
unlimited, the wealth unknowne, the worth invaluable. All this you shall
signfie unto that Noble King [Charles i]. And in the interim of our
progresse, we command all the rest of my vertuous Corporation to obey the
Lady Pallas, whom wee doe substitute in our stead as Queene Regent to see
our State well and peaceably governed (Llliv-Lll2).
The section ends as St David, patron of Wales, sings the praises of his
own country and Newfoundland, rebuking doubters in lines that sug-
gest how slander could shipwreck the new Argo:
The saint must endure rude interruptions by the falsely witty writers
Skelton and Scoggin, but at the request of Spenser such 'scoffing com-
panions, and base ballet Rimers' are exiled from Parnassus and the new
Colchis, 'for ever after ... incapable of the mystery of the golden fleece'
(Mmm4). The woods of Newfoundland, evidently, are to echo with
nothing but civility and good verse.
Vaughan's interest in Newfoundland also led him to write a new book
of medical advice. Medicine deals with the material world, and Vaughan
liked the thought of keeping Newfoundlanders fit. The Newlanders cure
(1630) builds on earlier medical books such as his Naturall and artificial
directions for health (iGoob and many later editions), a work informing
the reader, for example, that sugar makes milk better for the teeth, that
capon (somewhat surprisingly, all things considered) is an aphrodisiac,
and that the head should get washed four times a year. The 1617 edition
had more explicitly looked westward, presumably because Vaughan was
just launching his settlement. He was also by now even more agitated by
Britain. Perhaps you need a change of air, he tells the reader, if your
native land has 'infinite troupes of Lawyers,' heretics, and reprobates.
138 Anne Lake Prescott
seated here in our Zodiacke betwixt the Signes of Leo and Libra [that is,
Bacon's sign is Virgo, harvest queen and image of Justice], whereby the
Hearts of all this Land doe expect some notable effects to proceede from
the succeeding Rayes of your Wisedome: so it will please you likewise to
illustrate with your Countenance the rising Fortunes of our Plantation in
New-found-land, whereby Justice may shine in that incompassed Climate,
and consequently our Navigation increase by the industry of our
Merchants, for whose sakes partly, I have reviewed these my former
labours, hoping with the favour of God, sometime or other in person there
to partake of their Westerne Ayre. (A3V-A4)
myths helping him articulate these hopes are relevant to any decentring
the Renaissance: not only should we remember the variety of early mod-
ern perspectives (on both sides of the Atlantic), we should also recall
how the viewpoints of individual Renaissance writers could mentally
shift back and forth. Although, so far as we know, Vaughan never left
Europe, his fancy created a world in which east could indeed meet, and
even become, a newer, realer west, and in which the history being made
in Newfoundland could be justified by myths that he and his friends,
believing such tales to be poetic traces of actual ancient triumphs,
aimed to re-enact in modern times and on another continent.
NOTES
H4-H6, on ballads, old wives' tales, 'glozing Bookes of Chivalry,' stupid jests,
and faked genealogies.
7 Pi, X7; Vaughan (iGooa, T4V) quotes Utopias less fantastic Book i with no
'faigned,' whereas Aa8 mentions 'the (faigned) Syphograuntes.' Vaughan
liked Utopia, but he thought it wise to keep reminding us that Utopians are
not real.
8 'Train' is oil from whales or seals.
9 Vaughan 1630, H7. The 1626 Directions for health (published with Walter
Mason's treatises on the eyes) has a cure taught Vaughan by 'my deare friend
Captaine Mason,' who 'hath happily practiced the same in Newfound-land,
when some of his people in an extraordinary frozen winter, were troubled
with Coughes': wash the blood off some fox lungs and place in an earthen
pipkin. Add white wine to cover. Seal and set in an oven from which baking
bread has just been removed. Repeat last step twice. Administer a nutmeg-
sized portion in broth, beer, or other liquor. 'No beast is so long breathed as
the Fox,' adds Vaughan, 'which makes these Lungs so powerfull' (Vaughan
l626c, Oi-Olv). Cure gives a similar recipe, substituting vinegar for wine.
Images of English Origins in
Newfoundland and Roanoke
Mary C. Fuller
John Donne's elegy To His Mistress Going to Bed' has become a locus
classicus for the relation of English poetry to American discovery.
Donne's address to the woman disrobing as 'my America, my new found
land," generates a series of bivalent identifications of the body as land-
scape, and the landscape as body: as paradisal landscape, as a place to
rule, as a place newly found and full of hidden gems, as a legible book,
as a place for adventurers to enfranchise themselves, a place of edeni-
cally coded nakedness.2 Donne's apostrophe eroticizes exploration, as a
free, bold, joyfully transgressive movement to which no place is out of
bounds; in the remainder of the elegy, a sense of sure, even overdeter-
mined rhetorical and actual possession expresses itself in the multiplica-
tion of possessive pronouns - my America, my new found land, my
kingdom, my mine, my empery. Analogues for the eroticized imperial-
ism so powerfully crystallized in Donne's poem are not far to seek in the
prose accounts of English experience in the Americas: most famously,
perhaps, Walter Ralegh's assertion in The Discoverie of Guiana (1596) that
'Guiana is a countrey that hath yet her maidenhead' (Ralegh [1596]
1903, 10: 428). The frequency with which this phrase is cited and
referred to in modern scholarship suggests that it is seen as typical, even
defining. Yet not every site of English contact with the Americas gener-
ated such a gendered rhetoric of possession and mastery, such a sure
sense of masculine desire and desirability. What alternate strategies, if
any, did the English have for conceptualizing and representing Amer-
ica? And how were these conceptual strategies articulated with the expe-
rience of encountering the actual lands and peoples? Donne's poem
142 Mary C. Fuller
names an alternate, marginal, or failed colonial site - but both the copi-
ous legibility and sure possession of the mistress's geographic body
guarantee that the one part of America Donne can't be thinking of is
the one he names: 'O my America, my new found land.'
Newfoundland was England's earliest landfall, earliest land claim,
but, more than that, the central experience of America for the vast
majority of sixteenth-century Englishmen who had such experience. Yet
even after official colonization began in the early seventeenth century,
Newfoundland virtually failed to register on the English consciousness,
at least as represented in printed documents. As John Reid comments,
'colonization was a conceptual as well as a physical process'; everyone
knew what to do with Newfoundland, but conceptualizing the region
was a different matter (Reid 1981, xiv). What they did, of course, was
fish. Newfoundland was consistently an exception to the generally
unhappy story of England's frustrated search for American riches, as
Franklin McCann backhandedly suggests: after John Cabot's landfall in
1497. 'voyages to that part of America north of Mexico, (except those con-
cerned solely with the Newfoundland fishing), had ended in failure and pro-
duced only disappointment and bitterness' (McCann 1952, 69; emphasis
mine). As the fishery developed, it became a means of retaining what
precious metals the English possessed; a triangular trade with southern
Europe allowed 'exchange of Newfoundland fish for costly Mediterra-
nean commodities with no draining away of bullion from England'
(Cell 1969, 15). Simply in terms of numbers, Bruce Trigger asserts that
in the sixteenth century, 'more European ships and men frequented the
coasts of Newfoundland and the Gulf of the St. Lawrence each year than
travelled between Spain and its rich and far-flung colonies in the New
World' (Trigger 1987, 28). David Quinn and James Axtell both compare
the cod fishery off Newfoundland to the mines of Mexico and Peru.
Mexican gold might be more exciting or evocative a form for wealth,
but the value of the cod and whale fisheries off Newfoundland and in
the St Lawrence was such that 'the Gulf of Mexico could not afford to
look down its nose at its Laurentian cousin' (Axtell 1988, 146). Quinn
guesses that a comparison between 'the calories of nutriment provided
to Europe by Newfoundland products between about 1500 and 1650'
and 'the ounces of bullion extracted from Mexico and Peru' might find
that their effects on human life on Western Europe were at least equal
(Quinn 1990,301).
The failure to represent Newfoundland has to be understood as being
despite, or even because of, the fishery's success. Gillian Cell attributes
Images of English Origins in Newfoundland and Roanoke 143
II
that have proved durable and versatile in their uses. There is a disap-
pearance to be explained, a fragmentary message to decipher, named
individuals both lost (the Dare family) and returning to search for them
(John White). There are brilliant images - the White drawings - and
seminal texts by Harriot, Lane, and Barlowe. Finally, there are real and
imagined genealogies, claims about parentage and possession that apply
across national, cultural, and racial boundaries, the possibility of cul-
tural survival and transformation. Yet the records that inspire our narra-
tives document a brief colonial enterprise that failed.
D.W. Prowse opened his monumental A History of Newfoundland
(1895) by lamenting that Newfoundland history at its origin cannot
yield a good story. 'Alas! for the glory of our Island, for the praise of
our discoverer, there are no portraits to discuss, no noble Isabella la
Catolica, no devoted friar. No golden haze of romance surrounds our
earliest annals. The story of the discovery of Newfoundland and North
America, as told by the Cabots, is as dull as the log of a dredge-boat.
Every picturesque element is eliminated from it, and the great voyage,
so pregnant with moral and material results, is brought down to the low
level of a mere trading adventure' (Prowse 1895, 6). Prowse's phrase,
the 'golden haze of romance,' deftly condenses the properties of a
certain colonial narrative - riches, heterosexual courtship, fiction -
completely viable for Ralegh's Virginia, completely absent for New-
foundland. Without colonial romance, colonial representation was
problematized. In its absence, how was the territory of Newfoundland
actually conceptualized and represented?
Ill
As England began to see the Dutch rather than the Spanish as its main
rivals, writings on trade and wealth evinced envy and emulation not
towards Spain's lucrative gold mines but towards the industrious fisher-
men of the Netherlands (see, for instance, Whitbourne 1620, B2; 1622,
22; Gentleman 1614, 7-15; J. Smith 1616, 10; Mason 1620, Bi). Outside
of Asia, rivalry with the Dutch focused particularly on the fishery and
the carrying trade: Richard Whitbourne wrote, 'Let the Dutch report
what sweetnesse they haue suckt from her [Newfoundland] by trade
thither, in buying of fish from our Nation' (Whitbourne 1622, A4V).
More copious writing on and proposals about Newfoundland registered
the resulting conceptual shift in colonial projects. Whitbourne's A dis-
course and discovery of New-found-land (1620), one of the best-informed of
these publications, was supported by the Crown - at least to the extent
of having collections taken up to pay for publication - and promoted
from the pulpit (Bridenbaugh 1968, 408-9).
Many things the English knew about Newfoundland - and after more
than a century's experience, they did know something, despite their
ignorance of the interior, their creative ideas about climate, and their
inattentive cartography - lent themselves not only to description but
also to interpretation by the writers of promotional tracts. Facts about
the island's location, its history, its very insularity, were not inert or neu-
tral knowledge to the colonial promoters and theorists of the 16208 and
16305. Yet the sense of 'Newfoundland' emerging as rhetorical and ideo-
logical construction from these Stuart writings differs markedly from
the representation of Roanoke or Jamestown.
John Mason, who produced an early printed map of the island, repre-
sented Newfoundland in terms not of its isolation, but rather of its
advantageous proximity to Europe. This proximity made it cheaper to
transport settlers to the island, and permitted an easier return to 'our
owne home, which naturally we are so much addicted unto' (Mason
1620, Bi v ). John Hagthorpe commented favourably on Newfoundland's
insularity and isolation, noting that unlike Virginia, which the Spanish
threatened to cut off, Newfoundland is an island 'free from all pretence
or challenge of any forraine Prince' (Hagthorpe 1625, 33). Whitbourne
argues that Newfoundland should be cherished because 'trading thither
and returning home thence, wee little feare the Turkes bondage and
circumcision, nor any outlandish Inquisition' (Whitbourne 1620, 45).
The fishery represents not only freedom from political or religious chal-
lenge, but also an economic freedom from dependence on foreign
exchange: 'And this also to be gathered and brought home by the sole
148 Mary C. Fuller
lute Houses, which have Debauch'd Sea-men, and diverted them from
their Laborious and Industrious Calling; whereas before ... the Sea-men
had no other resort during the Fishing Season (being the time of their
abode in that Country) but to their Ships, which afforded them conve-
nient Food and Repose, without the inconveniencies of Excess' (Child
1698, 208). John Reeves, the first chief justice of Newfoundland's
Supreme Court, stated in his evidence to a parliamentary committee in
the late 17005 that 'Newfoundland is still nothing but a great ship,
dependent upon the mother country for every thing they eat, drink and
wear or for the funds to procure them ... They all look to the sea alone
for support... and those who carry cultivation furthest reap no produce
but what can be furnished by a garden' (Innis [1940] 1954, 299, citing
Third Report 1793). The nature of English endeavours at Newfoundland
and of the land itself worked against recognition of Newfoundland as a
plantation or colony, even as the English were settling it. These observa-
tions about relations to the land should be set next to some observations
about the role of real and symbolic women.
At different times, the home government issued proclamations that
English subjects should leave Newfoundland - these were never en-
forced - and directives to officials to discourage permanent inhabitants
(see Innis [1940] 1954, 316-17; Prowse 1895, 190-2). It is in this context
that Captain Francis Wheler, RN, commissioned to report on French
activities in Newfoundland, remarked of the settlers in 1684, 's°e longe
as there comes no women they are not fixed' (Handcock 1989, 32, 284).
The connection between women and implantation embedded in
Wheler's famous comment has its echoes in other colonial documents.
In 1607 the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Zuriiga reported to the
king of Spain on Jamestown: 'it is not their intention to plant colonies,
but to send out pirates from thence, since they do not take women, but
only men' (A. Brown 1890, i: 119). The first English women were sent to
Virginia in 1621 (Kingsbury 1906-35, i: 255-6); the Earl of Southhamp-
ton explained to the government 'that the Plantation can never flourish
till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the peo-
ple on the soyle' (Bridenbaugh 1968, 419). English men might live in
Newfoundland, but they were not be taken as permanent residents until
English women were there with them.
Until the nineteenth century, the population of early colonial New-
foundland was both largely male and largely migratory, fluctuating with
the seasonal demands of the fishery. The scholarly literature links these
factors as strongly as did seventeenth-century observers: 'A signal fea-
Images of English Origins in Newfoundland and Roanoke 153
NOTES
7 This sense of analogy persisted: D.W. Prowse describes the island of New-
foundland as occupying 'nearly the same position in the new world that
Britain does in the old' (Prowse 1895, xiii).
8 Robert Thorne wrote in 1527 that 'there is left one way to discover, which is
into the North' (Hakluyt 1903, 2: 161). In the prefatory material to the first
volume of Principal Navigations, devoted to discoveries to the north and
northeast, Hakluyt favourably compares the discoveries of England in the
North to those of Spain and Portugal in the West. Spain and Portugal had
classical testimonies to the feasibility of their discoveries, as well as 'Colum-
bus to stirre them up, and pricke them forward unto their Westerne discov-
eries.' The English, by contrast, 'were either altogether destitute of such
cleare lights and inducements, or if they had any inkling at all, it was as misty
as they found the Northern seas, and so obscure and ambiguous, that it was
meet rather to deterre them, then to give them encouragement' (Hakluyt
1903, i: xli-xlii). England's northern voyages are unthought of and unprece-
dented, entirely anomalous.
9 Whitbourne notes the depredations of'an English erring Captaine (that
went forth with Sir Walter Rawleigh)' (1620, Ci v ). Numerous narratives in
Principal Navigations describe voyages that made intermediate or unintended
stops at Newfoundland. Whitbourne describes Newfoundland as 'fit for
Harbour and reliefe, upon the way betweene us and Virginia' (Bi v ), also as
lying near the course Spanish ships take returning from the West Indies;
three such ships arrived there for provisioning in 1615, and Portuguese ships
called regularly to take on fish for Brazil (17-18).
10 See Cell 1969, 24-5 on Sir William Cecil's promotion of the fishery as a
source of trained mariners for naval war. Cecil proposed legislation in 1563
increasing the number offish days (mandated by patriotism rather than
religion) and making fish free of export duty; Cell notes that the injunction
to consume fish was frequently reinforced by proclamation.
11 W. Gordon Handcock refers to Grant Head's explanation of Newfound-
land's 'retarded colonization' in terms of'the properties and limitations of
the physical environment, the problems of survival and adaptation, and
especially the critical importance of food supply from external sources'
(Handcock 1989, 13-14, citing Head 1976).
12 In a study of Newfoundland's population W. Gordon Handcock writes,
Tn any colonizing context, the number of women and children may be
regarded as an index of the more stable and permanent population, since it
is axiomatic that these categories have implications for the germination,
perpetuation, and continuity of a population and its social capacity to absorb
subsequent immigrants (intermarriage)' (Handcock 1989, 95).
From the Good Savage to the
Degenerate Indian: The Amerindian in
the Accounts of Travel to America*
Real Ouellet with Mylene Tremblay
For example: one branch has leaves like those of a cane and another
leaves likes those of a mastic tree, and thus, on a single tree, there are five
or six different kinds all so diverse from each other' (33).
Caught up in this setting, Columbus initially embraced a vision of the
Amerindian as innocent, docile child. Yet such a view was soon chal-
lenged, even by Columbus himself on later voyages. Europeans devel-
oped diverse images of the Native peoples of the New World. These
representations ran the full range from child of Eden to descendant of
Cain. In between were descriptions of behaviour found useful and
exploited by some explorers and deplored by others. This essay exam-
ines, in turn, these various representations and how they changed over
generations of contact.
of original justice ... But since the Maragnans have never had any knowl-
edge of the law, they can have no knowledge of the failings of vice and
sin' (Claude d'Abbeville i6i4a, 270). But let us forget these theological
subtleties to explore surer ground.
From these early European encounters with the inhabitants of the
New World, a double image emerged: that of the Christian conqueror
who wanted to entice the Savages with presents 'so that they might
feel great amity towards us,' so as to convert and then reduce them to
slavery; and that of the 'docile' Amerindian, 'deficient in everything'
(Columbus 1960, 23), but paradoxically rich in everything the Spaniards
were avidly searching for.
With the help of this rough information, the explorer was able to consti-
tute, in an embryonic form, the hydrographic network of the Canadian
East.
Once Champlain understood that the St Lawrence was an important
pathway by which to penetrate the continent, he realized that European
technology would not allow him to go any further: a light Amerindian
bark canoe alone could cross the Lachine rapids, which had impeded
Carder's progress in the preceding century. The negative traits of the
Savage had not disappeared: they had merely been ignored or summa-
rized in an incidental ethnographic observation: 'all these people some-
times suffer so great extremity, on account of the great cold and snow,
that they are almost constrained to eat one another; for the animals and
fowl on which they live migrate to warmer countries' (Champlain 1922-
36, i: no).
Like Champlain the explorers, without always admitting it, would
count on the knowledge of the Savage to adapt to the harsh living con-
ditions in America. Several of them would succeed so well that they
would, like the Baron de Saint-Castin, become tribal chiefs, or like Nico-
las Perrot, become trappers, interpreters, or traffickers.
You teach us that God existed before the creation of heaven and earth; if
he did, where did he live, since there was neither heaven nor earth? You say
also that the Angels were created in the beginning of the world, and that
those who disobeyed were cast into Hell; elsewhere, you put Hell in the
depths of the earth; these statements cannot agree very well, for, if the
Angels sinned before the creation of the earth, they could not be thrown
into Hell, or Hell is not where you place it. (Jesuit Relations [1610-1791]
1896-1901 [hereafter//?] 16: 182-3)
The missionary told the story as a picturesque anecdote, to show that his
The Amerindian in the Accounts of Travel to America 165 165
For a long time now, we have noticed that the proximity of Frenchmen
does us more harm than good; we see it, we the Elders, but the young
people do not see it. The Frenchmen's Merchandise pleases the young; but
what is it all good for, except to debauch the girls & corrupt the Nation's
blood, & to make [the girls] prideful and lazy? The young men are in the
same situation: & the married men must kill themselves with work to feed
their family & satisfy their children. (Le Page du Pratz 1758, 3: 238)
The old man's revulsion allowed the author to put forth his own crit-
icism of the French commander sent to govern the Natchez, and to
demonstrate his insight, since he had predicted everything (231). Cor-
ruption spread even further among the Natchez through the experience
of war, because it provoked 'too familiar a contact with the French'
(329); 'this familiarity allows for vice, from which stem dangerous
illnesses & the corruption of the blood which is naturally very pure in
this colony; the people who come in contact with the Naturals think they
have permission to commit vice because it is customary to offer women
to guests when they arrive; this does ill to their health & their Merchan-
dise' (330). The flaws of European civilization had managed to catch up
with the Savage, even in the depth of his distant American forest.
Another of Le Page du Pratz's Natchez personalities, Serpent Pique,
listed the deceptive advantages of the coming of the French, asking
whether the blankets and guns were worth the loss of their land and
l68 Real Ouellet with Mylene Tremblay
wheat. The conclusion did not leave any doubt: according to Serpent
Pique, 'before the arrival of the French, we lived like men who knew
how to content themselves with what they had; instead, today, we walk as
Slaves who do not do what they wish' (Le Page du Pratz 1758, i: 205).
Rousseau had said it forcefully a few years earlier: a society cannot turn
back once it has known the poisoned seduction of civilization.
Ten years after Le Page du Pratz, the Dutchman Cornelius De Pauw
discussed the subject of Amerindian degeneration at length, in a pub-
lished debate with Antoine-Joseph Pernety. For De Pauw, the degenera-
tion of the Amerindians, in the North as in the South, was undeniable
and 'progressive'; it attacked the 'physical and moral faculties.' This
degeneration even affected Europeans who spent time in America (De
Pauw 1770, Defence, 10-14), the animals (78-104), and the plants (111-
18). No expression was too strong or too contemptuous to describe the
Savages: they were stupid (233), moronic (19), pusillanimous (15), cruel
(53); their women were ugly (19) and barren (25); they were prone to
all sorts of diseases, including the venereal (35); it was 'animal instinct'
and not brains that 'teach[es] the Savage to build a hut, sleep with his
mate, raise his children, speak, live from hunting and fishing, or from
wild fruit according to the products indigenous to the area, defend him-
self against his enemies or attack them' (251). For De Pauw, Native
degeneration came not from the Europeans, but from the 'inclemency
of the climate' (10) and perhaps also from 'the blood of this pusillani-
mous race' (15). The harshness of this judgment is less striking than the
new point of view - very different from the majority of authors - accord-
ing to which de Pauw saw the Amerindian as subjected to a heavy bio-
logical, geographical, and historical determinism (see Roelens 1972;
Ouellet and Beaulieu in Lahontan [1702-3] 1990).
This vehement affirmation around 1770 of the Amerindian's degener-
ation formed part of the development of philosophical treatises turned
resolutely towards progress and technical development. Yet, at the same
time, primitivist discourse continued to present the Savage as a stable
and ahistorical entity. Pierre Berthiaume, studying the writings of Tur-
got and Condorcet, rightly speaks of 'the Savage's deliquescence,' in as
much as the primitive figure can no longer be located on the axis of
humanity's continuous progress. For Turgot and Condorcet, as in the
Encyclopedic,7 he was absent, or rather he became an 'aberration, quickly
erased in order to create a new human model, one who would illustrate
the economic postulates on which rested the new conception of the
world' (Berthiaume 1993, 198). It is significant, in this regard, that in his
The Amerindian in the Accounts of Travel to America 169
If representations of both the Good and the Cruel Savage hearken back
to the myth of the lost paradise, we begin to see the Reasoning Native,
denouncer of European civilization, as the spokesperson for Europe's
criticism of itself. The Degenerate Native, victim of a civilization held in
contempt, then becomes the echo of a guilty conscience. It is in this
sense that, as part of our collective unconscious, the image returns to
haunt us today, in the increasing number of situations in which both the
descendants of the European colonizers and the descendants of the
American Savages of the seventeenth century maintain that the Amerin-
dian is the victim of the white man's wickedness. Though the idea of this
degeneration is fading progressively as new research defines more pre-
cisely the role of the Amerindian in American history, certain representa-
tions still persist. For example, the recent association between the
Amerindians and the ecological movement recalls the Savage Philoso-
pher, faithful to the values of the natural state. But by reclaiming this
message, are the Amerindians themselves not conforming to the old ste-
reotype of the 'natural' wise man, guardian of the earth and appointed
critic of civilization (H. Tanner and Sioui 1994; Fixico 1994)? Who is to
distinguish between the ethnographic reality and the fictive work of
myth? Are the myths of the good Savage and of the Savage as a re-
fraction of the Other's imperialism based on the existence of a real
Amerindian, or does such a figure actually exist outside language and
subjectivity?
NOTES
1 See, for example, the title of Olive P. Dickason's well-known book, The Myth of
the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (1984).
2 See, for example, Columbus 1960, 29, 36, 41, 52.
3 See, however, the passage on the monstrous Armouchiquois he had heard
about, 'who are savages of quite monstrous shape: for their head is small and
their body short, their arms and likewise their thighs slender like those of a
skeleton, their legs thick and long, and of the same size all the way down; and
when they sit upon their heels, their knees are higher by half a foot than their
170 Real Ouellet with Mylene Tremblay
head, which is a strange thing, and they seem to be out of the course of
nature' (Champlain 1922-36, i: 181).
4 See Foigny 1676; Veiras 1676-8.
5 See the long introduction by Real Ouellet and Alain Beaulieu to their edition
of Louis-Armand de Lorn d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan, Oeuvres completes
([Lahontan 1702-3] 1990).
6 On this subject, see A. Vachon on Francois de Laval (Vachon 1969); Stanley
1953» 492-8; Eastman 1915, 72-82, 122-34, 179-201.
7 On the Encyclopedic?, lack of interest in North America and the Amerindians,
see Ouellet and Beaulieu's introduction to Lahontan [1702-3] 1990.
PART III
Translatio fide
This page intentionally left blank
Few, Uncooperative, and 111 Informed?
The Roman Catholic Clergy in
French and British North America,
1610-1658
Luca Codignola
Between 1611 and 1613 a Jesuit mission existed in Acadia, and eleven
years later another mission of the order was established in Quebec,
which lasted from 1625 to 1629, when the English for a time conquered
the French colony. In the first three decades of the seventeenth century,
a total of eighteen Jesuits left France to go to Quebec and Acadia. At
that time, the Society of Jesus, which had been founded in 1534 and
approved in 1540, had missions all over Europe, besides those in Asia
and in Iberian America (Szilas 1990, 58*, 78). The Society of Jesus was
not the only order involved in the early days of New France. Between
1615 and 1625 twenty-one Recollets were sent to Quebec. The Recollets
were a branch of the Order of Friars Minor, also known as Franciscans.
Like the Jesuits, they were actively involved in missionary work in France
and abroad. In Spanish America they were among the earliest and most
active orders, with several hundred convents (Iriarte 1983, 303-45).
In the i6ios and 16205 the idea of taking advantage of the settlement
of North America to establish Catholic missions was not the concern of
French missionaries alone. The planting of an English colony, the Ava-
lon settlement in Newfoundland, was contemporary with the earliest
Jesuit and Recollet attempts in New France. George Calvert, Baron Balti-
more and a Catholic member of the English Privy Council, had to
accommodate both Protestants and Catholics in Ferryland, the centre of
his colony. This provided an opening for Catholic missionaries, five of
whom (three secular priests and two Jesuits) went to Newfoundland
between 1627 and 1629 (Codignola 1988).
The second phase of the expansion of Catholicism in North America,
between 1632 and 1658, represents quite diverse forms of religious orga-
nization. A 'regular order' is a community of priests who also follow a
special set of 'rules' (hence 'regular') that have been approved by the
pope. Orders usually subdivide their territory into 'provinces,' whose
chief administrator is known as the 'provincial.' Secular priests are not
members of any order and, as such, they are under the jurisdiction of
the bishop of the diocese in which they live. Some secular priests, such
as the Sulpicians, live together as a community, but do not regard them-
selves as a 'regular order.' Canada proper was in effect a French Jesuit
province, although the missionary field was not reserved to them. Aca-
dia from 1630 to 1658 was an open field in which Recollets, Capuchins,
and Jesuits all tried their lot. Maryland was the only province in British
North America where, from 1633 to 1645, there was a Jesuit presence
resembling the experiment among the Huron. 2
After 1632 the Jesuits in New France grew in number, though not as
176 Luca Codignola
abound throughout the early phase of the history of New France. Jean
de Biencourt, better known as Sieur de Poutrincourt, brought the secu-
lar priest Fleche to Acadia in order to prevent the Jesuits from being
sent to his colony. For their part, the Society of Jesus used its court con-
nections to overrule Sieur de Poutrincourt's family and go to Port-
Royal, where they promptly criticized Fleche's missionary methods and
the laymen's easy-going manners (Campeau 1967-94, 2: i9O*-2i6*,
203-50). The dispute between the secular clergy and the regular orders
was all too well known in Europe. That it did not produce any major
trauma in North America was because there were almost no secular
clergy in the colonies until the arrival of Laval in 1659. Yet right from
the time of his selection as future bishop, Laval met with the opposition
of the Sulpicians, who were, in all but their canonical constitutions, very
much a regular order. In fact, Laval had been hurriedly selected as a
candidate for the soon-to-be-established bishopric of Quebec by the
Jesuits, who gave him their support because they feared that the Societe
de Notre-Dame de Montreal, the devot group that was established in
1639 and that in 1642 had founded Montreal without bothering to
inform the Society of Jesus, would manage to have someone they
favoured appointed to the position (Campeau 1974, 64-6).
There were also differences and jealousies between regular orders,
each trying to secure full jurisdiction and exclusive rights over new mis-
sions at the expense of other orders. Rather then seeking cooperation
with each other, they seemed to avoid it as much as possible. The Jesuits
and the Recollets got along well only for a very short time, when the lat-
ter received and lodged the Jesuits in their Quebec convent of Saint-
Charles in 1625 (Sagard 1636, 869; Campeau 1967-94, 2: 146, 176-7).
The presence of both groups in Quebec was owing simply to overlap-
ping influences within the French court. The Queen Mother's first dame
d'honneur, Antoinette de Pons, Marquise de Guercheville, was influential
in selecting the first Jesuits who were sent to Acadia in 1611, whereas
proximity to the court probably favoured the Recollet province of Paris
over that of Aquitaine in 1615. No common plan for evangelization of
the Amerindians was ever devised.
Relations between the two branches of the Franciscan family, the Rec-
ollets and the Capuchins, were even worse. For one thing, it is most
likely that the exclusion of the Recollets from Canada in 1632 was due to
the Capuchins, and not to the Jesuits, as a Recollet tradition that origi-
nated long after the events would have had it (Le Tac [1689] 1888; Le
Clercq 1691; Dube 1995). Joseph de Paris had been so persuasive that in
180 Luca Codignola
January 1632 Richelieu had granted the whole of New France to the
Capuchins, who, however, declined the offer to become involved in
Canada and kept only Acadia for themselves (Campeau 1967-94, 2: 273-
6). When in March 1633 Richelieu ordered all Recollets in Acadia to
leave the mission to their fellow Franciscans, so as to avoid 'the prob-
lems that might arise from the mingling of persons of different alle-
giances in that country,' 4 they refused to leave. Then the two branches
of the Franciscan family became enmeshed in a civil war that set them in
opposition. Since Charles de Saint-Etienne de La Tour was retaining his
Recollets, the Capuchins felt they had little choice but to support La
Tour's rival, Charles de Menou d'Aulnay (MacDonald 1983, 208 n.6).
The order of the Minims never went to New France, but their permis-
sion to go to North America had spelled out that they could reside only
where no other regular order was already active. Had they succeeded in
their project, one could only guess that a fourth contestant would have
positioned itself in the same arena.5
There were also differences within the same orders. The Recollet
provinces of Paris and Aquitaine very strongly opposed each other in
their respective North American projects, actually hindering each
other's progress. The Recollets of Aquitaine had not been ready to go to
New France in 1614, so their place had been taken by the Recollets of
Paris. The former then turned to Acadia, where they resided from 1620
to 1624. The only contact between the Recollets of Acadia and their con-
freres in Quebec seems to have been in the winter 1624—5, when three
of the Acadians took refuge in Quebec in order to return to France at
the earliest opportunity.
As for the Capuchins, the death of Joseph de Paris in 1638 created
problems within their province of Paris, of which he was the real leader,
although he was not, officially, its provincial. In fact, his death created
problems in the whole of France, as he was considered overall leader by
all the French Capuchin provinces. A bitter struggle ensued in which a
'Roman' party (that is, one on good terms with Propaganda Fide) and
a 'local' party contended for overall leadership. The power of that
province within France was constantly being eroded by other French
provinces, such as Touraine (separated 1610), Burgundy (1618), Brit-
tany (1629), Normandy (1629), and Aquitaine (1640), all of which
resented the central leadership of Paris and had only recently managed
to be recognized as independent bodies (Raoul de Sccaux 1965, 261-
574). At stake was the control of the province's foreign missions in
Greece, England, Palestine, and Canada. As for Canada, the fact that a
Catholic Clergy in French and British North America 181
In this article, I have briefly addressed the issues of the number of the
missionary clergy in French and British North America between 1610
and 1658, of the cooperation among them, and of the influence of
printed missionary literature. Before any firm conclusion can be
reached, however, we need an in-depth prosopographical account of
the ecclesiastical personnel in early North America - their geographical,
family, and educational background, the rationale behind their depar-
ture, the length of their stay, the careers of those who returned to
Europe, and, finally, the spreading of knowledge regarding the New
World and its influence over their choices.
For the time being, available figures show that the number of people
who were involved in the evangelization of North America, on both
184 Luca Codignola
sides of the Atlantic Ocean, was very small. Only 190-193 male and 26
female members of the clergy, at all levels (including the lay brothers
and the converse [lay] sisters), voluntarily went or were forcibly sent to
North America between 1610 and 1658. For almost half a century, the
members of the clergy who left European ports for North America aver-
aged not more than four a year. Considering the massive influence
claimed for them, this is a very low figure even when, to account for the
inaccuracy of the available data, we double it by estimating that there
were others who might have manifested some wish to go.
As for cooperation, it would certainly be too much to say that there
was none at all among the ecclesiastical personnel. Hostility and dissent,
however, were almost as evident. The Holy See - that is, mainly the
Sacred Congregation 'de Propaganda Fide' - had little control over
what was going on in North America. For their part, the Jesuits, the
Recollets, and the Capuchins did their utmost to exclude fellow mis-
sionaries from the territories they believed it was their rightful duty to
administer. Furthermore, available evidence points to the fact that most
of the information relating to the North American missions circulated
through personal contacts and byword of mouth among groups of peo-
ple who might have been interested, but represented a very limited sam-
ple of the European missionaries, let alone of the European clergy.
Printed missionary literature, when it existed at all, seems to have had
little influence on the prospective missionaries. Historians need to
come to terms with the available evidence: there was far less European
interest than we have assumed in the evangelization of French and Brit-
ish North America.
NOTES
Old France could have been like the New, if God hadn 't viewed it more favour-
ably. Who does not feel obliged to thank God for having made our condition
better than that of the savages ?
Francois Annat, SJ, 1644
to say that they are completely savage. From morning to night they have
no other care than to fill their stomach ... Vices of the flesh are common
among them, such that one marries several women, and leaves them
whenever he feels like it, to take others ... Cleanliness is unknown among
them ... They have neither religion [culte divin], nor any sort of prayers'
(Campeau 1967-94, 2: 141-3, author's translations throughout; see also
Codignola 1995, 204-5). To the usual linguistic and cultural barriers were
added subsistence concerns and the dangers of Huron-Iroquois warfare.
Nor did the home front support the missionary campaign. Until Jean-
Baptiste Colbert adopted a policy of colonial expansion in the i66os,
French ministers were unenthusiastic about northern colonial venture,
and the reading public preferred Oriental exotica to boreal gloom.1
Worse yet, from the point of view of religious conversion, an 'Augustin-
ian backlash' or reaction against liberal doctrines of salvation, animated
those educated milieux that sustained Christian reform activity (Briggs
1989, 239; Brockliss 1987, 247; Williams 1989, 7-29, 90-3). Early devots-
stern and moralizing enthusiasts of Catholic reform - and then after
1640 followers of the rigorous Flemish bishop Cornelius Jansen, pro-
moted a puritanical vision that saw religious conversion as profound
inner transformation. Their obsession with sin and with religious purity
confined the missionary impulse by characterizing true Christian life as
restricted to the devoted, predestined few, and by setting impossibly
high standards of religious conduct. While Jesuits were formally com-
mitted to combatting this bleak view of salvation, their own position
was precarious: French elites were suspicious of 'ultramontanism,' or
Roman influence, and France was hostile towards Spain, the spiritual
home of the Society of Jesus. This uncomfortable political situation
forced Jesuits to downplay their attachment to the optimistic creed of
'finding God in all things,' which had animated the society's activity
since its inception in 1540 (Chatellier 1993, 22-58; Gentilcore 1994;
Duverger 1987, 161-8; Cervantes 1994, 10-16). Perhaps reflecting this
pessimistic religious climate, fewer Jesuits than expected embraced the
challenge of mission work in New France (Deslandres 1993, 5-10; Codi-
gnola, in this volume).
How did this inauspicious climate influence the Jesuits' thinking
about Canada? This essay examines the appeal of the seventeenth-
century Canadian mission to the Jesuits, and assesses the uses to which
their Canadian experience was put in teaching, preaching, and religious
controversy back in France. It suggests that mystical spirituality and
asceticism as well as a 'Christian utopianism' found a home in Canada,
188 Peter A. Goddard
world but also the clergy, especially the Jesuits, whose standards were
deemed too inclusive (and hence too low) to assure the purity of the
faith. Historians have long viewed this Augustinian tendency as a prop-
erty of extremist oppositional movements such as Jansenism or Puritan-
ism; however, it asserted itself even within the Society of Jesus, whose
adherence to post-Tridentine doctrine and support of Rome have given
Jesuits the reputation of being supporters of modern centralism and
orthodoxy (Guibert 1964, 349-73).
A Jesuit thinker who demonstrates this mystical and ascetical strain of
Christianitas, or true Christian doctrine, and who dominated the missio-
logical theory of Canada in the first half of the seventeenth century, was
Louis Lallemant (1587-1635). From 1619 to 1631, Lallemant taught at
the Jesuit college at Rouen, an important centre for the training of mis-
sionaries (Bottereau 1937). Jean Rigoleuc, organizer of the Breton mis-
sions, and Paul Le Jeune, who styled himself the pioneer of the New
France mission, were Lallemant's 'disciples,'2 while the future Canadian
martyrs Jean de Brebeuf, Antoine Daniel, and Isaac Jogues were among
his spiritual charges (Bottereau 1937, 126; and see Latourelle 1993,
225-74). Early in his career, the frail Lallemant had sought a missionary
posting to Canada, lured not by the prospect of abundant conver-
sions - indeed, other mission fields were known to produce a greater
harvest - but rather by the conviction that the Canadian mission offered
rewards of a different sort: 'it is more fruitful in travails and in crosses: it
is less brilliant, and contributes more to the sanctification of its mission-
aries' (Lallement [1694] 1781, 52). However, Lallemant's talents proved
better-suited for the training of Jesuit novices, and he served as counsel-
lor and spiritual guide to those Jesuits returning from the pastoral field
to refresh their vocation.
Lallemant cultivated an inwardly directed, mystical spirituality. He
emphasized inner purification and spiritual perfection, and he insisted
on separating oneself from the struggles and temptations of the world.
He also spoke against the optimistic creed that the Jesuits have embod-
ied historically: nature, in Lallemant's quasi-monastic view, was void of
virtue and the polar opposite of the spirit. Strikingly Augustinian in its
insistence that truth dwelt within the believer, and not in the external
world,3 his doctrine stood apart from the Ignatian conviction that God
would be found in all places. Lallemant asserted, instead, that hardship
in the new land would force reflection on where grace lay. Conversion
to an ascetic and rigorous if not mystical faith was the only option for
salvation (Lallement [1694] 1781, 69; and see Buckley 1989).
igo Peter A. Goddard
Lallemant's student Paul Le Jeune was the great publicist of the Cana-
dian mission in its early (post-i632) days. Brought up in a Calvinist
household, Le Jeune was a confessional warrior, always eager to spar
with enemies of the truth. He also embodied the great Jesuit principle
of indifference: he admitted to no particular desire to go to Canada but
willingly submitted as a means of fulfilling his vocation. As author and
editor of mission Relations from 1632, he presented an accessible por-
trait of the conversion of the Amerindians to a devout public at the
same time as he stressed the arduousness of apostolic life in the boreal
forest.4 The ascetic, penitent soul thrived in arduous Canadian condi-
tions - 'the more one loses, the more one gains' (Jesuit Relations [1610-
1791] 1896-1901 [hereafter JR] 5: 167-8). In such a life, the individual
might find his own path of the cross, or higher conversion, as both Le
Jeune's Relations and his personal correspondence indicated.
Lejeune's view of the Native reflects the severity of Lallemantian spir-
ituality in the early days of mission in Canada. While Le Jeune affirmed
the humanity and the virtues of the Algonquian Montagnais in the
famous mission Relation of 1634, he was equally concerned to depict, in
Augustinian terms, a vein of corruption in the pagan human breast. It
has been fashionable to excoriate Le feune as an exponent of culturally
imperialist attitudes, which unavoidably he was.5 Yet if we step back from
the imputed ethnographic content of his accounts, and attempt to
understand Paul Le Jeune's religious world-view, with its emphasis on
the austere and extreme states in which grace operates, we see that the
figures Le Jeune produces are edifying ones, part of an epideictic rheto-
ric aimed at spiritual improvement. His reports on the Montagnais illus-
trated the chasm between 'natural' ways and godly ones; conversion
alone bridges this gap. The faith tames, civilizes, lets true virtue flourish.
The effects of this rigorist form of conversion were most pronounced in
the case of the sauvage, but were universally applicable, especially in the
case of the jaded, self-loving bourgeois back in France (Goddard 1993).
In Lejeune's view, Canada was a place where the fundamental impor-
tance of religious conversion, the actual transformation of self, and the
defeat of nature within, could be illustrated. One underexamined
aspect of the massively studied mission Relations is that of the exemplary
conversion.'' Much space in these annual accounts was taken up by sto-
ries of almost miraculously total transformation from sauvage to Chris-
tian, eliding many stages of historical development. Such conversions
were expedited by sensitive instruction, prayer, ceaseless goodwill (even
if embodied by the terrorist pastorale de la peur, or use of fear as a spur to
Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought 191
Rivieres in the 16405 and 16508, with public penance, strict Sabbatarian-
ism, and rigid community discipline against both apostasy arid simple
moral weakness (no dancing or drumming).
The Jesuits in New France hoped to imitate the 'reductions' of con-
temporary Paraguay, where by 1627 as many as 30,000 formerly nomadic
Guaranis lived under close supervision in fourteen Jesuit-run and
largely self-sufficient communities. As in Paraguay, Jesuits hoped to
build the ideal community of harmony, sharing, and godly discipline,
the embodiment of the ideal of ascetic communal Christianity (Jetten
1994)- Such community depended on its isolation, the fact that it was
buffered from corrupting civilization. So, while an earlier lay writer
about Canada, Marc Lescarbot, could emphasize the nearness of this
new France, and its location on the same latitude as the familiar (Lescar-
bot 1618, 128), Jesuits tended to emphasize the distance, and that this
was a radically different world. No less important is the fact that Jesuits
controlled the representation of such places: no one, for the time being,
could challenge such views. As Christian Marouby points out (1990, 31-
94), the classical Utopia requires isolation and self-sufficiency.
The best instance of the Jesuit practice of representing a Christian
Utopia, and indeed the greatest single pastoral effort of the Jesuit mis-
sion to Canada, was the mission of St Joseph to the Huron (Wcndat) of
the Georgian Bay area from 1635 to 1650. In 1633, Le Jeune wrote that if
all went well, and war did not interfere, the harvest of souls from this
'stable nation' would be great: 'probably in two years it will be seen that
there is not a nation so barbarous as not to recognize and honor God'
(JR 5: 189-90). The evangelization of the Huron, into which the Jesuits
poured the best of their meagre resources, sought not only to capitalize
on the advanced degree of social and economic qualities of these north-
ern farmers, but also to serve as the gateway to the innumerable peoples
beyond the Great Lakes (JR 28: 65-6). The wholesale transformation of
community appeared possible without the egregious Europeanization
that seemed to obstruct the conversion process when it was attempted in
Quebec. The Huron mission would demonstrate the efficacy of the
unadulterated Jesuit program, in which instruction arid example alone
would produce change in life and belief. Mission reports were consis-
tently most optimistic about this 'harvest'; here Jesuits made predictions
about the flowering of Christianity that would prove unachievable, but
that illustrated their strong desire to establish the 'reduction' in north-
ern latitudes on the basis of the already famous Paraguayan example far
to the south.
Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought 193
For its duration, the Huron mission was the site of a program of cul-
tural change according to the broad lines of reformed Catholicism.
Advanced knowledge of Huron cultural practice, acquired over a
decade, made it possible for missionaries to write out detailed prescrip-
tions for Christianization (JR 13: 167-70). These involved the reorienta-
tion of cultic practice from the void of ignorant superstition towards the
true God, and also the repression of the entire range of concupiscent
behaviours of unenlightened natural man. Discipline was imposed on
both the individual and the collective level, and a new community rose
up in opposition to the old. In 1637 the headman Aenons, sympathetic
to the Jesuits, illustrated perfectly the requirements of comprehensive
cultural change when he linked the rigorous new practice with the
Jesuit desire to 'overthrow the country' and to create something new
and pure {JR 13: 171-2). Impossible without a miracle, he said.
With the 1649 destruction of the mission centre Sainte-Marie and the
dispersal of the Christianized Wendat population, the window of great-
est Jesuit opportunity in New France was inexorably closing. Following
his decision to take control of French government after the death of
chief minister Mazarin in 1661, Louis xiv began to pay more attention
to colonial affairs. The loss of the Jesuits' monopoly on missions after
1672, and the arrival of Recollet missionaries that year, limited the free-
dom enjoyed by the Society. So too were the ills of European coloniza-
tion spreading: Jesuits would battle the brandy trade, for instance, but
increasingly the controlled environment of the 'reduction' was the only
place where indigenous Christianity might thrive. A secular era had
arrived.
cal. The Society needed some means of preserving itself from accusa-
tions of 'laxism,' that perilous tendency to view God in human terms, as
someone who can be negotiated with and even bought off, and which
could lead to the systematic weakening of Christian moral obligation.
They sought defence too against charges of the strange doctrine of fe
peche philosophique, or 'philosophical sin,' in which Jesuits were charged
with sloppy gate-keeping by not holding new Christians accountable for
sins committed prior to conversion (see, for example, Arnauld 1690,
114-26).
Missions to the stark Canadian wilderness fulfilled the function of
counterargument, and allowed the Jesuits to claim the moral high
ground in this bitter conflict. The rigorism and asceticism that charac-
terized Le Jeune's writing in the 16305 could stand as a testament to the
Jesuit commitment to a rigorous form of religious experience. Far from
being the cats who lapped up the cream of apostolic work in comfort-
able and exotic situations ranging from the Qing court to Louis xiv's
confessional, Jesuits in New France were selfless workers who risked all
for marginalized and downtrodden peoples. According to Michel Le
Tellier, writing in the i68os, Jesuits welcomed 'a perpetual exile in the
forests of Guyana or Canada' (Le Tellier 1687, i: 149-50). Martyrdom as
the embodiment of true religious commitment was a theme that
emerged in later Jesuit writing, though it was not initially apparent in
the reaction to the deaths of Brebeuf, Daniel, and others in the 16405.'"
Their history was published in epic form by Francois Du Creux in his
Historia Canadensis, sen novae-frandae Him decem ([1664] 1951-2), and
then repeated in increasingly lurid forms; it contradicted the armchair
critics and hypocritical bishops who supported Jansenism from their
comfortable positions at home. If the missionaries endured great tra-
vails, and demanded high standards of the sauvage convert, they surely
would not be more tolerant when confessing educated Christians in
France. The later decades of mission writing emphasized the purity of
faith as practised in the primitive setting, as well as the pristine clarity of
evangelism and the strength of communal discipline. Canadian rigour
thus opposed domestic laxism, and showed that the Jesuits were champi-
ons of the clearest evangel, wherever it might be preached. Outside the
site of a 1700 clerical assembly convened to condemn laxist doctrines,
there appeared a poster that contrasted in one panel the morale severe
(severe morality), featuring a cartoon of corpulent Jansenist bishops
and abbots enjoying a feast, and on the other, the morale reldchee (slack
Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought 195
of self and Christian society. Far from being the site of absolute free-
dom, of course, the frontier is often the mirror of the centre: the Jesuits'
Canada reflected an ambitious program with universal intent.
NOTES
1 On the latter point, see the unsurpassed works by Chinard (1913) and
Atkinson (1927).
2 Bremond summarizes the 'school' of Lallemant as 'sober, scarcely aware
of the world around them, but very active' (Bremond 1928-38, 5: 66; my
translation).
3 Lallement's spiritual doctrine embodies Augustine's injunction in De vera
religione: 'Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in intcriore homine habitat veritas'
(Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth)
(see Taylor 1989, 129-31).
4 Le Jeune's indifference is apparent in his description of hardships encoun-
tered early in the mission: after an account of the privations of the voyage to
New France, he stated simply that 'I would not have wished to be in France'
(JRy 15). On Ignatian indifference, see Barthes 1971, 77-8. Le Jeune's
writing about Canada contains some of the century's most harrowing 'realist'
accounts of hardship and privation. I would set his Relation of 1634 ('What
one must suffer in wintering with the savages') (JR 7: 35—233), in which he
recounts his participation in winter nomadism, alongside Thomas James's
The strange and dangerous voyage ofcaplaine Thomas James, in his intended
Discovery of the Northwest Passage into the South Sea (1633), as classics i n this
genre of colonial writing.
5 See Principe 1990 for the argument that Le Jeune's assessment was more
balanced than is suggested by revisionist history of Native—missionary
contact, including work by Yvon Le Bras (Le Bras 1988, 142-9).
6 Recent work points to a new appreciation of the figurative aspects of Jesuit
conversion accounts, although literalism predominates among historians of
the mission; see Deffain 1995 and Ouellet 1993.
7 SeeJR Q: 133-49, for laudatory accounts of the moral quality of the new
colony. Another useful comment about moral qualities under conditions of
duress (Iroquois attack, epidemics, etc.) is Jean de Brebeufs 'Not vice rules
here, but virtue and piety; not only among ours, who everywhere show
themselves men, and true sons of the Society, but also among our French,
and among the barbarians' (JRzy 250-1).
8 Contrast the portrait of the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples with that of
Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought 199
the gentle Guarani depicted in Yves d'Evreux's Voyage dans le nord du Bresil
fait durant les annees 1613 et 1614 ([1615] 1864); the Capuchin characterized
these Amerindians as naturally religious and virtuous folk.
9 For remote and isolated Brittany, see Boschet 1697, 91 ff; for the Alps, see
Charles de Geneve 1976, 3: 199-221. The same strategy of idealizing the
impossibly remote is found in seventeenth-century writing about China; see
Semedo 1645, Avant-discours; see also Duteil 1996.
10 For an iconoclastic view of Canadian martyrology, see Lafleche, 1988-91.
Dominique Deslandres (1995) provides useful context for Lafleche's inter-
pretation of the ideology of martyrdom.
*A New Loreto in New France':
Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot, SJ,
and the Holy House of Loreto*
Andre Sanfapon
In the seventeenth century, the most popular Marian shrine in Italy was
Our Lady of Loreto. In the santa Casa, sheltered by the basilica on which
Bramante and other Renaissance architects had laboured to such mag-
nificent effect, pilgrims would gather their thoughts before the statue of
Our Lady, in the glow of devotional lamps. Having come to seek the Vir-
gin's blessings in her own house, they were confident their prayers
would be answered. Here, they could feel like children of the Virgin,
addressing her as the daughter of Anne and Joachim and, at the same
time, as the wife of Joseph and virgin mother of Jesus. Why should they
have had any doubts about the tradition, which as we know was a legend
born in 1472, nurtured in subsequent decades by humanists, and
granted broad support by theologians? Following his predecessors' lead,
Pope Sixtus v had also given the tradition his sanction and had inscribed
on the building's pediment the words: Deiparae domus in qua Verbum cam
faclum est (The house of the Mother of God, in whom the Word was
made flesh) (Veuillot 1841, 190). For a believer of the time, the Holy
House in which the Virgin Mary was born, had received the angel Gab-
riel at the Annunciation, and had reared her son Jesus, had been trans-
ported in 1291 by the angels from Nazareth to Tersatto in Dalmatia,
and, three years later, from there to the other shore of the Adriatic,
around Recanati, ending up, finally, at Loreto, in the province of
Ancona, protected by the Renaissance church built mainly between
1468 and 1513.' This was the legend when Pierre Chaumonot (1611-93)
made the first of several pilgrimages to the shrine about 1630. Not long
afterwards, he embarked on what was to become more than a half-
1650 and 1674, around Quebec (Vaugeois 1996; Blouin 1987). Charac-
terized by special devotion to the Virgin and membership in pious fra-
ternities, by the wearing of crosses, rosaries, and devotional medallions,
by regular attendance at mass featuring the use of images and relics
(Gagnon 1975, 29-46), and by fervent participation in ritual Christian
processions, these individuals were kept away as much as possible from
the bad example of certain unscrupulous French residents of Quebec.
In spite of the upheaval in their lives, these Huron were on the way to
achieving the objectives derived from the model of the 'ideal Christian'
and loyal subject of the king, as set forth by the Jesuits (Lindsay 1900;
Chaumonot 1885; Sanfacon 1996). In their efforts among the Amerindi-
ans, Chaumonot and his colleagues spoke of the 'miraculous cures
which occur at Nostre Dame de Laurette [Loreto],' which did not fail to
touch their audience; the Relations tell us that some of that number actu-
ally experienced the powers of the Loretan Virgin (JR 30: 92-7).
After years of missionary work, Chaumonot decided that the time was
ripe for launching his much-delayed project after Father Poncet sent
him a statue modelled on the one in Loreto, the shrine at which Poncet
was then serving as confessor. He also sent 'a head-covering or bonnet
of white taffeta which had been placed briefly on the head of the statue
in the Holy House of Italy, and a faience dish, fashioned after the one
[held by] the infant Jesus and having touched it, and thumbnail-sized
loaves of bread which had been kneaded in the Holy Family's dishes and
then blessed' (Chaumonot 1885, 203) ,3 With these objects, Chaumonot
was in possession of what he needed: a tangible impetus for the develop-
ment in Canada of devotion to Our Lady of Loreto.
The Notre Dame de Foy site had become uncomfortable for the
Huron and some Iroquois converts. Father Claude Dablon, superior-
general of this mission, wrote in 1673: 'As this mission increases daily ...
our Savages ... were in need of land and wood' (JR 58: 131; Father Chau-
monot has indicated the same causes in his autobiography [Chaumonot
1885: 194]). The Jesuits decided to transfer the Huron mission north-
ward to their St Gabriel seigneury, in the Laurentian foothills not far
from Quebec. Chaumonot and his brothers agreed that this new mis-
sion would be an ideal site on which to 'build of brick a new Loreto in
New France' (195). Their goals were to increase devotion to the Virgin,
celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation, allow those who could never
make the pilgrimage to Italy to fulfil their duty to honour the Loreto
shrine 'at least in its image,' and, finally, nurture 'spiritual birth in the
hearts of all the French and all the Savages of America!' (JR&0: 68-73) .4
204 Andre Sanfafon
Bursting with joy, on 4 March 1672 Chaumonot gave his 'offering made
to Our Lady of Loreto of a living temple in which to enclose and, as it
were, set as a jewel the holy house in Canada built on the design of the
original, which is in Italy' (Lindsay 1900, 144-6). This 'living temple,'
which he described as rather a 'poor hut or dwelling,' was nothing other
than his own body and soul. In thus consecrating himself, Chaumonot
became nothing less than the spiritual and bodily incarnation in New
France of the santa Casa of Loreto.
Yet Chaumonot's pledge went beyond this 'living temple' to plans for
and construction of a new Loreto. Many other people were involved in
the construction project. Chaumonot wrote, 'the devotion which is
entertained here for Notre Dame de Lorette in Canada, began just as
soon as the project for building that holy chapel was formed. In fact,
when at the beginning of the year 1673 we went to mark out its site, per-
sons of high standing in this country betook themselves thither with
much fervor, and themselves wished to fell some of the trees which occu-
pied the place designated for building the chapel'((JR6 9
before the construction of the chapel (mass was then being celebrated in
a cabin at the Lorette mission in progress), 'the mere name of Lorette, -
since our village as yet had none but that, - was powerful enough to
attract thither all sorts of persons, who came on pilgrimages, from great
distances, in very bad weather and by wretched roads' (JR6o: 94-5).
The layout of the future village was decided on in the course of 1673:
a square whose sides would be composed of bark cabins (longhouses)
equidistant from each other, with the chapel at its centre (JR 60: 79).
The missionaries showed the plan to the Huron still at Notre Dame de
Foy; the dogique,5 Louis Thaondechoren, 'relating, among other things,
what he had heard of Our Lady of Loretto in Italy ... [He] said that it
seemed to him that all their cabins, which he saw ranged around the
chapel, represented in his eyes the great temple enclosing the sacred
house of Loretto; that thus they were to consider the whole of their vil-
lage as a great church, of which all the cabins constituted so many differ-
ent parts' (JR 58: 149-51; 60: 79). In the discourse of this seventeenth-
century Huron, then, the projected bark cabins became, by analogy, the
temple itself, the church erected by Renaissance architects in Loreto,
Italy, which housed the santa Casa.
During 1673-4, Chaumonot and his missionary colleagues continued
to prepare the Amerindians spiritually for their move to the Lorette site,
dedicating them to the Holy Angels, to Our Lady of Loreto and to St
Anne, successively, 'for the happy establishment of the house and the
'A New Loreto in New France' 205
The plans for the basilica of Our Lady of Loreto and of the Holy
House were known by the Jesuits in Quebec, especially Father Chau-
monot, because of the pilgrimages he had made to Loreto before his
departure for Canada.6 In 1675, Father Bouvart described the chapel as
'similar to the true Loretto ... wholly of brick - forty feet long by twenty
wide, and twenty-five feet high.' He supplied details on the location of
the doors, chimney, and windows, and, by way of additional documenta-
tion, referred to his reading: 'Turcellin opines that the main portion of
the dwelling is the North side, and affirms that the threshold of the
door is of wood - which we have observed in case of the Canadian Lor-
etto' (JR6o::88-91). Turcellin' was Father Orazio Torsellini (1544-99),
who had been rector of the Jesuit college at Loreto; in 1594, he wrote
his Lauretanae historiae libri quinque.1 Bouvart went on to mention 'a cup-
board quite simply constructed, and suitable for locking up plate and
other similar articles ... The small recess which is behind the altar is
called by the Italians "il camino santo" [the holy chimney], because it
contains the chimney of the holy family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Our
Hurons name it at least as properly in their language, Marie etiondata,
"the apartment of Mary" because that, as is believed, was where the
blessed Virgin had her bed, and where, it is asserted, she often changed
the clothing of her divine child, and warmed him' (JR 60: 90-3).
A copy of the statue of the Madonna at Loreto was placed, like the
original, on the mantelpiece, where 'it is greatly esteemed and justly
venerated' (JR 58: 154-7). Yet the statue bore one notable change from
the original: 'the image of Our Lady which is in the true Loretto being
black, - either on account of the smoke from the lamps which burn
there, or otherwise, - we have had the image of our Lorette painted in
flesh-color. We did this for fear lest, if we exposed for the veneration of
our Savages an image entirely black, we might cause them to resume the
custom which we have made them abandon, of blackening and staining
their faces' (JR 60: 92-3). Altogether, the arrangement of the chapel
interior proved to be quite effective in the daily life of the mission,
where the concrete elements of the santa Casa were used to further the
Christianizing of the Hurons and Iroquois at Lorette and to attract
French pilgrims from the colony.
The blessing of the chapel took place on 4 November 1674, 'with a
great coming together of French and savages, as many Huron as Abenaki'
(Chaumonot 1885, 198); Father Bouvart adds that 'there were some
present who had purposely come from a distance often long leagues' (JR
60: 94-5). A procession formed to go into the forest to fetch three statues
'A New Loreto in New France' 207
that had been sent from Europe: the main one was the copy of Our Lady
of Loreto; the two others were 'made of the real wood of Notre Dame de
Foy' in what is now Belgium.8 One statue 'is a Virgin, bearing her Son;
and it was sent to our savages by the cities of Nancy and Bar. The other,
which the princes and princesses of the most illustrious and pious house
of Lorraine have sent us, is a Saint Joseph, who also holds the infantjesus
upon one of his arms.' These statues were adorned with relics: 'a piece of
the Blessed Virgin's veil, which is at the base of the St, Joseph, and a small
portion of the same St. Joseph's girdle, enshrined in a little escutcheon
which the infantjesus holds, who is himself borne by his mother.' The
nuns of the Hospital of Quebec had made a robe for the statue of Our
Lady of Loreto so as to cover her majestically, like the one on display in
the santa Casa in Italy. They had also donated 'a bowl fashioned after the
holy bowls which are at Loretto, one that has touched them' (/R6o: 84-
7; 58:157). In this way, the model of the Holy House was being assimilated
to the Huron mission, its continuity and legitimacy derived from Euro-
pean traditions of piety connected with two shrines dedicated to the Vir-
gin and with the protective mediation offered by the princely house of
Lorraine and by two cities, Nancy and Bar, pledged to the Virgin by their
prince. Upon returning to the village of the Huron, the procession 'made
its way round the great square, so that the holy Virgin might take posses-
sion of all the cabins in front of which she passed before entering into her
own dwelling' (Lindsay 1900, 147).
In his sermon, Father Claude Dablon, superior-general of the col-
ony's Jesuit missions, highlighted the symbolic meaning of the model
and of the similarity and resemblance between the holy houses of Italy
and New France (JR 60: 86-9). The description of this ceremony shows
how strongly the Jesuits insisted on the dramatic passage from the bar-
barism of forest life to Christian civilization in 'Mary's hamlet,' where
the chapel's statues and relics and the Holy Family's cabin would help
mission proteges forge ahead towards sanctification, far from the
demons of the forest. This passage was further symbolized by the use of
'the real wood of Notre Dame de Foy,' in two of the statues in the
chapel. In the Holy House, the chaste Joseph had plied his humble car-
penter's trade, while the young Jesus - consistent with traditional repre-
sentation - gathered up the wood shavings and chips. The relics
allegedly from the Virgin's veil and St Joseph's girdle formed a legacy
embodying other aspects of domestic life, enhanced by the robe des-
tined to 'majestically' cover Our Lady of Loreto's statue and by the
dishes fashioned after those of the Italian shrine.
2o8 Andre Sanfaf on
Well before the chapel modelled on the Holy House was actually con-
structed, the Quebec Jesuits had made a point of popularizing the place
and objects commemorating the daily life of the Virgin and Holy Fam-
ily. As a result, almost immediately after its dedication the Holy House
of Lorette was functioning as an effective place of pilgrimage: 'Since the
opening of the chapel, the devotion of the French for coming thither
on pilgrimages, for making and fulfilling vows there, and receiving the
sacraments there, has been altogether extraordinary.' Over the ensuing
months, pilgrims from Quebec and its environs - 'the governor of this
country and the common people, the priests and the religious, the rich
and the poor' - converged on Lorette (JR 58: 142-3; 60: 94-7, 308-9). In
1675, Bouvart stated that there was 'in all New France no place more
notable through the devotion of the French and the Savages than ...
Notre Dame de Lorette' (/R6o: 68-9).
According to the testimony of their missionaries, the Amerindians
quickly adapted daily chapel devotions to the specific features presented
by the model of the santa Casa, which they called the House of the
Virgin. As the 'settlers' of the new Lorette, the Huron seemed to be
'the first to feel its effects when manifesting ... their devotion ... their
fervor in honoring Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in their holy house.' They
displayed 'greater assiduity at mass, at the instructions, arid at prayers,'
imitating 'the punctuality of the most accomplished Religious' (JR 60:
98-9). Many came to chapel as early as four o'clock in the morning,
some praying for as long as two or three hours at a time (JR 58: 166-7).
The children were likewise eager and joyful about going to pray or to
receive instruction at the chapel; this had not been the case in the
Native settlement at Notre Dame de Foy, where, in the opinion of
Father Chaumonot and the children's mothers, 'they had no ardor' for
such things (JR 60: 98-101). The Huron made it a point of honour to
keep the Virgin's house extremely tidy, and,to clear away the snow on
the paths leading to it (/R6o: 100-3). Thus, they were putting into prac-
tice the teaching inspired by the Lorette model - accepting simple
everyday tasks and doing them with humility, devotion, and prayer, just
as each member of the Holy Family had done in the Holy House.
Each day, the Huron families took turns praying in the camino santo,
the 'little recess ... behind the altar,' where the French also went to med-
itate after confession and communion; 'and, when the round of the cab-
ins is complete, they begin again with even more fervor than if it were
the first time' (JR6o::102-3). The Virgin's 'room' created a locus of the
sacred - concentrating there the essence of its Loretan prototype - one
'A New Loreto in New France' 209
patterns are altered. How could the Holy House function effectively
without the miraculous statue and the objects connected with the
Loretan tradition? The legend served to restore order in a situation felt
to be chaotic, indeed doomed, although it should be added that
another statue of the Virgin, resembling to some extent that of Notre
Dame de Lorette, had already replaced at Ancienne-Lorette the copy of
the statue of Our Lady of Loreto that had been moved to the chapel of
Jeune-Lorette (Lindsay 1900, 148-9). The French who had settled
around Notre Dame de Lorette, Cote St Paul, Champigny, and St Ange
all attended services at the original mission chapel, which as early as
1676 had become for them the equivalent of a parish church (Allard
1979,48,60).
In the chapel of the new Huron village, the memory of the Holy
House of Ancienne-Lorette was kept alive. On 13 February 1698, Monsi-
gnor de Saint-Vallier, bishop of Quebec, granted the sum of one hun-
dred ecus to aid in construction of the new church 'and to further mark
our goodwill toward them, we have granted a new title of Notre Dame
de Laurette for the chapel which they [the Jesuits] are to build for the
Savages, as they have given us to understand that the aforesaid Huron
savages have a particular devotion to the mystery and feast-day of Our
Lady of Laurette' (Lindsay 1900, 36-7). A sculpture created by Noel
LeVasseur in the eighteenth century showing the Holy House being
borne by two angels and a cherub can still be seen in the present chapel,
affixed to the upper part of the wall above the main altar. Below it, there
is another sculpture, presenting the distinctive features of Our Lady of
Lorette, behind a decorative wooden plaque reminiscent of the triangu-
lar shape of the robe with which the Lorette statue is traditionally
adorned. The Huron likewise venerate, in their chapel, a Black Virgin of
Loreto blessed by Pope John Paul ii in 1980. In Ancienne-Lorette, after
the Huron mission left, parishioners continued to honour the Virgin of
Lorette, especially in front of a statue kept in the parish to this day."
The Jesuits of Quebec systematically made use of specific Judeo-
Christian elements characterizing the model of the santa Casa so as to
produce the maximum effect on the senses, as well as on the beliefs and
devotional practices of the French and Amerindian populations of New
France to whom they were proposing that model. Analysing the Jesuits'
Marian undertaking allows us to identify and articulate a long list of con-
ditions singled out as favourable to success. First, select a familiar
model, one already quite popular with European Christians, and focus
on its essential traits. Have first-hand knowledge of the model's impact
214 Andre Sanfafon
and, thus, the ability to offer vivid and abundant testimony about it. Cre-
ate a network of reliable collaborators with access to the prototype in
order to give the model the greatest number of essential characteristics
of the original. Wait for the most propitious time at which to inaugurate
the model. Involve as many people as possible from the target popula-
tion, stressing the ripple effect of benefits for all the actors. At every
stage of its development and execution, place the responsibility for the
realization of the project under the aegis of key religious and political
leaders. Complete the project within a reasonable period of time after
approval has been secured and work initiated. Appeal in so far as possi-
ble to thefivesenses - on which adherence to the model is predicated -
so that its essential features can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and
smelled. Make very explicit the parallels inextricably linking the pro-
totype and its copy. Be involved in the 'mechanics' of the model's
everyday operation, particularly by recommending intentions and
formulations for prayers in which the chief distinguishing traits of the
model are present. Brook no doubt concerning the model's effective-
ness; be convinced and convincing that the constituent elements of the
recreated model are imbued with the power of the original. Publicize
the blessings bestowed through specific kinds of reliance on the model.
Nourish an aura of the extraordinary around the model, thus protecting
it from trivialization and all forms of defilement. Strengthen the symbol-
ism of the place of worship through multiple links with complementary
Marian traditions. Finally, express gratitude to both the divinity at the
centre of the model, to whom all blessings received are publicly attrib-
uted, and, as well, to the collaborators helping to make the model work,
for their indispensable support.
Father Chaumonot had been able to bring all these conditions
together to maximum effect, apparendy ensuring that the model of the
santa Casa would function optimally (although for a limited time) by first
informing his Jesuit colleagues, and then the elite of Quebec, of his plans.
The operational impact of the model of the Holy House made a striking
impression on all the missionaries. In October 1676, Fatherjean Enjalran
was only too happy to serve as their spokesman, stating, 'Our savages have
an admirable veneration for this place ... All the people agree that there
are in this mission persons of eminent holiness' (JR6o: 144-5).
In Europe throughout the second half of the seventeenth century,
the fervour displayed by the faithful towards the Italian shrine of Loreto
was maintained, even though the peak of its glory had come at the end
of the sixteenth century, when tens of thousands of pilgrims flocked
'A New Lore to in New France' 215
thrust of the model and its teachings is ambivalent: if the Virgin of the
Holy House of Lorette is the servant of God and of her family, she is also
a powerful woman, inheritor of a lineage, queen of the village of Notre
Dame de Lorette and treated as such in her house or chapel around
which the life of the protected community revolved. Totally dependent
on the French for their survival, beginning in 1648 or perhaps even 1647
- in the eye of the Iroquois hurricane sweeping across their ancestral
Huronia (Trigger [1976] 1987, 749-50) - the Christianized Hurons fol-
lowed their missionaries and settler allies to the region around Quebec.
From then on, in a twin quest for security and identity, the Huron found
themselves in a situation that offered certain advantages even though it
also implied a process of assimilation and resistance, accommodation
and continuity.
Devotions to the Virgin and the Holy House were inseparable in
Loretan practice, using the basic components of belief to give rise to
a complex and powerful model, capable of nurturing the spiritual
progress in New France of French and Amerindians alike, through fam-
ily roles assigned by the canons of a Western and Christian civilization
then undergoing transformation (Muchembled 1988; Delumeau 1983,
1989). The Virgin of Loreto/Lorette represents the glorification of
Mary, the humble servant of God, 'our all-gracious mother and all-
powerful protectress' (/R60: 70-1), the one who shows the way to medi-
tation upon the mysteries of the Annunciation and Incarnation by
means of accessible, tangible objects such as her house, bed, wardrobe,
garments, dishes. An ideal model of family life is presented: that of the
Holy Family - inheritors of Anne and Joachim's house - whose lives
exemplified the passive virtues of obedience, humility, and purity. Mary,
Joseph, and Jesus shared supposedly around twenty-five years of a mod-
est existence spent in domestic work and carpentry, the parents' efforts
unfailingly seconded by the help of their son, Jesus.
In die seventeenth-century mystical perspective shaping Father Chau-
monot's spirituality, the veneration of the Holy Family and Holy House
of Loreto was not a mere devotion to be added to a host of others, but
rather a genuine duty for which distance granted no dispensation: in
order to pay the homage due to that place and its sainted figures, it
would be necessary to build in America a copy of the house from Naza-
reth. There is no reason to doubt the Jesuit's sincerity as he trod the
path to sanctification by fulfilling his obligations towards the Holy Fam-
ily - in particular, the Blessed Virgin, his adoptive mother - and the 'his-
toric' sites that had housed them. Nor is there any doubt that the same
2i8 Andre Sanfafon
NOTES
has enjoyed such a success/ but notes that 'his statements concerning the
quadruple translation [of the santa Casa] rest on no proof worthy of a
serious historian's attention.'
8 This wood was taken from an oak tree in whose trunk a woodcutter had, in
1609, found a small statue of the Virgin (Hayot 1939, 9-11).
9 For devotion in New France to the Holy Family, especially with regard to the
religious fraternity named for them, see Cliche 1988, 158-70. Beginning in
1642, Montreal's Notre Dame Society dedicated the future city to the Holy
Family.
10 Quebec, Archives of the Monasteiy of the Hotel-Dieu, F.i, C.iy6, No.i.
11 Archaeological excavations in August 1983 by Gilles Drolet and his team -
with research completed by Michel Gaumond, archaeologist with the Que-
bec Ministry of Culture - made it possible to find and authenticate remnants
of brick walls from the original chapel 'less than one hundred feet from the
[present] church' in Ancienne-Lorette (Drolet 1985, iii). A cartoon booklet,
with text by Gilles Drolet and drawings by Paul Roux, reconstructs Father
Chaumonot's itinerary as a missionary (Drolet 1989).
12 Feminist studies have given us new perspectives on this question, in the light
of seventeenth-century social values and their enduring influences. For
Karen Anderson (1991), the Jesuits came to New France consciously and
determinedly bearing a new social and moral order, characterized by values
that hinged on wealth, power, prestige, fear, submission, and fidelity. Jesuit
action, therefore, helped put Amerindian women under the domination of
men. For her part, Laura Peers (1996), in a study of the cultivation of Marian
devotion by the Jesuits working among the Salish (Flatheads) in the nine-
teenth century in what is now Montana, maintains that Marian devotional
practices became potent tools for assimilation via the introduction of
Western Christian models of conjugal and family life. From this perspective,
the veneration of the Holy House and Holy Family in the mission of Notre
Dame de Lorette furnished the chief illustration of the European model of
the nuclear family, with roles divided among husband and wife, father and
mother, grandfather and grandmother, evoking a paradigm of family life
claimed to be ideal.
PART IV
Decentring at Work
This page intentionally left blank
The Delights of Nature in This New
World: A Seventeenth-Century
Canadian View of the Environment
Lynn Berry
ing around him on his return to Canada, he saw the abundance and
diversity of the natural world with new eyes, and wrote about it in a way
that other writers could not duplicate. His observations show that he
had experienced a process of hybridization, and had become a kind of
acclimatized and hardy transplant, like those plants or animals brought
from France that he described as thriving in the New World.
Pierre Boucher's experience of Canada began in 1635, at the age
of thirteen, when he and his parents and siblings emigrated from
Mortagne in Normandy to the town of Quebec. As a teenager, he was a
lay assistant to the Jesuits at their Huron mission. He went on to become
a soldier, an official interpreter of Native languages for the colonial gov-
ernor, and a fur trade post manager. Later, he became governor of
Trois-Rivieres, a seigneur, and a judge. In 1661, Boucher received letters
of nobility for organizing Trois-Rivieres against a prolonged Iroquois
siege (Roy 1926, 401-2). The settlements of the St Lawrence valley
region had faced determined and constant Iroquois resistance with little
respite for the previous two decades, and the colony was in a deplorable
state. Owing to his years of experience at the forefront of French
defence, his knowledge of the country, and his position as noble and
seigneur, Boucher was chosen by the colonial governor to travel to
France and solicit military aid from Louis XTV and his ministers. On his
return from this mission in the summer of 1662, Boucher composed his
Histoire and returned it to Paris for publication the following year.
Boucher had several motives for writing his Histoire, all of them based
more on local interests than on those of the mother country. One goal
was to offer an accurate description of his adopted home to those in
France who had besieged him with questions, questions that revealed
distorted views acquired from short-term visitors. As gratified as he was
by their interest, he was deeply troubled that Canada was being misrep-
resented out of ignorance or malice. Boucher's second aim was to
remind the king of his promised economic and military assistance to the
colony, and to that end he included in his Histoire frequent and often
intense denunciations of 'our enemy,' the Iroquois. What good are the
natural advantages of Canada, he asked, when such bounty remained
untouched because the Iroquois war 'prevents us from exploring it, as it
is desirable we should' (Boucher [1664] 1883, 14). His third goal was to
use his own experience to offer information and advice to potential
immigrants. His treatise, however, was not simply a piece of colonial
propaganda or a dutiful response to a request for information from Col-
bert, the king's first minister, as some historians have claimed (Trudel
A Seventeenth-Century View of the Environment 225
24 land and 3 marine mammals, 25 fish, 28 trees and shrubs, and 22 edi-
ble plants. He notes the most productive resources and connects a num-
ber of them to habitats and seasons. He indicates, for example, the ideal
months for pigeon hunting or smelt fishing, and notes that certain coni-
fers grow in damp places and that the preferred habitat of the black
bear is the oak forests near Montreal (31, 36, 43, 45). In the interests of
candour, he acknowledges what he considers 'the most troublesome
and disagreeable things' - the Iroquois war, mosquitoes, rattlesnakes,
and the length of winter (76-8). He nonetheless praises the countiy as
remarkably healthy: animals and plants from France were thriving; habi-
tant children grew up 'well formed, tall and robust'; rare plants had
marvellous curative powers; and even 'in the coldest place here winter is
a more cheerful season than it is in France' (13-14, 71). Boucher's
appreciation of this bountiful land increases as he surveys it from the
Adantic coast, eastward to Tadoussac and Quebec, and further up the St
Lawrence to Trois-Rivieres and Montreal. Only his desire for brevity
restrains his enthusiastic descriptions of the charms of the lands to the
west, controlled by the Iroquois: 'I could not describe to you all the
beautiful places in those countries, nor the good things to be found
there, and at the same time be brief, as I intend to be* (24).
The brevity of Boucher's natural history does not limit its significance
in comparison to the work of his contemporaries. During this period,
the words 'histoire naturelle' signified a simple description of natural
phenomena. Unlike what contemporaries termed 'natural philosophy,'
natural history did not search for the causes of phenomena or attempt
to explain how living things functioned (Roger 1995, 201). Natural his-
tory was actually not a popular topic in mid-seventeenth-century France.
A variety of such works had appeared in most European countries in the
century before Boucher wrote, but by the early seventeenth century,
mathematics, mechanics, and physics attracted the majority of scholars,
whether professional or amateur. It was to this audience that Jacques
Rohault's System of Natural Philosophy (1671) appealed, with its exposi-
tion of Cartesian physics, chemistry, astronomy, and physiology. In
France the period was one of increased scientific study; scholarly socie-
ties and academies were formed and advancements in the use of micro-
scopes and dissection led to intense focus on a single plant or animal
species. There was no serious renewal of interest in natural history until
the 16705, and that took place in England before it spread to Europe
(Roger 1995,199-200).2 Those few works on the natural world that were
printed immediately after Boucher's Histoire were either treatises based
A Seventeenth-Century View of the Environment 227
for those of elk - and he criticizes the captains from France who did not
respect the skill of Iroquois warriors and paid for their ignorance with
their lives (Boucher [1664] 1883, 41, 77). His detailed and systematic
natural history did not have the naivety of a newly arrived Frenchman; it
was not an appendix describing commodities in an explorer's journal,
or an incidental inspiration in a missionary's report. Though the
authors before him had actually experienced the Canadian environ-
ment, they did not, at heart, have the same understanding of it or
attachment to it that Boucher had (see Warwick in Sagard, 1990). In
Marcel Trudel's words, 'no one understood better than he did, no one
had had more actual experience of New France, or more varied' (Tru-
del in Boucher [1664] 1964, preface).
Influences in Boucher's life may explain his exceptional approach to
nature in the New World. As we have seen, his long residence in Canada
gave him a profound appreciation of the wild environment. This resi-
dence was shaped by interaction with the people who knew Canadian
nature best, the Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples whom he describes
in the Histoire. The complexities of Boucher's attitudes towards different
Native groups, as revealed in the section of his treatise devoted to them,
are outside the scope of this paper, but we can consider the ways in
which his view of the natural world was affected by contact with Amer-
indians.
At a time when many of the young people of New France were being
deeply influenced by Native society, two significant events in Boucher's
early years brought him into particularly close contact with Native cus-
toms and the environment. The first influence was the young Boucher's
four years as a lay assistant to the Jesuit fathers at their mission in Huron
country. Native paddlers had transported him the 1,300 kilometres from
Quebec to Georgian Bay. For all the Jesuits' emphasis on conversion,
the missions were predominantly Native environments. Boucher would
have adopted aspects of Huron dress and food, resided in a bark lodge,
cut firewood in the forests, worked in the fields of maize and squash,
and joined with Huron warriors in the defence of the mission against
Iroquois attack. The impact of such an intensely lived experience on a
teenager only recently arrived in Canada from a pastoral Norman vil-
lage must have been profound. The Marquis de Denonville, a contem-
porary of Boucher's who was the governor of New France, complained
in a letter to Paris, 'I would not know, Monseigneur, how to sufficiently
express to you the attraction that the life of the savages has for all the
young people' (quoted in Delage 1992, 154). Its influence on his view of
the environment is revealed in the Histoire. Journeys in the woods and
A Seventeenth-Century View of the Environment 231
I can assure you that ... there are few of those who have come here who
have any intention to return to France, unless called there by affairs of
great importance; and I tell you candidly that during my stay in Paris and
elsewhere, last year, I met with many persons in easy circumstances who
had formerly been inhabitants of Canada, and had left it on account of the
war, who assured me that they were full of impatience to return to it, so
true it is that New France has attractions for those who know how to
appreciate its delights. (Boucher [1664] 1883, 15)
of his court patrons. Comparison to the Old World nation that Boucher
had left behind inspired his admiration for the delights of the New
World that had become his home.
NOTES
1 Or The True and Natural History of the Customs and Productions of the (Country of
New France, Commonly Known as Canada. Unless noted otherwise, quotations
are based on the English translation of the Histoire Veritable published by one
of Boucher's descendants, Edward Louis Montizambert — Canada in the Seven-
teenth Century, cited as Boucher [1664] 1883. This translation is generally accu-
rate, but when Montizambert omitted words or entire passages, bowdlerized
descriptions, or slightly altered meanings, I have used my own translations.
These corrections are based on the facsimile reproduction of Histoire Vmtabk
et naturelle, cited as Boucher [1664] 1964. Translations of all other French
texts are my own. Boucher used the terms 'New France' and 'Canada' inter-
changeably. As New France actually represented a much broader portion of
North American territory than the Great Lakes-St Lawrence colony of f Can-
ada, I will use 'Canada' in this paper in referring to the region.
2 For an excellent overview of early modern zoological works up to the end of
the seventeenth century, see Pinon 1995.
3 I^escarbot is described in this fashion in Carile 1988, 85. See also Champiain's
predicted incomes from Canadian resources in Champlain [1604] 1993, 236-
8 and his 'Utilitez du Pays de la Nouvelle-France,' his most focused reference
to nature in his journals of exploration (Champlain 1922-36, 6: 366-74).
4 Dominique Deslandres argues that the Ursulines were seldom completely suc-
cessful in their attempts to 'civilize' their Native students (Deslandres 1987,
100). Marie continued, for example, to use her Native name after her mar-
riage to Boucher (Charbonneau and Legare 1980, 4: 127-8).
5 See Van Kirk 1980, 53-73 for more on the essential contributions of Native
women to European husbands. As for Marie's kinship, there is some
uncertainty whether she was a Huron or of Algonquian background (Suite
1882, 3: 101; Mitchell 1967, 64). Her first marriage is also a mystery. She was
widow when she married Boucher, probably having been in a Native relation-
ship, which the church did not recognize (Charbonneau and Legare 1980, 4:
127-8).
6 Boucher's preference for wild haws contrasts with Marie de 1'Incarnation's
suffering in making do with indigenous fruits after a hard frost killed French
fruit trees planted in the convent, garden (Guyart [1626-72] 1971, 364).
A Seventeenth-Century View of the Environment 235
Introduction
merits during the second half of the seventeenth century, they are inad-
equate as an explanation for the beginnings of interior exploration out
of the St Lawrence valley, in which the human factor, credited above but
then dismissed, proves to be of signal importance. This paper presents a
brief examination of the first thirty-five years of the seventeenth century
in Canada, the motives from which the French acted, and the proce-
dures developed by them that would eventually lead to the exploration
of the Great Lakes and the system of rivers to Hudson Bay and the Gulf
of Mexico before any Dutch or Englishman had even seen Lake
Ontario. These French successes were the result of a total rethinking of
how exploration should be carried out, by a group of men - among
them notably Champlain - who were far more flexible in their attitudes
and thinking than Carticr and Roberval, who preceded them.
Although exploration begins with motives, these are not enough to set
the actual process in motion. Means have to be devised to overcome the
physical and in some cases cultural obstacles that stand in the way. The
expeditions of Jacques Cartier are good examples of situations where
powerful motives were present and great efforts were made to push west-
ward, yet all came to naught because neither the physical nor cultural
obstacles to exploration could be overcome. Cartier's motive on his first
(1534) and second (1535-6) expeditions was to find a route through the
Canadian landmass (M. Trudel 1973, 12, 19-20). What he discovered
was that the St Lawrence valley was a cul-de-sac. All the entrances to the
interior were blocked by mighty waterfalls (Cartier 1993, 65, 103-4). On
his third expedition (1541—2), shared with Roberval (1542—3), a motive
was added that originated in stories told to Cartier by the St Lawrence
Iroquoians on his second voyage. This was the possibility of exploring
and conquering the mythical Kingdom of Saguenay, with its supposed
riches of gold and precious stones. After these stories were repeated at
the French court by kidnapped Stadaconans, the French began to envi-
sion themselves in a situation analogous to that of the Spaniards in Cen-
tral and South America. Like their contemporaries - De Soto with six
hundred men (1539-42), and Coronado with three hundred (1540-1) -
Cartier and Roberval, with their combined force of at least five hundred
men, were supposed to mix exploration with conquest (Cartier 1993, 97,
135-8, 144-51). And like the Spanish expeditions into the southern
reaches of North America, the Cartier-Roberval adventure also ended in
238 Conrad E. Heidenreich
the short summer of 1603, Champlain learned more about the river sys-
tems that flowed into the St Lawrence valley than all the explorers
before him (Heidenreich 1976, 1-4). On 11 June, the Montagnais
described a route forty to fifty days long from Tadoussac to a northern
salt sea (Hudson Bay), which Champlain reasoned was a gulf of the
Atlantic, 'which overflows in the north into the midst of the continent'
(Champlain 1922-36, i: 121-4, 4: 42). On 26 June, he was told of a route
up the St Maurice River to Lac St Jean (i: 136-7). Four days later, he
learned of the way up the Richelieu River to the Atlantic coast, a route
he partially explored in 1609 (i: 143-4). On 4, 10, and 11 July Cham-
plain obtained from Algonquin informants three accounts with sketch
maps of the upper St Lawrence through Lake Ontario to Lake Erie (i:
1
53-65)- The sketch map from the second of these accounts was used by
Champlain on his large Carte Geographique of 1612. (For Champlain's
explorations out of the St Lawrence valley 1603-15, see figure 5.)
The second important innovation by Champlain was that he recog-
nized the potential importance of the birch-bark canoe in exploration.
He first described the canoe in some detail on May 28 (i: 104-5). On
30 June, as he failed to get across the first set of rapids on the Riche-
lieu River in his ship as well as his rowboat, he became more aware of
the manoeuvrability and portability of the canoe (i: 141-3). The next
day, he was given his first ride in a canoe across the St Lawrence River
(i: 144-5). On 3 July, when a shallow draft boat specifically developed to
navigate across the Lachine Rapids failed to achieve its goal Champlain
concluded that
Quinn: 1983, 222-3) • ^n about two months, Champlain had solved two
technical aspects of exploration: the use of Native verbal and carto-
graphical information, and the potential use of the canoe as a mode of
transportation. Even more importantly, he began to recognize the need
for Native help to achieve his ends.
When Champlain returned to the St Lawrence in 1608, after four years
on the Atlantic coast, he had become proficient at gathering and inter-
preting Native geographical information (Heidenreich 1976, 4-11). On
at least one occasion he had tested Native descriptions of a part of the
New England coast and found them to be totally reliable (Champlain
1922-36, i: 335-40). He had also gained more experience in dealing
with Native people and more knowledge of their customs. Champlain's
new tasks were to establish a base of operations at Quebec and to con-
tinue exploration past the Lachine Rapids and towards the northern salt
sea (2: 3-5, 16-19; 4: 31-43). Immediately he set his sights on the
Saguenay route because he had heard that the English were trying to
find a northwestern passage to China and he was certain that the salt sea
the Montagnais had told him about was part of that passage (2: 19).
When the Montagnais, who by now had been trading partners of the
French for at least twenty years, refused to take him or any other French-
men along on a northern journey, Champlain became convinced that
somehow he had to build a greater bridge of trust between them. In Sep-
tember 1608, therefore, he promised the Montagnais and their allies the
Iroquet Algonquins (who were named Iroquet after their chief) the one
thing they wanted from him - the fulfilment of Henri iv's promise that
the French would help them in their wars (2: 69-70). As a result of these
promises, a combined force of two hundred to three hundred Monta-
gnais, Iroquet, and Huron - the latter a group the French had never
seen before - met in June 1609 near the mouth of the Batiscan River to
'make an alliance' and to conduct a raid on the Iroquois up the Riche-
lieu River (2: 64-71). Champlain saw this as an opportunity not only to
further his standing in the eyes of his new allies, but also to engage in the
exploration of an important waterway (2: 80-1). Although the final war
party consisted of only sixty Natives as well as Champlain and two French
volunteers, it was considered a success by the Native allies. At the conclu-
sion of the raid, further expressions of friendship were exchanged
between the allies, and promises were made to take Champlain explor-
ing to the west and north if he continued to 'aid them, continually like a
brother' (2: 104-5, no). This he promised to do.
As a result of the 'alliance' and raid of 1609, Champlain received two
242 Conrad E. Heidenreich
offers for 1610: the Montagnais promised to take him up the St Maurice
River to the northern salt sea and return via the Saguenay, while the
Huron would take him west to the 'mer douce' Carder had been told
about in 1535, and show him some copper deposits (2: 118-19). Neither
trip took place. Instead, he got involved in another fight with the Iro-
quois, this time at the mouth of the Richelieu River. He did, however,
manage to place a French youth (probably Etienne Brule) with Iro-
quet's people and the Huron. Because the Algonquin were apprehen-
sive about taking Brule with them lest an accident befall him for which
they might be blamed, Champlain had to agree to take along a Huron
lad, Savignon (2: 138-42). With these two young men, Champlain and
Iroquet began to develop the important role of the French-Native inter-
preter and trader's agent. Brule and Savignon were to learn the lan-
guage of their hosts and report back to their respective people on what
they had seen. Increasingly frustrated by the reluctance of the Native
people to take him exploring, Champlain tried in 1611 to persuade the
Montagnais to take just one of his men with them up the St Maurice (2:
!73-4)- When they declined, he tried to purchase a canoe to undertake
exploration without them, but was unsuccessful in getting one. By now it
became apparent that these refusals were prompted by Native fears that
if anything happened to the French while in their care, they might be
blamed and their relationship could be in danger (2: 139; 3: 91). Young-
sters were one thing; important men like Champlain were quite
another. However, the success of the Brule-Savignon exchange was
extended to other youths (2: 186-206). In spite of his disappointment,
Champlain reiterated his promise to support his Native allies and
requested again that they take him exploring. This time he assured the
Huron that he would ask the king for forty to fifty armed men to accom-
pany him on an expedition against their enemies. He further promised
that if he found their country fertile he would establish several settle-
ments there 'whereby we should have communication with one another,
and live happily in the future in the fear of God, whom we should make
known to them' (2: 195-6). Apparently Champlain's suggestions for
what could be interpreted as future Huron assimilation to French values
received a favourable response from the assembled Natives. It is certain
that at this point Champlain's thoughts on this subject were only at a
very preliminary stage. It is therefore equally certain that the Huron did
not understand the full meaning of what was being suggested to them.
From their reaction, it is probable that they saw Champlain's sugges-
tions as a friendly gesture designed to further closer relations.
French Exploration out of the St Lawrence Valley 243
345). Time and again he reiterated that all French plans - exploration,
trade, defence of the colony, settlements, and missionizing - hinged on
good Native relations. The continuing problem was how to enact the
intentions formulated by him and the Recollets. By the mid-16205, it had
become evident that the plans to Christianize and 'civilize' the Native
people were not being realized. Native cultures were resistant to the
kinds of changes demanded of them, and there were far too few French
colonists to act as role models.
In 1632 Cardinal Richelieu decided to replace the Recollets, a mendi-
cant order that could not pay its way in a colony that was itself in need of
money, with the Capuchins. When the latter could not undertake the St
Lawrence mission because they had just been given a special apostolate
to England, he sent the self-funded Jesuits instead (Grant 1984, 26).
Although they later changed their policies drastically, initially the Jesuits
continued those established by their predecessors. However, in order to
speed up the process of conversion and acculturation, they were willing
to take a step the Recollets had not suggested. On 22 July 1635, five
months before Champlain died, he and Father Paul Le Jeune, superior
of the Jesuit mission to Canada, met with seven hundred Huron in a
council at Quebec to discuss with them a proposal they had formulated
for more binding ties between the two groups. The proposal was for
French men to settle in the Huron country, where they would marry
Huron women after these had adopted Christianity. Champlain prom-
ised that this would strengthen Huron-French ties. Moreover, he said,
Christianity would make them triumph over their enemies, and the
French could teach them to make all the things they now purchased
(Jesuit Relations [1610-1791] 1896-1901 [hereafter//?] 8:47-51, 12: 125-
7). a Although the purpose of this proposal was mainly to spread Chris-
tianity and French values, Champlain also hoped for strong socio-politi-
cal ties with the Huron and the development of a group of people who
would take 'exploration to the extremity of North America' (Charlevoix
i?44> 1: 282, 288-9; my translation). It took the Huron two years to
respond to this proposal, finally deciding that marriage was not a matter
of national policy, but up to individuals and their families. Among other
things, they were concerned about dowries, the fate of the women in
cases of separation, and the disposition of property in such cases. In
other words, the Huron balked at some of the French values attached to
marriage, particularly the indissolubility of Christian unions, but had
otherwise no qualms about French men marrying Huron women. This
was, of course, not what the priests wanted to hear, because their main
246 Conrad E. Heidenreich
concern had been to use marriage as a vehicle for conversion and accul-
turation. By placing marriage into the hands of couples and their
Huron families, the Jesuits would lose control of the acculturation pro-
cess. The conclusion they reached was that the whole matter deserved
more thought before any further steps were taken (JR 14: 15-21).
Over succeeding years, the Jesuits retreated further from the plans of
Champlain and the Recollets, gradually coming to the conclusion by the
16405 that in order to Christianize the Native people, it would be best to
segregate them from excessive French influence arid avoid trying to
'Frenchify' them (Axtell 1985, 43-70) .3
Discussion
At this point, the prime object of exploration was to find a route west
to China, a route Champlain was convinced existed. At no point does he
or any contemporary writer suggest that exploration was conducted in
order to expand the fur trade. The fur trade to the St Lawrence was in
Native hands, and it was assumed, correctly, that it would expand as a con-
sequence of exploration, as more Native groups were contacted by
explorers, missionaries, and traders' agents. Exploration did not follow
automatically from trading relations. Quite the contrary. Native traders
and their fellow countrymen refused to take Frenchmen with them for
fear that these valued but inexperienced men might die in their company
or on their lands, thus rupturing existing friendly relations. Champlain
learned that in order to be accepted and taken on exploring trips, close
personal relations and trust had to be built with Native leaders. He did
this by acting on their insistence that, as befitted allies, they be helped in
their wars, and through a 'cultural exchange program' involving young
men. It took seven years (1608-15) of negotiation, tokens of friendship,
alliances, and aid in war before he finally saw the 'mer douce.' Once
friendly relations had been established that led Native people to allow
Frenchmen to accompany them on their travels, Champlain set him-
self the task of trying to create permanent bonds between the French
and their Native allies, especially the settled and agricultural Huron.
To Champlain, a devout Catholic living in the climate of the Counter-
Reformation and cognizant of the clauses in de Monts's commissions
regarding Native conversions, the answer was Christianization through a
strong missionary effort. A common religion and - he hoped - accep-
tance of French values would create the bonds he sought. Although at
first he found little support among the traders, he found enough support
in France for the sponsorship of four Recollets to begin the task of trying
to assimilating the Native people into a Catholic community. In 1635 the
Jesuits elaborated on these plans to include intermarriage between
French men and Native women. This suggestion was not simply a way of
providing women for a gender-imbalanced French colonial population,
but a serious attempt to spread Christianity and promote assimilation
(Axtell 1985, 278; Jaenen 1976, 161-5; Dickason 1992, 167-9). Through
the i66os the directives of the French minister in charge of colonial
affairs, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, urged his intendant, Jean Talon, to encour-
age assimilation through mingling French and Native so that they would
become 'one people and one race' (O'Callaghan and Fernow 1853-87,9:
59). By this time, the Jesuits had long abandoned this plan because it did
not lead to Christianization (Charlevoix 1744, 2: 164).
248 Conrad E. Heidenreich
were reinforced by racial prejudice (Axtell 1981, 80-1, 102-5, 270). The
powerful ideologies present in the Dutch and English colonies made
accommodation to Native culture difficult if not impossible. Without
such accommodation, westward exploration could not take place.
Conclusions
order to achieve their aims, Native help was necessary, and the one
thing they all wanted from the French was that support be given them in
their wars. As Champlain put it in June 1615: 'Thereupon the said Sieur
du Pont and I came to the conclusion that it was very necessaiy to assist
them [in war], both to engage them the more to love us, and also to
provide the means of furthering my enterprises and explorations which
apparently could only be carried out with their help' (Champlain 1922-
36, 3: 31-2). Once a strong bond had been created, Champlain hoped
that the various Native groups would accept missionaries. This was the
second powerful motive that made French travel into the interior a
necessity. With the Recollets, Champlain planned the transfer of Cathol-
icism into the interior Native communities; with the Jesuits he proposed
an intermarried French-Native-Catholic population that would secure
French objectives in North America. From the point of view of the
Native people, the establishment of commercial relations, an exchange
of people, mutual aid in war, and marriage into an allied group were
necessary steps in forging binding ties. The two cultures had found ways
of bridging the gap between them.
What helped the French to bridge this gap? Unlike the English and
Dutch, the French wanted to explore and missionize. With their minute
population and lack of expertise in travelling in the New World, they
needed Native cooperation. The English and Dutch colonies were
essentially agricultural settlements for which they needed Native land,
not aid. Secondly, although all the European groups had strong cultural
biases, the French were relatively free of the feelings of racial superiority
that were present in the Dutch and English colonies. Finally, by and
large, the French regarded Native people as humans who could become
equals through conversion to Christianity. To the south, Native human-
ity as well as their ability to become Christians was a matter of some
dispute. Comparatively speaking, the French had a positive attitude
towards Natives, born to some extent out of necessity, but to a much
greater degree out of their willingness to try to understand the foreign
cultures they were meeting, as well as the demands of the Catholic
Church, which insisted on the conversion of the Natives, whom they
regarded as humans worthy of such an effort.
Attitudes and flexibility, more than physiography and the ramifications
of the fur trade, account for the early and sustained success of French
exploration. Champlain and others like him, working with Native leaders
and their people, were able to set aside a significant array of prejudices in
order to create bridges between their cultures. What we see in the actions
French Exploration out of the St Lawrence Valley 251
of these men is the application of new attitudes towards life in the New
World. For the first time, the Native population was treated with some
respect and was deemed to be worthy of understanding. There was a gen-
uine rethinking of how to deal with human and physical problems, based
not on dogma or experiences elsewhere, but on direct observations of
local situations. These early-seventeenth-century Frenchmen developed
a pragmatic flexibility that permitted a relatively peaceful beginning of
French activities in Canada. Because adaptation had to be to Canadian
conditions, what developed here was not merely the transfer of French
culture to a new land, but the development of a Canadian culture.
NOTES
1 To 'stern' is to steer from the rear of the canoe while providing power at the
same time.
2 Champlain first mentioned a plan for interior settlements in 1611 (Cham-
plain 1922-36, 2: 195-6); it was Father Le Jeune who added the suggestion
that the French intermarry with the Huron. For an elaboration of the Jesuit
scheme for French-Native intermarriage, see Campeau 1967-94, 3: 36-9.
3 The term 'Frenchify' was used by Charlevoix, 1744, 3: 144: 'Enfin on ne
pouvoit plus douter que le meilleur moyen de les christianiserne fut de se
bien donner de garde de les franciser.'
4 In the 1632 edition of Les Voyages, Champlain mentioned the Cartier-
Roberval voyage briefly for the first time, concluding that they were 'not
able to live there with the savages who were unbearable,' Champlain 1922-36,
6:193. There is no reason to believe that Champlain knew anything about this
voyage when he first came to Canada.
The Earliest European Encounters
with Iroquoian Languages
Wallace Chafe
vocabulary, but for the first we have only copies and translations (Hoff-
man 1961, 156-60). Third, numerous mistakes in copying left a variety
of different spellings of the same word in different manuscripts. For
example, the first vocabulary gives the word for 'bread' (pain) as caca-
comy, whereas the second vocabulary gives it as carraconny. In this case, it
is easy to see what happened. From what we now know of the history of
the Iroquoian language family, we can reconstruct this word as having
sounded something like kahrahkg-ni-, which is more closely approxi-
mated by the spelling in the second vocabulary.12 Whoever copied this
word in the first vocabulary must have mistaken an r (or double r) for a c
and a double n for an m. Such errors abound.
Fourth, the Stadaconan sounds were filtered through the phonetic
expectations of a speaker of French, a fact that led to many inevitable
distortions of what was actually heard. Fifth, various changes in pronun-
ciation were taking place in the French language at the time, and
French orthography had not become stabilized. For example, for at
least some French speakers the sound represented earlier by the letter s
after a vowel had been replaced by a lengthening of the vowel, but the s
was still being used as an indication of the lengthening, as in teste. Later
the s was replaced by a circumflex accent over the lengthened vowel, as
in tete. This orthographic situation may help to explain spellings like
anondasco for 'legs' in the first vocabulary, a spelling that makes sense
only if the s marked a lengthening of the preceding a rather than an
actual s sound. The word can be reconstructed as having sounded some-
thing like anQdd-kQ..
Sixth, there are various examples of miscommunication between the
elicitor of the words and his source (Mithun 1982, 231-3). The elicitor
asked for the word for 'salmon' but was given the word for 'pot,' pre-
sumably because he was pointing to a salmon in a pot. He asked for the
word for 'bronze' but was given the word for 'ring,' presumably because
he was pointing to a bronze ring.
Finally, as mentioned above, it is possible that more than one lan-
guage or dialect was included in the second vocabulary. Scholars have
sometimes tried to equate the language of the Cartier vocabularies with
one or another of the Iroquoian languages about which more is known
- for example, with Huron (Robinson 1948; Barbeau 1961), Mohawk
(Cuoq 1869), and even Tuscarora (Beaugrand-Champagne 1937, 99-
104, 108-14). The most plausible hypothesis is that the vocabularies rep-
resent for the most part the language of Stadacona, which was closely
related to, but distinct from, other Iroquoian languages in the area. But
Early European Encounters with Iroquoian Languages 255
as the most recent study of this question concludes, the vocabularies 'do
not represent a single, unified language, but, rather, contain several dif-
ferent Iroquoian languages or dialects' (Mithun 1982, 242). These
admixtures may have included the dialects of the towns of Achelacy and
Hochelaga further up the St Lawrence, and perhaps also a dialect of
Huron.
The compiler or compilers of these vocabularies provided short lists
of words and a few phrases such as 'The smoke hurts my eyes' (Carder
1924, 245), 'Give me a drink,' 'Give me breakfast,' 'Give me supper,' and
'Let's go to bed' (243), which may suggest something about the circum-
stances in which these items were collected. Perhaps, too, they hint that
some practical use of the language was foreseen. There was no discus-
sion of either the sounds or the grammar of the language, which may
have been viewed as one more example of the exotic traits of its users,
supplementing other curiosities that were described in the accounts
themselves.
After dinner I used to read some little book I had brought or else write. I
carefully noted the words of the language I was learning and made lists of
them which I used to study and repeat to my savages, who enjoyed it and
helped me to perfect myself at it, using a very good method. They would
often say to me, 'AuieV (instead of Gabriel which they could not
pronounce because of the letter B which does not occur at all in their
language, any more than the other labial letters), Assehoua, Agnonra, and
Seatonqua, 'Gabriel, take your pen and write.' Then they would explain as
best they could what I wanted to learn from them. And as sometimes they
could not make me understand their conceptions they would explain them
to me by figures, similitudes, and external demonstrations, sometimes in
speech, and sometimes with a stick, tracing the object on the ground as
best they could, or by a movement of the body. (Sagard [1632] 1939, 73)
Sagard observed more than individual words and phrases, and was
sensitive to differences in conversational style. 'They speak very compos-
edly as though desirous of being fully understood,' he wrote, 'and pause
of a sudden to reflect for a considerable space of time, then resume
their speech. This restraint of theirs leads them to call Frenchmen
women, because they are too hasty and excited in their movements and
speak all together and interrupt one another' (Sagard [1632] 1939,
140).
Sagard's dictionary is a fascinating record of the Huron language as it
was spoken at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His purpose
was stated clearly on the tide page: 'Dictionary of the Huron Language:
necessary for those who have no knowledge of it, and need to deal with
the savages of that country.' He opened the dictionary with an introduc-
tion in which he pointed out that each Native nation had its own way of
speaking, a situation he blamed on the presumption of those who built
the tower of Babel. There were even, he said, dialect differences among
the Huron themselves. He was the first to point out that Iroquoian
words often express complex thoughts that have to be translated with
entire sentences in French (Sagard i632b, 3-7). Because Iroquoian
verbs can contain a variety of different prefixes and a verb root can be
inflected in hundreds of different ways, it is difficult even today to
decide on the best format for a dictionary of any Iroquoian language.
Sagard's practical solution was to provide, not an alphabetical list of
words, but a collection of meaning categories with examples relevant to
each category. Thus, under the heading 'go' (alter, partir) he included
entries such as 'Where are you going?' 'Goodbye, I'm leaving,' 'I'm leav-
ing tomorrow morning,' and 'Let's go together' (Sagard i632b, a vi'~ v ).
The last category in the dictionary is Yoscaha, the name of the good twin
in the Iroquois creation myth (Tooker [1964] 1991, 151). Sagard seems
to have mixed Huron with Christian theology, equating the Huron cre-
ator Yoscaha with the Christian God, as the Huron's indirect descen-
dants the Wyandots continued to do into the present century (Barbeau
!9i5> 49. 5 1 )- Included in this section were sentences like 'The abode of
Yoscaha is far from here,' as well as 'The abode of the Devil is under the
earth.' Souls were said to 'dance with Ataensique,' the grandmother of
Yoscaha (Sagard i632b, i viiir~v).
The dictionary gives us numerous clues to specific changes that had
taken place in the sounds of Huron. For example, the word for 'town'
(ville) was given as andata (Sagard i632b, i vii'). At first glance this word
may not look much like the Stadaconan word with the same meaning,
258 Wallace Chafe
There was still another problem here: 'Now in connection with this
name Father I must not forget the difficulty there is in teaching to say
Our Father who art in Heaven, to those who have none on earth; to speak
to them of the dead whom they have loved, is to insult them. A woman,
whose mother had died a short time before, almost lost her desire to be
baptized because the command, Thou shalt honor thy Father and thy
Mother, had been inadvertently quoted to her' (JR 10: 118, 121). Thus we
know that the Huron possessed a taboo against uttering the name of a
deceased relative.
Like Sagard, Brebeuf recognized that the structure of Huron words
was marvellously complex. He noticed 'that they vary their tenses in as
many ways as did the Greeks; their numbers also, - besides that the first
person, of both the dual number and the plural, is, moreover, double;
thus to say 'we set out, thou and I,' we must say kiarascwa, and to say 'we
set out, he and I,' aiarascwa. Likewise in the plural, 'we, several of us, set
out,' awarascwa; 'we, together, set out,' cwarascwd (JR 10: 120-1). What
Brebeuf had noticed was that the Huron did not distinguish just
between singular and plural, but between singular, dual, and plural.
Beyond that, however, they distinguished between so-called inclusive
and exclusive first persons - that is, whether 'we' included or excluded
the person spoken to - something even classical Greek did not do,
Brebeuf, in short, was as interested as Sagard in the practical and
social dimensions of the language, but perhaps because of his Jesuit
training he explored the structure of Huron in ways that Sagard had
not. The Huron who eventually settled at Lorette, years after the devas-
tating Iroquois attacks, retained their language well into the nineteenth
century. The Jesuit missionaries among them maintained their lively
interest in the language, building through the years extensive dictionar-
ies and grammars. These materials show an increasingly sophisticated
understanding of the nature of the language, towards which Brebeuf
had led the way.
Perhaps, with what we may think now is our superior knowledge and
experience, we in this century can take a more detached perspective on
these earliest encounters, interpreting them as tentative steps in the
direction of cross-cultural understanding. First came the Cartier voyag-
ers, for whom it was only natural to view Native languages and all the
other customs of its speakers as simply strange. When the compassion-
ate and perceptive Sagard had been able to share his life with the
Hurons for a while, he came to appreciate both their good and bad
Early European Encounters with Iroquoian Languages 261
qualities and could compare them and their language not at all
unfavourably with the French. Brebeuf, living much longer among them
and better trained as a linguist, understood in more specific detail the
intricacies of both their language and their culture. In the centuries
since then, other linguists have come to appreciate more and more of
the richness of these and other Native languages, along with the cul-
tures of which they are or were a part. It would be hard to deny, how-
ever, that even today we maintain our preconceptions of what other
languages and cultures are or should be like, having replaced the reli-
gions of Sagard and Brebeuf with the theories of academia.
NOTES
Among 'first contact' events in the Americas, the voyages of Martin Fro-
bisher stand out as one of the most extensively documented of early
exploration ventures. Few other voyages can claim so many narratives
(Best, Ellis, Fenton, Hall, Settle, Lok, and others), and some (including
Best's and Fenton's accounts), provide alternative perspectives on the
same events. Few other exploration narratives deal with events in such a
circumscribed geographic locus, the environs of outer Frobisher Bay.
Forget for the moment that we did not know the exact location until
nearly three hundred years after the fact, as Helen Wallis (1984) has
pointed out. Frobisher historians have benefited from an unusual
instance of historical preservation: the bankruptcy proceedings follow-
ing die Cathay Company's economic failure, which produced the most
detailed financial records of any early expedition (Shammas 1975;
McDermott 1984). From this welter has emerged a remarkable record of
England's first venture into the New World, and to a region - Frobisher
Bay - that would not be revisited by Europeans on a sustained basis for
nearly three hundred years (see Symons, 1999).
In recent years, historians have become accustomed to utilizing new
sources that greatly expand the 'voices' of historical evidence. Neverthe-
less, studies of early exploration of the New World remain constrained
by the accounts of the principal European observers. WThile historians
long ago uncovered the most important documents describing these
ventures, and now have also explored much of their social, economic,
political, and biographical underpinnings, we remain substantially igno-
rant about many aspects of these pioneering enterprises. Much of what
we know or can learn lies in the archives and libraries of the European
actors, but these sources are silent on crucial aspects of these ventures
Exploring the Archaeology of Early European-Inuit Contact 263
6 The Frobisher site research area: (i) Baffin Land in relation to England and
(ii) the location of Kodlunarn Island and Kamaiyuk.
relating to Native peoples and their relations with Europeans. The Meta
Incognita research project, in which the authors of this article have all
been involved, was designed to bring the resources of scientific study to
bear on a sixteenth-century event that had generated ample historical
records, but where the scientific record invited fuller investigation.
Our research program emerged from a thirty-year-old riddle that was
resolved by a surprise discovery at the Smithsonian Institution in 1964.
Curator Wilcomb Washburn happened upon an artefact that had been
presented to the Smithsonian in the mid-i86os by American explorer/
journalist Charles Francis Hall (1865, 1866). Hall had found a site
known to the Inuit as 'Kodlunarn' (White Man's Island) at the eastern
entrance to Frobisher's Bay (see figure 6, i-ii) with mining trenches,
architectural remains, and artefacts. The Inuit insisted to Hall that these
events had transpired at Kodlunarn Island many generations ago rather
than in recent decades, and that the qallunat (white men) had come
first in two ships, 'then two or three, then many - very many vessels.'
264 Reginald Auger et al.
This convinced Hall (1865, 246-7) that he had identified the long-lost
mines on Frobisher's Countess of Warwick Island (Kodlunarn Island).
However, when Vilhjalmur Stcfansson, compiling his edition of the Fro-
bisher voyages (Best [1578] 1938), consulted the Royal Geographical
Society and the Smithsonian Institution on the whereabouts of Hall's
collections, both institutions informed him that the collections were no
longer available, having been 'mislaid' (Sayre et al. 1982, 442-3; Wash-
burn 1993). The artefact that Washburn rediscovered was an iron
'bloom' (a mass of smelted iron ore) originally collected by Hall, and
the archaeometallurgical investigation of its properties and history
became our starting point.
From an archaeological point of view, the Frobisher records already
provide a rare window on the first encounters between Europeans and
Inuit in post-Viking times. The official accounts of the 1576, 1577, and
1578 voyages contain descriptions of Inuit life and customs, housing,
behaviour; of hostage-taking on both sides; of skirmishes between the
English and Inuit; and of details of the establishment of shore camps,
mines, and general operations (Best [1578] 1867; [1578] 1938). Edward
Fenton's journal contains valuable details of the 1578 voyage and min-
ing activities, including operations at Kodlunarn Island. The fate of the
Inuit hostages can be traced to their graves in England (Cheshire et al.
1980), while the disappearance and presumed loss of a group of five sail-
ors and the ship's boat in 1576 leads to a more ambiguous conclusion.
In short, the ethnographic detail provided in these and other Frobisher
accounts (Sturtevant and Quinn 1987), and from the John White illus-
trations, is remarkable for its day. Not until Zorgdrager's 1720 descrip-
tions of Greenland Inuit, and Parry's of people in northern Hudson Bay
in the 18205, are Frobisher's descriptions of Inuit people and culture
substantially enhanced. These and other aspects of the Frobisher voy-
ages have been under investigation since 1981 as part of an archaeologi-
cal investigation of the Frobisher voyages themselves, and their impact
on Inuit cultures of the east Baffin region (Fitzhugh and Olin 1993). In
this essay we present a cross-section of the results so far obtained, to illu-
minate the context of exchange between the Inuit and the English
towards the end of the Renaissance.
of Frobisher Bay, two small ice caps cover the eastern end of the Meta
Incognita peninsula; on the north side (Hall's Peninsula), ice and snow
usually disappear during the summer months. The average July temper-
ature is below 8° C, with annual precipitation of around 400 mm (Jacobs
et al. 1985). Permanently frozen ground underlies a thin layer of soil
that thaws during the summer months. This low arctic tundra zone
(Jacobs 1988) is treeless and consists of many species of sedges, grasses,
herbs, mosses, heath plants, and dwarf shrubs. Since spring is late and
summer is short, starting in mid-June one can see willow catkins unfold
their flowers, the flora burst into a mosaic of colours, and fields grow
purple with fireweed. By mid-August crowberries and blueberries are
ripe, and the hills are covered with red and yellow fall foliage of the
bearberry plant.
Two major climatic changes, the Medieval Optimum (ca AD 1250-
1500) and the Little Ice Age (ca AD 1600-1800), have influenced the
outer Frobisher Bay environment during the latest period of the
Holocene (Grove 1988; Houghton, Callander, and Varney 1992). Both
the medieval climate warming and the later cooler conditions would
have had direct impacts on the resources available to the Inuit both
from the sea and the land. Frobisher, like other European explorers,
would have also felt the impact of climatic conditions corresponding
with the beginning of the Little Ice Age as he and his fleet negotiated
the sea ice in Davis Strait and the coastal waters off Frobisher Bay. Mem-
bers of our research program have sought to reconstruct local manifes-
tations of these global climatic episodes from animal and plant remains
preserved in the archaeological record as well as from palaeoclimatic
proxies preserved in glacier ice, lake sediments, and tree rings.
Inuit populations inhabiting the eastern Arctic have a cultural history
that began over four thousand years ago when the first Palaeo-Eskimo
immigrated from the western Arctic (Damas 1984; Maxwell 1985). About
AD 1000, people of the Thule culture, the direct ancestors of the Inuit,
migrated to the eastern Arctic. Throughout this period, contact be-
tween the Inuit and other groups such as the Dorset people as well as
interactions with an unpredictable physical environment and internal
changes within their own society attest to a successful adaptation to their
new environment. The last five hundred years represent the most recent
part of this continuum, one that marks the entrance and participation
of Inuit peoples in the world economy. The influx of commodities and
new technologies created different needs for the Inuit, and required
Inuit materials and labour to be traded in exchange, but the degree to
266 Reginald Auger et al.
which the Inuit participated in this global economy is still a subject for
discussion.
The settlement patterns and house structures of the sixteenth-century
Inuit did not differ substantially from those of their ancestors. But in the
nineteenth century, following the Little Ice Age, semi-subterranean sod
and stone-walled structures were replaced by qarmat (winterized tents)
on land and by snow houses on the ice. During the summer, light seal-
skin tent camps were located near Arctic char fishing areas. In the fall,
people lived in qarmat and hunted caribou and seals, and in the winter
they gathered in large snow-house villages on land or on the sea ice and
hunted walrus, seal, polar bear and also caribou (Morrison 1983;
McGhee ig84a; Maxwell 1985; McCartney and Savelle 1985; Stenton
1987; Park 1988, 1997)-
The English mounted a second expedition the next year with the sole
purpose of exploring for new sources of the rock they had collected;
reaching China was no longer a consideration of the expedition. The
second voyage was made with three ships and a complement of 145 per-
sons, of whom eight were miners and three were assayers. The Saxon-
trained Jonas Shutz, who was to become chief technologist for the
group in London, was master assayer. Frobisher initially explored a
place called Beare Sound on the northeast coast of Frobisher Bay. Here
they found a rock similar to the discovery of the previous year, but his
crew was forced to depart because of the danger from drifting pack ice.
The flotilla then sailed further up Frobisher Bay and discovered a
sound, which they named Countess of Warwick Sound. They anchored
off a tiny island with veins of the sought-after mineral, and named it
Countess of Warwick Island.
The island (see figures 7 and 9) - barely more than a barren eight-
hectare rock - not only yielded the black ore, but also provided a
safe harbour and some protection for Frobisher's exposed crew from
Exploring the Archaeology of Early European-Inuit Contact 269
8 Ship's trench (1577 mine); excavation of the deposit left there by the 1578
Frobisher expedition.
Archaeological Investigations
The Elizabethan site at Kodlunarn Island and the coexisting Inuit site at
Kamaiyuk (figures 9 and 10), as well as other Elizabethan and Inuit sites
in Frobisher Bay (Stenton 1987), have now been investigated for several
years (1981, 1990-4) by the Canadian, American, and British research-
ers of the Meta Incognita project. Combining Inuit oral history, written
accounts of the voyages, archival research, and archaeology, this effort
has greatly expanded our knowledge of the history of the Frobisher voy-
ages. In particular, our research has focused on two subjects: the archae-
ology of Kodlunarn Island and other Elizabethan sites in Frobisher Bay,
272 Reginald Auger et al.
10 Sod house at the Inuit site of Kamaiyuk showing interior flooring of rocks
approximately two feet below ground surface; the roof rafters were of whale rib.
What Hall reported from his informants as a reservoir has been iden-
tified as Frobisher's mining trench. Hall stated, 'I soon came across an
excavation, which was probably the commencement of a mine dug by
Frobisher, though the Innuits, judging only from what they saw, called it
a reservoir for fresh water, a quantity of which collected in it at certain
seasons. This excavation was at some distance from the ruins of the
stone houses, and was eighty-eight feet long and six feet deep' (Hall
1865, 389). The Inuit interpretation of this feature results from the fact
that water accumulates in it during spring runoff. Although the prime
reason for the trench was undoubtedly mineral extraction, the Inuit
suggestion that it was a water reservoir is also reasonable, since the melt-
ing of permafrost in summer allows for the accumulation of water in the
depression. Mining activities are attested by the black ore spoil found
particularly at the south end of the reservoir. The depression measures
twenty-five metres long by four metres wide. In all likelihood, since
water is not readily available on the island another man-made feature
discovered on the west side of the hilltop house may be a well.
An eroded promontory on the east side of the island is probably the
site of a defensive feature described by George Best in 1577: 'On
Thurseday, the ninth of August, we beganne to make a small fort for our
defence in the Countesse Hand, and entrenched a corner of a cliffe,
which on thre parts like a wall of good heygth was compassed and well
fenced with the sea, and we finished the rest with caskes of earth to good
purpose, and this was called Bestes Bulwarke' (Best [1578] 1867, 148).
Erosion has eliminated any original Frobisher traces in this area as well
as most of the promontory.
What Hall terms the 'ship's trench' was actually first excavated as a
mine in 1577; most of our excavation effort has been spent testing this
feature. Rock samples from this trench were identical with those discov-
ered at Dartford (Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell 1994, 132). In 1578
the trench was used as a place to cache excess food, timber, and other
dry goods intended for the following year. Physically, this feature is a V--
shaped cut through the ledges on the north shore of the island that
measures twenty-six metres long by six metres wide at the shoreline. In
1993 a nine-square-metre excavation unit was begun, and was enlarged
in 1994 to an area of eighteen square metres. Excavation reached a
depth of one metre below the surface, with permafrost encountered at
O.6 m. Analysis of the profile shows the presence of wood chips and shav-
ings and other evidence of wood working above the layer in which
goods were buried by the 1578 departing expedition. Should this inter-
Exploring the Archaeology of Early European-Inuit Contact 275
So convincing was Hall's discovery that for more than a century few
scholars questioned his interpretation that Kodlunarn was the site of
Frobisher's lost mines. However, in 1980 radiocarbon assays on the
Smithsonian iron bloom collected by Hall and newly identified by Wash-
burn produced two dates (AD 1230-1400, 1160-1280) that suggested
Norse rather than Frobisher origin. Several scholars associated with the
bloom study (Sayre et al. 1982; Harbottle, Cresswell, and Stoenner 1993)
have maintained that the radiocarbon assays and bloom typology indi-
cate an early medieval age for these unusual artefacts. These views have
since been amplified by historical studies (e.g., Seaver 1996) that have
questioned the general view that Norse contacts in the New World west
of Greenland were, in general, rare events. But in 1981 a Smithsonian
field investigation recovered wood and charcoal samples from Kodlu-
narn Island structures associated with artefacts that we attributed to Fro-
bisher. The wood and charcoal samples dated to the Frobisher period
and were identified as European hardwoods; thus they could not have
originated from local driftwood or Scandinavian sources (Laeyendecker
1993)- Three new iron blooms were also recovered the same year from
Kodlunarn, and although questions about their date and origin have not
been completely answered, the consensus is that they seemingly were
carried as ship ballast by the Frobisher party (Fitzhugh 1997). In our
view, these peculiar artefacts are those described in the Frobisher finan-
cial records as 'paid for vc. yronstones of Russia at iiij pece beinge vj
tones for balliste for the Gabriell bought of master Patrik & R. Hopton'
(McDermott 1984, 144) and which were off-loaded on Kodlunarn for the
purpose of making room for ore cargo (Fitzhugh I993b, 236). Though it
has been suggested that the blooms had been exposed to contamination
by ancient carbon introduced during smithing activities (Unglik 1993),
radiocarbon assays from carbon extracted from the interior of the
blooms, remote from external contamination, are found to date roughly
to the Elizabethan period (Fitzhugh I993b, 232-4). Despite ambiguities
and the need for further study of the three new Frobisher blooms, our
research places these artefacts securely in a Frobisher context, from all
points of evidence: archaeological context, typology, metallurgy, and
dating.
Exploring the Archaeology of Early European-Inuit Contact 277
One of the questions emerging from this new archaeological work con-
cerns the fate of the five sailors who, according to the accounts of the
1576 voyage, were taken captive by the Inuit. In 1577, expedition mem-
bers believed they had found evidence of the lost sailors in York Sound
on the other side of the bay from the place where they had been taken
captive. Wrote Best, 'They also beheld (to their greatest marvaile) a
dublet of canvas, made after the Englishe fashion, a shirt, a girdle,
three shoes for contrarie feete and of unequal bignesse, which they well
conjectured to be the apparell of our five poore countriemen whiche
were intercepted the laste yeare by these countrie people, aboute fiftye
leagues from this place further within the straightes' (Best [1578] 1867,
140-1). Although they could not locate their lost sailors, Captain Yorke
left them a message to signal his whereabouts. Yet oral tradition
recorded among the Inuit in 1860-1 by Hall (1865) brings to light
another version of the 'lost sailors' incident. As it was reported to Hall,
a group of white men were abandoned in Frobisher Bay; the Inuit
helped them survive the following winter; and in the spring they built a
ship (presumably from timbers cached by Frobisher at Countess of
Warwick Island). Inuit history tells that the sailors tried to sail away
before the ice had cleared, and perished in a storm. Hall's informants,
when asked how they knew this story, replied, 'all the old Innuits said
so' (Hall 1865,390).
It is unclear whether these accounts relate to the same incident or to
separate ones. English sources speak of a single group of lost sailors, the
group lost in the 1576 incident. It might be reasonable to believe that
the Inuit account tells another version of this incident, but there are dif-
ficulties with such an attribution. Since Frobisher did not discover Kod-
lunarn Island until 1577, the Inuit account of the lost sailors must follow
the final departure of the Frobisher party in September 1578; Frobisher
never finds evidence of his 1576 men having been on Kodlunarn, which,
given the explicit details of the Inuit account, was certainly the location
of the event they are describing. Susan Rowley has studied the Inuit
responses to Hall's questions and finds their responses consistent and
unelaborated; when they did not know an answer they responded that
they had never heard of it. 'Certainly the Inuit believed they were trans-
mitting factual information to Hall - information they had received
from their parents who in turn had received it from their parents'
(Rowley 1993, 35). It is possible, however, that the differing oral and
278 Reginald Auger et al.
Frobisher and his group met with Inuit on several occasions, and the ini-
tial encounters were positive; the Englishmen had even brought a few
items for trade. Sometimes Inuit came on board to trade, and after sev-
eral courteous meetings, trust was established on both sides. The Inuit
spent time explaining the names and functions of many items of their
culture. However, relations irretrievably broke down in 1576 after five of
the ships' men disappeared on shore. In revenge, an Inuk was taken
hostage and brought back to England. The on-going conflict culmi-
nated in the Bloody Point battle in 1577, when several Inuit were killed
and a young woman and child were taken prisoner and brought to
England (Cheshire et al. 1980; Sturtevant and Quinn 1987). During the
third year, the Inuit deliberately avoided the English, and there was very
little direct contact between the two peoples.
As is common among early economic encounters, the European
goods traded to the Inuit were a combination of strictly utilitarian and
more frivolous items, among them bells, pins, needles, mirrors, and
knives. There are recorded instances of direct trading and gift giving,
and indirect trade, in the form of items left in abandoned kayaks or
tents. As we have seen, during the final season, Frobisher left many
items 'to allure those brutish and uncivil people to courtesy' in the little
house he had built on the summit of Kodlunarn. Moreover, anticipating
their own return, the English buried timber, barrels of provisions, and
other things in the ship's trench. More Elizabethan goods were made
available through outright abandonment. Towards the end of the sec-
ond voyage, we read 'it was now good time to leave; for, as the men were
wel wearied, so their shoes and clothes were well worne, their baskets
bottoms torne out, their tooles broken and the shippes reasonably well
filled' (Best [1578] 1867, 152). Traces of the Elizabethan presence in
Frobisher Bay have now been found in the artefact collections at five
Inuit sites: fragments of green-glazed stove tile, bits of clay roof tile,
English flint and coal, iron, wood, glass beads, and a small silver knife
blade.
Direct trade with the Elizabethans had little significant long-term
effect on Inuit culture. The impact of the Elizabethan expeditions lies
in the fact that they provide new raw materials (wood, iron, coal, brick,
tile) as sources for the Inuit. Significantly, however, certain iron objects,
notably blooms, were neither consistently collected nor exploited as a
source of iron, either because they were not interpreted as such or
Exploring the Archaeology of Early European-Inuit Contact 281
because the Inuit did not have the technology to extract the metal from
these blooms (Ehrenreich and Wayman 1993, 146).
Indeed, if one of the problems with interpreting sixteenth-century
Inuit-European interaction lies in the paucity of material evidence
recovered, this is especially true of metal items, which were highly val-
ued, heavily reused, and rapidly corroded. The issue is complicated by
the extensive use by the Inuit of deposits of meteoric iron in the Arctic
prior to European contact. In fact, McGhee (i984b) has called the
Thule period preceding contact, an 'iron age' culture, this based on its
widespread presence. McCartney's term, 'epi-metallurgy,' is more pre-
cise, however, since it denotes dependency on, rather than the produc-
tion of metal. Epi-metallurgy is technologically an intermediate phase
between no metal use and abundant metal use, and is marked by careful
curation and manufacture of miniaturized tools. Once more-routine
European contact was established beginning in the mid-nineteenth
century, the steady flow of manufactured metal goods into Inuit soci-
ety required less need for careful curation of iron or production of
miniaturized cutting/grooving/scraping blades (McCartney 1991, 29).
McCartney (1991) has suggested that the rate of Thule metal use accel-
erated after AD 1600, owing to the great 'influx' of metal from the Fro-
bisher expeditions and those that followed.
The Meta Incognita project considered this hypothesis by looking at
prehistoric and sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Thule Inuit artefacts
from three sites in Frobisher Bay for evidence of metal use (Gullason,
!999)- The most useful line of evidence, blade slot width, indicated that
tool slots containing metal blades general measured less than three mil-
limetres wide, while those containing slate blades were over four millime-
tres wide. Slot widths between three and four millimetres could have held
either material. Although tool function was found to have a greater influ-
ence on the blade slot width than the actual material of the blade, blade
slot width strongly confirmed the presence of metal use in prehistoric
contexts. However, contrary to McCartney's prediction, there appears to
have been a dedinein metal use after 1600, compared to prehistoric times.
It appears that, despite the proximity of the Frobisher base camp and its
supply of metal, much less metal was used in the initial contact period
than in precontact times. Moveover, the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, the period of indirect middleman contact from ship-based trade in
Hudson Strait, showed a frequency of metal-edged tools nearly identical
to that of the precontact period. In fact, the real increase in metal use did
not occur at the AD 1600 watershed but well after AD 1850 (Gullason 1999).
282 Reginald Auger et al.
bisher voyages, and for nearly a century afterward, made most of their
tools in the traditional way using driftwood. Here again we find that the
model that suggests that European methods quickly replaced Native
practices is not well supported by existing evidence.
crucial era in history. Whether or not the impacts of contact were im-
mediately registered on the Inuit or the English is immaterial. There is
much to learn, but only with the aid of new approaches and research
programs that cross not only ethnic and political boundaries but aca-
demic and public ones as well. Though these approaches are still exper-
imental, the benefits of multivocal research are beginning to take root.
NOTE
l This paper has been assembled by Dosia Laeyendecker and Reginald Auger
from individual paper presentations by all of the authors.
Sir William Phips and the Decentring of
Empire in Northeastern North America,
1690-1694
Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid
ing the hostilities that resulted in the expulsion of Phips and his family.
These Indianes in these parts did never Apeare dissatisfied untill their
Armes wear Taken Away,' wrote the Pemaquid fur trader Thomas Gard-
ner to Governor John Leverett in September 1675, adding that 'I do not
find by Any thing I Can discerne that the Indianes East of us ar in the
least our Ennimies' (Maine Historical Soc. 1869-1916, 6: 92; Baker 1986,
184-200). In a region where the balance of coexistence was always deli-
cate and trust always fragile, neglect of the need for intercultural rela-
tionships to be nourished was often all that was required to prompt a
phase of hostility.
To be sure, Sir William Phips's next interaction with the non-English
peoples of the northeast initially showed no overt sign of conciliation.
During the late 16805, Phips had gained wealth and a knighthood
through his persistent and ultimately successful effort to find and sal-
vage the cargo of a sunken Spanish treasure galleon off the coast of His-
pianola. He had returned to New England shortly after the English
Revolution of 1688, after a prolonged absence in England and the Car-
ibbean that had been broken since 1683 only by two short sojourns in
Boston. Cultivated by both Increase and Cotton Mather, Phips eventu-
ally made a profession of faith that led to his admission on 23 March
1690 to membership of the younger Mather's North Church in Boston
(Mather [1702] 1977, 295-8). On the previous day, he had accepted the
command of a seaborne expedition against Acadia, precipitated not
only by the military setbacks encountered by the English at the hands of
the Wabanaki, with suspected French encouragement from Port-Royal,
but also by the news of successful French and Aboriginal raids on
Schenectady, New York, and Salmon Falls, New Hampshire. Phips's fleet
of seven vessels proceeded quickly to Port-Royal. There, Phips per-
suaded a demoralized governor, Louis-Alexandre Des Friches de
Meneval, to surrender on terms that were promptly broken by English
plundering of the Acadian settlement and its church.8
Notwithstanding the failure of Phips's next expedition - to Quebec
later in 1690 - the French imperial perspective would henceforward cast
him as a dangerous and vindictive foe. Meneval's complaints that Phips
had personally harassed him, even while Meneval was imprisoned in
New England, were relayed to England with a formal French protest and
were sufficient to produce a mild but distinct reprimand at the level of
the cabinet council: 'Sir William Phips to be spoke with about his usage
of the Governor of Port-royal.' Following Phips's arrival in New England
as governor in 1692, Governor Frontenac of New France commented
292 Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid
that 'Phipps still intends to bend his efforts to come and visit us again
next year, which obliges me to take all precautions I can to give him a
good reception.'9
Yet, at Port-Royal in 1690, Phips left the custody of the English claim
to Nova Scotia in the hands of a council of Acadian inhabitants. The
president of the Acadian council was to be Charles La Tourasse, for-
merly a sergeant in the French garrison. Although La Tourasse was
described in his oath of office as appointed only by Phips and his advi-
sors, the five councillors were purportedly 'chosen by the Inhabitants of
port-Royal, L'Accadie or Nova-scotia ..., which choice is approved by the
Honourable Sr. William Phipps Knight..., with the advice of his Council.'
An oath of allegiance was administered to an unspecified number of the
residents of Port-Royal, and Phips made a parting gift to the president
and council of a list of instructions that enjoined them to report to the
Massachusetts governor 'from time to time how Matters are with you."0
The arrangement suffered an early setback, however, when a new
French commandant, Joseph Robinau de Villebon, removed the French
military headquarters to Fort Naxouat, in the valley of the St John River,
and there established a powerful centre of coordination between Native
and French military efforts against New England. The president of
Phips's Acadian council then quickly put himself under Villebon's
orders.'l
Phips encountered a further setback, as well as vociferous criticism,
when he led the expensive and disastrous attempt on Canada later in
1690. He defended himself effectively in London, however, and gained
powerful support. Crucial to this process were two of the Massachusetts
agents in England, Increase Mather and Sir Henry Ashurst. Mather
could offer his extensive network of relationships with dissenting clergy
and dissenting merchants in London and elsewhere, while Ashurst - a
Whig member of Parliament and a London alderman of long standing -
was the leading member of London's pre-eminent Presbyterian mer-
chant family. The promise of new North American trade was central to
their support of Ashurst and other City merchants.12
Thus Increase Mather's urging, in a pamphlet drafted in late March
1691 - at Ashurst's house and with Phips's participation - that a second
attempt should be mounted on Canada: 'His Majesties Subjects,' he
reminded his readers in language that associated economic advantage
with direct imperial control, 'have lately reduced the French in Acady
unto Obedience to the Crown of England: If the like should be done in
Canada, that would be worth Millions to the English Crown and Nation'
Sir William Phips and the Decentring of Empire 293
too varied and complex for that. Rather, the necessity for Phips to make
accommodations with Acadian economic and political leaders - who
faced pressures also from French imperial officials, and had experience
in manoeuvring among ambiguities - illustrated the limitations on the
English sphere of activity. The fall of Pemaquid was a visible setback, but
the phenomenon from which Boudrot's role arose was the decentring
effect on English imperial influence that stemmed from the inde-
pendent goals and activities of Acadians on whom Phips necessarily
depended for commercial and strategic reasons.
By the summer of the year after Phips's death, therefore, the persis-
tence of trading contacts between the Acadians and New England could
not obscure the reality that allegiance had proved to be an easier con-
cept to put down on paper than to induce in the lived experience of
non-English peoples. Phips's defence in 1693 of the Englishness of Abra-
ham Boudrot suggested a naivety of approach, even though in all likeli-
hood Boudrot remained the only contemporary fully able to savour its
irony. The renewal of hostilities with the Wabanaki in 1694 led to a strik-
ing acknowledgment of Native military power by Phips's successor, the
Earl of Bellomont, who reported ruefully to London in 1700 that any-
general alliance of northeastern Aboriginal peoples would be sufficient
'in a short time to drive us quite out of this Continent.' 20 It also sig-
nalled the failure of Phips's plans for greater Massachusetts, plans that
were being further undermined by the espionage activities of Boudrot,
and would be conclusively and conspicuously ruined after the gover-
nor's death by the fall of Fort William Henry.
In a wider imperial context, Phips's failure was not as clear-cut, either
in straightforward military terms or in terms of the geopolitical realities
facing English colonial activity. The military question was simple
enough: Phips never ceased to urge the conquest of Canada, not only as
being 'worth Millions to the Englishe Nation' but also as the sole ulti-
mate source of strategic security for Massachusetts.27 Phips was aware
that arrangements made with either Acadians or Wabanaki had an
inherent element of instability as long as imperial rivalries persisted
between Canada and New England. Thus, the failure of those arrange-
ments must be understood in the context that they were intended to be
followed by a further military thrust, which did not materialize.
More generally, Sir William Phips grappled during the early 16905
with problems that were to become increasingly acute for British imperi-
alism during the eighteenth century. The harnessing together of com-
mercial and strategic objectives, which became so evident following the
Sir William Phips and the Decentring of Empire 299
NOTES
1 Great Britain, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), CO5/858, no. 42(1),
12-13, Deposition of William Hill and Henry Francklyn, 10 September 1694.
2 This dispute is fully explored in Baker and Reid 1998, 223-31.
3 'List of Persons of the French nation admitted into the Colony by the Gover-
nor and Councill,' l February 1691, cited in Drake 1856, 536n; and Bosher
1995. However, for evidence of concern that French spies might have been
Sir William Phips and the Decentring of Empire 301
The essays gathered in this volume demonstrate that the complex his-
tory of the encounter between the Amerindian peoples and the Euro-
pean nations cannot be reduced to two or three formulas, in the way
still attempted not so long ago in textbooks on Canadian history. This is
why the achievement of the essays nevertheless calls for caution when it
comes time to draw conclusions, to develop certain lines of argument,
or to account for the reflections they generate. No afterword can be
exhaustive, but as sociologists we can at least attempt an analysis of the
global significance of these studies.
In doing so, we willingly expose ourselves to the critique of historians
who are apprehensive about grand generalizations. Instead of exploit-
ing the customary ways of thinking about the Renaissance, we have cho-
sen to emphasize those general traits and tendencies of European and
indigenous societies that were in opposition and to illuminate the prin-
cipal paradigms necessary for the understanding of that centuries-long
difference. We follow, in this regard, the tradition of Max Weber, who
constructed an idealized concept of the 'Protestant ethic,' beyond all
the contingencies of the emergence of specific protestantisms, or that of
Marcel Mauss, writing on the Gift, a concept that transcends the infinite
number of actual forms of exchange. It is important to characterize as
broadly as possible what - beginning with the Renaissance - has distin-
guished western Europe from the rest of the world. Similarly, it is just as
important to identify the Renaissance's 'logic' - its basic ethos, core
tenets, central thrust, defining features, and its world historical signifi-
cance - apart from the lengthy processes and conditions of its emer-
two worlds, and not that of two halves of the same world, or of three or
four different worlds. This encounter is thus different from the violent
confrontation of two Australian tribes or from that of two sixteenth-
century European 'nations.' During the age of the great discoveries and
of the formation of colonial empires, Europe's encounter with Africa,
Asia, and America was that of a modern world, emerging from the
Renaissance, with worlds obviously extremely different from each other
but nevertheless all pre-Renaissance and premodern. These worlds have
been referred to by anthropologists and sociologists in various ways that
reflect the same reality, whether Claude Levi-Strauss's famous distinc-
tion between cold and hot societies (Charbonnier [1961] 1969, 37-48)
or, closer in time, Michel Freitag's distinction between societies with
'culture-symbolic' and 'politico-institutional' modes of reproduction
(Freitag 1986).
Traditionally, the Middle Ages appears to us in the form of a society
cemented by deeply rooted traditions (familial, professional, religious,
feudal) and kept together by a cosmological explanation of the world in
which the terrestrial order emulates the celestial order, the carrier of all
knowledge of beings and of things. Doubt is frowned upon, and the
answers to conflicts and tensions are found in the sacred books. Truth
about the world is revealed in the Bible, with the consequence - surpris-
ing from our modern perspective - that all commentary on humankind
and nature takes place within the confines of sacred discourse. That a
rationalist tradition existed in parallel, reaching back into the Greek
classics, should not lead us to downplay the omnipresence and omnipo-
tence of the theological universe. Born of divine irradiation, man, like
all beings, was part of a universe of heavenly forces. The mystic Hilde-
gard of Bingen had clearly depicted the celestial hierarchy by drawing a
series of concentrical circles with man at the centre, followed by the
earth, then around it the seven heavens and lastly the integrative and
subsuming figure of God.
The Renaissance broke with the medieval order and destroyed its
frameworks; the cosmos became a mute and insignificant nature that
man could transform into an instrument of his power (Bloch [1977]
1994, 6-9). Without clearly breaking with theology or the concept of
God, the Renaissance thus brought us closer to humankind, whose exist-
ence would now be conceived as historical - that is, inscribed in time, in
a specific context, and in flux, but also in terms of the consequences of
its own actions. The notions of liberty and free will, as well as that of
humanity's capacity to exercise creative power over nature, upon the
308 Denys Delage and Jean-Philippe Warren
conquer, the duty to work, private property, the 'survival of the fittest,'
and so on. In short, the objectivization of culture has made possible the
desire to eliminate the Other as Other, as well as the desire to be open to
the Other (Simard 1988, 83).
Despite this history, modernity is not definable in a purely negative
form. It is not a cultural matrix without culture; it rather allows society
to explicitly rework cultural symbols and practices that constitute that
society's past and the basis of its future. Modernity adds to the concep-
tion of culture as heritage the conception of culture as project. If the
encounter of both worlds leads Amerindians to a certain cultural relativ-
ism, they are nevertheless not generally inclined to critique their own
culture; they do not distance themselves from it in order to objectivize
it, whereas this is precisely what Europeans do. The transformations in
the Renaissance mode of thought, and the intense cultural variation
resulting from colonial expansion, had prepared Europeans for the
objectivization of cultures, including their own. Europeans, as a result,
have mastered the manipulation of cultures to their own ends.
Two contradictory processes seem to be simultaneously at play here,
which in great part explains why, while cultural relativism facilitates
Western domination, at the same time it prevents Amerindians from
adopting a distance from their own culture. Why was it so difficult for
them to appropriate the Renaissance, and how could they move from
being the object of the Renaissance to its subject in the colonial con-
text? In addition to the fact that Amerindian modes of thought were
quite different from those of the Renaissance, it is historically via the
colonial process that the Renaissance reached Amerindian peoples, and
for that reason the Renaissance is intimately associated with the powers
that sought to enslave them. Both the colonized and the colonizer
see what the other attempts to hide: Amerindians do not formulate a
critique of their own culture but criticize the colonial relationship,
whereas the European blindly does the opposite.
the effort to understand a bygone epoch for itself, in its own logic, while
recognizing that one can do this only from one's own epoch. The same
logic, of course, applies to the study of other cultures. This is what the
studies in this volume have undertaken. Some have insisted on the
necessity of using all sources - not only written archives but also mate-
rial traces from the past revealed by archaeology as well as the memories
available to us through oral traditions. Many have insisted on the broad-
ening of geographical perspectives and diffusion networks, on compari-
sons, and on the interaction between micro and macro perspectives.
Others have proposed ways of reading sources, have proceeded to the
analysis of mental categories, or have proposed to characterize the
nature of the relationship to the Other: negation, segregation, observa-
tion, fusion, juxtaposition, interaction, and so on. These relations have
varied depending on the historical periods, the colonies, and the indi-
viduals involved; they have given rise to conquests, alliances, failures,
discoveries of all sorts, identity transformations, and the definition of
new ways of attaining knowledge. Brother Sagard, for example, built his
Huron dictionary around semantic networks rather than in alphabetical
order; Vaughan promoted the colonization of Newfoundland for strictly
socio-economic reasons rather than for religious motives.
This book is thus part of the recent reorientation of colonial history
that deconstructs the perspective of the actors - indeed, investigates all
actors (not only the colonists) - as well as analyzing the interaction and
influence among and between individual and collective actors, so as to
situate them in their historical contemporaneity. This last aspect is the
most problematic. The various actors, although contemporaries, are
participating in different temporal universes: a merchant's temporality
is not that of a self-sufficient peasant; the more cyclical temporality of
hunter-gatherers is different from the concept of time in colonial socie-
ties. Moreover, even though they are contemporaries, the 'partners' are
not equals. Europeans have three advantages over Amerindians: their
greater epidemiological resistance, their connection to centralized
states, and the Renaissance's legacy of objectification. History must
resist the temptation, in the name of political correctness, to deny these
inequalities and the relations of domination characteristic of past centu-
ries in the name of present-day idealizations.
The issue of biases intrinsic to written sources is related to these
broader questions. It is much easier to write the history of the Jesuits
than that of the Capuchins because the former have left writings behind
them, whereas the latter have not. The same is true for the history of
314 Denys Delage and Jean-Philippe Warren
Conclusion
Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. 1994. Telling the Truth about
History. New York: W.W. Norton.
Arnauld, Antoine. 1690. Seconde denonciation de la nouvelle heresie du pechephilo-
sophique enseigneepar lesjesuites de Dijon. Cologne: heirs of Balthazar d'Egmond.
Arnauld, Antoine, and Sebastien-Joseph du Cambout de Pontchateau. 1689-95.
La Morale pratique desjesuites, representee en plusieurs histoires arrivees dans toutes les
parties du monde. 8 vols. Cologne: Gervimis Quentel.
Arner, Robert D. 1985. The Lost Colony in Literature. Raleigh: North Carolina
Department of Cultural Resources.
Arnold, Charles D. 1994. 'The Importance of Wood in the Early Thule Culture
of the Western Canadian Arctic.' In Threads of Arctic Prehistory: Papers in Honour
of William E. Taylor Jr. Edited by David Morrison, 269-79. Archaeological Sur-
vey of Canada, Mercury Series Paper no. 149. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of
Civilization.
Arnold, David. 1996. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European
Expansion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Arsenault, Bona. 1978. Histoire et genealogie des Acadiens. 6 vols. Montreal: Editions
Lemeac.
Asher, G.M., ed. 1860. Henry Hudson the Navigator. 1st series, no. 27. London:
Hakluyt Society.
Asseline, David. 1874. Les Antiquitez et chroniques de la Ville de Dieppe. 2 vols. Paris:
Maisonneuve; Rouen: Meterie.
Atkinson, Geoffroy. 1927. La Litterature geographique francaise de la Renaissance.
Paris: Auguste Picard. Reprint, 1968. New York: Burt Franklin.
Auregan, Pierre. 1990. 'Nature et litterature a 1'age classique.' In La Nature.
Edited byJean-Christophe Goddard, 81-97. Paris: Integrale.
Avezac-Macaya, Marie-Armand-Pascal de. 1869. Campagne du navire I'Espoir de
Honfleur, 1503-1505. Relation authentique du voyage du Capitaine de Gonnevillt es
nouvelles terres des Indes. Paris: Challamel Aine.
Axtell, James. 1988. 'At the Water's Edge: Trading in the Sixteenth Century.' In
After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, 144-81.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 1986. 'White Legend: The Jesuit Missions in Maryland.' Maryland Historical
Magazine 81, 1 (spring): 1-7.
- 1985. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 1981. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baker, Emerson W. 1989. '"A Scratch with a Bear's Paw": Anglo-Indian Land
Deeds in Early Maine.' Ethnohistory 36, 3: 237-56.
Works Cited 321
Brockliss, Lawrence W.B. 1987. French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brodhead, John R. 1853. History of the State of New York. 2 vols. New York: Harper
and Brothers.
Brotherston, Gordon. 1992. Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas
through Their Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Alexander. 1890. The Genesis of the United States. 2 vols. Boston: Hough-
ton, Mifflin.
Brown, Jennifer S.H. 1980. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian
Country. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Brown, Jennifer S.H., and Elizabeth Vibert, eds. 1996. Reading beyond Words:
Contexts for Native History. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
Bucher, Bernadette. 1977. La Sauvage aux seins pendants. Paris: Hermann.
Buckley, Michael J. 1989. 'Seventeenth-Century French Spirituality: Three
Figures.' In Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern. Edited
by Louis Dupre and Don E. Saliers, 28-68. New York: Crossroad, SCM
Press.
Burke, Peter, 1998. The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Cain, P.J., and A.G. Hopkins. 1993- British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion,
1688—1914. London: Longman.
Callison, Cynthia. 1995. 'Appropriation of Aboriginal Oral Traditions.' University
of British Columbia Law Revieia. Special Issue - Material Culture in Flux: Law
and Policy of Repatriation of Cultural Property. Vol. 29: 162-72.
Campeau, Lucien. 1974. L'Evechede Quebec (1674). Aux origines du premier diocese
erige en Amerique francaise. Quebec: Societe Historique de Quebec.
— ed. 1967—94. Monumenta Novae Franciae. 8 vols. Rome: Monumenta
historica societatis lesu; Quebec: Presses de 1'Universite Laval; Montreal:
Bellarmin.
Carile, Paolo. 1988. 'Nature et culture dans les premieres descriptions de la
Nouvelle France.' In Le Paysage a la Renaissance. Edited by Yves Giraud, 83-90.
Fribourg, Switzerland: Editions universitaires Fribourg Suisse.
- 1987. Lo sguardo impedito: studi sulla relazioni di viaggio in 'Nouvelk-France'e sulla
letteratura popolare. Fasano: Schena.
Carter, Paul. 1995. 'Spatial History.' In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Edited
by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen, 375-7. London:
Routledge.
Cartier, Jacques. 1993. The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Edited by Ramsay Cook.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- 1986. Relations. Edited by Michel Bideaux. Collection Bibliotheque du Nou-
veau Monde. Montreal: Les Presses de 1'Universite de Montreal.
Works Cited 325
- 1924. The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Edited by H.P. Biggar. Publications of the
Public Archives of Canada no. 11. Ottawa: F.A. Acland.
Cassirer, Ernst. [1932] 1970. La Philosophie des luinieres. Paris: Fayard.
- [1927] 1983. Individu et cosmos dans la philosophie de fa Renaissance. Paris:
Editions de Minuit.
Cell, Gillian T. 1969. English Enterprise in Newfoundland 1577-1660. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
- ed. 1982. Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation, 1610-1630.
2nd series, vol. 160. London: Hakluyt Society.
Certeau, Michel de. [1975] 1988. The Writing of History. Translated Tom Conley.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Cervantes, Fernando. 1994. The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in
New Spain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Champlain, Samuel de. 1922-36. The Works of Samuel de Champlain. Edited by
Henry P. Biggar. 6 vols. Toronto: Champlain Society.
- [1619] 1970. Voyages to New France. Translated by Michael Macklem. Ottawa:
Oberon.
- [1604] 1993. Des Sauvages. Edited and annotated by Alain Beaulieu and Real
Ouellet. Montreal: Editions Typo.
Charbonneau, Hubert, and Jacques Legare, eds. 1980. Repertoire des aa.es de bap-
teme, manage, sefndture et des recensements du Qjtebec anden. Vol. 4. Montreal:
Presses de 1'Universite de Montreal.
Charbonnier, Georges. [1961] 1969. Entretiens avec Claude Levi-Strauss. Paris:
Union generale d'editions, Le monde en 10/18.
Charles I. 1633. A Commission for the, well governing of Our people, inhabiting in the.
New-found-land; Or, Traffiquing in Bayes, Creekes, or fresh Rivers there. London:
Robert Barker and the Assigns of John Bill.
Charlevoix, Pierre-Francois-Xavier de. 1744. Histoire el Description Generale de la
Nouvelle France. 6 vols. Paris: Rolin Fils.
~ [1744] IQQ4-Journal d'un voyage fait parordre du mi dans I'Amerique septentroniale.
Edited and annotated by Pierre Berthiaume. Montreal: Presses de 1'Universite
de Montreal.
Chatellier, Louis. 1993. La Religion des pauvres. Les sources du christianisme moderne
XVIe-XIXe siecles. Paris: Aubier.
Chaumonot, Pierre Joseph Marie. 1885. Un Missionaire des Hurons. Autobiographie
du Pere Chaumonot de la Compagnie de Jesus et son complement. Edited by Felix
Martin. Paris: H. Oudin.
Cheshire, Neil, Tony Waldron, Alison Quinn, and David Quinn. 1980.
'Frobisher's Eskimos in England.' Archivaria 1O: 23-50.
Chevalier, Ulysse. 1906. Notre-Dame de Lorette. Etude historique sur I'authentidte de la
santa Casa. Paris: Alphonse Picard.
326 Works Cited
Child, Sirjosiah. 1698. A New Discourse of Trade. 4th ed. London: T. Sowle.
Chinard, Gilbert. 1913. L'Amerique et le reve exotique dans la litteraturefrancaise au
XVIIIe siecle. Paris: Hachette.
Cholenec, Pierre. [1696] 1940. The Life of Katharine Tegakouita (1696).' In
Catholic Church, Sacred Congregation of Rites, The Positio ... on the Introduc-
tion of the Cause for Beatification and Canonization and on the Virtues of the Servant
of God Katharine Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Claude d'Abbeville (Clement Foullon). 16143. Histoire de la mission des Peres
Capucins en I'lsle de Maragnan et terres circonvoysines ou est traicte des singularitez
admirables & des Meurs merueilleuses des Indiens habitans de cepais Avec les missives
et advis qui ont este enuoyez de nouve. Par le R.P. Claude d'Abbeuille Predicateur
Capucin. Paris: Francois Huby.
- i6l4b. Lesfruicts de la mission des reverends peres Capuchins en I'isle de Maragnan.
Lille: Christophe Beys.
- 1612. L'arrivee des Peres Capucins en I'IndeNouvelle, appellee Maraguon, Avec la
reception que leur ontfaict les Sauvages de ce pays, & la conversion d 'iceux a nostre
SaincteFoy. Declaree par une lettre que le R.P. Claude d 'Abbeville Predicateur Capucin,
envoye d Frere Martial, pareillement Capucin, & d M. Foullon ses Freres. Paris: Abra-
ham Le Febvre.
Cliche, Marie-Aimee. 1988. Les Pratiques de devotion en Nouvelle-France. Comporte-
ments populaires et encadrement ecclesial dans le gouvernement de Quebec. Quebec:
Presses de 1'Universite Laval.
Codignola, Luca. I999a. 'Competing Networks: Roman Catholic Ecclesiastics in
French North America, 1610-58.' Canadian Historical Review So, 4: 539-84.
- I99gb. 'Roman Catholic Ecclesiastics in English North America, 1610-58: A
Comparative Assessment.' Canadian Catholic Historical Association, Historical
Studies 65: 107-24.
- 1996. 'The Battle Is Over: Campeau's Monumentavs. Thwaites' Jesuit Relations,
1602-1650.' In Missionaries, Native Americans, and Cultural 'Processes,'
special issue of European Review of Native American Studies 10, 2: 3-10.
- 1995- 'The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British
North America, 1493-1750.' In America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750.
Edited by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, 195-242. Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture.
- 1988. The Coldest Harbour of the Land: Simon Stock and Lord Baltimore's Colony in
Newfoundland, 1621-1649. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Codignola, Luca, and Giovanni Pizzorusso. 1996. 'Les lieux, les methodes et les
sources de 1'expansion missionnaire du Moyen Age au XVIIe siecle: Rome sur
la voie de la centralisation.' In Transferts culturels et metissages Amerique/Europe,
Works Cited 327
XVIe-XXe siecle / Cultural Transfer, America and Europe: 500 Years of Intercultura-
tion. Edited by Laurier Turgeon, Denys Delage, and Real Ouellet, 489-512.
Quebec: Presses de 1'Universite Laval; Paris: L'Harmattan.
Cohen, David William. 1989. 'The Undefining of Oral Tradition.' Ethnohistory
36, i: 9-18-
Columbus, Christopher. 1978. Four Voyages to the New World: Letters and Selected
Documents. Bilingual Edition, translated and edited by R.H. Major, introduc-
tion by John E. Fagg. Gloucester, MA: Corinth Books.
- 1960. The Journal of Christopher Columbus. Translated by Cecil Jane, appendix by
R.A. Skelton. New York: Bramhall House.
Copway, George. 1850. The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojib-
way Nation. London: C. Gilpin.
- 1847. The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), a young
Indian chief of the Ojibwa nation. Philadelphia: Harmstead.
Corboz, Andre. 1980. 'Contribute all'urbanistica palladiana: la pianta di Hoche-
laga (1556) quale progetto del club barbaro.' In Palladio: ein Symposium. Edited
by Kurt W. Forster and Martin Kubelik, 57-69. Rome: Schweizerisches Institut.
Creigh ton, Donald. 1937. The Commercial Empire of the St Lawrence, 1760-1850.
Toronto: Ryerson Press.
Cressy, David. 1987. Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England
and New England in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Cruikshank, Julie. 1996. 'Discovery of Gold on the Klondike: Perspectives from
Oral Tradition.' In Reading beyond Words: Contexts for Native History. Edited by
Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, 433-59. Peterborough, ON: Broad-
view Press.
— 1992. 'Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives: Skookum Jim and
the Discovery of Gold.' Ethnohistory 39, i: 20-41.
- 1991. Reading Voices Dan Dha Ts'edenintth 'e: Oral and Written Interpretation of the
Yukon's Past. Vancouver: Douglas Mclntyre.
- 1990. Life Lived like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders. Vancouver: UBC
Press.
Cummins, Thomas. 1995. 'From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and the Act
of Crosscultural Translation.' In Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in
Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650. Edited by Claire Farago, 152-74. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cuoq, Jean-Andre [N.O., ancien missionaire]. 1869. 'Quels etaient les sauvages
que rencontra Jacques Carder sur les rives du Saint-Laurent?' Annales de philo-
sophic chretienne, 5e serie, 79: 198-204.
Cusick, David. [1827] 1848. Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations. 3rd ed.
328 Works Cited
Lockport, NY: Niagara County Historical Society and Turner and McCollum
Printers.
Cuthand, Stan. 1988. 'On Nelson's Text.' In 'The Orders of the Dreamed. 'George
Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823. Edited by Jennifer
S.H. Brown and Robert Brightman, 189-98. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
Press.
Daigle, Jean. 1976. 'Nos amis les ennemis: les marchands acadiens et le Massa-
chusetts a la fin du lye siecle.' La Societe historique acadienne: les cahiers 7, 4:
161-70.
— 1975. 'Nos amis les ennemis: relations commerciales de 1'Acadie avec le
Massachusetts, 1670-1711.' PhD thesis, University of Maine.
Dainville, Francois de. 1978. L'Education desjesuites. Paris: Minuit.
Damas, David. 1984. 'Copper Eskimo.' In Handbook of the North American Indians,
edited by William Sturtevant. Vol. 5, Arctic, edited by David Damas, 397-414.
Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Darricau, Raymond. 19903. 'Marie (La bienheureuse Vierge).' In Dictionnaire du
Grand Siecle. Edited by Francois Bluche, 971-2. Paris: Fayard.
- l99Ob. 'Voeu de Louis XIII.' In Dictionnaire du Grand Siecle. Edited by Francois
Bluche, 1614-15. Paris: Fayard.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 19953. 'Metissage culturel et meditation historique.' Le
Monde, 18-19June !995> U-
- 1995b. Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
- 1994. 'Iroquois Women, European Women.' In Women, 'Race, 'and Writing
in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker,
243-58, London: Routledge.
Deffain, Dominique. 1995. Un voyageur francais en Nouvelle-France au XVIIe siecle.:
Etude litteraire des relations du pere Paul Lejeune. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
De Krey, Gary Stuart. 1985. A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age
of Party, 1688-1715. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Delage, Denys. 1993. Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North
America, 1600-64. Translated by Jane Brierley. Vancouver: UBC Press. Origi-
nally published as Le Pays renverse: Amerindiens etEuropeens en Amerique du Nord-
Est, 1600-1664. Montreal: Boreal, 1985.
- 1992. 'L'influence des Amerindiens sur les Canadiens et les Francais au temps
de la Nouvelle France.' Lekton 2, 2: 103-91.
Delumeau, Jean. 1989. Rassurer et proteger. Le sentiment de securite dans I'Occident
d'autrefois. Paris: Fayard.
- 1983. LePeche et lapeur. La culpabilisation en Occident (XIIIe-XVHIe siecles). Paris:
Fayard.
Works Ciled 329
Denis, Ferdinand, ed. 1850. UneFete bresilienne celebree a Rouen en 1550 ... Paris:
J. Techener. Reprint, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg Press, 1986.
Denys, Nicolas. [1672] 1908. The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of
North America (Acadia). Translated and edited, with a memoir of the author,
collateral documents, and a reprint from the original, by William F. Ganong.
Toronto: Champlain Society.
De Pauw, Cornelius. 1770. Reclierchesphilosophiques surles Americains, ou Memoires
interessants pour servir a I 'Histoire de I 'Espece Humaine de Mr de p***. Avec une Dis-
sertation sur I'Amerique & les Americains, parDom Pernetj. Et laDefense de I'Auteur
des Reclierches contre cetteDissertation. Berlin: GJ. Decker; the Defensehas its own
pagination.
Derrida, Jacques. 1972. 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences.' In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man. Edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, 247-65.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Deserontyou,John. [1782] 1926. '"A Form of Ritual Condolence April 9 1782."
Found at Lancaster, NY: Museum of the American Indian. Mentioned in 1826.
Notes.' Indian Notes 3: 139-40.
Deslandres, Dominique. 1995. 'A quand une ethnohistoire des missionnaircs?'
Etudes d'histomreligieusetil: 115-24.
- 1993- 'Mission et alterite: Les missionnaires francais et la definition de
l"'Autre"au XVII' siecle.' In Proceedings of the Eighteentli Meeting of the French
Colonial Historical Society, Montreal, May iggz / Actes du Dix-huilieme Colloque de
la Societe d'Histoire Colcmiale Franfaise, Montreal, Mai igc/2. Edited by James S.
Pritchard, 1-13. Cleveland, OH: French Colonial Historical Society/ La
Societe d'Histoire Coloniale Franfaise.
— 1990. 'Le modele francais d'integration socio-religieuse, 1600—1650. Missions
interieures et premieres missions canadiennes.' PhD Thesis, Univcrsitc de
Montreal.
- 1989. 'Seculicrs, laics, Jesuites: episteme et projets d'evangelisation et d'accul-
turation en Nouvelle France. Les premieres tentatives, 1604-1613.' In Anthro-
pologie et histoire, special section of Melanges de I'EcoleFrancaise de Rome, 101, 2.
Edited by Serge Gruzinski, 751-88.
- 1987. 'L'education dcs Amerindiennes d'apres la correspondence de Marie
Guyart de ITncarnation.' Studies in Religion 16, 1: 91-110.
Devens, Carol. 1992. Countering Colonization: Native American Women and (treat
Lakes Missions, 1630-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dickason, Olive Patricia. 1996. 'Europeans and a New World Cosmography.' In
Reading beyond Words: Contexts for Native History. Edited by Jennifer S.H. Brown
and Elizabeth Vibert, 4-20. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
33O Works Cited
Francis, Daniel, and Toby Morantz. 1983. Partners in Furs: A History of the Fur Trade
in Eastern James Bay, 1600-1870. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Freitag, Michel. 1986. Dialectique et Societe. Tome 2. Culture, pouvoir, controk: les
modes de reproduction formels de la societe. Montreal: Lcs Editions Albert St-Martin.
Fuller, Mary C. 1993. 'Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The
Discoverie of Guiana.' In Nezv World Encounters. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt,
218-40. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fumaroli, Marc. 1980. L'Age de ['eloquence: rhetorique et 'res literaria'de la Renais-
sance au seuil de I'epoque classique. Geneva: Libraire Droz.
Gaffarel, Paul. 1899. Les Colonies francaises. Paris: Felix Alcan.
- 1892. Histoire de la deamverte de I'Amerique. 2 vols. Paris: Arthur Rousseau.
- 1878. Histoire du Bresil francais au seizieme sieck. Paris: Maisonneuve.
- 1875. Histoire de la Floride francaise. Paris: Firmin-Didot.
Gagnon, Francois-Marc. 1975. La Conversion parl'image. un aspect de la mission des
jesuites aupris des Indiens du Canada au XVIIesiecle. Montreal: Bellarmin.
Garcia de Quevedo, Eloy. 1905. Ordenanzas del Consulado de Burgos de 1538, prece-
didas de un bosquejo historico. Burgos, n.p.
Gaiibay y Zamalloa, Esteban de. 1571. Compendia Historial Libra XV. Gapitulo 10,
vol. 2. Antwerp: Plantin.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology.
New York: Basic Books.
Genette, Gerard. 1972. 'La Rhetorique restreinte.' Figures $: 21-40.
Geneve, P. Charles de. 1976. I^es Trophees sacrees ou missions des Capucins en Savoie,
dans I'air, La Suisse Romande et la vallee d'Aoste, a la fin du XVIe et au XVIIe .siecle.
Edited by Felix Tisserand. 3 vols. Lausanne: Felix Tissei and.
Gentilcore, David. 1994. '"Adapt Yourselves to the People's Capabilities": Mis-
sionary Strategies, Methods and Impact in the Kingdom of Naples, 1600—
1800.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45, 2: 269-96.
Gentleman, Tobias. 1614. Englands way to win wealth, and to employ ships and mari-
ners. London: Nicholas Oakes for Nathaniel Butter.
Gibson, John Arthur. 1992. Concerning the League: The Iroquois Tradition in Onon-
daga. Edited by Hanni Woodbury in collaboration with Reg Henry and Harry
Webster, on the basis of A.A. Goldenweiser's manuscript. Memoir g. Win-
nipeg, MB: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics.
Giddings, J.L., Jr. 1941. 'Dendrochronology in Northern Alaska.' University of
Arizona Bulletin, 12, 4. Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research Bulletin No. I . Tucson:
University of Arizona and University of Alaska.
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey. [1576] 1886. A discourse to prove a passage by the North-west
to Cathay and the East Indies. Reprinted in Voyages in Search of a North-West
Passage. London: Cassell.
334 Works Cited
Harlot, Thomas. 1588. A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia.
London: R. Robinson.
Harris, R. Cole. 1982. 'Regionalism and the Canadian Archipelago.' In Heartland
and Hinterland: A Geography of Canada. Edited by L.D. McCann, 459-84.
Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall.
— 1968. The Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study. Quebec: Les
Presses de 1'Universite Laval; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Harris, R. Cole, and Geoffrey Matthews, eds. 1987. Historical Atlas of Canada.
Volume i. From the Beginning to 1800. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Haskins, Charles Homer. 1927. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Haton, Claude. [1601] 1857. Memoires de Claude Haton contenant le recit des evene-
ments accomplis de 1553 a 15^2, principalement dans la Champagne et la Brie.
Edited by Felix Bourquelot. 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale.
Hayman, Robert. 1628. Quodlibets, Lately Come Overfrom New Britaniola, Old
Newfound-Land. London: Elizabeth All-de & F. Kingston for R. Michell.
Hayot, E. 1939. Petite histoire deNotre-Dame deFoy d'apres des documents inedits.
Brussels: Imprimeries Ch. Bulens.
Head, Grant C. 1976. Eighteenth Century Newfoundland: A Geographer's Perspective.
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Hebert, Francois. 1927. Memoires du cure de Versailles, Francois Hebert, 1686-1704.
Edited by Georges Girard. Paris: Editions de France.
Heidenreich, Conrad E. 1990. 'History of the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes Area to
A.D. 1650.' In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario toA.D. 1650. Edited by ChrisJ.
Ellis and Neil Ferris, 475-92. London, ON: Occasional Papers of the London
Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society.
— 1976. Explorations and Mapping of Samuel de Champlain, 1603—1632. Cartograph-
ica Monograph no. 17. Toronto: B.V. Gutsell.
- 1971. Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600-1650.
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Heintzman, Ralph, 1994. 'Political Space and Economic Space: Quebec and the
Empire of the St Lawrence, 'Journal of Canadian Studies 29, 2: 19-63.
Helms, Mary W. 1994. 'Essay on Objects: Interpretations of Distance Made
Tangible.' In Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the
Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modem Era. Edited by
Stuart B. Schwartz, 355-77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hemming, John. 1978. Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500-1760.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Henshaw, A.S. 1995. 'Central Inuit Household Economies: Zooarcheological,
Environmental, and Historical Evidence from Outer Frobisher Bay, Baffin
Island, Canada.' PhD thesis, Harvard University.
Works Cited 337
Kingsbury, Susan M., ed. 1906-35. Records of the Virginia Company of London.
4 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Koyre, Alexandre. 1973. Etudes d'histoire de lapensee scientifique. Paris: Gallimard.
La Calle Beronense, Saravia de. 1544. Instruction de Mercaderes. Medina del
Campo: n.p.
Lacouture, Jean. iQQi.Jesuites. Vol. i, Les conquerants. Paris: Seuil.
Laeyendecker. Dosia M. 1993. 'Wood and Charcoal Remains from Kodlunarn
Island.' In Archeology of the Frobisher Voyages. Edited by William W. Fitzhugh
and Jacqueline S. Olin, 155-72. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press.
Lafitau, Joseph-Francois. 1724. Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains, comparees aux
moeurs des premiers temps. 2 vols. Paris: Saugrain 1'aine; Charles Estienne
Hochereau.
Lafleche, Guy. 1988-91. Les Saints martyrs canadiens. 3 vols. Montreal: Singulier.
Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de. [1702-3] 1990. Oeuvres com-
pletes. Edited by Real Ouellet and Alain Beaulieu. 2 vols. Collection Biblio-
theque du Nouveau Monde. Montreal: Presses de 1'Universite de Montreal.
Lallemant, Louis. [1694] 1781. Doctrine spirituelle. In La Vie et la doctrine spirituelle
du Pere Louis Lallemant. Edited by Pierre Champion. Paris: Estienne Michallet.
La Popeliniere, Sieur de, Henri Lancelot-Voisin. 1582. Les Trots Mondes. Paris:
Pierre L'Huillier.
La Ronciere, Charles de. 1899-1932. Histoire de la marine francaise. 6 vols. Paris:
Plon-Nourrit.
Larouche, Pierre. 1992. Montreal 1535: la Redecouverte de Hochelaga. Outremont,
QC: Les editions Villes nouvelles-Villes anciennes.
Latourelle, Rene. 1993. Jean de Brebeuf. Montreal: St Laurent Bellarmin.
Laudonniere, Rene de. [1586] I979a. 'Rene de Laudonniere's Account of the
First French Settlement at Charlesfort.' In New American World. Vol. 2. Edited
by David Quinn, 294-316. New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye.
- [1586] I97gb. 'The Second Voyage vinto Florida.' In New American World. Vol.
2. Edited by David Quinn, 319-353. New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye.
Leacock, Eleanor. 1980. 'Montagnais Women and the Jesuit Program for Coloni-
zation.' In Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Mona
Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, 25-42. New York: Praeger.
Le Bras, Yvon. 1994. L'Amerindien dans les Relations du pere Paul Lejeune. Quebec:
Editions de la Huit.
- 1988. 'L'Autre dans les Relations de Paul Lejeune.' In Les figures de L'Indien.
Edited by Gilles Therien, 141-50. Montreal: Universite du Quebec a
Montreal.
Le Challeux, Nicolas. 1579. Brief discours et histoire d'un voyage de quelques Francois
en laFloride ... Geneva: Eustace Vignon.
34O Works Cited
Le Clercq, Chresticn [Chretien]. [1691] 1910. New Relation ofGaspesia: With the
Customs and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians. Translated and edited with a
reprint from the original, by William F. Ganong. Toronto: Champlain Society.
- [1691] 1881. First Establishment of the Faith in NewFrance. Translated by John G.
Shea. 2 vols. New York: John G. Shea.
- 1691. Premier etablissement de lafoy dans la Nouvelle France, contenant la publication
de I'Evangile, I'Histoire des ColoniesFranfoises, & lesfameuses decouvertes depuis le
Fleuve de saint Laurent, la Louisiane & lefleuve Colbert jusqu 'au Golphe Mt-xique,
acheves sous la conduite defeu Monsieur de la, Salle. 2 vols. Paris: Amable Auroy.
Leder, Laurence, ed. 1956. The Livingston Indian Records, 1666-1723. Gettysburg:
Pennsylvania Historical Society Association.
Lernieux, Denise. 1985. LesPetits innocents. L'enfance en Nouvelk-France. Quebec:
Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture.
Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques. 1874. Narrative ofLe Moyne, an artist who accompa-
nied the French Expedition toFlorida under Laudonmere, 1564. Translated from the
Latin of DeBry. Boston: James R. Osgood.
Le Page du Pratz, Antoine Simon. 1758. Histoire de la Louisiane: Contenant la
Decouverte de ce vaste Pays. 3 vols. Paris: De Bure, La Veuve Delaguette and
Lambert.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. 1966. Les Patsans de Languedoc. Paris: SEVPEN.
Lery, Jean de. [1580] 1972. Histoire d 'un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil. Lausanne:
Bibliotheque Romande.
- [i578] 1990. History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America,
Containing the Navigation and the Remarkable Things Seen on the Sea by the Author;
The Behavior of Villegaignon in that Country; The Customs and Strange Ways of Life
of the American Savages; Together with the Description of Various Animals, Trees,
Plants and Other Singular Things Completely Unknown Over Here. Translated with
an introduction by Janet Whatley. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Published in French as Histoire d 'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil.
Lescarbot, Marc. 1618. Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. Paris: Chez Adricn Perier.
Lestringant, Frank. 1990. Le Huguenot et fe Sauvage: L 'Amerique et la controverse colo-
niale en France, au temps des Guerres de Religion (1555-1580). Paris: Aux Amateurs
de Livres.
[Le Tac, Sixte, attrib.]. [ 1689] 1888. Histoire chronologique de la NmivetteFrance ou
Canada depuis sa decouverte (mil cinq cents quatre) jusques en Van mil six cents trente
deux Par lePere Sixte Le Tac, Recollects. Edited by Eugene Reveillaud. Paris:
G. Fischbacher-Grassart and Maisonneuve Frcres.
Le Tellier, Michel. 1687. Defense des nouveaux chrestiens et des missionnaires de la.
Chine, du Japan, & des Indes. Conlre deux Livres intitulez La Morale Pratique des
Jesuites et I'Esprit de M. Arnauld. 2 vols. Paris: Estienne Michallet.
Works Cited 341
Levere, Trevor H., and Richard A. Jarrell. 1974. A Curious Field-book: Science and
Society in Canadian History. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Light, John, and Henry Unglik. 1987. A Frontier Fur Trade Blacksmith Shop, 1796-
1812. Rev. ed. Ottawa: Parks Canada.
Lindsay, Lionel Saint-George. 1900. Notre-Dame de la Jeune-Lorette en la Nouvelle-
France. Etude historique. Montreal: Cie. de Publication de la Revue Cana-
dienne.
Lintvelt,Jaap, Real Ouellet, and Hub. Hermans, eds. 1994. Culture et colonisation
en Amerique du Nord. Sillery, QC: Septentrion.
Lounsbury, Floyd G. igGi.'Iroquois-Cherokee Linguistic Relations.' In Sympo-
sium on Cherokee and Iroquois Culture. Edited by William N. Fenton and John
Gulick, 11-17. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 180. Washington, DC:
Government Publishing Office.
Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. London: Cambridge
University Press.
Luis de Maluenda, Fray. 1545. Leche de laFe. Burgos, n.p.
Lysaght, A.M., ed. 1971. Joseph Banks in Newfoundland and Labrador: His Diary,
Manuscripts and Collections. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McCann, Franklin T. 1952. English Discovery of America to 1585. New York: King's
Crown Press.
McCartney, Allen P. 1991. 'Canadian Arctic Trade Metal: Reflections of Prehis-
toric to Historic Social Networks." In Metals in Society: Theory beyond Analysis.
Edited by Robert M. Ehrenreich, 26-43. Philadelphia: MASCA, Research
Papers in Science and Archaeology, vol. 8, part 2.
McCartney, Allen P., and James M. Savelle. 1985. 'Thule Eskimo Whaling in the
Central Canadian Arctic.' Arctic Anthropology 22, 2: 37-58.
McClellan, Catharine. 1975. My Old People Say: An Ethnographic Survey of Southern
Yukon Territory. National Museum of Man Publications in Ethnology, Service
Paper no. 6. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.
- 1970. 'Indian Stories about the First Whites in Northwestern America.' In
Ethnohistory in Southwestern Alaska and Southern Yukon: Method and Content.
Edited by Margaret Lantis, 103-33. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
McDermott,J. 1984. 'The Account Books of Michal Lok, Relating to the North-
west Voyages of Martin Frobisher 1576-1578: Text and Analysis.' M. Phil, the-
sis, University of Hull.
MacDonald, M.A. 1983. Fortune and La Tour: The Civil War in Acadia. Toronto:
Methuen.
McGhee, Robert. 19843. The Thule Village at Brooman Point, High Arctic Canada.
Mercury Series, Archaeological Survey of Canada Paper no. 125. Ottawa:
National Museums of Canada.
342 Works Cited
- 19845. 'Contact between Native North Americans and the Medieval Norse: A
Review of the Evidence.' American Antiquity 49, i: 4-26.
Mackenthun, Gesa. 1997. Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and
the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Maine Historical Society. 1887-1910. York Deeds. 18 vols. Portland, ME: Brown
Thurston.
- 1869-1916. Documentary History of the State of Maine, Maine Historical Society
Collections. Series 2. 24 vols. Portland, ME: Thurston.
Major [Mair], John. 1510. In Secundum Librum Sententiarum. Paris: Sententiarum
libri quator.
Maran, Rene. 1943-55. Lespionniers de I'Empire. 3 vols. Paris: Albin Michel.
Marion, Seraphin. 1964. 'Pierre Boucher, Ecrivain.' In Histoire Veritable et
naturelle des moeurs et productions du pays de la Nouvelle-France vulgairement dite le
Canada, 235-46. Boucherville, QC: Societe historique de Boucherville.
Marouby, Christian. 1990. Utopie et primitivisme: essai sur I'imaginaire anthro-
pologique a I'dge classique. Paris: Seuil.
Mason, John. 1620. A briefe discourse of the New-found-land. Edinburgh: A. Hart.
Massachusetts. [1692-9] 1978. Province Laws, i6gs-l6gg. Edited by John D. Cash-
ing. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier.
Mather, Cotton. [1702] 1977. Magnalia Christi Americana: Bookslandll. Edited by
Kenneth B. Murdock with Elizabeth W. Miller. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press.
Mathes, W. Michael. 1980. 'Juan Maria de Salvatierra: A Portrait.' California
History tjQ, 2: 170-2.
Mauro, Frederic. 1961. Le Bresil au XVIIe siecle. Coimbra: n.p.
Maxwell, Moreau S. 1985. Prehistory of the Eastern Arctic. Orlando, FL: Academic
Press.
Meinig, D.W. 1986. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years
of History. Vol. l. Atlantic America, 1492-1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Mekking, A.J.J. 1975. 'De Kapel van onze lieve vrouw van Loreto onder de
Linden te Thorn.' In Publications de la Societe historique et archeologique dans
leLimbourgill: 233-340.
Melancon, Benoit. 1996. 'Bougainville avant Tahiti: les Amerindians dans la
correspondance canadienne (1756-1759).' In La I^ettre au XVIHe siecle et ses
avatars. Actes du Colloque international tenu au College universitaire Glendon,
Universite York, Toronto (Ontario), Canada, 2Q avril-Iermai IQ()3. Edited by
Georges Berube and Marie-France Silver, 217-29. Toronto: Editions du
GREF.
Works Cited 343
Peers, Laura. 1996. "The Guardian of All": Jesuit Missionary and Salish Percep-
tions of the Virgin Mary.' In Reading beyond Words: Contexts for Native History.
Edited by Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, 284-303. Peterborough,
ON: Broadview Press.
Perelman, Chaim. 1977. L'Empire rhetorique: rhetorique et argumentation. Collection
Pour demain. Paris: J. Vrin.
Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1970. Traite de I'argumentation. La
nouvelle rhetorique. 2nd ed. Brussels: Editions de 1'Institut de sociologie de
1'Universite libre de Bruxelles.
Petrone, Penny. 1990. Native Literature in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University
Press.
Philippon, Adam. 1649. Le Veritable plan et portrait de la maison miraculeuse de la
Sainte Vierge, ainsy qu 'ette se voit a present a Lorette. Paris: n.p.
Pinon, Laurent. 1995. Livres dezoologie de la Renaissance: une anthologie, 1450-
1700. Paris: Klincksieck.
Pioffet, Marie-Christine. 1997. La Tentation de I'epopee dans les Relations desjesuites.
Sillery, QC: Septentrion.
Porter, Charles W., III. 1985. Fort Raleigh and the First English Settlement in the New
World: Handbook 130. Washington, DC: National Park Service.
Porter, Marilyn. 1985. '"She Was Skipper of the Shore-crew": Notes on the His-
tory of the Sexual Division of Labour in Newfoundland.' Labour/Le Travail 15:
105-23-
Powell, William S., and Virginia W. Powell, eds. 1988. England and Roanoke: A
Collection of Poems, 1584-1987. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cul-
tural Resources.
Pratt, Maiy Louise. 1992- Jmperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
London: Routledge.
Prescott, Anne Lake. 1997. 'Rabelaisian Apocrypha and Satire in Early Canada:
The Case of Robert Hayman.' In Ediler et traduire Rabelais a travers les ages.
Edited by Paul J. Smith, 101-16. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Preston, Richard J. 1975. Cree Narrative: Expressing the Personal Meanings of Events.
National Museum of Man Mercury Series, Ethnology Service Paper no. 30.
Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.
Preston, Sarah, ed. 1986. Let the Past Go: A Life History, narrated by Alice Jacob.
Canadian Museum of Civilization Mercury Series, Ethnology Service Paper
no. 104. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.
Price, Richard. 1983. First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Principe, Charles. 1990. 'A Moral Portrait of the Indians of the St Lawrence in
One Relation of New France, Written by Paul Lejeune, s.j.' Canadian Catholic
Historical Association Historical Studies 57: 29-50.
346 Works Cited
Analysis of Relations between the Indians and the Hudson's Bay Company before 1763.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
[Razilly]. l653- Memoire pour servir d 'instruction a la grande compagnie de. I'Amerique,
qui s'y voudront interesser, ou passer dans lePais. Paris: Guillaume de Luyne.
Reid, John G. 1983. Trench Aspirations in the Kennebec-Penobscot Region,
1671.' Maine Historical Society Quarterly 23, 2: 85-92.
- 1981. Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Reverdin, Olivier. 1957. Quatorze Calvinistes chez les Topinambous. Geneva: Edi-
tions du Journal de Geneve and Libraire E. Droz.
Richardson, Boyce. 1975. Strangers Devour the Land. Toronto: MacmLIIan.
Richter, Daniel K. 1992. Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the froquois League, in
the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Ridington, Robin. 1990. Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthro-
pology. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Robinson, Percy J. 1948. 'The Huron Equivalents of Cartier's Second Vocabu-
lary.' In Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, vol. 42, series 3, section ii:
127-46.
Roelens, Maurice. 1972. 'Lahontan dans I'Encyclopedieet ses suites.' In Recherches
nouvelles surquelques ecrivains des Lumieres. Edited by Jacques Proust, 163-200.
Geneva: Droz.
Roger, Jacques. 1995. Pour une histoire des sciences A part entiere. Paris: A. Michel.
Rossky, William. 1958. 'Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and
Poetic.' Studies in the Renaissance 5: 49-73.
Rousseau, Jacques. 1964. 'Pierre Boucher, Naturaliste et Geographe.' In Histoire
Veritable et naturetie des moeurs et productions du pays de la Nouvelle-France vulgaire-
ment dite le, Canada, by Pierre Boucher, 262-400. Bouchcrville, QC: La Societe
Historique de Boucherville.
Rowley, Susan. 1993. 'Frobisher Miksanut: Inuit Accounts of the Frobisher
Voyages.' In Archeology of the Frobisher Voyages. Edited by William W. Fitzhugh
and Jacqueline S. Olin, 27-40. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press.
Roy, Pierre-Georges, ed. 1934. 'Contrat de Mariage de Pierre Boucher et de
Marie Chretien.' Bulletin des recherches historiques 40: 38-9.
- ed. 1926. 'Memoires de Feu Monsieur Boucher, Seigneur de Boucherville et
Aricien Gouverneur des Trois-Rivieres (Extraits).' Bulletin des recherches kis-
hrriques 32: 398-404.
Ryan, Michael T. 1981. 'Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seven-
teenth Centuries.' Comparative Studies in Society and History 29: 519-38.
Sagard, Gabriel. 1636. Histoire du Canada et des Voyages que les Freres Mineurs Recol-
lets y ontfaicts pour la conversion des fnfideUes. Paris: Claude Sonnius.
348 Works Cited
- 16323. Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons, situe en I'Amerique vers la mer douce, PS
demiers confins de la nouvelle France Ou il est traicte de tout ce qui est du pays &
du gouvemement des Sauvages Avec un Dictionnaire de La langue huronne. ParFr.
Gabriel Sagard Recollet de St. Franfois de la prouince St. Denis. Paris: Denys
Moreau.
- i632b. Dictionaire de la langue huronne. Paris: Denys Moreau.
- [1632] 1998. Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons [including] Dictionnaire de la
langue huronne. Edited and annotated by Jack Warwick. Montreal: Presses de
I'Universite de Montreal.
- [1632] 1990. Le grand voyage du Pays des Hurons. Edited by Real Ouellet and
Jack Warwick. Quebec: Bibliotheque Quebecoise.
- [1632] 1939. The Longjoumey to the Country of the Hurons. Edited with an
introduction by George M. Wrong, translated by H.H. Langton. Toronto:
Champlain Society.
Saint-Vallier,Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrieres. [1688] 1856. Estat present de
I'Eglise et de la coloniefrancaise dans la Nouvelle-France. Quebec: Augustin Cote.
Saladin d'Anglure, Bernard. 1984. 'Inuit of Quebec.' In Handbook of the North
American Indians, edited by William Sturtcvant. Vol. 5, Arctic, edited by David
Damas, 476-507. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Salisbury, Neal. 1996. 'Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North
America, 1600-1783.' In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Ameri-
cas. Vol. i. North America, part l. Edited by Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E.
Washburn, 399-460. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sanfacoii, Andre. 1996. 'Objets porteurs d'identite dans les consecrations
amerindiennes a Notre-Dame de Chartres.' In Transferts culturels et metissages
Amerique/Europe XVfe—XXe siecle. Culture Transfer, America and Europe: 500 Years
of Interculturation. Edited by Laurier Turgeon, Denys Delage, and Real Ouel-
let, 449-66. Quebec: Presses de 1'Universile Laval.
Savelle, James M. 1985. 'Effects of Nineteenth-Century European Exploration
on the Development of the Netsilik Inuit Culture.' In The Franklin Era in Cana-
dian Arctic History, 1845-1850. Edited by Patricia D. Sutherland, 192-214.
National Museum of Man, Archaeological Survey of Canada Paper no. 131.
Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.
Sayre, Edward V., Garman Hai bottle, Raymond W. Stoenner, Wilcomb Wash-
burn, Jacqueline S. Olin, and W'illiam W. Fitzhugh. 1982. The Carbon-14
Dating of an Iron Bloom Associated with the Voyages of Sir Martin Fro-
bisher.' In 'Nuclear and Chemical Dating Techniques.' ACS Symposium Series,
176. Edited by Lloyd Currie, 441-51. Washington, DC: American Chemical
Society.
Scott, Colin. 1992. 'La Rencontre avec les blancs, d'apres les recits historiques et
Works Cited 349
Stanley, George F.G. 1953. 'The Indians and the Brandy Trade during the
Ancien Regime.' Revue d'histoire de I'Amerique francaise 6, 4: 489-505.
Stenton, Douglas R. 1987. 'Recent Archaeological Investigations in Frobisher
Bay, Baffin Island, N.W.T.' Canadian Journal of Archaeology 11: 13-48.
- 1983. 'An Analysis of Faunal Remains from the Peale Point Site, (KkDo-i)
Baffin Island, N.W.T.' Master's thesis, Trent University.
Stone, Lawrence, ed. 1994. An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815.
London: Routledge.
Sturtevant, William C., and David B. Quinn. 1987. This New Prey: Eskimos in
Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577.' In Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary
Collection of Essays. Edited by Christian F. Feest, 61-140. Aachen: Rader Verlag.
Suite, Benjamin. 1882. Histoire des Canadiens-francais, 1608-1880. Vol. 3. Mont-
real: Wilson.
Symons, T.H.B., ed. 1999. Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery. Martin Frobisher's
Expeditions, 1576-1578. Mercury Series. Directorate Paper 10. 2 vols. Ottawa:
Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Synopsis historiae Societatis Jesu. 1950. Louvain: Typis ad Sancti Alphonsi.
Szilas, L. 1990. 'Les Fondations des Jesuites en Europe jusqu'en 1615.' Plate 78
in Atlas d'histoire de I'Eglise. Les eglises chretiennes hieret aujourd'hui. Edited by
HubertJedin, Kenneth Scott Latourette, and Jochen Martin. Turnhout:
Brepols.
Tallon, Alain. 1993. 'La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement et la fondation de
Montreal.' In Les Origines de Montreal. Actes du colloque organise par la Sociele
historique de Montreal (mat 19Q2), Edited byJean-Remi Brault, 39-62. Montreal:
Lemeac.
- 1990. La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement (1629-1667). Spiritualite et societe. Paris:
Editions du Cerf.
Tanner, Helen Hornbeck, and Georges E. Sioui. 1994. 'Personal Reactions of
Indigenous People to European Ideas and Behavior.' In Culture et Colonisation
en Amerique du Nord: Canada, Etats-Unis, Mexique. Edited byjaap Lintvelt, Real
Ouellet, and Hub. Hermans, 77-92. Collection Nouveaux Cahiers du Celat.
Quebec: Septentrion.
Tanner, Marie. 1993. The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic
Image of the Emperor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modem Identity.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, E.G.R., ed. 1935. The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two
Richard Hahluyts. 2nd series, nos. 76-7. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society.
Theresa de Jesus. 1982. Libra de las Fundaciones. Edited by Victor Garcia de la
Concha. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Works Cited 351
- 1611. The spirit of detraction conjured and convicted in seven circles. London: W.
Stansby for G. Norton.
- iGooa. The Golden-grove. London: Simon Stafford.
- iGoob. Naturall and artificial directions for health. London: Richarde Bradocke.
Veiras, Denis [Vairasse d'Allais]. 167&-8. L'Histoire des Sevarambes, peuples qui
habitent unepartie du troisieme continent communement appelU la Terre australe.
5 vols. Paris: Cl. Barbin.
Vespucci, Amerigo. 1894. The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents.
Edited by Clements Markham. 1st series, no. 90. London: Hakluyt Society.
Veuillot, Louis. 1841. Rome el Lorette. Tours: Alfred Mame.
Viau, Roland, 1997. Enfants du neant et mangeurs d 'antes. Guerre, culture et societe en
Iroquoisie andenne, Montreal: Boreal.
Vigneras, L.A. 1957. 'El Viaje de Esteban Gomez a Norte America.' Revista de
Indias 17, 68: 189-207.
Villebon, Joseph Robineau de. 1934. Acadia at theEnd of the Seventeenth Century:
Letters, Journals and Memoirs of Joseph Robineau de Villebon, Commandant in Aca-
dia, 1690-1700. Edited by John Clarence Webster. Monograph Series no. i.
Saint John, NB: New Brunswick Museum.
Vincent, Sylvie. 1992. 'L'Arrivee des chercheurs de terres. Recits et dires des
Montagnais de la Moyenne et de la Basse Cote-Nord.' Recherches amerindiennes
au Quehec22, 2-3: 19-29.
- 1981. 'La tradition orale montagnaise. Comment 1'interroger?' Cahien, de Clio.
70: 5-26.
Vitoria, Francisco de. [1557] 1917. De Indis et de Jure Belli Relectiones. Edited by
Ernest Nys. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution. Reprint, New York:
Oceana Publications; London: Wildy and Sons, 1964.
Walcott, Derek. 1995. 'The Muse of History.' In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen, 370-4. London:
Routledge.
Wallace, Paul A.W. 1946. The White Roots of Peace. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Wallis, Helen. 1984. 'England's Search for the Northern Passages in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.' Arctic37, 4: 453-72.
Warkentin, Germaine. 1999. 'In Search of 'The Word of the Other": Aboriginal
Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada.' Book History 2: 1-27.
- 1996. 'Discovering Radisson: A Renaissance Adventurer between Two Worlds.'
In Reading beyond Words: Contexts for Native History. Edited by Jennifer S.H.
Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, 43-70. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
- ed., 1993. Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, 1660-1860. Toronto:
Oxford University Press.
Washburn, Wilcomb E. 1993. 'The Frobisher Relics: A Museum History.' In
354 Works Cited
Huronia, 79, 81, 82, 84114, 202, 217, 187, 196, ig8n7, igSnS, 202, 203,
219113, 227, 231, 234115 206, 210, 215, 217, 223,224,226,
hybridity, concept of, 14, 26—9, 31, 230, 232, 238, 241-2, 244, 252,
52-3, 62-5, 224, 233. See also creolite; 254-5, 256, 257, 258, 260, 26in2,
metissage; middle ground 316; Five Nations, 42, 316; Great
Law (or Great Peace), 38-9; Great
Iberia, 5-6, no, in, 113, 175, 178, League of Peace and Power, 28;
186 Iroquoian Confederacy, 3, 38, 41,
Ignace, Marianne, 67n2O 43, 45', St Lawrence Iroquois, 23,
Ihonatiria, 79 25-6, 28, 69, 76-7, 94, 237, 238; Six
He du Cap-Breton, 176 Nations, 38, 41, 42, 45
illustrations. See pictorial manuscripts Isabella (Queen of Spain), 136, 146,
imperialism, 14, 34, 37, 87-107, 155
1081111, 127, 141, 190, 197, 287-9, Isasti, Lope de, 110, i n , 121, I24n8
291, 293, 295, 296, 297-8, 299, 300, Italian (people), 10, 69, 200-1, 206-7,
308,311,316 215, 216, 306
Incas, 24, 27
Indians. See Native peoples Jacob, Alice, 58, 66
indigenous peoples. See Native peo- Jacob, Margaret, 50, 52-3, 54
ples Jacobs, John D., 265
individualism, concept of, 27, 44-5, Jaenen, Cornelius, iogni5, 188, 247
54, 58-9, 73, 84 James, Thomas, ig8n4
Ingoli, Francesco, 178 James Bay, 48, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62;
Innis, Harold Adams, 10, 152 hydroelectric dam, 63
Innu, 55, 64, 66n3, 66n7, 67ni4, Jameson, J. Franklin, 45, 248
671117, 110-11, 114, 121, 123, 124. Jamestown, 145, 147, 148, 152, 153
See also Montagnais Jansen, Cornelius, 187
Inquisition records, 24 Jansenists, 188-9, 193, 194, 195, 215
interpreters, 27, 91, 97, 164, 231, 242, Jason. See Argonauts
243 Jennings, Francis, 248
Inuit, 3, 4, 8, 59, 121, 123, I24ni, Jarrell, Richard A., 225, 228
124n8, 124ng, 263, 264, 265-6, 267, Jerusalem, 70
269,271-4, 277-8, 280-6 Jesuit Relations, 21, 33, 61, 71, 74, 75,
Ireland, 134, 148 80, 81, 82, 83, 84n4, I09ni2, 163,
Iriarte, Lazaro, 175 164, 166, 173, 182, 183, 190, 191,
Irish (people), 144 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, I98n4,
Iroquet Algonquin (people), 241, ig8n7, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206,
242 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216,
Iroquois, 22, 28, 29, 33, 38-9, 40, 41, 217, 218, 2ign2, 2i9-2On6, 228,
42, 43, 44-5, 47ni, 51, 59, 61, 78, 82, 245, 246, 248, 258, 259, 310
374 Index
Jesuits, 7, 8, 12-13, 24, 25, 27-8, 29, 270, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277, 278,
31, 32113, 32114, 33, 34-5, 41, 50, 61, 280,282
70, 71, 72, 74, 75-6, 79-83, 84, 84112, Kondiaronk, 311
104-5,1081112,135,162, 163,164-6, Koyre, Alexandre, 308
167, 173, 174, 175-7, 178-83, 184,
186-98, 19806, 201-19, 219112, Labrador, no, in, 113, 114, 118, 120,
22Oni2,224,228, 230, 236, 245-6, 121, 122, 123, 124, I24n8
247, 248, 250, 251112, 253, 258-60, La Calle Beronense, Saravia de, 112
26103,313 Lachine, 45, 238, 239, 241, 243, 244
Jesus. See Christ Lacouture.Jean, 70
Jette, Rene, 231 Lac Stjean, 239
Jetten, Marc, 192 Laeyendecker, Dosia, 286nl
Jews, 27, 122, 195 Lafitau, Joseph-Francois, 195
Job's Garden (film), 63, 67018 Lafleche, Guy, iggnio
Jogues, Isaac, 189 La Grande River, 63
Johnson, Richard R., 3Oln6 La Heve, 176
Johnson, Sir William, 41, 47n4 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lorn
Joseph de Paris (Francois-Joseph Du d'Arce, Baron de, 20, 165-6, 168,
Tremblay), 178, 179-80 17005, 17007
Judaism, 27 Lake Champlaio, 78
Julien, Charles-Andre, 88 Lake Erie, 239
Lake Ontario, 237, 239, 244
Kamaiyuk, 263, 271, 272, 282-3 Lake Saint Louis, 28
Kawapit,John, 60 Lake Superior, 10, 229
Kelly,Joan, 19 Lalemant, Jerome, 81, 82, 197
Kennebec River, 290, 295 Lallemant, Louis, 189-90, 193, 196,
Kennebecs, 294, 295 19802, 19803
Kichesipirini Algonquins, 243 Lalement, Charles, 186-7
Kicza,John, 5 Lambert, Florentin, 223
King Philip's War, 290. See also Meta- Lancelotti, Signora Portia, 202
com land aod laodscape, 3, 12, 14, 2O, 32,
Kingsbury, Susan M., 152 36, 42-3, 45, 49, 54, 60, 63, 67018,
kingship, 76-7 83, 88, 90, 92-3, 96, 120, 124, 125,
kinship. See families 127,128,131,132,134,141,142,143,
Kiotseaeton, 28 145, 146, 151, 159, 167-8,216,
Kircher, Athanasius, 74 223-34; Native knowledge of, 14,35,
knights, 96, 98, 102, 128, 291, 292 44, 163-4, 188, 238-44, 246; repre-
knives. See trade goods sentations, 141-4, 153, 154-5, 156,
knowledge systems. S^epistemology 159-61, 162-3, 227; res nullius, 89,
Kodlunarn Island, 3, 8, 263, 264, 268, 94, 99, 135, 148, 231. See also place
Index 375
memory sticks, 31; natural memory, 228, 230, 231, 233, 236, 244, 245,
71-2, 74 247, 248, 250, 260, 310, 316. See also
Memory Theatre, 69, 73 evangelization
mentalite, 13, 14, 20, 21, 30, 68, 83-4, Mississippian Mound Builders, 101
no, 114, 124 Mitchell, Estelle, 234n5
merchants, 28, iO7ni, no, 111-13, Mitchell, J.G., 269, 272, 274, 279
114-15, 116, 117-20, 121, 122, 123, Mithun, Marianne, 252, 254-5
124, I24n3, 138, 2O2, 228,287-9, 'mixed blood.' See Metis
292-3, 294, 299, 300, 301 n 13, 306, mnemonic arts, 72, 73-4
313 mnemonic devices, 40, 41. See also
Mercier, Francois le, 82-3 birch-bark drawings; fur pelt draw-
Merlet, Lucien, 205 ings; memory sticks; wampum
Metacom, 316 modernity, concept of, 5, 13, 14, 30,
Meta Incognita project, 14, 263, 265, 70, 306-7, 308-12, 316-17
271, 281, 284 Mohawk, 7, n, 12, 26, 27, 28, 42, 43,
Metis (people), 60, 67ni5 45,46,47ni,2i5,254
metissage and metissage culturel, 13, Mohawk River, 42, 248
26-9,78,79,83,311 moieties, 39-40
Metraux, Alfred, !O9ni4 monsters, 130, 133, 156, 169,
Mexico, 20, 26-7, 29, 30, 101, 103, 142 i69-70n3,229, 308, 315
Michaelius, Jonas, 248 Montagnais, 21, 24, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35,
Michellet, Simon. See Yves d'Evreux 43, 79, 80, 110-11, 122, 190, 238,
middle ground, 26-9 239, 241-2, 311. Seealsolnnu
Mignolo, Walter D., 5, I5ni, 30, 31 Montaigne, Michel de, 21, 122, 310
Mi'kmaq, !O9ni2, 165, 174, 177 Montana, 22Oni2
military alliances, 36 Montchrestien, Antoine de, 95, 106
Miller, Shannon, I39ni Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Sec-
milling, 80, 81 ondat, Baron de La Brede, 309
Milton, John, 6 Montizambert, Edward Louis, 234ni
Minims, 180 Montmagny, Charles Huault de, 231
mining, 4, 142, 147, 149, 153, 162, Montmartre, 70
263-4, 267, 268-70, 272, 273, 274, Montreal, 94, 176, 179, 2ign9, 226,
275-6, 278-9, 293 289
Miranda, Domingo de, I24n2 Montrose, Louis, 139, I57n4
missions and missionaries, 13, 34, 43, Moogk, Peter, 232
47n2, 57, 59, ?o, 7L 74, 75, 80, 8i-2, Moone (ship), 278
91, 93, 98, 103, 104, 105, 107, 111, Moors, 113
121, 149, 163, 165, 166, 173-84, Morantz, Toby, 12, 14, 36, 40, 45, 49,
186-98, I98n4, I98n5, I98n6, 50, 52, 55, 60, 67ni5
201-19, 2ign5, 22Onn, 224, 225, Moravians, 41, ill
378 Index
70, 92, 93, 94, 105, 142, 162, 163, Schenectady, 291
164, 225, 232, 239, 247, 249, 255; Scott, Colin, 48-9, 53, 66ni, 66ng,
basin, 186 67ni6
St Lawrence valley, 92, 96, 191, 224, seasonal cycle, 38, 39, 54
232, 233, 234nl, 235118, 236, 237, Seaver, Kirsten A., 276
238, 239, 241, 244, 245, 248, 249, Seed, Patricia, 150
289 seigneurs, 76, 96, 224, 225, 229, 231
StMalo, 93 Seine River, 92, 120, 232
St Maurice River, 239, 242 Semedo, Alvaro, I99ng
St Paul River, 121 Seneca, 37, 42
Saint-Vallier, Monsignor de, 210, 213 Serpent Pique,167-8
Sainte-Marie among the Huron, 8i-2, Settle, Dionise, 262
193,202 Seville, 114, 115, 118
sainthood, 23, 113, 134, 200 sexuality, 28, 57, 125-6, 135, 141, 145,
Saladin D'Anglure, Bernard, 282 146, 150, 155, 161. See alsobody;
Salamanca, 90 virgins
Salazar, Antonio de, 120 shaking tent, 53
Salde.Juan de la, 12O shamans, 27
Salish (people), 22Onl2 Shammas, Carole, 262
Salmeron, Alfonso, 70 Shawnees, 311
Salvatierra, Juan Maria de, 215 Shelford, April, 9, 127
Samoet, 159 Shimony, Annemarie, 45
San Augustin, 103 shipping and ships, 25, 3ini, 33,
Sancerre, 3ini 48-9, 53, 90, 91, 92, 96, 102, io8n4,
Sanfacon, Andre, 13, 203 HO, 111, 113-15, 117, Il8, 12O-1,
San Lesrnes, 117 122, 124n2, 134, 142, 143, 149, 152,
San Luiz do Maranhao, 103 i58ng, 160, 162, 223, 239, 263, 264,
San Mateo, 102. See also Fort Caroline 267, 268, 269-71, 273, 275, 276, 277,
San Sebastian, 118 278, 280, 281, 283, 285, 287, 291,
Santa Cruz, Geronimo de Salamanca, 293-4, 294, 295, 297, 300, 306;
120 fleets, 93, 94, 96, 174, 265, 266,
Santiago, Pedro de, 116, 117 269-70, 294. See also names of indi-
saplings, 38 vidual ships
Saramakas, 62-3 Shutz, Jonas, 268
Saskatchewan, 54 Sidney, Sir Philip, 129, 132
sassafras, 103 Sillery, 82-3, 191
Satouriona, 101, 102 Silverblatt, Irene, 24, 27
Savelle, James M., 266 Simard, Jean-Jacques, 312, 315, 316
Savignon (Huron boy), 242 Sioui, Georges, 169
Sayre, Edward V., 264, 276 Sioux, 91
384 Index
Taylor, E.G.R., 157 238, 247, 248, 249, 250, 278, 280,
Tecumseh, 311 289, 294, 295, 310
Tekakwitha, Kateri (Catherine), trade goods, 50, 65-6, 89-90, 288, 289,
27-8, 30 296; European, 3, 22-4, 25-6, 48-9,
Tekouerimat, Noel, 82 105, i l l , 118, 160, 167-8, 267,273,
Teresa de Jesus, 119 280; Native, 48-9, 278, 280, 283. See
Terranova. See Newfoundland also furs
Tessouat, 243 traders, 225, 242, 243, 244, 248, 287;
textiles, 22, 55, go, 136, 266 fur traders, 28, 43, 49, 58, 59, 249,
Thames, 278 288, 290,291
Thaondechoren, Louis, 204 trading posts, 49, 50, 60, 67ni5, 224,
Therien, Gilles, 12, 13, 16113, 84114 231,236
Thevet, Andre, 33, 87, 93, 94, 95, 97, translatio fide, 13
98, 161,253 trapping, 49, 164
Thomas (ship), 270 Traquair, Ramsay, 212
Thorne, Robert, 158118 travel literature, 2O, 24, 33, 74, 76-8,
Thucydides, 35, 36 198114, 228, 246, 247, 252, 255, 262,
Thule culture, 265, 281, 283 264, 271. See also explorers
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 174, 219112 treaties, 29, 36, 41, 294, 295, 296
time, concepts of, 15, 29-30, 33, 34, Treaty of Tordesillas, 88
35, 36-7, 38-9, 40, 41, 44, 47, 53, tree of peace (Iroquoian), 42
54-5, 59, 64, 125, 132, 135,313,315 Trelease, Allen W., 248
Timucuans, 100, 101 Tremblay, Francois-Joseph Du. See
tipachiman, 40, 53-4, 55, 57, 59, 60, Joseph de Paris
66114, 671114, 671115, 671117 Tremblay, Mylene, 13
Tlinglit, 62 trickster figures, 51
Tonkin, Elizabeth, 40, 56, 57, 58, 65 Trigger, Bruce, 24, 34, 40, 50-1, 142,
Tooker, Elizabeth, 257 2O2, 205, 212, 217, 219n2, 26lni
Torsellini, Orazio, 206, 220117 Trois-Rivieres, 191-2, 223, 224, 226,
Toulouse, 117, 120 231
Touraine, 180 Trudel, Marcel, 6, 69, 93, 95, 224, 230,
Tours, 227 237
trade, 23-4, 25-6, 28, 36, 48-9, 55, 60, Trudel, Pierre, 60
65-6, 88, 89-90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, Tupi, 21, 24-5, 1091114; Ttipi-Guarani,
98, 102, 104, 105, 106, 114, 127, 133, 89,91
134, 135, 136-7, 138, 139m, 146, Tupinamba, 21, 22, 23, 91, 97, 104-5,
147-8, 149, 150, 153, 166, 241, 244, 122
245, 265-6, 281, 283, 292, 293, 296, Turgeon, Laurier, 16113, I39n3
3021122, 3021124, 302n26; fur trade, Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, Baron
50, 58, 91, 94, 110, 193, 202, 236, de 1'Aulne, 168
386 Index