long-lived example from the seeds of this first R. pseudoacacia in 1636 in the Jardin du Roi where he worked as a botanical demonstrator and arborist.69 The tree soon spread roots beyond the confines of Paris, although the eighteenth-century amateur botanist Joseph-Pierre Buc’hoz wrote that early experiments with planting the tree along French rural allées failed; unfortunately, he wrote, the branches broke “easily in the lightest wind,” although parts of the tree were eventually used both medicinally and for woodworking.70 Over a century after the first example of the tree was growing in Paris, Carolus Linnaeus attached Robin’s name to what by then was increasingly known as a false acacia.71
Yet the exact origins of the tree planted in 1601 remain unknown and disputed to this day, at least in part because the first name provided—Acacia Americana Robini—failed to identify either a specific region of origin or a vector of its arrival. Some scholars have suggested that the tree was first acquired much later than 1601 from the English naturalist John Tradescant, who had acquired it for himself from Virginia, either from his son John the younger (who traveled to Virginia on a botanizing trip) or from correspondents who had settled in the colony.72 Although Champlain might seem to be a possible source, his trip to Mexico and the Caribbean left him far to the south of the tree’s natural range, and his explorations of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley were both too late and too far north.73 In this respect, the uncertain origin of R. pseudoacacia makes it representative of many of the early plants that crossed the Atlantic from North America.
When Jacques Philippe Cornut produced the first written description and visual image of Robinia pseudoacacia in his 1635 Canadensium plantarum he called it Acacia Americana Robini; but he used the terms “Canada” to represent a far larger region than the present-day country and “America” as a fluid geographical marker more akin to how we today use the term “Americas” (Figure 5).74 The text marked a transition between the humanist herbals of the sixteenth century and the regional floras of the seventeenth and the eighteenth. The passages that described the plants and the copper-plate images that represented them were not the product of the circumscribed field trips that would soon come to define regional floras but were instead an effort to expand the geographical coverage of classical botanical authorities.75 If he and others of this community of Paris-based natural historians therefore continued to confuse the specific geographical origins of the plants they described, they surely can be forgiven; this was not the task that they took up for themselves or their science.
Figure 5. Jacques-Philippe Cornut, “Acacia Americana Robini,” Canadensium plantarum, 1635. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
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Successful calls to cultivate New France required methods of communication that could simultaneously describe New France for French readers and diagnose its deficiencies. The specimens in Parisian gardens could not accomplish this. If we were to look for an author who can offer an image of a typical French traveler of this style in the interior of North America, we might easily pick Jean de Brébeuf. Arriving initially in New France in 1625, he is best remembered for his exploration of the Great Lakes and his residence among the Wendat people in what is now Ontario. Brébeuf traveled widely throughout Wendat territory and was an early and authoritative source of information about the region that would become the pays d’en haut. About his life among the Wendat he wrote:
We live on the shore of a great Lake, which affords as good fish as I have ever seen or eaten in France; true, as I have said, we do not ordinarily procure them, and still less do we get meat, which is even more rarely seen here. Fruits even, according to the season, provided the year be somewhat favorable, are not lacking to us; strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries are to be found in almost incredible quantities. We gather plenty of grapes, which are fairly good; the squashes last sometimes four and five months, and are so abundant that they are to be had almost for nothing, and so good that, on being cooked in the ashes, they are eaten as apples are in France. Consequently, to tell the truth, as regards provisions, the change from France is not very great; the only grain of the Country is a sufficient nourishment, when one is somewhat accustomed to it. The Sauvages prepare it in more than twenty ways and yet employ only fire and water; it is true that the best sauce is that which it carries with it.76
Like the Relations more broadly, this is a complicated text that transitions cleanly between a single authorial voice and a “we” that spoke to both his fellow travelers and his readers. Brébeuf acknowledged both the limits of his own experience (“we do not ordinarily procure them”) and his reliance upon indigenous knowledge and labor.77 He nonetheless confidently named types of edible plants that he clearly knew intimately and expected his readers to know as well.
We can see then how such narratives were a deceptively simple formal strategy for describing newly discovered places and evoking the promise of colonialism to draw out latent possibilities in places and peoples. Even as the decades passed and the geographical reach of missionary authors increased, travel narratives presented their authors with an effective means to translate their experiences in a manner meant both to entice support and to assuage any concerns about the illegibility of new flora and environments. Writing about a Mascouten village in the western Great Lakes to which he had traveled in 1673, for example, Jacques Marquette wrote that “I took pleasure in observing the situation of this village. It is beautiful and very pleasing; For, from an Eminence upon which it is placed, one beholds on every side prairies, extending farther than the eye can see, interspersed with groves or with lofty trees. The soil is very fertile, and yields much Indian corn. The sauvages gather quantities of plums and grapes, wherewith much wine could be made, if desired.”78 Like Brébeuf, Marquette acknowledged aboriginal presence but confidently anticipated the expansion of French colonialism that would enrich the agricultural and ecological productivity of the region. Marquette assured his readers that familiar plants dotted the landscape, but he also introduced his own aesthetic judgments to provide an assessment of the innate beauty of the region and possibilities for French improvement.
The centrality of cultivation to the propagandistic quality of these writings is marked. In the 1632 edition of his Voyages, for example, Samuel de Champlain promised Richelieu an account of “lands no less than four times the size of France, as well as the progress in the conversion of the sauvages, the clearings of some of these lands whereby you will perceive that in no respect are they less fertile than that of France; and finally the settlements and forts that have been built there in the name of France.”79 It was a project that he summarized as aiming to “restore and retain possession of this New Land by the settlements and colonies which will be found necessary there.”80 Discussions of a sauvage country implied that conditions that might be claimed to be defining features of these newly explored and settled regions of Acadia and Québec were in fact remediable defects. The ambition of this era was perhaps best captured by the Jesuit Pierre Biard, however, who wrote that “there is no reason why the soil should not be equally fertile, if the cultivation of the plains were long continued upon to lands, and if it were not for the dense shades of the almost unbroken forests.”81 New France offered nothing less, he wrote, than “another France … to be cultivated.”82
Communicating American flora in print was therefore not an exercise in abstraction. Descriptive detail in these accounts gathered where authors allowed themselves to inhabit a place or to imagine it in the not-too-distant colonial future. The organization of these accounts was therefore both spatial and temporal, offering experience of linear itineraries and selected sites that were transmuted into representative samples of larger American environments.83 Scholars of the literatures of encounter in French North America have often emphasized the distinction between colonial and missionary texts of this early period, yet the shared reliance on chronologically
