of early American places.84 They were accounts that often provided brief descriptions, offering the perspective of a traveler who could only catch glimpses of complex ecologies from canoes or on foot and who often relied on guides as they traveled into the heart of the continent. These were environments that were peopled, either by living indigenous communities or by the specter of future colonial development. Authors explicitly presented spaces in which they had dwelled; they foregrounded their own experience and knowledge produced through their physical presence in American cultural and ecological settings.85 Embedded in descriptions of unfamiliar peoples and landscapes, narratives such as these highlighted the presence of recognizable French plants such as oak, grapevine, strawberries, and grains that anchored readers and travelers alike, continuing to offer promises of an essential familiarity behind apparent difference.
In effect, plants and American environments continued to be known as they were lived, and the immersive perspective of early authors such as Champlain, Sagard, and Le Jeune continued throughout the century. North American plants could be identified by functional roles they shared with European counterparts, an essence defined, at least in part, by how French communities could live with a plant. Describing Acadia in his 1672 Histoire naturelle, the colonial promoter and landowner Nicolas Denys wrote, “There are also pine for making planks, good for making decks, and fir for ornaments … pine, little spruce and fir are also found in the forests of this country which serve for tar the qualities of which I have already spoken.”86 If the American wilderness was perceived through a lens that favored extractive enterprise and the transformation of botanical resources into commodities, seventeenth-century texts from French North America suggest that colonists and missionaries also looked at North American flora with an eye to transplanting European ecological relationships into new soils. More than a mercantilist gaze, this was an understanding of botanical identity that saw latent or potential utility as a constitutive facet of a plant’s identity.87 The adoption of the natural historical genre allowed even greater flexibility to include knowledge acquired from decades of colonial experience. It meant that even the imposing forests of New France were seen to support the efforts by colonial authors who understood that this flora would be called upon through cultivation of French colonial spaces and lives.88
Plants in print—those that arrived as descriptions in travel narratives, histories, natural histories, and personal correspondence—therefore contributed far more to an emerging awareness of Acadian and Laurentian places and peoples than the specimens that grew in French gardens. Sagard wrote in 1632 that some of his fellow missionaries had brought “some Martagons” to France, “with some cardinal plants as rare flowers, but they did not profit there, nor did they reach their perfection, as they do in their own climate and native soil.”89 He juxtaposed this anecdote with his description of the landscapes of the early seventeenth-century Saint Lawrence Valley, suggesting that he hoped instead to offer his French readers a virtual experience of the plant’s “native soil” through his text.90 Not only were written descriptions better able to survive transit and inform a broader audience in France, they did the additional work of bringing whole environments to life, rather than single specimens.
Like Poutrincourt’s presentation of wheat, authors such as Lescarbot and Champlain took presentations of American flora—both native and introduced—as opportunities to valorize experiential ways of knowing these newly colonized places that made them legible and familiar to their audiences. Travel narratives offered opportunities to convey personal experience of American places. By the time that missionary relations and the récits de voyage of explorers presented New France to European readers, travel narratives were well established as a privileged genre for carrying experiences of the new worlds Europeans discovered around the globe back to reading publics in Europe.91 In the representation of New France, the travel narrative provided authors with an opportunity to meditate on the most prosaic fixtures of American landscapes, establishing familiarity and engendering confidence in the success of French colonialism to make them more familiar still.92 Even as authors began to call their accounts natural histories by midcentury, a strong authorial presence remained, along with considerable reliance on narratives that warranted descriptions as the product of firsthand experience. Narratives allowed authors to seamlessly move between empirical observations of real environments and imagine a not-too-distant promised future.93 The movement between these two tenses both legitimated colonial authors as experts and imaginatively engaged readers in the cultivation of an empire in northeastern North America.
The genres favored by colonial authors were the most capacious, and accounts of early American environments featured a variety of written forms.94 If the forms were fluid, however, the function remained consistent: to capture not only the experience of a New World but the affinities that connected New France and Old and that transcended the physical distance of the ocean that separated them. Textual features such as lists, indigenous-language dictionaries, and specific sections that dealt with natural historical subjects hint at the variety of information that could be contained within texts that modestly claimed to be simple accounts of circumscribed travel.95 For example, the dictionary included in Sagard’s Grand Voyage, like the chapter devoted to plants, offered Native terms for plants seemingly abstracted from their local cultural or ecological context alongside vocabulary related to the consumption of tobacco and other foods, farming, and the medicinal use of local plants.96 In this, Sagard joined other authors such as Lescarbot in a willingness to enrich their own narratives with features common to other genres. The Acadian lawyer’s Histoire, for example, combined a first-person narrative of early maritime colonization with an anthology of previous and contemporary French efforts in the region. In the process, his text became a palimpsest of forms and narrative techniques that converged to make New France legible as a colonial space.97
As part of a broader effort to centralize his authority, in 1663 Louis XIV took direct control of New France and reorganized its government. As the king’s interest in France’s colonial possessions grew, Pierre Boucher, Nicolas Denys, Louis Nicolas, and other authors expanded the effort to explain New France to multiple and more popular audiences across the Atlantic. The justifications for these efforts varied. Some, such as Louis Nicolas, had left New France behind and sought to use knowledge acquired there to build a life and reputation for themselves across the Atlantic.98 Others, such as the landowners and promoters Nicolas Denys and Pierre Boucher, while likewise staking a claim to authority based on their considerable firsthand experience, claimed that they did so to counter false testimony that had degraded the image of New France and that had undermined the appeal of colonization there. Boucher claimed the goal of telling his readers “the truth with the greatest naïveté that is possible, and the briefest that I can.”99 Nicolas Denys likewise sought to “disabuse” his readers of pernicious false opinions that he himself had been subject to before his arrival in Acadia.100 In this they implicitly joined the efforts of their colonial predecessors, yet they did so in a genre that had thus far had little role in the works of those authors who related New France. The genre that Denys, Nicolas, and Boucher chose was the natural history.
Like travel narratives, the genre of the natural history was in flux during this period.101 The major impact of the natural historical texts that described New France was to remove the chronological and linear focus that had defined earlier accounts. In his Histoire veritable, for example, Boucher organized many of his chapters around specific kinds of life recognizable to seventeenth-century authors, such as trees, animals, birds, and fish, but also included chapters devoted to particular regions such as Québec and others that addressed indigenous peoples.102 Thus even where the descriptions of plants seem haphazard and chaotic to the modern reader, for early modern audiences they assumed a familiarity with organizing categories such as trees, grasses, or bushes common in contemporary botanical texts; their inclusion in texts about North American flora argued for the existence of fundamental similarities between North American and European plants.103 Louis Nicolas, for example, divided his descriptions of over two hundred plants from sections on fish, birds, mammals, and aboriginal peoples and provided smaller sections that divided trees from shrubs and grasses from
