At least some travel narrative authors similarly sought to escape, at least temporarily, the linearity of their narratives to linger on a discussion of regions in an abstract language that could encompass spaces broader than they might otherwise be able to include. Narratives such as Louis Hennepin’s 1683 Description de la Louisiane, for example, seemed willing to blend formal elements of both narrative and natural history.105 The first sections of the book included information presented in a manner that would have been familiar to readers of the Relations or Champlain’s Voyages. His description of a Detroit “covered by forests, fruit trees such as walnut, chestnuts, prune trees, apple trees, [and] sauvage vines, charged with grapes,” was introduced alongside the information that he and his fellow travelers were “fortunate enough to have arrived at the entrance of Détroit on the tenth in the morning, the feast day of Saint Lawrence.”106 These economical descriptions were complemented, however, by an appended text titled Les moeurs des sauvages that also included an introductory chapter on the “fertility of the country of the Sauvages.”107
In place of an emphasis on the different genres in which authors such as Champlain, Lescarbot, Boucher, and Denys wrote, we should instead emphasize both a common epistemology and shared formal promiscuity. Lists appeared within narratives, and accounts of travel punctuated natural historical texts. Consistently, however, these authors rarely failed to establish their authority as firsthand observers who knew the places that they described through their own labors of cultivation and experimentation.
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Authors such as Champlain, Lescarbot, and Biard established themselves as experts on American environments and made effective use of genres that privileged their own experience and knowledge. Champlain’s various Voyages and Lescarbot’s editions of the Histoire de la Nouvelle-France focused primary attention on the significant firsthand experience that they had acquired in the colony.108 While both Biard’s and Gabriel Sagard’s accounts of their missions to American indigenous peoples were interested in the invisible and otherworldly, their narratives revolved around their explorations—around their actions and experiences.109 Sagard promised, for example, that “I speak only of what I am assured.”110 Chronologically organized accounts emphasized the complexity of American environments and privileged the expertise of authors who had spent considerable time in New France.111 Descriptions of the weather, for example, became opportunities both to relate empirically observed facts and to remind readers of the length and breadth of an author’s experience. Foregrounding his experience of both Frances, Biard wrote, for example, that “I noticed once, that two February days, the 26th and 27th, were as beautiful, mild, and spring-like as are those in France about that time; nevertheless, the third day after, it snowed a little and the cold returned. Sometimes in summer the heat is as intolerable, or more so than it is in France; but it does not last long, and soon the sky begins to be overcast.”112 Champlain recounted successful experiments with spring and winter plantings, and Lescarbot reported that promoters had brought back some samples of Old World crops grown in Acadia to accompany his written account of the fecundity and—more important—the reliability and predictability of American climates.113 Each emphasized the empirical foundation of their knowledge and used their own experienced bodies as a metric for their readers, who were instructed how to appreciate the similarities between France and New France.114
Narrators also claimed a role as guarantors of testimony collected from indigenous and colonial sources. In many of the early Relations from the 1630s, for instance, Jesuits such as Paul Le Jeune established themselves as both collectors of testimony and witnesses in their own right.115 Le Jeune wrote in 1633, for example, that “on the 28th [of October], some French hunters, returning from the islands which are in the great St. Lawrence River, told us … that there were apples in those islands, very sweet but very small; and that they had eaten plums which would not be in any way inferior to our apricots in France if the trees were cultivated.”116 When Jacques Bruyas wrote in a letter from the mission to the Haudenosaunee at Saint François-Xavier in 1668 that “apple, plum, and chestnut trees are seen here,” he provided little sense of when or by whom they were seen.117 These movements between firsthand observation and gathered testimony served to foreground the author as expert and broaden the field of observation to verify observed and expected facts.118 Colonial authorities such as Champlain similarly translated their social privilege into epistemological authority that enabled him to speak of and on behalf of New France.119 A counterpart to his dual role in New France as a civil authority and an explorer, Champlain switched readily between his own experiences and those of others over whom he governed in his various Voyages.120 We can read as easily, for example, about his winter experiences among the Wendat or his explorations of the Ottawa River as we can his summaries of the experiences of colonists such as Louis Hébert who are otherwise silent.121 Jesuit and colonial authors communicated experience of American flora as a composite of multiple experiences by multiple authors and witnesses.122
Whether forwarding gathered testimony or relating their own considerable experience, the authors of natural histories and travel accounts to New France such as Champlain and Jesuit missionaries favored narratives that resisted reducing botanical knowledge to the description of plant morphology. Visual observation was privileged, but sight as it was increasingly used within contemporary European science was rarely deemed sufficient in and of itself. Renaissance and early modern natural history focused relentlessly on the visible characteristics of plants, and the growing use of textual descriptions and dried herbarium specimens in lieu of direct experience of living plants marginalized descriptions of what we might call their ecological contexts. In contrast, North America–based authors continued to situate novel flora in narratives that immersed their readers in complex and irreducible ecosystems.123 Both authors of early seventeenth-century travel narratives and authors of later natural histories such as Nicolas Denys and Louis Nicolas clearly appreciated the visible qualities of American flora, yet they rarely failed to also reference the tastes, smells, and aboriginal uses of new plants and foods. Even as empirical experience was central to French accounts, then, the field of experience and the types of knowledge presented remained self-consciously broad.
The result was that where modern readers might expect botanical descriptions that focus on morphology, other qualifications were frequently interwoven into narratives that drew upon multiple senses and that blended ethnographic and botanical observations. Take, for instance, the following account of a new plant described by Louis Nicolas in his Histoire naturelle, written around 1675. Nicolas named the plant simply “another black fruit.”124 This, in itself, was neither out of the ordinary for natural historical texts nor particularly informative. When he later added that Europeans could not accustom themselves to its taste, however, he took what might seem to be a strange rhetorical turn, writing that “it seems that these strange people have an aversion to everything that we like, and prize everything that we despise; they cannot bear our best smells, and say that they smell bad.”125 Investigations of plant life invited commentary on local cultures, and vice versa. This is not to suggest that missionary authors elided natural and cultural descriptions, categories that for missionaries and their readers meant little at the time.126 Rather, it hinted at the belief in a complex web of relations between people and place. As Jesuits worked to convert souls and colonists worked to transform place, they became aware of the importance of flora as emblematic of broader features of the North American natural and cultural landscape.
Narratives that recounted experience of peopled landscapes made the colonialist intent of natural description particularly clear; French texts could provide both experience of new flora and judgments about the inadequacy of indigenous ecological knowledge. In 1639, for example, as the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune sought to provide his readers with insights into the “superstitions” and “customs” of the Algonquian speakers whom the missionaries were actively trying to settle at Québec in agricultural communities, he took what might seem to us a strange turn. As he proceeded “first, as to what concerns their
