Some of them imagine a Paradise abounding in blueberries; these are little blue fruits, the berries of which are as large as the largest grapes. I have not seen any of them in France. They have a tolerably good flavor, and for this reason the souls like them very much. Others say that the souls do nothing but dance after their departure from this life: there are some who admit the transmigration of souls, as Pythagoras did; and the majority of them imagine that the soul is insensible after it has left the body: as a general thing, all believe that it is immortal…. In fact, I have heard some of them assert that they have no souls; they hear people talk about these attendant forms, and sometimes persuade themselves that they possess them,—the Devil employing their imagination and their passions, or their melancholy, to bring about some results that appear to them extraordinary.127
Le Jeune’s description of the blueberry functioned as a means to explore and explain aboriginal conceptions of the soul to his European readers and hinted at the possibility of diabolical influence in indigenous religions.
First-person narratives permitted moving seamlessly between the botanical and ethnographic description that enabled authors to both catalogue American flora and diagnose it as deficient.128 Writing from Wendat territory in 1653, for instance, Bressani declared that “there are some wild vines, but in small quantity, nor are they esteemed by the Barbarians themselves; but they do esteem highly a certain fruit of violet color, the size of a juniper berry which I have never seen in these countries. I have also seen, once, a plant similar to the Melon of India, with fruit the size of a small lime.”129 Writing from the mission at Kahnawake, Jacques Frémin similarly wrote: “And besides the grapes, plums, apples, and other fruits, which would be fairly good if the Sauvages had patience to let them ripen, there also grows on the prairies a kind of lime resembling that of France.”130 Jesuits presented cultural and natural environments that were defined by aboriginal ecological practice. Even where authors such as Frémin and Bressani added their own observations, they were assembled from personal experiences that were couched in wider discussions of aboriginal ecological lives.
Subjective experiences therefore became the primary registers for explaining these new foods, plants, and animals. Encounters with indigenous food provoked few of the anxieties that wracked English and Spanish explorers who feared that changes to their humoral complexion would result from consuming foreign foodstuffs.131 The primary challenge was the disgust and discomfort that were prominent in written accounts of Native foodways. Sagard’s description of a dish of fermented corn among the Wendat, for example, evoked a plate “very stinky and more rotten than even the gutters.”132 Among the Innu, Paul Le Jeune blurred natural history and a description of indigenous foods when he gave an account of “the meats and other dishes which the sauvages eat, their seasoning, and their drinks.” He noted that
among their terrestrial animals they have the Elk, which is here generally called the Moose; Castors, which the English call Beavers; Caribou by some called the Wild ass; they also have Bears, Badgers, Porcupines, Foxes, Hares, Whistler or Nightingale,—this is an animal larger than a Hare; they eat also Martens, and three kinds of Squirrels. As to birds, they have Bustards, white and gray Geese, several species of Ducks, Teals, Ospreys and several kinds of Divers. These are all river birds. They also catch Partridges or gray Hazel-hens, Woodcocks and Snipe of many kinds, Turtle doves, etc. As to Fish, they catch, in the season, different kinds of Salmon, Seals, Pike, Carp, and Sturgeon of various sorts; Whitefish, Goldfish, Barbels, Eels, Lampreys, Smelt, Turtles, and others. They eat, besides some small ground fruits, such as raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, nuts which have very little meat, hazelnuts, wild apples sweeter than those of France, but much smaller; cherries, of which the flesh and pit together are not larger than the pit of the Bigarreau cherry in France. They have also other small Wild fruits of different kinds, in some places Wild Grapes; in short, all the fruits they have (except strawberries and raspberries, which they have in abundance) are not worth one single species of the most ordinary fruits of Europe.133
Details of subjective experiences such as tasting Native foods reveal the colonialist intent of these otherwise descriptive accounts. Whether travel narrative or natural history, description was not an end in and of itself. Instead, authors such as Le Jeune seized upon these moments to invite readers to understand the need for French intervention in cultural and natural landscapes that were deemed lacking.
Authors who based their descriptions on their own experiences positioned their bodies as instruments in the production of natural knowledge and their own subjective tastes as the metric for comparisons between New France and Old. In 1640, for example, Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot described sagamité, a porridge that the Wendat made with corn, as he wrote that “the whole apparatus of our kitchen and of our refectory consists of a great wooden dish, full of sagamité, whereto I see nothing more similar than the paste which is used in covering walls. Thirst hardly annoys us,—either because we never use salt, or because our food is always very liquid. As for me, since I have been here, I have not drunk in all a glass of water, although it is now eight months since I arrived.”134 A letter from François du Peron to his brother from the Wendat village of Ossossanë written a year earlier similarly explained that “one does not have undisturbed rest here, as in France; all our Fathers and domestics, except one or two, I being of the number, rise four or five times every night … the food here causes this.”135 In this way, du Peron’s digestion became an opportunity to highlight deficient indigenous relationships with American nature; colonial bodies became an essential and authoritative mediator of both American environments and authorized judgment of aboriginal ecological practice.
Narratives equally promised that sauvage plants that might differ subtly from their French counterparts could nonetheless be counted upon to support French lives. While the use of a name such as “oak,” “cherry,” “vine,” or “lemon” certainly implied the existence of specific morphological features expected by French audiences and colonists, these familiar French names also implied a set of potential uses and ways of living with the plant and its products. On both sides of the Atlantic, North American plants became knowable through lived experience of working with them, and their possible uses and incorporations into French ecological and domestic regimes figured prominently in early written accounts. Experience with American crops demonstrated that they could also be understood through practice—through experience of cultivation, harvest, cooking, and digestion. Where corn was integrated into French fields and lives, for example, it was because it was valuable as a substitute for other grains. In Nicolas de Ville’s Histoire des plantes de l’Europe et des plus usitées qui viennent d’Asie, d’Afrique et de l’Amérique he wrote, for example, that “the flour is white … but thicker and more viscous than that of wheat; it is less easily digestible. The peasants make a porridge of it with butter and cheese which is agreeable enough, even if heavy on the stomach. The flour is excellent for plasters which ripen. The juice of the leaves is good for inflammations and erysipelas.”136 Where botanical science relied upon morphology and other visual cues to provide differentiation, narrative and a dwelling perspective could promise familiarity far more effectively.
Only a few decades later in 1709, Louis Liger confidently assumed a widespread knowledge and experience of the plant when he wrote that “the Turkish wheat, otherwise known as Indian wheat, is known well enough, such that there is no need to describe it.”137 After detailing the method and timing necessary to plant the crop, Liger continued to situate the plant within a French geographical and social setting.
It is not difficult to acquire Turkish wheat to sow, because it is very common in Burgundy, in Franche-Comté and in Bresse where a lot of it is cultivated, its usages … are very advantageous, the grain is milled and the flour is used to make bread of which almost all the laborers of these regions feed their families during the entire year. The flour is also used to make beignets, galettes, tarts seasoned with dairy products, and a type of porridge that they call Gaude, that they make like rice or millet; this serves as breakfast for everyone in the house, it is for this reason
