“baggage” that explorers, colonists, and missionaries brought with them to the Americas in environments that shared common natural histories with Europe and that, in effect, were far more familiar than foreign for early modern explorers.16 Sagard’s lack of confusion can seem surprising if we expect European explorers utterly unmoored by the newness of the Americas. J. H. Elliott’s argument that the impact of the New World on the Old was “disappointingly muted and slow in materializing” has encouraged a generation of scholars to debate the cause of a “blunted impact” that seems to echo in Sagard’s confidence.17 As the inheritors of decades of scholarly investigation of narratives of travel and exploration that in extremis claim that “we can be certain only that European representations of the New World tell us something about the European practice of representation,” we are justly skeptical of authors such as Sagard, Champlain, and other settlers and missionaries in northeastern North America who demonstrate a considerable familiarity with what we know were new places.18 At its most innocent, the failure of authors such as Sagard to recognize the novelty of American environments can seem a confusion of kinds and an inability to comprehend how the distance that they had traveled had translated into real biological and ecological differences.19 Yet Sagard seemed reassured by what he found, and he saw in New France environments that were more French than new.20
Appreciating the colonialist intent of explorers such as Sagard who arrived with the explicit purpose of subverting indigenous cultures demands that we recognize that the power of Sagard’s diagnosis of fruit that was “small for lack of being cultivated and grafted” or grapes that produced poor wine because local indigenous communities “did not cultivate them” worked through immersion in the natural worlds of early America rather than obfuscation of these material realities.21 If, as Michel de Certeau has described colonial accounts, this was “writing that conquers,” it was not because it “will use the New World as if it is a blank, ‘savage’ page on which Western desire will be written.”22 While a knowing confusion obscured indigenous title and promised easy European settlement in other parts of the Americas, in New France it was Sagard’s efforts to foreground familiarity that instead justified European colonialism through close and precise study of American environments.23 Empirical and accurate observation of plant morphology and ecology became essential acts in the establishment of a French colonial political ecology in northeastern North America that diagnosed the region as being in need of colonialism that its architects represented as a form of cultivation. Sagard’s gardens, like his narrative more broadly, in this way reveal how French visions of American colonialism drew upon both material histories acting across millions of years and more recent cultural revolutions that enabled explorers and missionaries to appreciate them.
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In his 1603 Des Sauvages, Samuel de Champlain recounted his first sighting of North America as an encounter not with land but instead with a “bank of ice that was more than eight leagues in length, with an infinity of smaller other ones.” It was spotted April 29 when, their pilot estimated, they remained “one hundred or two hundred leagues from the land of Canada.”24 Champlain’s voyage with a Spanish vessel to the West Indies only a few years earlier must have seemed a distant dream and the frigid lands he was discovering in this New France the near opposite of the terrestrial paradises to be found among the islands of the Caribbean.25 Almost seventy years earlier in 1534, Jacques Cartier had a similar first impression of the northern reaches of North America, noting the “large number of blocks of ice along the coast” of Newfoundland. Before discovering the Saint Lawrence and more fertile lands to the west he found himself “inclined to believe that this is the land that God gave to Cain” near what is now Labrador.26 Yet within a few short years these northern shores would be home to several tentative efforts at French colonization of the Americas. Early accounts of the region therefore attempted both to describe the frequently harsh and inhospitable settings and to hint at the possibility that the transplantation of French ecological regimes could ameliorate these extreme colds.
The Europeans who traveled to northeastern North America in the early seventeenth century found environments that resembled those they had left more than any others in the early modern world.27 Many species of North American flora would have been almost immediately recognizable to European travelers who were familiar with European congeners, or related plants that shared a common genus. Birch, oak, maple, and other common features of temperate and boreal environments on both sides of the Atlantic were visible traces of shared geological and ecological histories produced by tectonic plate movements and climate change. This was equally true of smaller shrubs, fruits, and grasses.28
This was in fact a not-so-New World. French colonists recognized the flora of North America because it was made up of the same types of plants as the environments that they had left in France. Champlain was able to catalogue “oak, aspen, poplar, hops, ash, maple, beech, cedar, [and] very few pines and firs” so readily because of the existence of real botanical continuities between his Old World and the New and, more specifically, between northeastern North America and Europe.29 These trees, along with the walnut and chestnut that Sagard described, and many other noticeable features of the contact-era environment were the descendants of once globally distributed plant communities that, across millions of years, circulated and spread throughout the northern hemisphere of North America, Europe, and Asia.30 Scientific attention to the presence of related species of plants across massive distances and natural boundaries such as mountains and oceans—what biogeographers call disjunct distributions—has thrived for centuries.31 More recently, with increased knowledge of geological processes and the science of plate tectonics, biogeographers have been able to write the history of the Earth’s plant communities with much greater clarity. If considerable uncertainty remains around the specific timing and sequence of geological and evolutionary events, research into plant fossils, geological history, and molecular analysis has established a general paradigm.
In the past several decades, biogeographers have reconstructed the “widespread distribution of temperate forest elements in the northern hemisphere” during the Tertiary, or between 65 and 2 million years ago.32 The forests that Champlain and Sagard left behind in Europe were the remnants of a much larger floral community that already included familiar trees such as maples, walnut, hornbeam, and sycamore, along with the ancestors of current species of Prunus such as cherries and plums.33 They were more properly part of an “Arctotertioary geoflora” or “boreotropical flora” that can best be described as a “warm-temperate evergreen broadleaf and mixed forest” that had spread across temperate regions of the world that were much farther north than they are now.34 These connections were more recent than the early supercontinents such as Pangaea or Gondwana and date instead to a series of connections between Asia, North America, and Europe that allowed for considerable communication of plants and animals between these continents.35 To the west, a land bridge crossed what is now the Bering Strait and, to the east, volcanic activity created a land bridge crossing what is now Greenland, bridging North America and Europe.36 The unique floras of local regions in the northern hemisphere were the product of repeated ruptures and re-creations of these bridges, as well as the accident of geographical features such as mountains, rivers, and inland seas.37
In the more recent past, global climatic cooling effectively broke these connections, driving plants and animals fast enough to adapt to the south and to isolated ice-free high points created as the ice sheets moved south and glaciers surrounded them.38 In Europe, many tropical species were pushed to the south and died out as the Mediterranean blocked their escape.39 Isolated by glaciers and oceans, North American, Asian, and European plant and animal populations began to diverge.40 The floras of Europe and North America would have been most similar in the early Tertiary, before divergence began between 10 and 40 million years ago.41 The specific makeup of individual ecosystems, shaped as much by geography as they were their specific organismal composition, drove evolutionary patterns and the emergence of new species of genera that remain common to much of the temperate northern hemisphere.42 Many of the species unique
