was both foregrounded and critiqued within accounts that drew upon the sylvan symbolism of the term sauvage. Missionary and colonial sources were clear that these sauvage people were unable to properly use sauvage plants to better themselves; they languished together. Lescarbot complained about the resistance of Mi’kmaq with whom he interacted to appreciate the evident superiority of French practice. “We showed them,” he wrote, “in pressing grapes in a glass, that this was how we made the wine that we drank. We wanted to make them eat the grapes, but having them in their mouths they spit them out, and thought (as Ammianus Marcellinus recounts of our old Gauls) that it was poison, such are these people ignorant of the best thing that God has given to man, after bread.”154 These were critiques that therefore slipped readily between accusations of cultural and moral inferiority and that rendered discussions of indigenous practices evidence of the need for spiritual reform and civilization. Even if “the forest serves” the indigenous peoples of New France, as one Jesuit explained, it was because “they know better the ways of these vast and dreadful forests than do the wild beasts, whose dwelling they are; the French did not lightly venture to entangle themselves in these dense woods.”155
Indigenous people in these accounts seemed both part of and subject to the natural environments of New France. Champlain, for example, framed his struggles to traverse “thick woods” while “loaded down with a pikeman’s corselet” and attacked by “hosts of mosquitoes, a strange sight, which were so thick that they hardly allowed us to draw our breath,” as a brutal episode saved only by two aboriginal people who were simply “traversing the woods.”156 Elsewhere he described a waterfall that his guides crossed easily without getting wet.157 The Jesuit Paul Le Jeune was astonished that even as he experienced a cold “so violent that we heard the trees split in the woods,” he was visited by indigenous peoples “sometimes half-naked, without complaining of the cold.”158 Perhaps this was because, as Le Jeune later related, these Innu peoples conceived of the seasons as non-human beings with whom they could interact; Pipounoukhe (winter) and Nipinoukhe (spring and summer) each shared the world and could be heard “talking or rustling, especially at their coming.”159 Accounts such as these did not represent indigenous knowledge as the product of skillful adaptations to harsh environments. Instead, colonial authors marginalized complex technologies and skills as unlearned and unrefined reactions of sauvage cultures.
As often as they seemed to remain above the material constraints of the natural world that so challenged French exploration and settlement, both Iroquoian peoples to the west and Algonquian communities to the north were represented as being mastered by, rather than masters of, their environments.160 Champlain, for example, compared the ordinary indigenous preparation of dried fruit for winter to the practice of Lent in France; the power of abstinence during Lent is of course its voluntary nature but here in a land that seemed capable of supporting great ecological diversity, such a fast was a necessity.161 Even as the seasonality of the continent’s climate encouraged his vision of an agricultural empire, the frequent migrations of indigenous communities such as the Odawa berry gatherers who Champlain encountered in 1615 seemed dependent upon fruit that was “manna,” or a gift from God, rather than the product of their own labors.162 Even the Wendat peoples with whom Champlain had frequent cause to winter—admirable agriculturalists though they were—were found lacking. “Their life is miserable when compared with ours,” he wrote, “but happy among them because they have not tasted better.”163 Land was cleared “with great costs” and labored by women, and it produced dishes that “we would give to pigs to eat.164
In this way, sauvage became a term that as both noun and adjective described and explained the uncanny character of northeastern North American places and peoples. As an adjective, the sauvage laid claim to an essential biological equality between the flora and environments of New France and Europe. As a noun, it argued that indigenous peoples were unable to claim the requisite distance from their natural world required of civilized people. Together, they diagnosed place and people in tandem. Both were in a state of wildness, subject to the excesses and insufficiencies of the other.
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When early authors—colonists, missionaries, and explorers such as Gabriel Sagard, Samuel de Champlain, Marc Lescarbot, and Paul Le Jeune—arrived in northeastern North America, they were drawn to a natural world that they called sauvage. They carefully recorded each encounter and experience with new places and new plants, arguing that, adequately understood, the nature of these regions would provide insight into how French colonialism could take root there. The political ecology of French colonialism in seventeenth-century North America translated the region’s distinctive environmental history into evidence for the need for French intervention. In the same breath, colonial authors highlighted both affinities and differences between European and American environments. Floral and ecological similarities offered proof of an essential resemblance and unity, while real differences legitimized French efforts to marginalize indigenous ecological knowledge and ignore the sovereignty of the aboriginal communities who had long lived in what soon became New France.
The first narratives of exploration, evangelization, and settlement therefore moved consciously toward accounts of the region that were both human and natural histories. Gabriel Sagard, when he delighted in the gardens of his order at Québec, understood French intervention in northeastern environments as the fulfillment of a providential history that offered the promise that the sauvage nature he described could be perfected. Champlain, when he described early efforts to cultivate American grapes at his habitation, suggested that French colonialism would tap the region’s unfulfilled potential. Close study and careful attention to the distribution of temperate flora provided proponents of French colonialism with a purpose for New France. As letters, narratives, specimens, and samples crossed the Atlantic in the first decades of the seventeenth century, understanding the environments of northeastern North America became central to France’s colonial project.
CHAPTER 2
Communicating Cultivation
When Marc Lescarbot recounted his own experiences during the first years of Acadian settlement, he wrote from Paris with the benefit of hindsight and a lingering sense of loss. Both are obvious from his frequent and loving accounts of farming in northeastern North America. We know, for example, that the settlement on Île Sainte-Croix in what is now Maine lasted one harsh winter, but for Lescarbot what was worth remembering was “the nature of the land.” It was, he promised, “very good and pleasantly abundant.” He knew this from his own experience because their leader, Pierre du Gua, the Sieur de Monts, “had ordered several sections of land cultivated there” that soon revealed its promise—its nature—and demonstrated the power of French labor to plant agricultural lands that produced “marvelously.”1 The apothecary Louis Hébert had planned to work with local grapes at Port Royal, and, at what is now Canso, Nova Scotia, Lescarbot cultivated “his garden of wheat as beautiful as one knows in France.”2 The moral and legal legitimacy of French colonialism was established through efforts to turn over soils, to prune and graft indigenous and introduced flora, and to announce the success of French horticultural practices in a New World.
Lescarbot’s account synthesized a century of French experience in North America but routinely highlighted the power of moments such as these where he or other colonists and explorers had worked closely with American environments. Cultivation was “likely the only innocent vocation,” Lescarbot wrote, and failure to embrace it had doomed the French in Florida and the Iberian powers whose empires in the Americas remained instead extractive and exploitative.3 Agricultural labor, we learn, was valued as much in classical tradition as it was commanded by God. Clearing land was dangerous but pleasing work that opened dangerous airs that had been trapped in the soil but also promised pleasures that made him confident that “he would never return to France.”4
