the local climate, the proper seasons to plant, and the best means to realize the potential of local environments.5 Cultivation was, in effect, the means through which Lescarbot came to understand the continent to which he had come and to appreciate the transformation that French colonialism could reap in American landscapes and indigenous lives.
Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle-France was an enormous book, but he remained consistent in his argument that the lands that French colonists had claimed in northeastern North America were uncultivated and sauvage. He acknowledged the differences between France and the country to which he had come. He found particular inspiration in Deuteronomy, where Moses had explained to his followers that “the country to which you go to possess is not like Egypt from which you are leaving, where you have sown your seeds and watered with the labor of your feet.” Instead, “the country to which you go to possess is a land of mountains and plains and is watered as it pleases heaven.”6 Lescarbot therefore represented a landscape in natural simplicity, labored only by a beneficial God and awaiting a people who would come to take and improve upon the gifts that God had seen fit to bestow. He transmitted his experience of this place in a detailed narrative that, while routinely citing classical and contemporary authorities, foregrounded the knowledge acquired through the labor of his own hands and cemented as he reflected upon his close encounter with American environments.
As both place and people were diagnosed as sauvage, French plans for their salvation were inseparable parts of a worldview that, anachronistically, we might call ecological. Colonization, conceptualized as a form of cultivation, would draw out the potential of every facet of American environments. The scale and ambitions of French colonialism increased with its geographic footprint. In 1634, French settlement pushed west to Trois-Rivières, and in 1642 Montréal was established where over a century earlier Jacques Cartier had gazed upon an Iroquoian village. Colonists followed in the wake of missionaries who had traveled westward to establish themselves among Great Lakes communities within a decade of the founding of Québec. When, in the late seventeenth century, the explorer Henri Joutel described the western country that he had discovered as a participant in the explorations of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, he wrote tellingly that “one finds there vine that is lacking only a little culture.”7 His call found echoes in other writings by missionaries and colonists and reveals the extent to which a French colonial political ecology that transmuted the visible differences between American and European flora into the difference between the sauvage and the cultivated shaped environmental encounters across seventeenth-century North America. Like Lescarbot, Joutel was participating in a broader theorization of empire itself as a form of cultivation, as a rehabilitative enterprise in early America that targeted both the human and the natural worlds.8
Making the case for cultivation required forms of communication that transported French audiences into the gardens and missions of northeastern North America. These were not claims that could be communicated through botanical specimens, nor could they be captured through the presentation of rare species of novel plants or animals to Parisian collectors. It was one thing to note the biological affinities between temperate ecosystems and flora that shared evolutionary histories, but the transition to identifying the environmental differences between New France and Old as remediable defects demanded rhetoric that foregrounded the firsthand experience of the authors who made the claim and narratives that could simultaneously describe the natural world and confidently diagnose it as deficient. While there was much about which Lescarbot and other colonial authors disagreed, they shared a common understanding that the act of cultivation would reveal the true—French—nature of the places and peoples of northeastern North America. It was an active process that demanded strength of character and clarity of purpose, but it was an enterprise that had been commanded by God and that promised real pleasure for those willing to take up the task. The cultivated spaces of French North America became opportunities to display a stewardship associated with the management of a landed estate.9 This was an ideology that therefore valorized environmental practice as much as it offered a convenient metaphor to conceptualize the conversion of indigenous peoples; it authorized the claims of authors such as Lescarbot through a celebration of their labors and rooted claims of French sovereignty through the imposition of European horticultural regimes in American landscapes.10
The cultivated spaces of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley in this way became privileged sites from which to lay claims to know and to own New France, but the success of these claims was dependent upon the means through which they were communicated to France. The rhetorical strategies of explorers such as Champlain, missionaries such as Sagard, and colonists such as Lescarbot did not rely upon an abstracting science but on immersive forms of writing that mediated the intellectual and geographical distance that separated New France from the Old. They presented North American environments as complex wholes best knowable through their own lived experiences. Just as the landscapes that they cultivated promiscuously blended elements of introduced and indigenous flora as witnesses to their own ability to channel the productive energies of colonial soils and environments, they were similarly promiscuous in their choice of forms and genres in which they wrote. Across the seventeenth century, the authors who communicated New World environments to French audiences did so in travel narratives, administrative documents, natural histories, and modes that blurred distinctions between personal accounts, colonialist propaganda, and protoscientific genres. In fact, the only consistent feature across these texts was a focus on emphasizing the essential familiarity of New World places and certainty in the promise that cultivation would produce a New France in northeastern North America.
* * *
As Samuel de Champlain expanded the French presence in Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley in the seventeenth century, he frequently created experimental sites to test the planting of French species and ecological practices. In both written texts and accompanying images, cultivated spaces functioned as visible beachheads for European ecological practice and species. As the habitation at Québec was being built in 1608, Champlain “had all the rest cleared so as to make gardens in which to sow seeds to see how they succeed.”11 He continued experimental plantings as he turned his attention west in the following years. In 1611, while waiting for the aboriginal guides who would lead him into the interior, he wrote that “I had two gardens made, one in the prairie and the other in the woods … and the second of June I sowed some seeds that grew in all perfection and in little time, that demonstrated the bounty of the land.”12 Even the crops of failed colonial endeavors such as those at Île Sainte-Croix offered evidence of the promise of the region—and the need for French colonization.13 French travelers and colonists therefore drew a mandate from their experience cultivating northeastern environments.
Cultivation implied specific ecological practices as well as gesturing toward a larger organizing ideology. It meant, for example, clearing the land of woods and opening the soils to the warming sun through French labor. Gold and silver might be found, wrote Lescarbot, but “the first mine to have is bread and wine, and livestock.”14 Le Jeune explained this necessity was also an obligation when he wrote that “New France will someday be a terrestrial Paradise if our Lord continues to bestow upon it his blessings, both material and spiritual. But, meanwhile, its first inhabitants must do to it what Adam was commanded to do in that one which he lost by his own fault. God had placed him there to fertilize it by his own work and to preserve it by his vigilance, and not to stay there and do nothing.”15 Even if accomplishments were admittedly modest in the first decades of French colonization, with the colonization of Acadia suffering repeated setbacks during intermittent power struggles and residents of Québec having cleared only “18 or 20 acres at the most” by 1627, early advocates of both mission and colonization looked to early crops and assessments of American environments as evidence of a bright agricultural future.16 Colonists and missionaries cleared land, sowed crops, and learned the seasons. In such a manner colonists came to understand what one Jesuit referred to in 1643 as “the spirit [génie] of this place.”17
Gardens of necessity, those that fed colonists and established a visible claim to only newly settled
