species, would have been familiar as types of plants that many of the French who crossed the Atlantic already knew.
However recognizable many parts of the local flora were, the cold was an unavoidable fact in the nascent colony, whether it was observed at Tadoussac, Port Royal, or Québec.43 The lands that Champlain saw upon entering the Saint Lawrence River were “sterile” and lacking in any obvious “conveniences.”44 They were, he wrote, subject to “impetuous winds” and the “coldness that they brought with them.”45 It was a cold that once on land he found simply “excessive.”46 Archaeological and textual records from around the wider Atlantic world support these observations, suggesting that the first decade of the seventeenth century was one of the worst in a longer “little ice age.”47 Even if, as Champlain himself noted, the harshness of the winter varied annually, there is little doubt that these were years of immense climatological stress across the Americas and the Atlantic world.48 Where a first French colony at Île Sainte-Croix in 1604 succumbed to the cold and scurvy, it was soon followed by the English colony of Sagadahoc; founded in 1607, Sagadahoc was itself a victim of a particularly harsh winter that was felt on both sides of the Atlantic.49 Further to the south that same year, would-be settlers at Jamestown found themselves in the middle of the worst drought to hit the region in 770 years.50
It need not be surprising then that other early authors such as Marc Lescarbot and the Jesuit Pierre Biard expressed a deep ambivalence about the North American climate. Both authors traveled to and described Acadia within the first decade of its founding, and both lavished attention on the experience of Canadian winters. When, in 1604, Champlain arrived at Île Sainte-Croix, “winter came upon us sooner than we expected.”51 It was a defining experience for Champlain as he sought to understand this region, and he wrote that “it was difficult to know this country without having wintered here.”52 Within a few short months and the abandonment of their first colony, the attention of French colonial activity turned toward what would soon become Port Royal. Here again winter proved a bitter experience. The Sieur de Monts had originally hoped to move the struggling colony further south to “escape the coldness” but was uninspired by the coast of present-day Maine and instead turned his focus toward the Bay of Fundy.53 Port Royal, it was hoped, would be “softer and more temperate.”54 Champlain expected that this would put the colony “at the shelter from the northwest,” as well as provide a suitable site for the agricultural colony imagined as gardens were laid out, fields were sown, and buildings erected.55 Although the winter of 1605–6 proved less “bitter” than that of the year before, it nonetheless provided the background for another vicious attack of the “mal de la terre,” or scurvy.56 It was a disease that attacked like clockwork as groups of colonists settled New France, adding considerable mortality to the other inconveniences of an already difficult season. Even if authors such as Marc Lescarbot presented Acadia as a potential “terrestrial paradise,” the harsh winters featured prominently in their accounts.57
There is little to suggest the sort of shock that intellectual historians suggest was common for travelers to the equatorial Americas, yet early settlers nonetheless seemed surprised at colonial environments that challenged contemporary theories that privileged latitude as a primary determinant of weather and as a key term in their geographical imaginary.58 “There ought to be,” claimed the Jesuit Biard, “the same sort of Climate in every respect as that of our France.”59 This was, or could be at least, “a twin land with ours, subject to the same influences, lying in the same latitude.”60 At Québec almost a decade later, the Récollet Sagard was still surprised that even if the settlement was “by the 46[th] degree and a half [and] almost two degrees farther south than Paris, … nonetheless the winter is longer and the country colder.”61 Divided into five bands that included frigid, temperate, and torrid zones, the model of the world inherited by explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries included regions that would necessarily be uninhabitable.62 Into the late seventeenth century, authors such as Nicolas Denys insisted on the natural parallels between New France and Old that were signified by their common latitudes. “All of this extent of New France contains only 5 degrees,” he explained, situating the colony between Bayonne to the south and Calais to the north “to make it understood that New France can produce all that the old one can and as well, but it will require a great number of people’s labor to bring it into productivity.”63 The temperate regions (defined most commonly and loosely as supporting life) that lay between arctic and torrid wastes could reliably be predicted to sustain the sort of life left by European colonists. The latitude of settlements in New France predicted climates and environments that would be similar to those across the Atlantic.64
Authors such as Biard and Lescarbot were participating in a broader reconceptualization of cold environments taking place on both sides of the Atlantic.65 Throughout Europe, scholars deduced that a rational God would not have created uninhabitable regions of the world. At the same moment, English expeditions to the north and Spanish and Portuguese explorations of the global south revealed sizable human populations that defied classical and medieval assumptions about climate, population, and culture.66 The sixteenth century had seen massive human and capital investment in the exploitation of northern fisheries. Explorers followed suit and sought out minerals, potential settlement sites, and an elusive northwest passage throughout the century.67 Encounters with people who made their homes in these bitter climates encouraged the tempering of long-standing beliefs in the inferiority of both northern places and peoples. The fact that the regions of the world that cosmographers identified as most amenable to settlement had already been claimed by Iberian powers pushed even skeptics toward support of colonization in the north.68
Even if they were at odds with Biard and other Jesuits over the direction of colonization in the region that we now know as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and northern Maine, secular authors such as the lawyer and colonist Marc Lescarbot wrote with the same faith in the possibilities for agriculture and colonial development in the region.69 Each argued the limitations of sweeping assumptions about global climates and devoted considerable effort to understanding the specificity of the relationship between geography and weather. Biard suggested that “this country being, as we have said, parallel to our France, that is, in the same climate and latitude, by a principle of Astrology it ought to have the same physical forces, deviations and temperatures.”70 He called for close empirical study to determine the nature of local weather patterns when he wrote that “nevertheless, whatever the Astrologers may say, it must be confessed that that country (generally speaking, and as it is at present) is colder than our France, and that they differ greatly from each other in regard to weather and seasons. The causes thereof not being in the sky, we must seek them upon the earth.”71 Biard confidently looked to a future where New France was recognizably French in climate, environment, and culture, and he understood the urgent study of colonial environments to be an inherently political project.
Confidence in New France’s agricultural future remained as French attention focused westward after the founding of Québec in 1608, Trois-Rivières in 1634, and Montréal in 1642.72 Accounts of harsh winters in a “locus horribilis” could seem designed to terrify readers but also affirmed the ultimate ability (and duty) of missionaries and colonists to conquer the season for their faith and their king.73 French study of the area focused on temperate tendencies that could be accentuated and developed with colonial intervention. In the short term, explained seigneur and colonial promoter Pierre Boucher, the cold “does not impede anybody from doing what needs to be done; we wear a little more clothing than ordinary; we cover our hands with a type of muffle, called in this country mittens; we have great fires in our houses, because wood costs nothing here to chop and carry to the fire.”74 Adapting to these winters became a key facet of colonial experience and a principal ingredient in the articulation of colonial culture.75 If the climate of North America presented these and other colonists with a puzzle, then it was one that these authors imagined would be easily solved for hardworking colonists who were trained to see such differences as superficial and transient.76
