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Figure 4. Samuel de Champlain, “Carte géographique de la Nouvelle Franse,” Les voyages du Sieur de Champlain, 1613. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Environmental and climatic outliers might inflict suffering or even kill, but they could safely be marginalized by presenting more temperate norms to metropolitan readers. This was an era of extreme climates on both sides of the Atlantic, and audiences could be relied upon to understand the difference between seasonally and locally variable weather and climatic patterns that emerged over a longer durée.94
These authors therefore paid exquisite attention to local ecological and climatological variation across New France. Pierre Biard explained how to properly read the clues presented by landscapes when he advised readers to note locations suitable for colonial development by the soil’s “black color, by the high trees, strong and straight, which it nourishes, by the plants and grasses, often as high as a man, and similar things.”95 As Champlain returned to the Saint Lawrence Valley in 1608 with an eye toward establishing Québec, he noted a variety of landscapes and environments. Each setting was discursively composed of recognizable features that, whether present, absent, or noticed in place-specific combinations with other ecological markers, offered insight into what we now might consider the local ecology. Near Tadoussac, for example, Champlain saw only “mountains and rocky promontories … uninhabited by animals or birds.” Even areas that at first seemed “the most pleasant” revealed only small, seasonally present birds.96 Places such as “the island of hares” or “the river of salmon” memorialized ecological encounters and likewise made significant species or environmental features stand-ins for the environment as a whole.97 Where there was no indigenous occupation that could testify to agricultural promise, trees became a particularly prominent feature of such accounts as they attested to soil qualities and other aspects otherwise hidden from view. The land between Tadoussac and Île d’Orléans, for example, showed only “some pines, fir and birch,” evidence that this was truly “very bad.”98 As he passed the Gaspé Bay, Gabriel Sagard wrote that “all of this country is mountainous and high, almost everywhere sterile and unwelcoming, showing nothing but several pine, birch and other little trees.”99 As latitude could be a good predictor of what would grow, so too were the things that inhabited a place clues about its nature and the possibilities it offered to would-be cultivators.100
Explorers and early settlers highlighted the presence of familiar plants that were legible as symbols of the habitability—or potential habitability—of Laurentian environments. Selective inclusions of novel plants in their texts are therefore worth noting, but narrative accounts of settlement, exploration, and evangelization were not primarily interested in cataloging new botanical species.101 Their authors instead populated environments with recognizable features and familiar names even if, armed with modern scientific taxonomies, we would name many of the plants that they encountered new species. Instances where the novelty of American flora was immediately recognized are thus rare in colonial texts. Champlain, for example, brought together a number of discursive and rhetorical strategies that limited the sense of cognitive disorientation that his French audience might have felt in the course of reading his numerous accounts of foreign cultural and natural environments. His description of Wendat territory in 1615 offered numerous representative examples of these features of early colonial texts.
All of this country where I was contains some 20 or 30 leagues and is very beautiful, under a maximum of forty four degrees and a half of latitude, very well cleared lands, where they sow a great quantity of Turkish wheat [bleds d’inde], which grow beautifully there, as well as pumpkins, [and] sunflower, of which they make oil from the seed…. There are many vines and prunes which are very good, raspberry, strawberries, little wild apples, nuts, and a manner of fruit which is of the form and color of little lemons and which has none of the taste, but the inside is very good, and almost similar to that of figs…. It is a plant that carries them, which has a height of two and a half feet, each plant has only three or four leaves…. There are a quantity in several places, and the fruit is good and has a good flavor; oak, elm and beech, there are many spruce in this country…. There are also a number of little cherries and wild cherries [merise] and the same species of trees that we have in our forest of France are in this country. In truth the land seems a little sandy, but that does not mean it is not good for this type of wheat.102
In this fashion, the ecosystems of North America were presented as assemblages of recognizable plants. Embedded in descriptions of otherwise unfamiliar peoples and landscapes, the presence of recognizable French plants such as oak and grapevine anchored readers and travelers alike, offering promises of an essential similarity behind cultural and ecological difference more apparent than real.
Plants and places that French explorers and settlers were seeing for the first time in northeastern North America therefore rarely presented a disorienting challenge to Old World epistemologies or taxonomies. Colonial authors brought with them a transported taxonomy, a grid through which they learned about and made sense of novel American places. The names that an author such as Champlain used—broad classifications such as grain and herb, as well as specific names such as beech, oak, and maple—were all familiar European taxa, adapted and expanded to become abstract, generic terms. They became an implicit argument for a botanical unity between New France and Old that transcended the physical distance of the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that colonists and missionaries, employing the same terms that they used to describe French and European plants, incorporated American plants into a truly transatlantic flora that allowed them to feel familiar in environments that they were seeing and describing for the very first time. It also permitted French authors in North America to describe environments to European audiences in ways that mitigated distances and flattened the ecological and cultural specificity of what became a much more familiar New World.
Instead of working to catalogue individual species, a reliance on generic categories gave missionaries, colonists, and explorers considerable flexibility that allowed them to map Old World types onto American environments with a minimum of intellectual effort. Gabriel Sagard wrote in 1632 that “there are some pears, or that are called pears, certain small fruits a bit larger than peas, of a blackish color and soft, very good to eat.”103 Similarly, when the Jesuit Louis Nicolas wrote at the end of the seventeenth century that “the New World strawberry differs from ours only in that it is smaller, less fragrant and much more common,” he was fundamentally relying on a common understanding of strawberry-ness that persisted in spite of changes in shape, color, smell, and distribution.104 The result was to effectively mitigate the specificity of the plants they sought to describe, reducing morphological and ecological characteristics unique to North American populations to accidental traits that left essential characters unchanged. Therefore, when Jacques Bruyas wrote from his mission to the Haudenosaunee that he had found “walnuts and chestnuts, which I find in no wise different in taste from our own,” the self-evidence of his identification was clear and the phrasing even redundant.105
These accounts imagined colonial landscapes populated with familiar plants such as pines, spruce, cherries, and raspberries, making new species of plants that differed morphologically and ecologically from those found in Europe portable and comprehensible outside of local sites of observation and experience in North America. Authors relied upon a body of knowledge shared with their European audience. What this meant was that as these authors noted the presence of oak, birch, or plum trees on the banks of rivers on which they traveled, in the environs of the missions at which they worked, and in the communities that they founded, they were drawing on a set of categories that would have been obvious to their intended readers. These were obvious when Lescarbot observed “cedar, fir, laurels, musk roses, currants, purslane, raspberry, ferns, lysimachia, a type of scammony, calamus odoratus, angelica, & other simples” at Port au Mouton.106 They were equally obvious when Champlain saw forests “filled with woods, such as fir and birch.”107 The seemingly infinite references to trees such as pine and spruce or to French fruits such
