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CHAPTER 1

Discovering a Not-So-New World

In 1623, the Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard’s first glimpse of the nascent New France to which he had come was a garden. At the mouth of the Saint Lawrence, near Mont-Sainte-Anne in Gaspé Bay, he encountered a landscape that he described as “very mountainous and elevated almost everywhere, disagreeable and sterile.” He was disappointed to see “nothing but fir trees, birch, and little other wood.”¹ These were the lands of the Canadian Shield, scraped bare of much of their soil by millennia of glacial movement and home to boreal forests.² Yet he was soon to find that “in front of the harbor, in a slightly elevated place, a garden was made that the sailors cultivated when they arrived there, they sowed sorrel, and other little herbs there, with which they make soup.”³ Amid seemingly endless forests, in a frequently harsh and forbidding landscape, he had found a garden; it was a locus amoenus in a New World otherwise unknown to him.

Sagard’s encounter with the garden changed the tenor of his descriptions and marked a new relationship between the author and the environments he now set about to explore. As he passed into the Saint Lawrence, the Récollet encountered far more familiar and pleasing landscapes, with recognizable geology, weather, and flora.⁴ Rough similarities in rainfall, in seasonality, and in ecological organization make western Europe and eastern North America the heart of a region identified by environmental scientists as the temperate forest biome.⁵ Sagard would have seen large swaths of deciduous forests but with prominent stands of coniferous trees throughout.⁶ The unique climates of the Saint Lawrence Valley made the region home to multiple plant communities that blended boreal elements with analogues in Scandinavia and the Baltic and genuinely temperate plants that were close relatives of those found throughout Atlantic France. Populations of familiar plants were particularly prominent where indigenous cultures had aided their establishment over the previous centuries.⁷ The missionary reached the heart of French settlement in the region at Québec by traveling through the mixed landscapes of the upper Saint Lawrence that he found “agreeable in several places” and even “very pleasant.”⁸

Sagard reveled in describing flora for his French readers.⁹ In a later chapter of his 1632 Grand Voyage dedicated to the “fruits, plants, trees & riches of the country,” his familiarity with the environments of this New France became clear. He confidently named and described cedar, oak, wild cherries, onions, raspberries, grapes, and lilies.¹⁰ He was uniquely attentive to indigenous names and knowledge of these plants, but even in these moments he highlighted an essential similarity that transcended cultural differences in use and identification. If Sagard named the carnivorous pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) “Angyahouiche Orichya, which is to say, turtle’s stocking,” for example, he included indigenous names more often as an opportunity to reassure his readers that these were simply new names for old plants.¹¹ He described, for example, “Cedars, named Asquata,” and “Roses, that they call Eindauhatayon.”¹² Sagard and the other French merchants, missionaries, and explorers who traveled to northeastern North America in the early seventeenth century were confident that they had discovered a not-so-New World, recognizable with existing names and amenable to French uses.

Sagard showed little disorientation, nor did he give any hint that the ecological novelty of North America might pose a significant challenge to Aristotelian intellectual traditions.¹³ Instead, even if the geographical distance that the Récollet traveled was remarkable, it seems obvious that nowhere else could Europeans have traveled so far to find environments so familiar.¹⁴ In northeastern North America, common ecological and evolutionary histories meant that the environments to which the French had come shared a great deal with those they had left.¹⁵ American maples looked much like those of France (and the same was as true of plants as large and as common as birch as it was for more locally available strawberries, raspberries, and grapes), but they nonetheless differed substantially. We would now recognize them as different species of related botanical genera and families, but early colonists mapped these differences onto a distinction between the sauvage (wild) and cultivated. Close encounter and empirical engagement with these new places and new plants facilitated French efforts to plant an empire in seventeenth-century North America. The nature of New France was uncanny—simultaneously familiar and foreign—and naming the sauvage inspired confidence that this tension could be overcome and managed (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Louis Nicolas, “Sauvages plants,” Codex Canadensis, ca. 1674–80. Gilcrease Museum. Acc. 4726.7. Courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Sagard’s encounter suggests the need to weigh the effect of the cultural or mental “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 to American and European ecologies therefore share common ancestors and visible similarities and, while different 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

* * *

Images of American environments that envisioned discrete climatic bands gradually gave way to understandings of a more complex relationship between weather and geography. When Sagard, Champlain, and other early settlers of New France traveled to the Saint Lawrence Valley, they were drawn toward the landscapes of the Saint Lawrence platform: lowlands between the Appalachian Mountains to the south and the Laurentians to the north. This geological province largely begins at Québec, extending south along the Saint Lawrence and into the eastern Great Lakes region. It was a transition that was easily noticeable to early explorers. From “lofty mountains” at the mouth of the Saguenay, Jacques Cartier described finding himself among land “covered with fine high trees and with many vines,” with “as good soil as it is possible to find.”⁷⁷ This was, he suggested, truly the beginning of the area that he called Canada. The transition was as jarring for Champlain, who likewise traveled from a “very unpleasant land, as much on one coast as the other,” at Saguenay to the region of Québec that was “beautiful and pleasant, and supports all sorts of grains to maturity.”⁷⁸ These explorers noticed what geologists have since confirmed: the Saint Lawrence lowlands, once home to massive lakes and seas as glaciers receded, melted, and deposited rich alluvial clays that would support indigenous and colonial agriculture, was a temperate oasis in the midst of an otherwise forbidding landscape.⁷⁹

These authors were describing an ecotone, or a transition between one climatic zone and the next.⁸⁰ The Saint Lawrence Valley was the northernmost reach of temperate North America and remained a mixed and ecologically complex region.⁸¹ The forests that the French encountered were the product of geographical and climatic push and pull that exerted their force over millions of years. Periods of global cooling had pushed boreal elements such as pine and spruce south and temperate elements such as maple and chestnut had returned north with broader periods of warming that inevitably returned.⁸² The colonists and administrators who settled New France therefore established their colony at the boundary between these two ecological regions. These are frequently particularly rich and diverse environments, home to more species than either ecological region individually. In practical terms, the ecotone offered the advantages of access to the resources of multiple ecosystems.

The mosaic-like quality of environments that blended boreal and temperate flora attracted the attention of colonial authors.⁸³ Beyond offering more resources, however, these rich and diverse environments also offered evidence for the possible future of New France. These were landscapes that were familiar enough to beckon colonists and that were yet different enough to demand their intervention. Rather than simply effacing the differences between European and American environments, the accounts of Champlain, Sagard, Lescarbot, and others of this first generation drew attention to them and offered the region’s environmental history as evidence of a need for French intervention.

The natural richness and diversity of these spaces had been cultivated by millennia of indigenous occupation. As the French returned to the Saint Lawrence in the seventeenth century, a great deal had changed since it had been visited by Jacques Cartier. Where Cartier had visited thriving Iroquoian cultures that practiced agriculture and established large sedentary villages at sites such as Hochelaga (Montréal) and Stadacona (Québec), Champlain now found Algonquian peoples who traded for rather than cultivating corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. Each occupied and exploited ecological niches that supported their own lives and their commerce with each other. When Champlain visited what is now Montréal, he described the evidence of recent Iroquoian agriculture. He wrote:

For higher up than this place (which we named Place Royale) at a league’s distance from Mount Royal, there are many small rocks and very dangerous shoals. And near this Place Royale there is a small river, which leads some distance into the interior, alongside which are more than sixty arpents of land, which have been cleared and now like meadows, where one might sow grain and do gardening. Formerly the sauvages cultivated these lands.⁸⁴

Champlain neglected to describe any features of Iroquoian agriculture that might have persisted, but there is reason to believe that at least some of the plants might have continued to grow into the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century, anthropologists reported finding wild tobacco at sites of previous indigenous occupation, and there is no reason to suspect that this would not have been true at Montréal as well.⁸⁵ At the very least, the landscape that Iroquoians had cultivated and that favored the population of local animals such as deer and plants such as wild fruits continued to flourish in the “edge effect” created by previous clearings of farm land and firing of local forests.⁸⁶

Authors soon explained to their Atlantic audiences that the transitional quality of this region was more relevant to understanding New France than zonal bands that drew their significance from latitudinal transitions. The Récollet Denis Jamet explained that an east-west axis changed abruptly at Québec, writing,

For the temperature of the air we find it similar to that of France, except for the heat which is more ardent to us. As for the winter I can only say what others have stayed here several years have said. The snows are larger than those of France and last ordinarily four months. The freezing is more violent (than in France) [and] the great river freezes up to the ocean. Something good is that we do not feel the cold winds like in France. From Gaspé up to Québec, which is almost two hundred leagues are only high and terrifying mountains fertile only in rocks and pines. But after Québec the lands are beautiful and have the possibility of being good if they were cultivated.⁸⁷

The explorations of Champlain and others who followed the Saint Lawrence traced the transition between boreal and temperate regions of the continent and between the Canadian Shield, the Laurentian lowlands, and the Appalachian Mountains to the south.⁸⁸ In the “Carte géographique de la Nouvelle Franse” included in Champlain’s 1613 Voyages, this ecological shift was marked clearly (Figure 4). The printed page itself clearly divided the terrestrial regions of the northeast along a north-south axis at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. To the right, the landscape was mountainous with isolated groups of one to three trees. To the left, with the exception of specific landmarks such as “montreal,” the landscape leveled out and was populated by large clusters of identical trees.⁸⁹ Farther west, explorers encountered a continental climate that was ameliorated considerably by the presence of the Great Lakes and regional variations that indigenous cultures had used to develop complex agricultural communities in the preceding millennia.⁹⁰ These authors were also aware that moving southwest along the Saint Lawrence accelerated these tendencies. Champlain described Haudenosaunee lands, for example, as “temperate, without much winter, or very little.”⁹¹ New France might therefore be inhospitable, but it was not at all uninhabitable to those who understood it properly.

* * *

Even as they would have vicariously experienced the severity of these early American winters, then, readers of the first French texts that described American environments would also learn about the climatic and ecological variability of these places. Champlain, for example, was quick to note that the winter of 1605–6 was not nearly as harsh as the one the year before.⁹² Where colonial authors lacked adequate experience to judge the typicality of any given extreme, they could turn to indigenous peoples for a broader temporal range. In 1636, for example, Paul Le Jeune related that

there was a great Northeaster accompanied by a rainfall which lasted a long time, and by a cold severe enough to freeze this water as soon as it touched anything; so that when this rain fell upon the trees, from the summit to the roots it was converted into ice-crystals, which encased both the trunk and the branches, causing for a long time all our great forests to seem but a forest of crystal,—for, indeed, the ice which everywhere completely covered them was thicker than a coin. In a word, all the bushes and everything above the snow were surrounded on all sides and encased in ice. The Sauvages told me that this did not happen often.⁹³

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 as cherries and plums testified to a confidence in the plasticity of common French botanical names that became, in effect, templates for the description and experience of American plants that were, as we understand them now, most often new species.

For both their present-day and contemporary readers, these references function by their obviousness. Named and listed as part of a floral catalogue of their new environments, these generic references can provide a crucial insight into both how French authors perceived North American plants and how they communicated their findings within the French Atlantic world and throughout Europe. This is in large part due to the overwhelming predominance of what scholars of folk taxonomies call a folk generic or generic specieme.¹⁰⁸ This, as ethnobotanist Brent Berlin writes, is the “category readily recognizable at first glance, as a single gestalt or configuration,” and one that requires neither the use of specialized tools (i.e., microscope) nor considerable effort at differentiation.¹⁰⁹ Authors such as Champlain would have come with a set of generic floral templates based on their experience of the environments they had left. Having come from regions where there may have been just one example of a particular genus, all future species encountered were understood to be subtypes of this model. When Champlain commented on the birch he found in Wendake, for example, he identified the novel Fagus grandifolia with the Fagus sylvatica he would have known in France.¹¹⁰ Differences in the shape of leaves and ecologies were effaced or minimized, and a piece of a new environment was cognitively domesticated.

With the use of these familiar names, the morphological details of a plant were most often simply implied. When he turned his attention to plants that he felt required more detail, Louis Nicolas situated them within particular cultural contexts and provided additional linguistic, medical, or economic information. When he described barley, for instance, he wrote that it was originally introduced from France and was used to make beer.¹¹¹ To describe a species of seaweed, he wrote only that small crustaceans survived the force of waves by growing filaments that kept them bound to the marine plant.¹¹² Thus even where a European botanical type was situated within a novel ecological or cultural context, its physical continuity with European plants was implied by relying on and reinforcing the salience of universally applicable types arrayed in lists compiled under a recognizable and familiar logic.

French familiarity was increased because of nearly a century of contact with American flora that had arrived as part of a broader Columbian Exchange.¹¹³ American plants such as corn, pumpkins, sunflowers, and beans—widely sown in indigenous landscapes and a regular feature of travel accounts and natural history—were, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, relatively well-known in France. A recent analysis of the Grandes heures of Anne of Brittany, produced between 1503 and 1508, revealed the introduction, already by this early date, of a North American squash into cultivated landscapes in the Loire Valley. Botanical analysis of the “Quegourdes de Turquie” illustrated in the text suggests that it was an example of Cucurbita pepo, subspecies texana that was likely originally collected from the northern coasts of the Gulf of Mexico.¹¹⁴ This is a variant of the same species that was represented in frescoes at the Villa Farnesina in Rome between 1515 and 1518, where the South American species C. maxima also appeared.¹¹⁵ The eighteenth-century botanist Antoine de Jussieu also identified an American bean now known as Phaseolus vulgaris in the Grandes Heures.¹¹⁶ How these plants arrived in the Loire Valley by 1508 and how they came to grow in the garden of Anne of Brittany, then queen of France, remains an open question, although the queen’s strong personal ties to the papacy and Spanish crown may have inserted her into networks of botanical circulation that quickly diffused newly discovered American plants throughout Europe in the decades after first contact.¹¹⁷

There is little doubt that the squash in Anne’s gardens were valued as a curiosity, but American flora became more economically significant and more widely grown as the century progressed. Charles Estienne, the author of the influential sixteenth-century L’Agriculture et maison rustique, wrote that “Turkish wheat [blé de Turquie], so called, or rather Indian wheat [blé d’Inde], … came originally from the west indies, then from Turkey and from there into France, not that it was cultivated for pleasure, or for the admiration of foreign things, of which the French give great weight.”¹¹⁸ Providing insights into the cultivation of the crop, he also offered advice on assimilating it into French lives. “It has a similar temperament to our wheat,” he wrote, “always hotter, recognizable by the softness of the bread that is made with it.”¹¹⁹ Corn spread throughout Europe quickly in the wake of Spanish explorations of the Caribbean and American mainland, although recent research into the genetics of European corn populations suggests that the spread of the crop into northern Europe awaited a second introduction from North America.¹²⁰ The diffusion of corn within France was slower than in contemporary Spain or Italy, but by the turn of the seventeenth century the crop was beginning to gain traction in rural regions such as Bresse.¹²¹ Estienne likewise discussed the domestic cultivation of the pumpkins that Anne of Brittany had likely grown as a curiosity.¹²² By the early seventeenth century, new editions of the Maison rustique also introduced tobacco as a valuable crop for landowners in France.¹²³ Champlain, Lescarbot, Biard, and Sagard had each left a France that was already home to many of the most widely cultivated American plants that they would find in New France.

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The relatedness of French and northeastern North American environments was therefore frequently as obvious to seventeenth-century authors as it is to contemporary natural scientists. Accounting for this uncanny relatedness—a simultaneous recognition of difference and affinity—was the intellectual challenge for explorers, settlers, and missionaries who traveled and settled in the Saint Lawrence Valley and Acadia. It was neither possible nor preferable to completely ignore the differences that existed between European and American plants or the diversity that existed within North American plant populations. Adding additional information on cultural and religious significance or ecological and morphological distinctions, colonial authors modified generic botanical types to create what ethnobotanists refer to as folk specifics or folk varietals. This is obvious, for instance, when authors described white pine or red cedar. Assuming a shared body of characteristics (pine-ness or cedarness, in this case), authors could incorporate new flora with the greatest possible economy of description and communicate more effectively with their French audiences. The Jesuit Louis Nicolas wrote that there were three façons (later using the word “species” as well). The smallest type was not even given a name, and as for the difference between the red and white species, he wrote that they “differ only in the color of their bark.”¹²⁴ While there were moments where these comparisons seem infelicitous, such as when Sagard described the Tupinambour (Sunchoke or Jerusalem Artichoke) as the “apple of Canada,” they more often pointed to an acknowledgment of real botanical continuities that we now use evolutionary science to explain.¹²⁵

Contact with indigenous cultures could provide colonists and explorers with new names for American plants and knowledge about their possible uses. Lescarbot related, for example, the vain search for the plant Annedda that had—a century earlier—cured Jacques Cartier’s men of scurvy as an instance where this dependence meant death. “As to the tree Annedda to which Cartier has made mention,” he wrote, “the Sauvages of these lands do not know it at all.”¹²⁶ Cartier had described the miraculous plant only as “large and as tall as any I ever saw” but lavished attention on its powers and, it seems, brought specimens of the tree that were soon growing in the gardens at Fontainebleau. It “produced such a result,” he wrote, “that had all the doctors of Louvain and Montpellier been there, with all the drugs of Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as did this tree in eight days.”¹²⁷ The most obvious lesson from the incident for seventeenth-century colonists was to turn to indigenous peoples and ask for the curing plant. Champlain, when he discovered a Native near Tadoussac with the name “Aneda,” seemed sure that “by this name was the one of his race who had found the herb Aneda known,” even if “the sauvages do not know this herb at all.”¹²⁸ Many of these truly novel plants, however, were presented to European audiences without names, such as those presumably edible roots that featured on Champlain’s 1613 map.¹²⁹

The use of indigenous names did not, however, universally imply a respect for indigenous knowledge or a lasting connection to specific indigenous communities. Atoca (cranberry), for example, was known by variants on this Wendat name after it was first described by Gabriel Sagard, but the name became generalized and lost its association to any specific community.¹³⁰ This missionary first transcribed the name as “toca” and wrote that with “neither pit nor seed, the Hurons [Wendat] eat it raw, and also put it in their little loaves,” demonstrating the interwoven nature of botanical and cultural exchange.¹³¹ The Jesuit Paul Le Jeune also recorded the fruit among the Haudenosaunee. He explained to his readers that “the young people went to gather it in the neighboring meadows, and, although it is neither palatable nor substantial, hunger made us find it excellent. It is almost of the color and size of a small cherry.”¹³² It was not just the French who appreciated the fruit. Le Jeune’s confrère Louis Nicolas wrote that English colonists used the plant in place of verjuice, which was normally produced from unripe grapes.¹³³ Over time these references to the indigenous peoples who harvested this plant would decline, but the name, standardized as Atoca, remained the same.¹³⁴ The engineer Gédéon de Catalogne wrote that it was used to make preserves in 1712.¹³⁵ Antoine-Denis Raudot added that it was useful against dysentery, and the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix suggested its use for digestive ailments.¹³⁶ Orthography, descriptions of morphology, and the expected effects of the plants became fixed as names such as Atoca became part of a French Atlantic taxonomy. Linguistically, plants such as this retained their linkage to American soils, but, like the originally indigenous words “barbecue” and “canoe,” their connection to any specific indigenous language was severed.¹³⁷

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Among multiple strategies for naming the simultaneous familiarity and foreignness of plants and places, describing the nature of New France as sauvage became a particularly powerful tool that both affirmed similarity and stigmatized difference. In many cases, morphological differences between European and American species of plants were considered red herrings, more apparent than real. When colonial authors described various American plants such as lemons, cherries, and oats as sauvage, they implicitly suggested that American flora was an imperfect or degraded version of that which existed in France. A common refrain that emerged as early as the writing of Champlain was that French agricultural techniques had brought a full expression of botanical essences in French plants that were only latent in their American kin. In studying grapevines, for instance, authors such as Champlain understood that the grapes that produced bitter and unremarkable wines from Louisiana to Acadia were a product of aboriginal neglect.¹³⁸ In his 1603 Sauvages, Champlain wrote that Québec contained “wild fruit trees, and vines: in my opinion, if they were cultivated they would be as good as ours.”¹³⁹ In 1668, Jacques Bruyas wrote similarly about the vines near his mission among the Haudenosaunee at Saint François-Xavier (Kahnawake): “I believe that, if they were pruned two years in succession, the grapes would be as good as those of France.”¹⁴⁰ The authors who described the sauvage plants of French North America focused on these subtle differences and diagnosed a lack of cultivation—of an unmet and unexplored potential in American plants. Where, throughout Louis Nicolas’s Histoire naturelle and the Jesuit Relations, plants such as cherry trees or vines are identified as sauvage, they were speaking to this sense of an inferiority less innate than accidental.¹⁴¹ Champlain, Bruyas, and Nicolas each claimed that the observable differences of American plants were mutable and credited them to the influence of the local North American environments and aboriginal ecological practice.

The term sauvage—as a noun—referred to the aboriginal communities of North America in the seventeenth century. The American sauvage, explains historian Olive Dickason, blended “the well-known Renaissance folkloric figure of the Wild Man; early Christian perceptions of monkeys, apes, and baboons; and the classical Greek and Roman tradition of the noble savage.”¹⁴² Aboriginal communities, as sauvages, were said to blur the line between civilization and savagery so that they lived in a perpetual state of wildness, more non-human than human in their customs and relationships with the natural world. If it did not carry many of the pejorative connotations of unrestrained violence that the English translation of “savage” does today, the characterization of aboriginal peoples as sauvage encouraged and justified the establishment of a French presence throughout North America as a project to reclaim and rehabilitate a degenerate people. It was a term therefore that could equally be applied to the human and non-human world and that suggested a deviation from the norms that defined the civilized French world.

It was a complex term that, already by the end of the sixteenth century, rejected a neat teleology or morality.¹⁴³ By the time of the colonization of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence, the term embodied some of the tension that would come to the fore as visions of the “noble savage” were articulated in eighteenth century. The author of a Jesuit journal, for example, wrote that “it is true that one lives in these countries in a great innocence.”¹⁴⁴ Passages such as these seem to hint at the continuation of sixteenth-century discourses that evoked respect for the rustic and simple lives of indigenous peoples.¹⁴⁵ Famously, Michel de Montaigne wrote that “they are sauvages, just as we call sauvages the fruits, that nature, in itself and its ordinary progress, has produced: although, in truth, it is those that we have altered by our artifice, and turned away from the common order, that we should rather call sauvages. In the former are alive and vigorous the true and most useful and natural properties, which we have bastardized in the latter, and have accommodated them only to the pleasure of our corrupted tastes.”¹⁴⁶ The use of the term sauvage therefore mapped closely onto debates about the distinction between the artificial and the natural and, more broadly still, about whether the natural world could be fundamentally improved upon.¹⁴⁷ Ultimately, however, one finds little of this sophistication in colonial texts that instead saw sauvage places and peoples as less than their French counterparts.

The ideology of the sauvage, as it was framed in New France, was ambivalent about any claims that the sauvage state of North America made it naturally superior to the culture that the French could introduce.¹⁴⁸ Instead, authors who named the aboriginal peoples of French North America sauvage encouraged treating them in a similar fashion to the wild grapevines that, one explorer wrote, were “lacking only a little culture.”¹⁴⁹ If the implication of this language was a sense that aboriginal cultures were not irreconcilably different or inferior, it suggested that, under the right conditions, they too could be “cultivated” through their encounters with French missionaries and colonists.

Yet in practice colonial authors frequently recognized indigenous improvement of American environments. Sites with histories of indigenous occupation were often sought out for colonial settlement even where indigenous ecological knowledge was otherwise marginalized and dismissed. Studying the environment for hints of its habitability meant observing the ways in which indigenous cultures had lived with them and implicitly recognizing the merits of indigenous technologies and ecological practice. It is likely that early explorers were particularly attracted to land that had, in the preceding century, been home to indigenous communities.¹⁵⁰ One of the first farms established as the settlement at Québec grew, for example, has a documented history of aboriginal occupation that stretched back millennia and that had only declined with the broader disappearance of Iroquoian agriculture in the area during the sixteenth century.¹⁵¹ Perhaps not surprisingly, in an era that regularly saw starvation threaten colonial settlements throughout the Americas, early explorers also focused a great deal of attention on the native foods of the region when they investigated Native cultures.¹⁵² Observation of edible plants was intimately associated with French experience of indigenous peoples and their cultures. In the fields of the Iroquoian Wendat in what is now Ontario, for example, French efforts to ascertain the civility of the people meant studying the botanical company that they kept and carefully cataloguing the cultivation, preservation, and consumption of food crops.¹⁵³

Indigenous ecological knowledge 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.