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CHAPTER 2

Communicating Cultivation

When Marc Lescarbot recounted his own experiences during the first years of Acadian settlement, he wrote from Paris with the benefit of hindsight and a lingering sense of loss. Both are obvious from his frequent and loving accounts of farming in northeastern North America. We know, for example, that the settlement on Île Sainte-Croix in what is now Maine lasted one harsh winter, but for Lescarbot what was worth remembering was “the nature of the land.” It was, he promised, “very good and pleasantly abundant.” He knew this from his own experience because their leader, Pierre du Gua, the Sieur de Monts, “had ordered several sections of land cultivated there” that soon revealed its promise—its nature—and demonstrated the power of French labor to plant agricultural lands that produced “marvelously.”¹ The apothecary Louis Hébert had planned to work with local grapes at Port Royal, and, at what is now Canso, Nova Scotia, Lescarbot cultivated “his garden of wheat as beautiful as one knows in France.”² The moral and legal legitimacy of French colonialism was established through efforts to turn over soils, to prune and graft indigenous and introduced flora, and to announce the success of French horticultural practices in a New World.

Lescarbot’s account synthesized a century of French experience in North America but routinely highlighted the power of moments such as these where he or other colonists and explorers had worked closely with American environments. Cultivation was “likely the only innocent vocation,” Lescarbot wrote, and failure to embrace it had doomed the French in Florida and the Iberian powers whose empires in the Americas remained instead extractive and exploitative.³ Agricultural labor, we learn, was valued as much in classical tradition as it was commanded by God. Clearing land was dangerous but pleasing work that opened dangerous airs that had been trapped in the soil but also promised pleasures that made him confident that “he would never return to France.”⁴ It was through these efforts that Lescarbot learned 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.

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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 lands, were also pleasure gardens.¹⁸ As Lescarbot explained, “I can say without lying that I have never worked my body so hard, for the pleasure that I took to lay out and cultivate my gardens … to make parterres, to align the allées, to build the cabinets, to sow wheat, barley, oats, beans, peas, garden herbs and to water them, such was my desire to recognize [reconoitre] the land through my own experience.”¹⁹ For as much as the horrors of scurvy and frigid isolation shaped the experience of early colonists such as Lescarbot and Champlain, the simple act of setting roots—both figurative and real—in New France was a reassuring one. Cultivated spaces became sites in which to experience a harmony only possible as the result of a concerted effort by skilled husbandmen and an experience of desire and pleasure made possible by the fulfillment of a duty to cultivate place and people.

Lescarbot was particularly concerned with foregrounding this “little labor” that “God has blessed” in his accounts, but he was not unusual in his efforts to claim that agricultural labor provided an authority that was both moral and epistemological. As the Protestant polymath Bernard Palissy explained in the sixteenth century, the labor of cultivation was inspired by both God and Roman precedent. It was in the classical era that people had

wisely set themselves to plant, sow and cultivate to aid nature, which is why the first inventors of something good, to aid nature, have been so esteemed by our predecessors, they were reputed to have been participants in the spirit of God. Ceres who advised us to sow and cultivate wheat was called a goddess; the good man Bacchus (not at all a drunkard as the painters have made him) was exulted because he advised us to plant and cultivate the vine: … Bacchus had found sauvage grapes, Ceres had found sauvage wheat; but these were insufficient to feed them as well as when they were transplanted. From this we know that God wants us to work to aid nature.²⁰

It was through labor that the productive essence of sauvage plants was revealed and the foundations for European civilization laid.

Authors were inspired by developments in the evolution of renaissance gardens that created spaces in which the natural and artificial were intentionally blurred to demonstrate the skillful labor of a benevolent patriarchal authority.²¹ In a description worth quoting at length, Champlain hinted that rich landscapes that aimed to blend human and natural agencies were as important in North America:

As soon as the said Sieur de Monts had departed, some of the forty or forty-five who stayed behind began to make gardens. I also, in order not to remain idle, made one which I surrounded with ditches full of water wherein I placed some very fine trout; and through it flowed three brooks of very clear running water from which the greater part of our settlement was supplied. I constructed it near the seashore a little sluiceway, to draw off the water whenever I desired. This spot was completely surrounded by meadows, and there I arranged a summer-house with fine trees, in order that I might enjoy the fresh air. I constructed there like-wise a small reservoir to hold salt-water fish, which we took out as we required them. I also sowed there some seeds which throve well; and I took therein a particular pleasure, although beforehand it had entailed a great deal of labor. We often resorted there to pass the time, and it seemed as if the little birds thereabouts received pleasure from this; for they gathered in great numbers and warbled and chirped so pleasantly that I do not think I ever heard the like.²²

Agricultural and horticultural authors in the sixteenth century had laid claims that these sorts of labors were particularly virtuous, translating an act that could be conceptualized as one of Adam’s punishment into a site where God could be encountered and where His designs could be made legible, and where one could expect rewards of pleasure and beauty.²³ These were places, therefore, of both pleasure and toil, and accounts of these landscapes demonstrated the possibility of creating the “third nature”—a skillful display of the subtle manipulation of natural agencies—that renaissance and early modern gardens championed.²⁴

In this way, colonial narratives framed French colonialism less as imposition than as redemption and extended a project that had thus far targeted the environments of rural France for improvement into the Atlantic world.²⁵ Imagining effective husbandry as an encounter that cultivated farmer and farmed alike, it encouraged both confidence in the ability of French colonists to weather the influence of New World environments and a belief that civilization would allow for the expression of latent identities—a possible Frenchness—in both place and peoples. It offered French colonists and colonial promoters an image of themselves and their project that differed substantially from the bloody conquests of New Spain and Peru and that allowed them to imagine sovereignty over New World possessions and control over American peoples as recompense in a consensual and mutually beneficial exchange of lands, goods, and cultures.²⁶ For the cultivator could not be a conquistador, and the manifestation of his (for this figure was invariably male) will was imagined as operating far more subtly, offering a glimpse at an understanding of the importance of the agency of both the cultivator and the cultivated to the success of colonization.²⁷

Narratives of cultivation in New France translated French practices of mesnagement, or stewardship, flourishing in France across the Atlantic and into American soils.²⁸ In France, the reclaiming and improvement of agricultural and horticultural lands by French cultural and political elite was part of a broader strategy of political centralization that produced a robust visual and material culture of royal authority in early modern France that drew upon the metaphor of a benevolent patriarch who enriched both his own holdings and his subjects.²⁹ These produced frequently formal landscapes that were sites of political practice where new visual and practical forms of power were articulated and experimented.³⁰ Texts on gardening and estate management had begun to proliferate in France after the middle of the sixteenth century following military adventures in Italy, both introducing classical authorities on the subject and developing a French aesthetic and landscape theory.³¹ During this period, gardeners and landscape designers hired from Italy produced gardens such as Fontainebleau and invented the French mannerist style.³² The French formal garden was born in the seventeenth century in gardens such as the Tuileries and the Luxembourg palace through royal support and horticultural innovation that emphasized the aesthetic beauty of purposeful design and utility.³³

In France and England, authors were reengaging the georgic tradition of Virgil and other classical authors that valorized the active management of estates by their noble owners.³⁴ The horticultural theory that emerged in late sixteenth-century France celebrated the empirical roots of botanical knowledge acquired through the virtuous labor that expanded patriarchal authority in French rural landscapes. In the 1600 Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs of Olivier de Serres, a leading horticultural theorist patronized by Henri IV, we can see how the practice of mesnagement brought the disparate concerns of epistemology, agricultural improvement, and authority into a productive relationship. Serres proposed understanding agriculture as a science that observed and adapted to local environmental conditions.³⁵ It was a “science more useful than difficult, provided that it was understood by its principle, applied with reason, led by experience and practiced with diligence.”³⁶ Serres had escaped the ravages of France’s wars of religion on his estate and had there learned practices for effective estate management that he felt were a moral obligation ordained by God. “For as much as God wants us to content ourselves with the places that he has given us,” he wrote, “it is reasonable to take them from his hand as they are and serve him the best as possible trying to remedy their defaults through artifice and diligence.”³⁷ What he developed at his estate could be applied to the state, with the king conceptualized as a bon ménager of the kingdom. These writings were particularly resonant in a France still feeling the effects of economic and cultural disruption that had characterized much of the sixteenth century.³⁸ Particularly relevant to the ambitions and concerns of Henri IV, Serres drew upon classical texts to argue that the management of people and the management of place were twinned and inseparable.³⁹

Serres’s calls for a nation of nobles who understood their role as effective managers of their estates, influenced heavily by readings of classical authorities such as Virgil, mapped neatly onto a larger seventeenth-century debate about the relationship between France and its Roman past. Sixteenth-century French humanists had claimed the Gauls as their colonized ancestors to chart a new intellectual course distinct from an inherited Roman past.⁴⁰ French theorizations of empire were heavily inspired by a Roman model (as all European nations were, to some extent).⁴¹ As French intellectuals debated their cultural debt to Rome, an agricultural discourse enabled them to refigure differences between Roman and French culture (otherwise often understood to be deficiencies in the French) into an evolutionary model that figured cultivation as a principal civilizing act.⁴² Even if colonialism could occupy an ambiguous place within the thought of Serres and his adherents—the Duc de Sully, for example, saw colonialism as a drain on French population and an overextension that defeated the effective management of French territories—in stepping into the role of their former Roman colonizers, colonial promoters in France argued that their nation would itself be bettered.⁴³ Colonialism would work alongside the cultivation of French arts and sciences to produce a nation that surpassed its classical counterparts.⁴⁴

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Lescarbot’s Histoire described a particularly momentous presentation of American flora to the French court that had taken place in 1607. This had been a crucial moment only three years after the first colony in Acadia had been founded and only two years after Port Royal had been established in 1605. The colonists—Lescarbot among them—had just recently learned that their monopoly on the fur trade that had been granted to their benefactor and leader, the Sieur de Monts, had been revoked in the face of opposition from Atlantic merchants in France.⁴⁵ In August of that year, the colonists at Port Royal had been forced to return to a king and a court that seemed uncertain about how or even whether to support colonization in North America. It was Jean de Poutrincourt, a close friend of de Monts and lieutenant governor of his colony in Acadia, who “presented to the King the fruits of the land from which they came” when they arrived in Paris. Alongside geese and other fauna from North America, it was “the grain, wheat, rye, barley, & oats, as the most precious things that one could bring back from any country,” that he delivered to king and court.⁴⁶

In the context of disputes over the colony’s direction, experiences of cultivation were forwarded as a symbol of the promise of the colony and proof of the moral authority of its founders and leaders. There was nothing “curious” about the wheat, rye, barley, and oats that Poutrincourt brought back from Acadia.⁴⁷ These were not rare plants valuable to collectors, nor were they of any medicinal benefit beyond the calories that they could provide. These were among the humblest plants that could be brought back from New France, but in this Lescarbot suggested that Poutrincourt had echoed the Romans, who had likewise translated such a harvest into symbols of triumph in their own newly claimed regions, dating back to the foundations of Rome itself.⁴⁸ He was, Lescarbot would reflect, akin to the “good father Noah, who after having made the most necessary agriculture in the sowing of wheat, put himself to planting the vine.”⁴⁹

Colonization increased French access to American naturalia, but increased access did not necessarily translate into greater knowledge about North America. French naturalists such as the Provence-based Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc were able to personally observe and experience North American animals such as the caribou, the hummingbird, and a horseshoe crab that had been brought back by early Acadian settlers such as de Monts.⁵⁰ These North American animals joined collections that also included cultural artifacts such as canoes, bows and arrows, and the aboriginal weapon known to the French as the casse-tête.⁵¹ They were valued, like other objects with which they were stored and compared, less for their contribution to furthering knowledge about newly claimed or discovered regions of the world than for their novelty and rarity.⁵² The arrival and dissemination of these American plants were therefore part of a much larger culture of curiosity that animated a diverse array of intellectual and commercial activity in the seventeenth century and that was at least equally concerned with geographical breadth as it was precision.⁵³

Considerable geographical uncertainty limited the impact of flora from northeastern North America. Within scientific genres, the significance of locality remained a debated subject.⁵⁴ Terms used to designate regions of North America such as Canada remained unmoored to specific locations.⁵⁵ Early gardens such as Peiresc’s blended flora from the world over. In a 1630 letter, for example, Peiresc described his garden in the southeast of France as home to “several curious pieces come from the Indies and from Canada and from elsewhere.” Alongside “an orchard of fruit trees where I have more than sixty sort of excellent European apples,” and hyacinths, he noted that his “vine of Canada” had “covered entire houses in three or four years.”⁵⁶ The systematic study of these plants was further limited by their irregular arrival and frequently confused provenance. Peiresc and other collectors could touch, taste, smell, and observe American squash, grapes, and strawberries, but we have little record of where these originated from, nor do we have much information about the identities behind the many hands that would have been needed to transplant them in Peiresc’s southern garden.⁵⁷ In hindsight it is possible to see the stirrings of a botanical science with a particular attention to morphological and geographical specificity, but that was not the goal of collectors such as Peiresc.

In Paris, it was the efforts of Guy de la Brosse, Jean Robin, and Robin’s son Vespasien in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that established a sizable presence of American plants in the city’s gardens. Both Robins and de la Brosse presided over gardens associated with royal authority and the city’s medical establishments, Jean and Vespasien Robin as gardeners for Henri IV and the city’s medical faculty and de la Brosse as physician to Louis XIII and first director of the Jardin du Roi after it was founded in 1635.⁵⁸ They directed increasingly sophisticated and well-funded gardens that helped the crown establish cultural authority through the skilled display of exotic plants.⁵⁹ Jean Robin, a surgeon by training, had been hired to create a garden for the faculty of medicine in Paris in 1597.⁶⁰ His son Vespasien collected plants throughout Europe and, where they had already been transplanted in European gardens, from the Americas and Asia.⁶¹ Vespasien was later hired as a botanical demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi founded by de la Brosse.⁶² In a 1641 catalogue of the plants that grew in his garden, de La Brosse credited Vespasien with introducing many of the foreign plants, as well as with maintaining the networks through which new seeds and specimens arrived.⁶³

Vespasien and his father were only two among the many Paris-based gardeners who introduced foreign flora into the French capital in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁶⁴ Published catalogues of their gardens allow us to trace the growth in the presence of American plants numerically, even if the source of many of these specimens remains unknowable. In 1601, at least three of the almost 1,300 plants that Robin listed in his Catalogus stirpium tam indigenarum quam exoticarum quae Lutetiae coluntur were identifiably American: an arbor vitae that was first brought back by Jacques Cartier, a Christophoriana that Robin also supplied to the English herbalist John Gerard, and the Aconitum racemosum sive Christophoriana that soon became better known simply as snakeroot.⁶⁵ If only a few were positively North American, many were rare and came to Jean through extensive networks that he cultivated with other collectors and that connected him with plants that were arriving from French, Spanish, Dutch, and English colonies in the Americas.⁶⁶ Within the first decades of the seventeenth century, he built a sizable collection that would later form the basis of the Jardin du Roi.⁶⁷

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the American origins of these plants were prized or that their cultivation supported conversations about colonialism in the places from which they had come. Jean Robin’s association with Robinia pseudoacacia, also known as the Black Locust, for example, reveals the relative unimportance of origin to these collections. Jean is frequently acknowledged as having introduced the plant into Paris—and more specifically into the Left Bank garden of the Paris medical faculty near Notre Dame Cathedral—in 1601, where it grows to this day.⁶⁸ His son Vespasien planted another long-lived example from the seeds of this first R. pseudoacacia in 1636 in the Jardin du Roi where he worked as a botanical demonstrator and arborist.⁶⁹ The tree soon spread roots beyond the confines of Paris, although the eighteenth-century amateur botanist Joseph-Pierre Buc’hoz wrote that early experiments with planting the tree along French rural allées failed; unfortunately, he wrote, the branches broke “easily in the lightest wind,” although parts of the tree were eventually used both medicinally and for woodworking.⁷⁰ Over a century after the first example of the tree was growing in Paris, Carolus Linnaeus attached Robin’s name to what by then was increasingly known as a false acacia.⁷¹

Yet the exact origins of the tree planted in 1601 remain unknown and disputed to this day, at least in part because the first name provided—Acacia Americana Robini—failed to identify either a specific region of origin or a vector of its arrival. Some scholars have suggested that the tree was first acquired much later than 1601 from the English naturalist John Tradescant, who had acquired it for himself from Virginia, either from his son John the younger (who traveled to Virginia on a botanizing trip) or from correspondents who had settled in the colony.⁷² Although Champlain might seem to be a possible source, his trip to Mexico and the Caribbean left him far to the south of the tree’s natural range, and his explorations of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley were both too late and too far north.⁷³ In this respect, the uncertain origin of R. pseudoacacia makes it representative of many of the early plants that crossed the Atlantic from North America.

When Jacques Philippe Cornut produced the first written description and visual image of Robinia pseudoacacia in his 1635 Canadensium plantarum he called it Acacia Americana Robini; but he used the terms “Canada” to represent a far larger region than the present-day country and “America” as a fluid geographical marker more akin to how we today use the term “Americas” (Figure 5).⁷⁴ The text marked a transition between the humanist herbals of the sixteenth century and the regional floras of the seventeenth and the eighteenth. The passages that described the plants and the copper-plate images that represented them were not the product of the circumscribed field trips that would soon come to define regional floras but were instead an effort to expand the geographical coverage of classical botanical authorities.⁷⁵ If he and others of this community of Paris-based natural historians therefore continued to confuse the specific geographical origins of the plants they described, they surely can be forgiven; this was not the task that they took up for themselves or their science.

Figure 5. Jacques-Philippe Cornut, “Acacia Americana Robini,” Canadensium plantarum, 1635. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

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Successful calls to cultivate New France required methods of communication that could simultaneously describe New France for French readers and diagnose its deficiencies. The specimens in Parisian gardens could not accomplish this. If we were to look for an author who can offer an image of a typical French traveler of this style in the interior of North America, we might easily pick Jean de Brébeuf. Arriving initially in New France in 1625, he is best remembered for his exploration of the Great Lakes and his residence among the Wendat people in what is now Ontario. Brébeuf traveled widely throughout Wendat territory and was an early and authoritative source of information about the region that would become the pays d’en haut. About his life among the Wendat he wrote:

We live on the shore of a great Lake, which affords as good fish as I have ever seen or eaten in France; true, as I have said, we do not ordinarily procure them, and still less do we get meat, which is even more rarely seen here. Fruits even, according to the season, provided the year be somewhat favorable, are not lacking to us; strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries are to be found in almost incredible quantities. We gather plenty of grapes, which are fairly good; the squashes last sometimes four and five months, and are so abundant that they are to be had almost for nothing, and so good that, on being cooked in the ashes, they are eaten as apples are in France. Consequently, to tell the truth, as regards provisions, the change from France is not very great; the only grain of the Country is a sufficient nourishment, when one is somewhat accustomed to it. The Sauvages prepare it in more than twenty ways and yet employ only fire and water; it is true that the best sauce is that which it carries with it.⁷⁶

Like the Relations more broadly, this is a complicated text that transitions cleanly between a single authorial voice and a “we” that spoke to both his fellow travelers and his readers. Brébeuf acknowledged both the limits of his own experience (“we do not ordinarily procure them”) and his reliance upon indigenous knowledge and labor.⁷⁷ He nonetheless confidently named types of edible plants that he clearly knew intimately and expected his readers to know as well.

We can see then how such narratives were a deceptively simple formal strategy for describing newly discovered places and evoking the promise of colonialism to draw out latent possibilities in places and peoples. Even as the decades passed and the geographical reach of missionary authors increased, travel narratives presented their authors with an effective means to translate their experiences in a manner meant both to entice support and to assuage any concerns about the illegibility of new flora and environments. Writing about a Mascouten village in the western Great Lakes to which he had traveled in 1673, for example, Jacques Marquette wrote that “I took pleasure in observing the situation of this village. It is beautiful and very pleasing; For, from an Eminence upon which it is placed, one beholds on every side prairies, extending farther than the eye can see, interspersed with groves or with lofty trees. The soil is very fertile, and yields much Indian corn. The sauvages gather quantities of plums and grapes, wherewith much wine could be made, if desired.”⁷⁸ Like Brébeuf, Marquette acknowledged aboriginal presence but confidently anticipated the expansion of French colonialism that would enrich the agricultural and ecological productivity of the region. Marquette assured his readers that familiar plants dotted the landscape, but he also introduced his own aesthetic judgments to provide an assessment of the innate beauty of the region and possibilities for French improvement.

The centrality of cultivation to the propagandistic quality of these writings is marked. In the 1632 edition of his Voyages, for example, Samuel de Champlain promised Richelieu an account of “lands no less than four times the size of France, as well as the progress in the conversion of the sauvages, the clearings of some of these lands whereby you will perceive that in no respect are they less fertile than that of France; and finally the settlements and forts that have been built there in the name of France.”⁷⁹ It was a project that he summarized as aiming to “restore and retain possession of this New Land by the settlements and colonies which will be found necessary there.”⁸⁰ Discussions of a sauvage country implied that conditions that might be claimed to be defining features of these newly explored and settled regions of Acadia and Québec were in fact remediable defects. The ambition of this era was perhaps best captured by the Jesuit Pierre Biard, however, who wrote that “there is no reason why the soil should not be equally fertile, if the cultivation of the plains were long continued upon to lands, and if it were not for the dense shades of the almost unbroken forests.”⁸¹ New France offered nothing less, he wrote, than “another France … to be cultivated.”⁸²

Communicating American flora in print was therefore not an exercise in abstraction. Descriptive detail in these accounts gathered where authors allowed themselves to inhabit a place or to imagine it in the not-too-distant colonial future. The organization of these accounts was therefore both spatial and temporal, offering experience of linear itineraries and selected sites that were transmuted into representative samples of larger American environments.⁸³ Scholars of the literatures of encounter in French North America have often emphasized the distinction between colonial and missionary texts of this early period, yet the shared reliance on chronologically organized narratives produced similar descriptions of early American places.⁸⁴ They were accounts that often provided brief descriptions, offering the perspective of a traveler who could only catch glimpses of complex ecologies from canoes or on foot and who often relied on guides as they traveled into the heart of the continent. These were environments that were peopled, either by living indigenous communities or by the specter of future colonial development. Authors explicitly presented spaces in which they had dwelled; they foregrounded their own experience and knowledge produced through their physical presence in American cultural and ecological settings.⁸⁵ Embedded in descriptions of unfamiliar peoples and landscapes, narratives such as these highlighted the presence of recognizable French plants such as oak, grapevine, strawberries, and grains that anchored readers and travelers alike, continuing to offer promises of an essential familiarity behind apparent difference.

In effect, plants and American environments continued to be known as they were lived, and the immersive perspective of early authors such as Champlain, Sagard, and Le Jeune continued throughout the century. North American plants could be identified by functional roles they shared with European counterparts, an essence defined, at least in part, by how French communities could live with a plant. Describing Acadia in his 1672 Histoire naturelle, the colonial promoter and landowner Nicolas Denys wrote, “There are also pine for making planks, good for making decks, and fir for ornaments … pine, little spruce and fir are also found in the forests of this country which serve for tar the qualities of which I have already spoken.”⁸⁶ If the American wilderness was perceived through a lens that favored extractive enterprise and the transformation of botanical resources into commodities, seventeenth-century texts from French North America suggest that colonists and missionaries also looked at North American flora with an eye to transplanting European ecological relationships into new soils. More than a mercantilist gaze, this was an understanding of botanical identity that saw latent or potential utility as a constitutive facet of a plant’s identity.⁸⁷ The adoption of the natural historical genre allowed even greater flexibility to include knowledge acquired from decades of colonial experience. It meant that even the imposing forests of New France were seen to support the efforts by colonial authors who understood that this flora would be called upon through cultivation of French colonial spaces and lives.⁸⁸

Plants in print—those that arrived as descriptions in travel narratives, histories, natural histories, and personal correspondence—therefore contributed far more to an emerging awareness of Acadian and Laurentian places and peoples than the specimens that grew in French gardens. Sagard wrote in 1632 that some of his fellow missionaries had brought “some Martagons” to France, “with some cardinal plants as rare flowers, but they did not profit there, nor did they reach their perfection, as they do in their own climate and native soil.”⁸⁹ He juxtaposed this anecdote with his description of the landscapes of the early seventeenth-century Saint Lawrence Valley, suggesting that he hoped instead to offer his French readers a virtual experience of the plant’s “native soil” through his text.⁹⁰ Not only were written descriptions better able to survive transit and inform a broader audience in France, they did the additional work of bringing whole environments to life, rather than single specimens.

Like Poutrincourt’s presentation of wheat, authors such as Lescarbot and Champlain took presentations of American flora—both native and introduced—as opportunities to valorize experiential ways of knowing these newly colonized places that made them legible and familiar to their audiences. Travel narratives offered opportunities to convey personal experience of American places. By the time that missionary relations and the récits de voyage of explorers presented New France to European readers, travel narratives were well established as a privileged genre for carrying experiences of the new worlds Europeans discovered around the globe back to reading publics in Europe.⁹¹ In the representation of New France, the travel narrative provided authors with an opportunity to meditate on the most prosaic fixtures of American landscapes, establishing familiarity and engendering confidence in the success of French colonialism to make them more familiar still.⁹² Even as authors began to call their accounts natural histories by midcentury, a strong authorial presence remained, along with considerable reliance on narratives that warranted descriptions as the product of firsthand experience. Narratives allowed authors to seamlessly move between empirical observations of real environments and imagine a not-too-distant promised future.⁹³ The movement between these two tenses both legitimated colonial authors as experts and imaginatively engaged readers in the cultivation of an empire in northeastern North America.

The genres favored by colonial authors were the most capacious, and accounts of early American environments featured a variety of written forms.⁹⁴ If the forms were fluid, however, the function remained consistent: to capture not only the experience of a New World but the affinities that connected New France and Old and that transcended the physical distance of the ocean that separated them. Textual features such as lists, indigenous-language dictionaries, and specific sections that dealt with natural historical subjects hint at the variety of information that could be contained within texts that modestly claimed to be simple accounts of circumscribed travel.⁹⁵ For example, the dictionary included in Sagard’s Grand Voyage, like the chapter devoted to plants, offered Native terms for plants seemingly abstracted from their local cultural or ecological context alongside vocabulary related to the consumption of tobacco and other foods, farming, and the medicinal use of local plants.⁹⁶ In this, Sagard joined other authors such as Lescarbot in a willingness to enrich their own narratives with features common to other genres. The Acadian lawyer’s Histoire, for example, combined a first-person narrative of early maritime colonization with an anthology of previous and contemporary French efforts in the region. In the process, his text became a palimpsest of forms and narrative techniques that converged to make New France legible as a colonial space.⁹⁷

As part of a broader effort to centralize his authority, in 1663 Louis XIV took direct control of New France and reorganized its government. As the king’s interest in France’s colonial possessions grew, Pierre Boucher, Nicolas Denys, Louis Nicolas, and other authors expanded the effort to explain New France to multiple and more popular audiences across the Atlantic. The justifications for these efforts varied. Some, such as Louis Nicolas, had left New France behind and sought to use knowledge acquired there to build a life and reputation for themselves across the Atlantic.⁹⁸ Others, such as the landowners and promoters Nicolas Denys and Pierre Boucher, while likewise staking a claim to authority based on their considerable firsthand experience, claimed that they did so to counter false testimony that had degraded the image of New France and that had undermined the appeal of colonization there. Boucher claimed the goal of telling his readers “the truth with the greatest naïveté that is possible, and the briefest that I can.”⁹⁹ Nicolas Denys likewise sought to “disabuse” his readers of pernicious false opinions that he himself had been subject to before his arrival in Acadia.¹⁰⁰ In this they implicitly joined the efforts of their colonial predecessors, yet they did so in a genre that had thus far had little role in the works of those authors who related New France. The genre that Denys, Nicolas, and Boucher chose was the natural history.

Like travel narratives, the genre of the natural history was in flux during this period.¹⁰¹ The major impact of the natural historical texts that described New France was to remove the chronological and linear focus that had defined earlier accounts. In his Histoire veritable, for example, Boucher organized many of his chapters around specific kinds of life recognizable to seventeenth-century authors, such as trees, animals, birds, and fish, but also included chapters devoted to particular regions such as Québec and others that addressed indigenous peoples.¹⁰² Thus even where the descriptions of plants seem haphazard and chaotic to the modern reader, for early modern audiences they assumed a familiarity with organizing categories such as trees, grasses, or bushes common in contemporary botanical texts; their inclusion in texts about North American flora argued for the existence of fundamental similarities between North American and European plants.¹⁰³ Louis Nicolas, for example, divided his descriptions of over two hundred plants from sections on fish, birds, mammals, and aboriginal peoples and provided smaller sections that divided trees from shrubs and grasses from fruits.¹⁰⁴ Other natural histories were similarly organized.

At least some travel narrative authors similarly sought to escape, at least temporarily, the linearity of their narratives to linger on a discussion of regions in an abstract language that could encompass spaces broader than they might otherwise be able to include. Narratives such as Louis Hennepin’s 1683 Description de la Louisiane, for example, seemed willing to blend formal elements of both narrative and natural history.¹⁰⁵ The first sections of the book included information presented in a manner that would have been familiar to readers of the Relations or Champlain’s Voyages. His description of a Detroit “covered by forests, fruit trees such as walnut, chestnuts, prune trees, apple trees, [and] sauvage vines, charged with grapes,” was introduced alongside the information that he and his fellow travelers were “fortunate enough to have arrived at the entrance of Détroit on the tenth in the morning, the feast day of Saint Lawrence.”¹⁰⁶ These economical descriptions were complemented, however, by an appended text titled Les moeurs des sauvages that also included an introductory chapter on the “fertility of the country of the Sauvages.”¹⁰⁷

In place of an emphasis on the different genres in which authors such as Champlain, Lescarbot, Boucher, and Denys wrote, we should instead emphasize both a common epistemology and shared formal promiscuity. Lists appeared within narratives, and accounts of travel punctuated natural historical texts. Consistently, however, these authors rarely failed to establish their authority as firsthand observers who knew the places that they described through their own labors of cultivation and experimentation.

* * *

Authors such as Champlain, Lescarbot, and Biard established themselves as experts on American environments and made effective use of genres that privileged their own experience and knowledge. Champlain’s various Voyages and Lescarbot’s editions of the Histoire de la Nouvelle-France focused primary attention on the significant firsthand experience that they had acquired in the colony.¹⁰⁸ While both Biard’s and Gabriel Sagard’s accounts of their missions to American indigenous peoples were interested in the invisible and otherworldly, their narratives revolved around their explorations—around their actions and experiences.¹⁰⁹ Sagard promised, for example, that “I speak only of what I am assured.”¹¹⁰ Chronologically organized accounts emphasized the complexity of American environments and privileged the expertise of authors who had spent considerable time in New France.¹¹¹ Descriptions of the weather, for example, became opportunities both to relate empirically observed facts and to remind readers of the length and breadth of an author’s experience. Foregrounding his experience of both Frances, Biard wrote, for example, that “I noticed once, that two February days, the 26th and 27th, were as beautiful, mild, and spring-like as are those in France about that time; nevertheless, the third day after, it snowed a little and the cold returned. Sometimes in summer the heat is as intolerable, or more so than it is in France; but it does not last long, and soon the sky begins to be overcast.”¹¹² Champlain recounted successful experiments with spring and winter plantings, and Lescarbot reported that promoters had brought back some samples of Old World crops grown in Acadia to accompany his written account of the fecundity and—more important—the reliability and predictability of American climates.¹¹³ Each emphasized the empirical foundation of their knowledge and used their own experienced bodies as a metric for their readers, who were instructed how to appreciate the similarities between France and New France.¹¹⁴

Narrators also claimed a role as guarantors of testimony collected from indigenous and colonial sources. In many of the early Relations from the 1630s, for instance, Jesuits such as Paul Le Jeune established themselves as both collectors of testimony and witnesses in their own right.¹¹⁵ Le Jeune wrote in 1633, for example, that “on the 28th [of October], some French hunters, returning from the islands which are in the great St. Lawrence River, told us … that there were apples in those islands, very sweet but very small; and that they had eaten plums which would not be in any way inferior to our apricots in France if the trees were cultivated.”¹¹⁶ When Jacques Bruyas wrote in a letter from the mission to the Haudenosaunee at Saint François-Xavier in 1668 that “apple, plum, and chestnut trees are seen here,” he provided little sense of when or by whom they were seen.¹¹⁷ These movements between firsthand observation and gathered testimony served to foreground the author as expert and broaden the field of observation to verify observed and expected facts.¹¹⁸ Colonial authorities such as Champlain similarly translated their social privilege into epistemological authority that enabled him to speak of and on behalf of New France.¹¹⁹ A counterpart to his dual role in New France as a civil authority and an explorer, Champlain switched readily between his own experiences and those of others over whom he governed in his various Voyages.¹²⁰ We can read as easily, for example, about his winter experiences among the Wendat or his explorations of the Ottawa River as we can his summaries of the experiences of colonists such as Louis Hébert who are otherwise silent.¹²¹ Jesuit and colonial authors communicated experience of American flora as a composite of multiple experiences by multiple authors and witnesses.¹²²

Whether forwarding gathered testimony or relating their own considerable experience, the authors of natural histories and travel accounts to New France such as Champlain and Jesuit missionaries favored narratives that resisted reducing botanical knowledge to the description of plant morphology. Visual observation was privileged, but sight as it was increasingly used within contemporary European science was rarely deemed sufficient in and of itself. Renaissance and early modern natural history focused relentlessly on the visible characteristics of plants, and the growing use of textual descriptions and dried herbarium specimens in lieu of direct experience of living plants marginalized descriptions of what we might call their ecological contexts. In contrast, North America–based authors continued to situate novel flora in narratives that immersed their readers in complex and irreducible ecosystems.¹²³ Both authors of early seventeenth-century travel narratives and authors of later natural histories such as Nicolas Denys and Louis Nicolas clearly appreciated the visible qualities of American flora, yet they rarely failed to also reference the tastes, smells, and aboriginal uses of new plants and foods. Even as empirical experience was central to French accounts, then, the field of experience and the types of knowledge presented remained self-consciously broad.

The result was that where modern readers might expect botanical descriptions that focus on morphology, other qualifications were frequently interwoven into narratives that drew upon multiple senses and that blended ethnographic and botanical observations. Take, for instance, the following account of a new plant described by Louis Nicolas in his Histoire naturelle, written around 1675. Nicolas named the plant simply “another black fruit.”¹²⁴ This, in itself, was neither out of the ordinary for natural historical texts nor particularly informative. When he later added that Europeans could not accustom themselves to its taste, however, he took what might seem to be a strange rhetorical turn, writing that “it seems that these strange people have an aversion to everything that we like, and prize everything that we despise; they cannot bear our best smells, and say that they smell bad.”¹²⁵ Investigations of plant life invited commentary on local cultures, and vice versa. This is not to suggest that missionary authors elided natural and cultural descriptions, categories that for missionaries and their readers meant little at the time.¹²⁶ Rather, it hinted at the belief in a complex web of relations between people and place. As Jesuits worked to convert souls and colonists worked to transform place, they became aware of the importance of flora as emblematic of broader features of the North American natural and cultural landscape.

Narratives that recounted experience of peopled landscapes made the colonialist intent of natural description particularly clear; French texts could provide both experience of new flora and judgments about the inadequacy of indigenous ecological knowledge. In 1639, for example, as the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune sought to provide his readers with insights into the “superstitions” and “customs” of the Algonquian speakers whom the missionaries were actively trying to settle at Québec in agricultural communities, he took what might seem to us a strange turn. As he proceeded “first, as to what concerns their belief,” he soon wrote as much about fruit as he did about peoples. He explained:

Some of them imagine a Paradise abounding in blueberries; these are little blue fruits, the berries of which are as large as the largest grapes. I have not seen any of them in France. They have a tolerably good flavor, and for this reason the souls like them very much. Others say that the souls do nothing but dance after their departure from this life: there are some who admit the transmigration of souls, as Pythagoras did; and the majority of them imagine that the soul is insensible after it has left the body: as a general thing, all believe that it is immortal…. In fact, I have heard some of them assert that they have no souls; they hear people talk about these attendant forms, and sometimes persuade themselves that they possess them,—the Devil employing their imagination and their passions, or their melancholy, to bring about some results that appear to them extraordinary.¹²⁷

Le Jeune’s description of the blueberry functioned as a means to explore and explain aboriginal conceptions of the soul to his European readers and hinted at the possibility of diabolical influence in indigenous religions.

First-person narratives permitted moving seamlessly between the botanical and ethnographic description that enabled authors to both catalogue American flora and diagnose it as deficient.¹²⁸ Writing from Wendat territory in 1653, for instance, Bressani declared that “there are some wild vines, but in small quantity, nor are they esteemed by the Barbarians themselves; but they do esteem highly a certain fruit of violet color, the size of a juniper berry which I have never seen in these countries. I have also seen, once, a plant similar to the Melon of India, with fruit the size of a small lime.”¹²⁹ Writing from the mission at Kahnawake, Jacques Frémin similarly wrote: “And besides the grapes, plums, apples, and other fruits, which would be fairly good if the Sauvages had patience to let them ripen, there also grows on the prairies a kind of lime resembling that of France.”¹³⁰ Jesuits presented cultural and natural environments that were defined by aboriginal ecological practice. Even where authors such as Frémin and Bressani added their own observations, they were assembled from personal experiences that were couched in wider discussions of aboriginal ecological lives.

Subjective experiences therefore became the primary registers for explaining these new foods, plants, and animals. Encounters with indigenous food provoked few of the anxieties that wracked English and Spanish explorers who feared that changes to their humoral complexion would result from consuming foreign foodstuffs.¹³¹ The primary challenge was the disgust and discomfort that were prominent in written accounts of Native foodways. Sagard’s description of a dish of fermented corn among the Wendat, for example, evoked a plate “very stinky and more rotten than even the gutters.”¹³² Among the Innu, Paul Le Jeune blurred natural history and a description of indigenous foods when he gave an account of “the meats and other dishes which the sauvages eat, their seasoning, and their drinks.” He noted that

among their terrestrial animals they have the Elk, which is here generally called the Moose; Castors, which the English call Beavers; Caribou by some called the Wild ass; they also have Bears, Badgers, Porcupines, Foxes, Hares, Whistler or Nightingale,—this is an animal larger than a Hare; they eat also Martens, and three kinds of Squirrels. As to birds, they have Bustards, white and gray Geese, several species of Ducks, Teals, Ospreys and several kinds of Divers. These are all river birds. They also catch Partridges or gray Hazel-hens, Woodcocks and Snipe of many kinds, Turtle doves, etc. As to Fish, they catch, in the season, different kinds of Salmon, Seals, Pike, Carp, and Sturgeon of various sorts; Whitefish, Goldfish, Barbels, Eels, Lampreys, Smelt, Turtles, and others. They eat, besides some small ground fruits, such as raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, nuts which have very little meat, hazelnuts, wild apples sweeter than those of France, but much smaller; cherries, of which the flesh and pit together are not larger than the pit of the Bigarreau cherry in France. They have also other small Wild fruits of different kinds, in some places Wild Grapes; in short, all the fruits they have (except strawberries and raspberries, which they have in abundance) are not worth one single species of the most ordinary fruits of Europe.¹³³

Details of subjective experiences such as tasting Native foods reveal the colonialist intent of these otherwise descriptive accounts. Whether travel narrative or natural history, description was not an end in and of itself. Instead, authors such as Le Jeune seized upon these moments to invite readers to understand the need for French intervention in cultural and natural landscapes that were deemed lacking.

Authors who based their descriptions on their own experiences positioned their bodies as instruments in the production of natural knowledge and their own subjective tastes as the metric for comparisons between New France and Old. In 1640, for example, Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot described sagamité, a porridge that the Wendat made with corn, as he wrote that “the whole apparatus of our kitchen and of our refectory consists of a great wooden dish, full of sagamité, whereto I see nothing more similar than the paste which is used in covering walls. Thirst hardly annoys us,—either because we never use salt, or because our food is always very liquid. As for me, since I have been here, I have not drunk in all a glass of water, although it is now eight months since I arrived.”¹³⁴ A letter from François du Peron to his brother from the Wendat village of Ossossanë written a year earlier similarly explained that “one does not have undisturbed rest here, as in France; all our Fathers and domestics, except one or two, I being of the number, rise four or five times every night … the food here causes this.”¹³⁵ In this way, du Peron’s digestion became an opportunity to highlight deficient indigenous relationships with American nature; colonial bodies became an essential and authoritative mediator of both American environments and authorized judgment of aboriginal ecological practice.

Narratives equally promised that sauvage plants that might differ subtly from their French counterparts could nonetheless be counted upon to support French lives. While the use of a name such as “oak,” “cherry,” “vine,” or “lemon” certainly implied the existence of specific morphological features expected by French audiences and colonists, these familiar French names also implied a set of potential uses and ways of living with the plant and its products. On both sides of the Atlantic, North American plants became knowable through lived experience of working with them, and their possible uses and incorporations into French ecological and domestic regimes figured prominently in early written accounts. Experience with American crops demonstrated that they could also be understood through practice—through experience of cultivation, harvest, cooking, and digestion. Where corn was integrated into French fields and lives, for example, it was because it was valuable as a substitute for other grains. In Nicolas de Ville’s Histoire des plantes de l’Europe et des plus usitées qui viennent d’Asie, d’Afrique et de l’Amérique he wrote, for example, that “the flour is white … but thicker and more viscous than that of wheat; it is less easily digestible. The peasants make a porridge of it with butter and cheese which is agreeable enough, even if heavy on the stomach. The flour is excellent for plasters which ripen. The juice of the leaves is good for inflammations and erysipelas.”¹³⁶ Where botanical science relied upon morphology and other visual cues to provide differentiation, narrative and a dwelling perspective could promise familiarity far more effectively.

Only a few decades later in 1709, Louis Liger confidently assumed a widespread knowledge and experience of the plant when he wrote that “the Turkish wheat, otherwise known as Indian wheat, is known well enough, such that there is no need to describe it.”¹³⁷ After detailing the method and timing necessary to plant the crop, Liger continued to situate the plant within a French geographical and social setting.

It is not difficult to acquire Turkish wheat to sow, because it is very common in Burgundy, in Franche-Comté and in Bresse where a lot of it is cultivated, its usages … are very advantageous, the grain is milled and the flour is used to make bread of which almost all the laborers of these regions feed their families during the entire year. The flour is also used to make beignets, galettes, tarts seasoned with dairy products, and a type of porridge that they call Gaude, that they make like rice or millet; this serves as breakfast for everyone in the house, it is for this reason that from the morning on a pot is put in front of the fire, then when the Gaude is cooked, each can take a full bowl, which is enough to fill the stomach to capacity.¹³⁸