Plants and Peoples: French and Indigenous Botanical Knowledges in Colonial North America, 1600 – 1760

Christopher Michael Parsons

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto

Plants and Peoples: French and Indigenous Botanical Knowledge in Colonial North America, 1600 - 1760

Christopher Michael Parsons

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History

University of Toronto

2011 Abstract

As North American plants took root in Parisian botanical gardens and regularly appeared in scientific texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they retained their connections to networks of ecological and cultural exchange in colonial North America.

In this dissertation I study the history of French botany and natural history as it became an Atlantic enterprise during this time, analyzing the production of knowledge about

North American flora and the place of this knowledge in larger processes of colonialism and imperial expansion in the French Atlantic World. I focus particular attention on recovering the role of aboriginal peoples in the production of knowledge about colonial environments on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than integrating aboriginal collectors, chefs and healers into traditional histories of western science, I integrate familiar histories of science into larger histories of cultural contact in an Atlantic World with multiple centres of knowledge production and exchange.

This dissertation develops two closely related arguments. First, I argue that

French encounters with American environments and Native cultures were inseparable.

Jesuit missionaries, for example, called both a plant and a native culture ―wild rice,‖

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conflating descriptions of local ecological and morphological features of the Great Lakes plant with accounts of indigenous cultural and moral attributes. Second, ―Plants and

Peoples‖ also analyzes the process by which the Paris-based Académie Royale des

Sciences expanded its reach into North America and argues that French colonial naturalists drew on a vibrant conversation between diverse colonial and indigenous communities. Yet indigenous participation and the knowledges they provided were progressively effaced over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This research therefore presents both a new understanding of the history of early modern and enlightenment botany and a lens through which to revisit and enrich familiar histories of cultural exchange in colonial North America.

Acknowledgments

Between Toronto where this started and Hanover where it is coming to a close, I have been blessed with an extraordinary community of friends, colleagues and cheerleaders. A full list of debts accrued during these past six years could stretch almost as long as this dissertation, but I want to acknowledge the support of people and institutions who have done the most to make this dissertation what it is today.

First and foremost I owe a great debt of gratitude to Allan Greer whose patience in the face of my repeated stubbornness, perceptive comments on my written and presented work and continuous support allowed me to transform ill-formed ideas first discussed in his office in the fall of 2004 into an entire dissertation. I would additionally like to thank Ken Mills and Heidi Bohaker for their generous support and feedback as members of my committee these past years, as well as for their continued patience. I must also thank Michelle Murphy and Adrienne Hood for introducing me to the history of science and early American history during preparation for my comprehensive exams.

I also owe a great deal to several governmental agencies, institutions and libraries who saw the merits of this work – in many cases even before I did – and made travel to libraries, archives and conferences possible through their financial support. The generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario

Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, Associated Medical Services, Inc., and the University of Toronto allowed me time to focus on research and writing throughout my dissertation. Travel to archives and conferences would not have been possible without the support of Associated Medical Services, Inc., the National Sciences Foundation, the

André Michaux Foundation and the University of Toronto (and particularly the Armour

v family‘s support for the Department of History). I am also tremendously grateful to the

John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library and the American Philosophical

Society both for their financial support and, more importantly, for introducing me to many colleagues who have shaped my work profoundly and who, since my trips to these libraries, have in many cases become close friends.

The people who I met and talked with during my research trips were fantastic, and

I must thank librarians and staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Renald Lessard at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Québec, Cécile Aupic at the Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle, Timothy Dickinson at the Royal Ontario Museum, Ruth

Newell at the Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens at Acadia University, and Roy Goodman and Earle Spamer at the American Philosophical Society. I have also profited immensely from the opportunity to get to know colleagues at several conferences and workshops that

I have attended over the past several years. Audiences at two History of Science Society meetings, and meetings of the American Society for Ethnohistory, the French Colonial

Historical Society and the Canadian Historical Association gave valuable feedback on early drafts of many of these chapters. I found the opportunity to present to audiences at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, ―The Age of Sail‖ conference at UBC, the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College, an online NiCHE reading group, and the 2009 iteration of the Harvard Atlantic History Seminar particularly profitable, as was a workshop on Jesuit Science organized by Kristin Huffine and

Michelle Molina who both have no idea how much drinking martinis in Chicago helped make this dissertation possible.

While I have therefore had the privilege to present this work to many different people in many different venues, I would also like to acknowledge insightful comments and feedback from Victoria Dickenson, Gilles Havard, Robert Morrissey, François

Regourd, Thomas Wien, Kristin Huffine, Kelly Wisecup, Eva Botella-Ordinas, Bruce

Moran, Neil Safier, Michael Reidy, Luke Clossey, Florence Hsia, Karin Velez, Susan

Sleeper Smith, and Paul Cohen, Michael Reidy as well as Matthew Crawford, Joseph

Cullon, Bertie Mandelblatt, Kathleen Murphy and all of the other participants of the 2009

Harvard Atlantic History Seminar. Closer to home I also found a wonderful community of colleagues at the University of Toronto. In particular, the friendship and support of

Helen Dewar and Jean-François Lozier made this project immeasurably easier and a great deal more fun. The participants in my fourth year seminar ―The Columbian Exchange,‖ have likewise had a major impact on this dissertation and I thank them for teaching me more than I could have hoped to teach them. There are more than a few botanists –

Heather Coiner, Katy Heath, Patrick Vogan and Danielle Way among them – who were more than generous with their time and expertise. I would also like to thank Victoria

Freeman and Grafton Antone for introducing me to Native American Studies. I would also like to thank Peter Ward for giving me the tools to become a historian and some sound advice at the beginning of my graduate program that has become a mantra as I near the end.

I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the support of my colleagues and friends in the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College. You took an errant Canadian in out of the woods, gave him an office and made the last year of his

PhD a true joy. Melanie Benson Taylor, Colin Calloway, Bruce Duthu, Sergei Kan, Ben

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Madley, Vera Palmer, Dale Turner and Sheila Laplante, I really cannot describe to you what your support has meant to me, and how much our conversations have shaped this final product. I cannot thank you enough for your trust, confidence and generosity.

It is hard to avoid well-worn cliché as I thank my family, but I think that they will forgive me. Daniel Rikely and Geraldine Murphy continue to make Toronto home, and were always ready with support, fantastic meals and a bed. My parents (step and regular alike) have been the best cheerleaders that I could have hoped for, and were welcome sources of encouragement when I needed it most. As for Jess, what do I say? I would not be in graduate school if it were not for her, let alone walking away with a PhD. To her I owe absolutely everything – each accomplishment, each success and all of the joy that I have taken during this long process. This dissertation is hers as much as it is mine.

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1 - BOTANICAL DISCOVERY IN A NOT-SO-NEW WORLD 23

SHOCK AND LISTS 27 FRENCH FOLK CLASSIFICATIONS IN COLONIAL NORTH AMERICA 34 CULTURAL AND NATURAL DIFFERENCE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH NORTH AMERICA 50 THE EMERGENCE OF DIFFERENCE 65 CONCLUSION 83

CHAPTER 2 - THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SECRETS: JESUIT AND INDIGENOUS BOTANICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GREAT LAKES 87

JESUIT OBSERVERS AND THE FLORA OF THE GREAT LAKES REGION 90 INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND JESUIT OBSERVERS 102 MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE AND SECRET KNOWLEDGE 113 THE LIVED KNOWLEDGE OF ABORIGINAL WOMEN IN THE GREAT LAKES 121 CONCLUSION 137

CHAPTER 3 - ―I REPORT ONLY WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM MY SAUVAGES‖ : JESUITS, GINSENG AND SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ATLANTIC WORLD 140

EARLY WHISPERS OF THE DISCOVERY OF GINSENG IN THE JOURNAL DE TRÉVOUX 145 THE ACADÉMIE‘S RESPONSE: DANTY D‘ISNARD AND VAILLANT 155 LAFITAU‘S MÉMOIRE 165 THE ACADÉMIE‘S SYNTHESIS 188 EPILOGUE – THE BOTANICAL AGNOSTICISM OF THE GINSENG TRADE 198 CONCLUSION 204

CHAPTER 4 - THE ACADÉMIE ENTERS THE ATLANTIC: CENTRES AND PERIPHERIES IN FRENCH ATLANTIC SCIENCE 207

MICHEL SARRAZIN AND THE ACADÉMIE ROYALE DES SCIENCES 212 PLANTS AND PATRONAGE 220 QUÉBEC AND NEW ORLÉANS, THE BOTANICAL ENTREPÔTS OF FRENCH NORTH AMERICA 235 THE OTHER CORRESPONDENTS: COLONIAL COLLECTORS IN THE NETWORKS OF THE ACADÉMIE 254 CONCLUSION 265

CHAPTER 5 - MAKING PLANTS PORTABLE 267

THE EARLY FRENCH HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICAN PLANTS 272 THE ACADÉMIE ROYALE DES SCIENCES AND TRANSATLANTIC PLANTS 284 CONCLUSION 310

CONCLUSION 312

BIBLIOGRAPHY 322

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS 322 PUBLISHED SOURCES 324

List of Figures

Figure 1 - Arbres et Fruits des Païs Méridionaux de Canada 31

Figure 2 - ―On travaille aux champs‖ 125

Figure 3 - Mission Sault Saint Louis, circa 1721 – 1745 128

Figure 4 - Aureliana Canadenis, Sinensibus Gin-seng, Iroquoaeis Garent-oguen 176

Figure 5 - Panax quinquefolium 200

Figure 6 - Kocokar and herbe à jean hebert 261

Figure 7 - Robinia pseudoacacia (1635) 281

Figure 8 - The Passion Flowers of Nieremberg and Nicolas 300

INTRODUCTION

My God am I angry to have embarked upon an enterprise as difficult as writing an

account of the New World, where there are so many things to say; not knowing

where it is best to start, I admit that I am strongly troubled for what chance is there,

even after twenty years of assiduous labour and great voyages, that I can say what is

necessary of so many beautiful curiosities in a foreign land where everything is

different than ours? What means [exist] to reduce so many vast lands, and to speak

in few words of so many different objects … from a country of which we have not

yet discovered the limits?1

Written towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit Louis Nicolas‘ manuscript Histoire naturelle des Indes Occidentales speaks to the problems of describing the New World that faced any European brave enough to ―reduce so many

1 Louis Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle des Indes occidentales,‖ Fonds Français, 24225, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 1. On the history of this text and its author, see Germaine Warkentin, ―Aristotle in New France: Louis Nicolas and the Making of the Codex Canadensis,‖ French Colonial History 11 (2010): 71 – 107.

2 vast lands‖ to discourse and present unimaginable natural novelties to an information- starved audience in Europe.2

Nicolas may seem to be an unlikely figure to serve as an introduction to colonial science in French North America. As a recent article by the scholar Germaine Warkentin has amply demonstrated, there is much about the Jesuit‘s life that remains a mystery today. He arrived in New France in the latter half of the seventeenth century, possibly by

1664, after having begged his way into the mission and leaving his formation as a Jesuit early; he would eventually return to France in 1675 after which he would also soon leave the Society of Jesus.3 The regions that Nicolas lived in and described, those ―vast lands‖ that were so difficult for him to translate into written words, were in the midst of major transformations; war, dislocation of indigenous communities and the expansion of

France‘s colonial presence were paired with the introduction of devastating European illness and new species of plants and animals.4 Yet it was also a region of long-term cultural exchange, where French and aboriginal peoples began to come to terms with radically new ways of understanding and living in shared environments. This was the middle ground so eloquently described and studied by Richard White and the empire du milieu discussed by Gilles Havard, and it is ethnohistorians such as these who have most publicly celebrated Nicolas‘ unique perspective and the region that he took such pains to

2 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 1.

3 Warkentin, ―Aristotle in New France,‖ 77 – 78, 82; Much of what has been attributed to him as an author has only been identified in recent decades, based on the careful analysis of images, handwriting and textual evidence. Nicolas otherwise languished in relative obscurity without even a sure date of death or his own entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

4 For a recent introduction to this region, see Claiborne A. Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the colonial Great Lakes (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); See also Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire De L'Amérique Française (Paris: Editions Flammarion, 2006).

3 describe.5 Nicolas, however, did not write texts akin to the well-known Jesuit Relations which so richly described the slow spread of Christianity among the diverse indigenous cultures of New France and that have been at the core of much recent ethnohistory of the region. Instead, he produced not one natural historical text but three: one focused on quadrupeds, and two – one in images and one in text – were broad surveys of the flora and fauna of the Great Lakes Region in which he had lived and worked.6 Safe in Europe at the time that he wrote his Histoire naturelle, he nonetheless carefully constructed his account in a discourse that privileged his sizeable firsthand experience of North

American environments, inspired by intellectual currents on both sides of the Atlantic that granted an unlikely cast – travelers, sailors, merchants, missionaries and colonists among them – a rare authority in the production of natural knowledge about the world beyond Europe‘s shores.7 In spite of his personal challenges and the seriousness with which he set himself to his task of faithfully transcribing the distilled experience of novel plants and animals, his Histoire naturelle was ignored at the time and has gone largely unremarked since by historians of both the environment and of science. If Nicolas claimed to have tortured himself trying to find a language to engage his imagined French

5 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 – 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Gilles Havard, Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d‟en Haut, 1660 – 1715 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2003).

6 Arguably the most famous is his Codex Canadensis, a collection of images unparalleled both for its detail and imagination that is housed today in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His ―Histoire naturelle,‖ however has been the subject of more sustained study, valued primarily for its insights into ethnographic information.

7 Literary scholars such as Jim Egan and Ralph Bauer have shown that colonial authors began to draw on contemporary scientific discourses that privileged firsthand experience to articulate new roles in Atlantic information networks. See Jim Egan, Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

4 reading publics, he and so many other colonial authors in the French, Anglo and Spanish

Atlantic Worlds nonetheless found themselves marginalized in metropolitan accounts of these newly claimed and discovered environments.

The unfortunate fate of Nicolas‘ Histoire naturelle does not mean that we should not take his frustration very seriously. Indeed, Nicolas‘ lament can serve as an invitation to consider the very real difficulties involved both in understanding the natural environments of French North America and communicating experience and knowledge throughout the early modern French Atlantic World. As the historian of science Sara

Scharf has recently noted, the communication of natural knowledge in the early modern world encouraged essentialism – a decontextualization and reductionism that created botanical essences far more portable than real living plants.8 Yet here, in the Great Lakes

Region at the edge of his known world, Nicolas was at a loss, his challenge as much practical – what plants, what features, what knowledges would he choose and how would he transform forests of trees into forests of paper – as it was philosophical. Complaints akin to Nicolas‘ are not hard to find in the documents that today provide the most insight into the encounter between the French who travelled to and established colonies in seventeenth and eighteenth-century North America and early American environments.

Michel Sarrazin, a Paris-trained naturalist and physician who arrived in New France in

1697 as the Académie Royale des Science‘s first corresponding member, tried to explain his efforts to readers who, he wrote, did not understand that he ―could cross all of Europe

8 Sara Tovah Scharf, ―Identification keys and the natural method: the development of text-based information management tools in botany in the long 18th century‖ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2007), 54.

5 more easily, and with less danger, than I could cross 100 leagues in Canada.‖9 Jean Prat faced the same obstacles as Sarrazin when he arrived in New Orleans almost four decades later as Louisiana‘s royal physician and a correspondent of Paris-based botanist and member of the Académie Royale des Sciences Bernard du Jussieu. In 1736 he tried to capture the same frustration when he explained to Jussieu that ―I cannot forget to tell you that to do what you desire of me, I would be obligated to make several voyages to distant places. You would be content with me after you knew that beyond 15 leagues from here is nothing but swampy country, which is flooded for six months of the year.‖10 If their

French academic audience understood colonial botanical science to be, at its core, a search for the universal in American nature, these colonial naturalists, well-trained and amateur alike, sought to remind their Parisian audiences of their own entanglement in networks of cultural and ecological exchange at the edges of the French Atlantic empire.

In this dissertation I study the history of French botany and natural history as it became an Atlantic enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, analyzing the production of knowledge about North American flora and the place of this knowledge in larger processes of colonialism and imperial expansion in the French Atlantic World.

Between the first tentative steps towards colonization in early seventeenth-century

Acadia and the loss of both Canada and Louisiana at the end of the Seven Years‘ War, the French who settled and explored throughout North America encountered a staggering array of environments and plants. These plants often seemed to have drawn little attention

9 Sarrazin to Réaumur, 10 October 1726, in Arthur Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien: Michel Sarrazin, 1659- 1735: Sa vie, ses travaux et son temps (Quebec: Le Quotidien Levis, 1927), 219.

10 Prat to Jussieu, 30 October 1736, in Roland Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant de Bernard de Jussieu,‖ Rapport des Archives du Québec, 41 (1963), 136.

6 from Paris-based naturalists at that time – a manuscript from the 1730s, for example, advised botanists of the profit that could be gained from developing correspondence networks without ever mentioning France‘s American colonies – yet published and archival records reveal a seemingly inexorable flow of plants between New France and

Old that remained steady in spite of the ebb and flow of French interest in the colony. By the end of the French regime in North America plants from these regions had established a sizeable presence both in gardens and the botanical texts of the Académie Royale des

Sciences and its naturalist members.11 By 1700 many of the plants that grew in the Jardin du Roi in Paris – the Purple Pitcher-Plant and the Dwarf Lily of Acadia among them – shared a common North American origin. My dissertation reminds its readers that even as these plants took root in new soils and regularly appeared in scientific texts that obscured their transatlantic origins, their cultural and natural histories retained strong connections to the ecological and cultural borderlands of French colonial North America. If Louis Nicolas is not commonly associated with the history of French botany, neither are the Great

Lakes of North America. Yet this one-time Jesuit‘s frustration encourages us to revisit the place that this region – and the entire North American continent – holds in a history where it has most often played periphery to a centre composed of Paris and its Académie

Royale des Sciences.

Geographically, this dissertation examines a region that stretches from Louisiana to Acadia, while focusing more specifically on the communication of specimens and knowledge between the Pays d‟en Haut (as the region roughly described by the Great

Lakes watershed was then known to the French), the port cities of New Orleans and

11 Antoine de Jussieu, ―Des avantages d‘un commerce litteraire avec les botanistes etrangers,‖ MS 1116, Bibliothèque centrale, Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle, Paris, 1. [Hereafter BCMNHN]

Québec, and the wider French Atlantic World and Paris. It traces the growth of French botanical science to the quotidian exchanges in French North American borderlands, in regions that historians such as James Merrell, Richard White and Gilles Havard have convincingly shown to be vital sites of cultural encounter and translation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 The history of colonial botany offers a unique opportunity to revisit and enrich these by now familiar histories of cultural exchange; local ecosystems became instruments and avenues of this exchange, and following plants and knowledges as they became the raw materials of French botany can tease out the

Atlantic and global ramifications of these contingent, ambiguous and relentlessly local encounters.

Naturalists in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris (and many historians since) have implicitly translated distance from Paris into a division of scientific labour, segregating those regions where specimens were collected from those where legitimate scientific knowledge could be produced. Nicolas‘ Histoire naturelle was an attempt, even at this early date, to expand an emerging narrative that privileged metropolitan centres such as Paris at the expense of regions and a diverse cast of scientific labourers, artisans and plant collectors who were relegated to the margins or erased from the texts produced by institutions such as London‘s Royal Society or Paris‘ Académie Royale des Sciences entirely. In recent decades historians of many regions of Europe and the Atlantic World have shown that what is now best called ―science in the making‖ was a thoroughly social

12 James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); Havard, Empire et métissages; White, Middle Ground.

8 endeavour, no longer immune or separated from larger currents in the cultural history of early modern Europe.13

If I follow Nicolas‘ lead in wresting a place for men such as him in a history of scientific progress from which they have often been excluded, however, I also want to challenge Nicolas‘ attempt to mask the imprint of France‘s colonial project in North

America on his own work and the broader intellectual networks of the French Atlantic

World. Indeed, accepting Nicolas‘ lament at face value leads to an incomplete appreciation of the diverse cast involved in the production of botanical knowledge in colonial French North America, masking the complex realities of communication between cultures and across the Atlantic. If it is true that ―The history of science beyond

Europe has often been made synonymous with heroic narratives of discovery,‖ it is because authors such as Nicolas fought for a place in these narratives, rather than reconceptualizing the nature of scientific practice in a multicultural, epistemologically diverse world. 14 As an author of an Algonquian dictionary himself, Nicolas was well aware that the encounter with colonial environments in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century French North America was simultaneously an encounter with the diverse and varied knowledge systems of aboriginal cultures.15 This was a peopled world and the

13 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987), 15. The foundational text of what has since been understood as a constructivist school in the history science is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For a recent introduction to this literature, see Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

14 James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, ―Introduction: The Far Side of the Ocean,‖ in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (London: Routledge, 2008), 5; See also Mary Terrall, ―Heroic Narratives of Quest and Discovery,‖ Configurations 6, no.2 (1998): 223 – 242.

15 For a recent edition of this dictionary, see Louis Nicolas, L'algonquin au XVIIe siècle : une édition critique, analysée et commentée de la grammaire algonquine du Père Louis Nicolas, ed. Diane Daviault (Québec: Presses de l‘Université du Québec, 1994)

9 discovery of new medicines, new commodities and new foods was rarely the result of an investigation of North American ecosystems by missionaries such as Nicolas alone.

Rather, French newcomers assembled an account of North American environments as they turned their eyes, mouths and hands to the aboriginal ecological and medical practices that they were fortunate enough to observe and as they stole whispers of oral knowledge that they were fortunate enough to overhear or, rarer still, to be given.

This is a history of science that faces east from Indian country.16 In this dissertation, I argue that French encounters with American environments and indigenous cultures were inseparable throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jesuit missionaries, for example, called both a plant and an indigenous culture ―wild rice‖ (folle avoine), conflating descriptions of the Great Lakes plant and accounts of indigenous cultural and moral attributes. Likewise, French colonists along the Saint Lawrence and

Mississippi rivers studied American flora through their assumptions about aboriginal cultures. Plants such as wild grapes were thought to be identical in essence if not in appearance to those of Europe; colonial authors justified the expansion of French colonialism in part by presenting wild and degenerate flora as evidence of an aboriginal moral failure to maintain North American nature in its natural state. French colonists imagined a complex web of relations between people and place, often to the detriment of both indigenous ecosystems and aboriginal cultures. When the Académie Royale des

Sciences first began to establish a presence in their New World, it was to these peoples they turned to make their global ambitions a reality. Colonial and metropolitan botany can not only trace its origins to cultural encounters between aboriginal peoples and

16 This phrasing is taken from Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

10 colonists, but was only a success because of the participation of peoples whose labour and knowledges brought the influence of the Académie Royale des Sciences and its members into the heart of the North American continent. The silence of French botanical texts on the colonial origins of its research subjects – silences that contained and effaced the multicultural origins of much of what we now consider French botanical science itself– has a history all its own. This dissertation therefore has two principal aims: 1) to explore the complex origins of colonial and metropolitan knowledge of North American plants in the encounters with aboriginal cultures, and 2) to explain why so little of this is known today, and the process by which this history was effaced.

This work would not have been possible were it not for historians of science in the Atlantic World who now number among the loudest critics of diffusionist discourses in the history of science. This approach, nearly synonymous with the work of George

Basalla, imposes a linear, evolutionary understanding of the relationship between metropole and colony, translating differences in scientific practice into distinct stages on a linear and evolutionary path of scientific development.17 The historians who have inspired me have instead sought to demonstrate that what we now understand by the term science was itself a product of the expansion of European empires in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and have brought a more nuanced attention to practices of knowledge production in colonies throughout the world. Historians of the Spanish

Atlantic such as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Antonio Barrera-Osorio have confronted centuries-old historiographies that have marginalized both Spain and its Atlantic empire, reimagining the histories of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment as an Atlantic

17 George Basalla, ―The Spread of Western Science,‖ Science 15 (1967): 611 – 22.

11 and global phenomena and as the product of lively and frequently contentious transatlantic communication of knowledge and specimens.18 Yet I have been particularly inspired by those works that have sought to re-imagine the role of non-European cultures and knowledges in this history, that have painstakingly traced out the trajectories of indigenous ecological, botanical, zoological, astronomical and other knowledges in scientific networks that are now revealed to have been far more culturally diverse than we at one time assumed. Historians of science in Asia have been particularly effective in broadening the basis of their research to reclaim indigenous voices and reconceptualize early modern and enlightenment science as an emergent cultural form that was endlessly translated, mediated and entangled in the messy histories of colonial expansion and cultural exchange.19 Scholars such as Londa Schiebinger, Neil Safier and Susan Scott

Parrish have similarly represented the natural knowledge of colonial physicians and naturalists as the product of long-term negotiations with local enslaved and indigenous peoples, and have traced out the effects of these encounters as hybrid knowledges circulated throughout the wider Atlantic World and to metropolitan capitals.20

Nonetheless, if this programme has been most effective where historians have been able

18 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

19 Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 214 – 225; Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650 – 1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

20 See Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

12 to consult indigenous-language materials, efforts to insert American indigenous peoples into histories of Atlantic science have been considerably more difficult and met with mixed success.

Mine is the not the first study to call for a re-evaluation of the place of aboriginal peoples and indigenous knowledges in the history of science in the early modern Atlantic

World.21 Yet even if few historians today still work in a diffusionist discourse that implicitly dismisses the knowledges of indigenous peoples, fewer still have re-examined the methods with which they study these cultures or have imagined a role for them that extends beyond a Squanto or a Sacagawea, friendly guides to the resources of the New

World who function as intermediaries rather than mediators.22 Most often therefore, aboriginal peoples still populate the margins of research into scientific practice in the colonial Americas. As native peoples are cast as informants who conveniently offer evidence of cures or foods in readily citeable anecdotes, indigenous knowledges themselves are framed less as a product of vibrant cultural traditions than a discursive creation of European authors. Recent studies that treat indigenous knowledge primarily as a discursive creation of European texts silence aboriginal cultures almost as effectively as

21 For recent calls to bring the study of indigenous knowledge into the history of science more broadly, see David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, ―Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge,‖ Osiris 2nd Series, 15 (2000): 233 – 36; Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, ―Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems,‖ in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald Markle, James C. Petersen, and Trevor Pinch (London: Sage, 1995), 115 – 39.

22 This is a distinction drawn by Bruno Latour between those brokers who mediate the exchange that they handle (mediators) or those (rare intermediaries) who leave no trace in the encounter. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; 2007), 37 – 42.

13 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial authors, shedding little light on the lived realities and intellectual complexity of indigenous knowledge systems.23

Scholars such as Neil Safier have demonstrated the need to bring together ―recent methodologies in history, anthropology, and archaeology‖ to adequately capture the indigenous actors and knowledges who are still often underrepresented.24 Sujit

Sivasundaram has likewise claimed that ―Thinking about how to approach sources is vital, given how often historians of science use the excuse of a lack of sources for constraining their projects to European topics.‖25 If these calls for interdisciplinary methodologies are nothing new – Clara Sue Kidwell made many of the same arguments almost three decades ago – they have gained a new sense of purpose by being placed in dialogue with global histories of European colonialism and a reorientation of the history of science towards the study of the social and material practices of knowledge production.26 Scholars such as David Turnbull and Arun Agrawal have explicitly aimed to move past seemingly inviolate divisions between European and indigenous knowledge systems and towards a history of interaction and connectedness by studying what scientists and indigenous knowledge producers actually do to produce knowledge.27 At

23 This approach is best expressed by Stephen Greenblatt who once wrote that ―We can be certain only that European representations of the New World tell us something about the European practice of representation.‖ Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; papeback edition, 1992), 7.

24 Neil Safier, ―Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, Amerindian Narratives, and Deep Histoires of Science,‖ Isis 101 (2010): 143.

25 Sujit Sivasundaram, ―Science and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and Theory,‖ Isis (2010): 146.

26 Clara Sue Kidwell, ―Native Knowledge in the Americas,‖ Osiris 2nd Series, 1 (1985): 209 – 28.

27 Arun Agrawal, ―Dismantling the Divide Between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge,‖ Development and Change 26, No. 3 (1995): 413 – 439; David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers (London: Routledge, 2000).

14 the heart of this innovation has therefore been a shift to studying science as practice, and an understanding of knowledge as the product of heterogeneous assemblages of ―places, bodies, voices, skills, practices, technical devices, theories, social strategies and collective work‖ rather than incommensurate ideologies.28 Dismissing teleological explanations for the successes of Western science that derive from a unique ownership of rationalism or universality, these scholars have provided a new generation of researchers such as myself with an exciting set of tools that allow for both sustained comparative analysis of indigenous and European knowledges, and a new method to trace out flows and exchanges between them. Drawing out assemblages and polycentric networks in place of centres and peripheries, these recent works also offer new geographical metaphors for this research that decentre traditional focuses on Europe and Western science.29 For historians interested in revisiting and reconceptualizing the role of indigenous peoples in the history of science, this is a propitious time.

My research combines analysis of sources such as missionary relations, travel accounts, colonial natural histories and administrative correspondence with collections from French scientific institutions such as the Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle and the Académie des Sciences, subjecting them all to an analysis not commonly associated with the history of science. If I do not consider the alternative literacies of indigenous peoples that several scholars have demonstrated contain a wealth of information about indigenous worldviews and knowledge systems, I subject these familiar sources to

28 Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, 44.

29 Wade Chambers, ―Locality‖; Fa-ti Fan ―Science in Cultural Borderlands: Methodological Reflections on the Study of Science, European Imperialism, and Cultural Encounter.‖ East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 1 (2007): 213 – 31; Diarmid A. Finnegan, ―The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science,‖ Journal of the History of Biology 41 (2008): 369 – 88; James A. Secord, ―Knowledge in Transit,‖ 95 (2004): 654 – 72.

15 techniques now used by generations of ethnohistorians to recover indigenous voices and perspectives from colonial texts.30 I have relied particularly heavily on the technique known as ―upstreaming‖ that uses anthropological studies of contemporary or near- contemporary aboriginal cultures for insights into historical populations, first popularized by ethnohistorians such as William Fenton, Bruce Trigger and Colin Calloway and an accepted practice for generations of scholars since.31 This approach might be criticized for an assumption of cultural uniformity through time, but it has provided a larger context in which to understand the traces of indigenous cultural practices that are found in colonial texts and a basis from which to understand how indigenous knowledges systems have interacted with those of Europeans and colonists over time.

My use of the term ―indigenous knowledge‖ draws upon the similarly problematic term ―traditional ecological knowledge‖ that is common in anthropological and policy studies. Fikret Berkes defines TEK as ―… a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment.‖32 This definition could just as easily be applied to how I

30 I do not go so far as other historians and literary scholars who have attempted to produce multimedia histories of aboriginal cultures to combat or complement a reliance on European-authored sources. See Heidi Bohaker, ―Reading Anishinaabe Identities: Meaning and Metaphor in Nindoodem Pictographs,‖ Ethnohistory 57, no. 1 (2010): 11 – 33; Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Spaces in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Matt Cohen. The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

31 William Fenton writes that ―The method rests on three premises. First, major patterns of culture tend to be stable over long periods of time. Second, one proceeds from what is known to examining sources that may contain familiar elements. Third, the ethnologist favors those sources that ring true ethnologically and resonate at both ends of the time span.‖ The Great Law and the Longhouse: a political history of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), xvi.

32 Fikret Berkes. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 8.

16 understand colonial or metropolitan botanical knowledges. There is little doubt that approaches to the question of authority and evidence in indigenous history are always political and that the methodology that I have adopted here leaves considerable room for interpretation and uncertainty in its results. Yet as Matt Cohen has so elegantly argued in his The Networked Wilderness, the decision to close down possible avenues of investigation into the aboriginal histories of colonial North America is neither academically nor politically satisfying.33 We must, as Bruno Latour has recently written,

―find our firm ground: on shifting sands.‖34

This dissertation, ―Plants and Peoples: French and Indigenous Botanical

Knowledge in colonial North America, 1600 – 1760,‖ explores the French encounter with

American flora in three sections. The first two chapters argue that the French colonists and missionaries who traveled and settled in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North

America learned much of what they knew about colonial flora from indigenous cultures, both about new plants and the limits of the knowledge that they had brought with them from Europe. In the third and fourth chapters, I trace out the fraught interactions between colonial, aboriginal and metropolitan knowledge systems that followed the efforts of the

Paris-based Académie Royale des Sciences to expand its influence in the scientific networks of the French Atlantic World. In my fifth chapter I turn my focus to the Atlantic histories of American plants to argue that discussions of French colonial and Atlantic botany shaped both the human and natural histories of plants in transit.

33 Cohen, Networked Wilderness, Introduction.

34 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 24.

The first chapter of my dissertation, ―Botanical Discovery in a Not-So-New

World,‖ revisits familiar narratives of the European discovery of American environments.

Drawing upon colonial natural histories, travel accounts, correspondence and administrative documents, I argue that French travelers and colonists felt little shock as they named and studied the flora of New France and Louisiana. Instead, authors drew upon their own sizeable experience of American plants such as corn that were a familiar feature of European fields, and used literary forms and discourses that created familiarity with novel plants that they integrated into their daily lives. Colonial authors adapted

French taxonomies for service in colonial settings, using generic categories such as oak or maple to ignore differences we now recognize at the species level. Where difference was noticeable, it was considered cultural rather than biological. For example, differences between the wild grapes of New France and the grapes of Europe were attributed to the failure of aboriginal cultures to maintain plants in their natural states. This evidence of botanical degeneracy promoted the introduction of French ecological regimes and Old

World plants and justified colonialism as a rehabilitation of American nature. If the novelty of the New World impressed itself upon colonial authors, it was learned over time and expressed through a growing anxiety about the limits of French ecological practice to change the character of American flora that seemed to maintain its wild qualities even after generations of integration into colonial orchards, gardens and fields.

While numerous historians have suggested that aboriginal cultures provided

European travellers and colonists with unique insight into the natural environments of the

Americas, documenting the process by which this knowledge was exchanged has often proven difficult in the face of reticent or non-existent sources. My second chapter, ―The

Natural History of Secrets: Jesuit and Indigenous Botanical Knowledge in the Great

Lakes,‖ focuses on the transmission of botanical knowledge in the missions of the

Society of Jesus to Iroquoian and Algonquian communities of the Great Lakes in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. My analysis of extant Jesuit texts such as the oft-cited Jesuit Relations and lesser known works such as manuscript dictionaries, natural histories and the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses reveals networks of circulation and exchange both more limited and subtle than have often been assumed. As it was presented to its Atlantic and global audience, Jesuit botanical knowledge was shaped by the character of indigenous knowledge systems; as men who remained unmarried residents of indigenous communities, Jesuits experienced limited access to knowledge of medicinal and wild plants that was legitimately the preserve of women and specific kin groups. Yet, as they lived and worked with indigenous peoples for years on end, they learned about local flora through their experience of the lives of their aboriginal hosts, as they ate, were treated for illness, and as they travelled throughout indigenous territories with indigenous guides. As this knowledge was transmitted through practice, it escaped

Jesuit imposed restraints born of fears of diabolical influence in Native cultures. As they mediated the Jesuit experience of American flora and brought missionaries into the lived knowledges of their kitchens, fields and forests, aboriginal men and women became unwitting and often unacknowledged co-authors of the Jesuit accounts of new plants and places penned for their French and global audiences.

The history of Atlantic and colonial natural history is often seen as a neat progression, one marked by a shift from the individual efforts of well-intentioned if isolated amateur naturalists to the organized expeditions directed by metropolitan

19 scientific institutions such as the Royal Society of London and Paris-based Académie

Royale des Sciences. Chapter Three, ― ‗I report only what I have learned from my sauvages‘ : Jesuits, Ginseng and Scientific Community in the eighteenth-century French

Atlantic World,‖ demonstrates that the exchanges of knowledge and plants between amateur naturalists in French North America and the naturalists of the Académie were no less fraught and complicated than earlier colonial encounters with indigenous cultures. In this chapter I follow the story of Joseph-François Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary to the

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and his efforts to force the Paris-based Académie Royale des

Sciences to acknowledge both his claimed discovery of American ginseng and the indigenous knowledges on which he had relied. Lafitau‘s efforts to claim legitimacy for a study of American flora that took indigenous insights to heart, one that argued against the neat epistemological distinction between centre and periphery articulated by naturalists at the Académie Royale des Sciences, demonstrates the contested nature of scientific community in the French Atlantic World. Almost immediately, Paris-based naturalists such as Sébastien Vaillaint and Antoine Tristan Danty d‘Isnard dismissed or limited the contributions of the Society of Jesus to the growth of French botanical science, arguing that the plant could only be legitimately understood in Paris by trained professionals and in designated sites such as the Jardin du Roi. Each effort to define and claim discovery of ginseng rested not only on different standards of proof, but on different visions of scientific community in the French Atlantic World. The multiple discoveries of ginseng, presented in distinct texts to disparate audiences in and after 1717, therefore provides a rare lens through which to understand the alternatives to academic science developed by

20 those amateur naturalists such as Lafitau who have more often appeared as willing participants in projects designed and directed by Parisian academicians.

The Atlantic expansion of the Académie Royale des Sciences is the subject of

Chapter Four, ―The Académie Enters the Atlantic: Centres and Peripheries in French

Atlantic Science.‖ As the Académie extended its reach and influence into the Atlantic

World, its members attempted to frame relationships with American plant collectors within a mercantilist logic; geographical distance from Paris was translated into epistemic inferiority and a division of scientific labour between those who collected plants and those who studied them. The Académie sought to transform Paris into a scientific capital, an epistemic centre drawing in the raw scientific materials (plants, animals, minerals and astronomical observations) necessary to create legitimate enlightenment science. Yet even as their texts obscured the networks on which they drew, naturalists at the Académie came to depend on new members who worked as brokers between American and Atlantic networks of botanical exchange from Québec and New Orleans. From these Atlantic port cities, these Académie-endorsed and trained naturalists became vital mediators even as they accepted an inferior role in the Académie, enlisting a diverse cast of colonial, aboriginal and missionary plant collectors and translating their efforts into the registers of the Académie. From their dual positions as academic naturalists and royal physicians and apothecaries, American correspondents such as Michel Sarrazin and Jean-François

Gaultier of Québec or Jean Prat and Alexandre Vielle of New Orleans integrated scientific research into the colonial administration and Atlantic bureaucracy of the French state. Using their access to colonial and metropolitan administrators, these correspondents were able to draw upon far flung military posts, trading and exploration expeditions and

21 religious missions to supply their Parisian patrons with new plants, and could reward their collectors with payment, promotions and the patronage of royal officials.

Throughout the French regime in French North America, these correspondents therefore transformed the Atlantic port cities of Québec and New Orleans into botanical entrêpots, translating plants acquired from collectors most often interested in material gain into scientific specimens desired by their Parisian counterparts.

The fifth and final chapter of my dissertation, ―Making Plants Portable‖ explores the Atlantic histories of the plants that travelled between the New World and Old.

Engaging with scholarship which contends that the circulation of scientific objects was vital to the expansion of Enlightenment science, this chapter argues that the character of

North American plants changed as they were integrated into and circulated between scientific, commercial, administrative and religious networks of the French Atlantic

World. If the communication of new plants and new botanical knowledges to French audiences was a preoccupation of colonial naturalists of all stripes, the material, discursive and visual practices that they embraced to make North American plants travel to their French, European and global audiences differed enormously. The ginseng root that missionaries sent to the Duke of Orleans, for example, was useless for scientific purposes after it had been stored in alcohol and stripped of the flowers that gave it a distinct botanical identity. Where I focus on the transport of plants as physical objects, I pay particular attention to the growth of a body of scientific knowledge about the shipboard environment. With an increased awareness about the social and physical environments of ships and the needs of plants as they crossed the ocean, French naturalists such as Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau studied ships as ecosystems and

22 experimented with new social and material practices that he hoped would help both his own gardens and French botanical science flourish with increased access to American flora. Once in European gardens, some plants created trajectories of their own; Canadian goldenrod and the Black Locust both became invasive species and powerful symbols of the limits of French control over American nature.

This dissertation therefore brings discussion of colonial science back to France‘s

North American colonies, and argues that long-term encounter and dialogue with indigenous peoples was integral to French conceptions of North American environments on both sides of the Atlantic. It also shows, however, that the invisibility of this history of long-term exchange was itself an important part of the production of knowledge about

North American flora and the expansion of France‘s North American colonies.

CHAPTER ONE

Botanical Discovery in a Not-So-New World

It has often been assumed that the ecological novelty of North America posed a significant challenge to European intellectual traditions that, built on Aristotelian insights into the natural world, were unable to grapple with the diversity and difference of

American nature. Antonio Barrera-Osorio has even seen the origins of modern science itself in this conflict, while others have suggested that, at the very least, the experience of

American novelty severely challenged the validity of classical sources that had long defined the flora and fauna of the Old World.35 Yet while plants and animals

35 See Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature. See also, for example, Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), and Richard Drayton, Nature‟s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the „Improvement‟ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), particularly Chapter 1. This chapter, as it explores discovery as a process rather than an event, ultimately seeks to strike a balance between works such as these which explain the impact of the Americas on Europe through assumptions about its novelty, and research that proceeded it that suggested that the discovery of the New World had a ―blunted impact‖ on the Old. JH Elliot, for example, suggested instead that the impact of the New World on the Old was ―deliberately blunted,‖ while others such as Michael Ryan argue that the early modern eye was conditioned to see similarities and familiarity before differences and novelty. See J.H. Elliot, ―Final Reflections: The Old World and the New Revisited,‖ in America in European Conscious: 1493 – 1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995):391 – 408; Michael T. Ryan, ―Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,‖ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 519 – 538.

24 both marvelous and monstrous were a legitimate ontological problem for Columbus and later explorers of Spanish territories in Central and South America, French colonists and missionaries had a fundamentally different experience of North American ecologies.

As Jonathan Sauer has noted, nowhere else could Europeans have travelled so far to find environments that were so familiar; yet this familiarity was a product of forces both cultural and ecological.36 In many ways then the story of botanical description in

French North America might therefore offer a counter narrative to that offered by historians such as Anthony Grafton and Anthony Pagden who have argued that the encounter with a New World radically different from the Old upset the European reliance on established authority.37 Colonial authors often seemed to be most familiar with North

American flora upon their arrival in New France. If disorientation or the ―vertiginous experience of being in a ‗new‘ world‖ occurred, it seemed to grow over time and emerge as a result of the encounter with indigenous peoples as much as with new types of indigenous plants.38

If it is true that roughly similar ecological conditions and shared evolutionary histories had produced a North American flora with morphological features reminiscent of those found in Europe, the effective assimilation of these plants by colonists and missionaries was ultimately a product of their cognitive engagement with North

American environments and their ability to discursively render differences between

American and European plant species invisible. Colonial authors used abstract, generic

36 Jonathan D. Sauer, ―Changing Perception and Exploitation of New World Plants in Europe, 1492 – 1800,‖ in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 815.

37 Pagden, European Encounters; Grafton, New Worlds.

38 Pagden, European Encounters, 24.

25 terms to argue that a botanical unity between New France and Old transcended the physical distance created by the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that colonists and missionaries, employing the same terms that they used to describe French and European flora, 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.

Yet as French colonists and missionaries expanded the reach of French reading publics into Louisiana, along the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes in the late seventeenth century, they began to appreciate the limits of both their knowledge and their folk classification. Experiencing North American flora with and through indigenous cultures, these authors were introduced to new plants which clearly did not fit into existing categories and, with other plants such as persimmon, they began to realize that the French names that had been applied did not quite fit. If ecological continuity between

New France and Old made it possible to think of these plants in terms of European generic names (like oak, maple or cherries, for example), continued exploration and contact with indigenous flora demonstrated the variety of North American plant populations and their distance from French models. Likewise, contact with aboriginal cultures introduced French colonists and missionaries to new ways of using seemingly- familiar plants. As they learned about maple syrup and sugar, for example, the authors studied in this chapter struggled to understand how American maples were different from those that they had known in Europe. These plants became, over time, progressively more

American in French discussions about them that became more deeply rooted in indigenous soils and aboriginal cultures.

Analyzing a wide selection of published and manuscript documents authored by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonists and missionaries, this chapter therefore questions the relationship between discovery and novelty in the New World.39 Recent discussions about race and conceptions of aboriginal peoples in colonial North America have stressed that colonial authors in New France and New England struggled to come to terms with similarities, rather than differences, between themselves and the indigenous cultures that they met in the seventeenth century. Before it was articulated in the language of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many years of contact and conflict had begun to teach early American colonists that aboriginal peoples were irreconcilably different and, by extension, inferior.40 This chapter argues for a broader

39 The term ―New World‖ is not without controversy and as it has been (and is) deployed within a colonialist discourse has effaced the history of aboriginal peoples in the Americas before contact. There is no doubt that this term has the power to simplify our understanding of the encounter between European and aboriginal cultures, yet among historians such as Colin Calloway it has found new life as a means to signal the profound changes that both European and aboriginal peoples experienced in the post-contact Americas. It is in this spirit that this term is used in this dissertation. See, for example, Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), and James H. Merrell, The Indians‟ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

40 Numerous scholars have pointed to the gradual hardening of distinctions between indigenous and colonial cultures, although many still debate the timing of this shift and point to specific events which crystalized perceptions of aboriginal difference. Both Jill Lepore and Joyce Chaplin, for example, argue that this process was already under way in the seventeenth century, fuelled by, respectively, King Philip‘s War and differential mortality from outbreaks of epidemic disease. See Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip‟s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), and Joyce E. Chaplin, ―Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,‖ The William & Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 54, no. 1 (1997): 229 – 52, and Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also, Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming White and Red in Eighteenth-Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), particularly Chapter 6, and Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). Studies of the French in North America have tended to trace the origins of this process to the later seventeenth century. See Saliha Belmessous, ―Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy,‖ The American Historical Review 110, no. 2

27 discussion of the origins of the understanding of American novelty and difference – one concerned more with what it meant to be American in the broadest sense than in simply trying to pinpoint the earliest efforts to differentiate between the continent‘s human populations. The encounter with natural environments in North American history has been characterized as a ―gentle conquest,‖ one removed from the marginalization and dispossession of aboriginal peoples.41 I argue instead that discussions about American flora – for good or for ill – were inextricably bound with discussions of the nature of aboriginal cultures and the establishment and justification of a French colonial presence in North America. Contact with indigenous cultures and the experience and understanding of colonial flora were intertwined in the history of French efforts to come to terms with the moral and natural environments of seventeenth and eighteenth-century

North America.

Shock and Lists

French explorers, colonists and missionaries who travelled to New France in the seventeenth century made their affective engagement with the New World plain to see.

Yet in texts that celebrated the colonial possibilities of these newly settled or explored regions, authors strictly confined their shock to the abundance of familiar plants and the fertility of North American soils that produced it. Like contemporary travellers to

Virginia and New England, early seventeenth-century explorers such as Samuel de

(2005): 322 – 349, and Réal Ouellet and Mylene Tremblay, ―From the Good Savage to the Degenerate Indian: The Amerindian in the Accounts of Travel to America,‖ in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500 – 1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 159 - 170.

41 See for instance James Reveal, Gentle Conquest: The Botanical Discovery of North America (Washington, DC: Starwood Publishing, 1992).

Champlain and Marc Lescarbot marveled at local plants, yet they never implied any essential differences between the flora of their homeland and that which they were encountering for the first time. Writing his ―Adieu à la Nouvelle France‖ in 1607, for example, the early Acadian colonist and author Lescarbot wrote that:

Qui croire que le segle, et le chanvre, et le pois,

Le chef d‘un jeune gars ait surpassé deux fois?

Qui croire que le blé que l‘on appellee d‘Inde

En cette saison-ci si hautement se guinde,

Qu‘il semble estre porté d‘insupportable orgueil

Pour se rendre, hautain, aux arbrisseaux pareil?42

Lescarbot celebrated the visible success of early efforts to transplant European ecological regimes to seventeenth-century North America, parsing agricultural accomplishments into positive augurs for the future of French settlement on the continent.43 Lescarbot lamented only that he was forced to return to France before he could see the colonists‘ agricultural efforts come to seemingly inevitable fruition.44

Describing his early experiences of the North American northeast and Great

Lakes Region, the Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard likewise hinted at his shock at the fertility of indigenous environments. Sagard travelled to the Récollet mission to the

42 Marc Lescarbot, Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France (Paris: chez Jean Millot, 1612) 38 – 39. This translates as: Who would believe that the barley, and the hemp, and the peas / Have surpassed the head of a young boy two times / Who would believe that the wheat that one calls Turkish / Elevates itself so high in this season here / That it seems carried by an insupportable pride / To carry itself, haughtily, even to the little trees.

43 Ramsay Cook, 1492 and all that: making a garden out of a wilderness (North York, ON: Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, 1993), 8.

44 Lescarbot, Muses, 39.

Wendat (Huron) in 1623, where, he wrote, ―I was mistaken, thinking at the beginning that their fields were sown with good grain: I was also mistaken by wild peas, … to show how fertile the land is, a sauvage of Toenchen having planted a few peas that he acquired through trade, produced fruit two times larger than normal, which surprised me, having never seen any so large either in France or Canada.‖45 Passages such as these could quickly transition from celebration to anxiety, as amateur naturalists sought, often unsuccessfully, to explain the fertility of these newly discovered environments. Yet these

French authors rarely felt the same shock that historians have claimed was common in these early natural exchanges, and showed little awareness of an overwhelming novelty in the early modern Americas.

These descriptions showed a degree of comfort and familiarity with plants more different in quantity than quality. The accounts of colonial authors produced this sense through the use of familiar French plants names and the prevalence of lists that managed to convey a sense of marvel contained within an underlying botanical continuity. The

Jesuit Louis Nicolas‘ Histoire naturelle, for example, was essentially a list of the flora and fauna that he had encountered in his travels in and around the Great Lakes Region included under chapter headings such as ―Treatise on the simples, flours, grains and the herbs that grow naturally and artificially in the country of the western indies‖ and ―Of the fruits, shrubs, and the trees of the western indies transported or natural in these lands.‖46

Assembled and juxtaposed under these headings, the plants that Nicolas described became greater than the sum of their individual parts, hinting both at the abundance of

45 Gabriel Sagard, Le Grand Voyage au pays des Hurons; suivi du dictionnaire de la langue huronne, ed. Jack Warwick (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1998), 179.

46 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 4, 17.

American environments and an implied similarity with familiar European botanical types.

Within this text Nicolas wrote, for example, that ―All the herbs that I am going to name are so common here in this country that it would take a great volume to describe all of their particularities, and as that is too tiresome, it is necessary to content ourselves with simple names. Asparagus. Red beets. White beets. Carrots. Charvis. Salsify. Panets.

Yellow, purple, straight and wild passenades. White chicory … "47 The Baron de

Lahontan, another late seventeenth-century traveller to the Great Lakes Region, included a list of plants in addition to individual descriptions, similarly suggesting an organizing principal that juxtaposed familiar and foreign plants (FIGURE 1). As both Lahontan‘s and Nicolas‘ lists progressed, the repetitive naming of each plant drove the reader‘s momentum further, suggesting that the list was composed of entries whose individuality was dwarfed by their belonging to a larger category.48 The inclusion of plants that had been introduced from Europe in a list that failed to draw any firm distinction between foreign and familiar plants ultimately rendered such divisions invisible and inconsequential. New plants and old were commingled in an explicit statement about

47 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 7.

48 The literary scholar Robert Belknap calls this ―Asyndeton‖ and argues that such lists ―imply that the list is longer than is revealed and that something further remains unsaid.‖ The List: The uses and pleasures of cataloguing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 30.

FIGURE 1 – Arbres et Fruits des Païs Méridionaux de Canada Figure 1 - Arbres et Fruits des Païs Méridionaux de Canada Louis Armand de Lom d‘Arce de Lahontan, Memoires de l‟Amerique Septentrionale (La Haye: chez les Frères l‘Honoré, 1703), 2:57

(Image Source: Google Books)

32 their shared ―plant-ness‖ that persisted despite their unique histories and origins.49 What mattered was that each, whether they grew as deliberately cultivated elements of French kitchen gardens or as features of regional landscapes, was comprehensible for French audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Thus even where the descriptions of plants seem haphazard and chaotic to the modern reader, for early modern audiences they assumed a familiarity with common organizing categories such as trees, herbs or bushes (arbres, herbes and arbrisseaux in

French) common in contemporary botanical texts; their inclusion in texts about North

American flora argued for the existence of fundamental similarities between the plants of the New and Old World.50 Louis Nicolas divided his descriptions of over 200 plants from sections on fish, birds, mammals and aboriginal peoples.51 Within this, Nicolas

―consecrates 20 folios to trees, 12 deal with herbs, then the fruits are described in 7 folios and finally come the 4 folios on shrubs.‖52 Other natural histories were similarly organized. For example, Pierre Boucher, an early colonial official at Trois-Rivières and seigneur near Montréal, restricted most of the botanical descriptions in his 1664 Histoire naturelle to chapters entitled ―The trees that grow in New France‖ and ―The names of the

49 Alix Cooper‘s recently published research has shown that this was a common practice in seventeenth- century Europe where published herbals were most ―generally universalist in outlook and compass. Far from focusing specifically on the plants of any one area, most tended instead, in semi-encyclopedic fashion, to incorporate as much material as possible within their covers.‖ Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25 – 26.

50 These categorical divisions can be traced back to Aristotle and his students and were rigorously attacked by eighteenth-century systematists. See Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30 – 31.

51 Pierre Simon Doyon, Histoire de l‟iconographie botanique en Amérique française du 17e au 19e siècles, https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/pls/public/gscw030?owa_no_site=640.

52 Ibid.

33 wheats (Bleds) and other grains brought from Europe, that grow in this country‖ even if the boundary between these and chapters devoted to geography and aboriginal cultures remained decidedly porous.53 Although most obvious in natural histories, these categorizations slipped easily between genres, rendering any neat distinction between the botanical descriptions in natural histories, travel literature and missionary relations impossible. The anonymous eighteenth-century Relation de la Louisianne, for example, featured a chapter that included discussion of the major plants of the region, just as the

Abenaki dictionary of the Jesuit Sébastien Râles included distinctive and otherwise unrelated words under general headings such as tree and fruit.54 Regardless of what they might find, French explorers, colonists and missionaries remained confident that, at the very least, new plants that they found would be comprehensible as plants or, better still, as types of trees, shrubs or herbs.

While natural histories such as Nicolas‘ often made these categorizations explicit in their structure, there is clear evidence that the imposition of these larger taxonomic categories was widespread. For instance, the Jesuit introduction to Christian thought written in Wendat, De Religione, intended to instruct its Iroquoian audience in these fundamental divisions of living kinds when it stated that ―It is as if there are three lineages of those who live. The lives of oak, ash, and every kind of tree make one

53 Pierre Boucher, Histoire veritable et naturelle de moeurs & productions du pays de la Nouvelle France, vulgairement dite le Canada (Paris: chez Florentin Lambert, 1664), 39, 81.

54 ―Relation de la Louisianne ou Mississipi. Ecrite à une dame, par un officier de marine,‖ [c.1735], Ms. 530, Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, 204; Sébastien Rasles, A Dictionary of the Abnaki Language, in North America, ed. John Pickering (Cambridge, MA: Charles Folsom, 1833), 386, 460.

34 lineage. They resemble each other in their lives.‖55 Animals and people became two distinct lineages in a worldview that Jesuits sought to use both to make sense of their immediate environments and to recast the mental worlds of indigenous cultures.56

Claiming that North American flora remained understandable as plants challenged

European assumptions that the physical distance that separated the Americas from

Europe translated into ontological difference.57 For French readers of natural historical, mission and travel accounts, knowledge of these categories could be assumed and their use in framing discussions of North American flora distanced any possible anxieties about insurmountable botanical difference between New France and Old. Description became an affirmation of similarities, and classification became an act of containment.

French Folk Classification in Colonial North America

There were therefore limits to the novelty of New France as it was presented in these texts, and the form in which accounts of new plants were described served to further minimize the expectation and experience of botanical difference. The use of

55 John Steckley, ed., De Religione: Telling the Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Story in Huron to the Iroquois (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 51.

56 Ibid.

57 Scholars in multiple disciplines have suggested that travellers in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe expected to be amazed by what they saw in the extra-European world. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have suggested, for example, that distance was translated into difference following medieval accounts of travel that included descriptions of fantastic people, places, plants and animals. See Wonders and the Order of Nature:1150-1750 (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1998); Seymour Phillips, ―The outer world of the European Middle Ages,‖ in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1994), 23 – 62. As late as the early seventeenth century, French authors still provided descriptions of plants encountered on Atlantic islands that blurred distinctions between plants and animals. See Claude Duret, Histoire admirable des plantes et herbes esmerveillables et miraculeuses en nature (Paris: 1605) and his discussion of trees whose leaves turn into fish or animals, for example.

35 familiar botanical names for plants encountered throughout French North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further obscured ecological and botanical differences. Early explorer and colonist Samuel de Champlain, for example, brought together a number of discursive and rhetorical strategies that minimized 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 offers numerous representative examples of these features of early colonial texts. He wrote that:

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 (herbe au

soleil) 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 colour 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.58

The ecosystems of French North America were presented as assemblages of recognizable plants.

As they travelled along the Saint Lawrence River, into the Great Lakes and south into the Mississippi watershed, French authors continued to describe environments populated by familiar French types of plants. Alongside Champlain, if we were to look for an author who can offer an image of a ―typical‖ French traveler in the interior of

North America we might easily pick Jacques Marquette. Arriving in New France in 1666, he is best remembered for his exploration of the Mississippi and throughout the Pays d‟en

Haut but saw much of the colony and many of the Jesuit missions in his travels. Indeed, although he died just nine years later in present day Michigan, he travelled over vast areas of the interior of North America and met a wide range of its peoples including the

Illinois, Algonquin and Wendat. Analyzing some of his representative descriptions, we can learn a great deal about the particular strategies employed by a travelling Jesuit trying to capture a foreign environment in text. At a Mascouten village in 1673, for instance, he wrote the following:

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

58 Samuel de Champlain, The Works of Samuel de Champlain (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922 – 36), 3:50 – 51.

lofty trees. The soil is very fertile, and yields much Indian corn. The savages gather

quantities of plums and grapes, wherewith much wine could be made, if desired.59

Just a short while later, while travelling on the Wisconsin River, he wrote that:

The River on which we embarked is called Meskousing. It is very wide; it has a

sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that render its navigation very difficult. It

is full of Islands Covered with Vines. On the banks one sees fertile land, diversified

with woods, prairies, and hills. There are oak, walnut, and basswood trees; and

another kind, whose branches are armed with long thorns. We saw there neither

feathered game nor fish, but many deer, and a large number of cattle. Our Route lay

to the southwest, and, after navigating about 30 leagues, we saw a spot presenting

all the appearances of an iron mine; and, in fact, one of our party who had formerly

seen such mines, assures us that The One which We found is very good and very

rich. It is Covered with three feet of good soil, and is quite near a chain of rocks, the

base of which is covered by very fine trees. After proceeding 40 leagues on This

same route, we arrived at the mouth of our River; and, at 42 and a half degrees Of

latitude, We safely entered Missisipi on The 17th of June, with a Joy that I cannot

Express.60

Marquette‘s descriptions of upper Mississippi cultures such as the Mascouten demonstrate that the strategies employed by Champlain and other early explorers enjoyed continued use in newly discovered regions of the continent. Embedded in descriptions of

59 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791 (Cleveland: Burrows Bros. Co., 1896 - 1901), 59:101. [Hereafter JR]

60 JR 59: 105.

38 unfamiliar peoples and landscapes, the presence of recognizable French plants such as oak and grape vine anchored readers and travellers alike, offering promises of an essential similarity behind cultural and ecological difference more apparent than real.

French folk taxonomies were both portable and discursively economical, encouraging use by the travellers, missionaries and colonists who introduced French audiences to the environments of North America throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If we compare the descriptions of Champlain and Marquette to those written by Nicolas Denys and Pierre Le Moyne d‘Iberville who respectively represented late seventeenth-century Acadia and early eighteenth-century Louisiana – the furthest possible reaches of French North America – the extent of a common discursive strategy becomes clear. Denys, like Pierre Boucher in the Saint Lawrence Valley or the later Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz of Louisiana, was interested in raising the profile of the colony in hopes of personal profit. Throughout his 1672 Histoire Naturelle des peuples, des animaux, des arbres & plantes de l‟Amérique septentrionale he worked diligently to present a familiar face of the colony to his French readers and prospective colonists. ―With regard to the fruits which are found in this country,‖ he wrote, ― there are wild cherries, the fruit is not very big, but the flavour contains a little of the cherry.

One sees there even more other trees, all the fruit is very small, there are some raspberries in all of the areas not covered by trees, and even in our clearings, if one does not clear them one year they fill up with raspberries, the raspberries are very fat and have a good taste better than that of France.‖61 Iberville, who was born in Montréal and brought his experience of Canadian flora to bear on his early assessment of the lower Mississippi,

61 Nicolas Denys, Histoire Naturelle des peuples, des animaux, des arbres & plantes de l‟Amérique septentrionale (Paris: Chez Claude Barbin, 1672), 350.

39 echoed these comments as he described the environment near Mobile Point in 1698. He wrote, certainly, that he had encountered ―woods unknown to me‖ that would remain unnamed, but he also recounted finding the ever present and always familiar ―sorts of timber, oak, elm, ash, [and] pine.‖62 These accounts imagined colonial landscapes populated with familiar plants, filled with 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.

Such botanical descriptions relied upon a body of knowledge shared with their authors‘ European audience. What this meant was that, as French American authors noted the presence of oak, birch or plum trees on the banks of rivers on which they travelled or in the environs of the missions at which they worked and the communities that they founded, they were drawing on a set of categories that would have been obvious to their intended readers. Evidently, as the French crossed the Atlantic, they brought with them a set of floral templates with which they sought to make sense of the environment of

French North America. Therefore, when Jacques Bruyas wrote from his mission to the

Haudenosaunee that he found ―walnuts and chestnuts, which I find in no wise different in taste from our own,‖ the self-evidence of his identification is clear and the phrasing redundant.63 The seemingly infinite references to trees such as pine, spruce, or French fruits such as cherry or plums testified to a confidence in the plasticity of common French

62 Pierre Le Moyne d‘Iberville, ―The Iberville Journal,‖ in A Comparative View of French Louisiana, 1699 and 1762: The Journals of Pierre Le Moyne d‟Iberville and Jean-Jacques-Blaise d‟Abbadie, ed. Carl Brasseaux (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1979), 27.

63 JR 51:121.

40 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.

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 both into 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.64 This, as the 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.65 Although it is often assumed that Europeans quickly worked to catalogue individual species, a reliance on generic categories gave Jesuits and colonial observers more generally considerable ontological flexibility that allowed Europeans to map Old World types onto American environments with a minimum of intellectual effort.

Gabriel Sagard, Récollet missionary to the Wendat, wrote in 1632 that, ―There are some pears, or that are called pears, certain small fruits a bit larger than peas, of a blackish colour and soft, very good to eat.‖66 Similarly, when the Jesuit Louis Nicolas wrote at the end of the seventeenth century that ―The strawberry of the New World only differs from ours in that it is smaller, less odoriferous, and much more common,‖ he was

64 This section of my chapter is influenced by ethnobotanical and ethnobiological works such as Atran, Cognitive Foundations. and Brent Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992)

65 Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification, 76.

66 Sagard, Grand Voyage, 312; Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 25.

41 fundamentally relying on a common understanding of ―strawberry-ness‖ that persisted in spite of changes in shape, colour, smell and distribution.67 The result was to effectively erase the specificity of the plants which they sought to describe, reducing morphological and ecological characteristics unique to North American populations to accidental traits that left essential characters unchanged.

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, for example, 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.68 To describe a species of ―varee,‖ he wrote only that small crustaceans survived the force of waves by growing filaments that kept them bound to the marine plant.69 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.

Yet 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

67 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 17 – 18.

68 Ibid, 13.

69 Ibid, 12; These descriptions therefore exhibited a tendency for authors to describe American natural objects by ―decontextualizing them and implicitly denying that their native habitat or setting mattered.‖ See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ―Introduction: The Changing Definition of America,‖ in America in European Consciousness: 1493 – 1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 12.

42 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 cedar-ness, in this case), authors were able to incorporate new flora with the greatest possible economy of description and to make their works considerably easier to understand for their intended audience.

Sometimes this could be fairly simple, as when Sagard described the Tupinambour as the

―apple of Canada‖ or where, throughout Louis Nicolas‘s Histoire naturelle and the Jesuit

Relations plants such as cherry trees or vines are identified as wild.70 At other times, and particularly in works such as Nicolas‘ Histoire naturelle where novel flora received considerable attention, the detail grew even as the strategy remains the same. When, for instance, he described the spruce of Canada, the Jesuit 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 ―I will not say a word to speak of the red spruce, nor of the white, between which the only difference is in their bark which is of different colours.‖71

The anonymous author J.C.B. showed a similar confidence in the plasticity of

European floral types when he described the flora of the Ohio Valley that he had seen during the Seven Year‘s War. He wrote that, ―All of the species of trees in the country of the Ohio are very beautiful; one finds there four sorts of fir known under the name white

70 Sagard, Grand Voyage, 312. Throughout this chapter I have translated the French sauvage, as it was used as a botanical description, as wild. The significance of the word choice is discussed further below. The tupinambour is today known as the Jerusalem Artichoke.

71 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 29.

43 spruce, red, péreuse (spruce?) and fir of France. Cedars of two sorts the white and the red; male and female maple, merisier (wild cherry ); ash, plane tree, walnut of three types, elm of two types, a prune tree and other plants that almost all of Canada produces.‖72 Such descriptions relied heavily on a common knowledge of European floral templates and the rhetorical power of the list, modifying widespread categories only slightly to hint at the diversity of colonial American environments. The differences noted were clearly substantial but they nonetheless failed to overcome a base similarity that made, for example, red and white cedar more alike than they were different. In the description of the Ohio Valley landscapes provided by J.C.B. it becomes clearer still that the experience of French flora provided the basis for the conception of American environments. Of the four types of fir tree described by this anonymous author, the

French species remained essentially unmodified and was synonymous with the folk generic itself. Making use of what renaissance and early modern natural historians referred to as differentiae, French authors were therefore able to refine their descriptions by recording only those singular features that marked a plant as unique.73

Clearly there were still many plants that were first encountered and experienced by

French authors on North American soil that lacked easy French analogues. Occasionally, all that it took for novel plants to be assimilated was the passage of time. In 1619, for instance, Champlain described a ―manner of fruit which is of the form and colour of little lemons and which has none of the taste, but the inside is very good, and almost similar to

72 J.C.B., ―Voyage au Canada Dans le nord de l‘Amerique Septentrionale, fait depuis l‘an 1751 à 1761,‖ Manuscrit Français – Nouvelles Acquisitions, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, 163.

73 Scharf, ―Identification keys and the natural method,‖ 47.

44 that of figs‖74 In 1673 the Jesuit Claude Dablon would record seeing, ―a type of lemon, which is similar to that of France, but which is not bitter at all, not even in its skin.‖75 His confrère Louis Nicolas would similarly describe what was no longer simply like a lemon, but had gradually become a type of lemon. In his Histoire naturelle the plant and its fruit are described in detail without ever undermining its essential ―lemon-ness.‖76 By the eighteenth century it was be common to write about the citronnier, effacing the early certainty that this plant was not in fact were the same as European lemons. This is how it was named by Pierre-François Xavier de Charlevoix in 1744, who, while noting that its bark was poisonous promised that its fruit was ―very agreeable and very refreshing.‖77

Therefore while simile could simplify the first encounter with novel plants, it could also have long term implications for their identification.

The use of a name such as oak, cherry, vine or lemon implied the existence of specific morphological features expected by French audiences and colonists. Yet a

French name also implied a set of potential uses. The identity of a plant, from natural state to finished product or commodity, was framed more as a spectrum than an absolute and included multiple stages in the plant‘s life and its role in supporting and maintaining

French cultures and ecologies. North American plants became knowable as much through lived experience of them as by observation of their prominent morphological features, and their possible uses and incorporations into French ecological and domestic regimes

74 Champlain, Works, 3:50.

75 JR 56: 122. This seems likely to have been May Apple (Podophyllum peltatum)

76 Nicolas, ―Histoire Naturelle,‖ 11.

77 cited at ―Les archives du français du Québec,‖ Trésor de la lange française au Québec, http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/ [Hereafter TLFQ]

45 figured prominently in early written accounts. There was often therefore a clear sense that even where morphological distinctions existed, North American plants could be identified by functional roles that 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 that, ―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.‖78 The anonymous manuscript Relation de la Louisianne, written around 1735, proceeded similarly when describing the cedars of French North America: ―There are two sorts of cedar the white and the red, one uses the white for carpentry and woodwork, because it is easy to work and very light … The red cedar can serve for the same usages, and is a bit stronger. The colour is magnificent, it is of a bright red.‖79 If, as historians such as William Cronon have argued, the American wilderness was perceived through a lens that favoured extractive enterprise and the transformation of botanical resources into commodities, seventeenth- and eighteenth-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.80

78 Denys, Histoire naturelle, 315.

79 ―Relation de la Louisianne,‖ 224.

80 Timothy Silver, for example, has written that ―Not only did colonists come from Europe, but the European market frequently dictated how colonists used the land and resources of America.‖ See Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests 1500 –

The utility of American flora was often understood in remarkably local terms.

Clearly the medicinal or nutritive properties of plants did not exclude a consideration of their possible commercial value in the wider French Atlantic World, but discussions of the uses to which new plants had been put to use by colonists and missionaries evoked recognizably French lifestyles as they were maintained in the New World rather than the potential profit of botanical commodities.81 For example, even as the amateur botanist

François-Madeleine Vallée sought to explain the value of the flora around Louisbourg to would-be Parisian patrons, his discussions of the utility of local plants inevitably turned around local health concerns and the local knowledges of indigenous and colonial peoples. Vallée attributed medicinal properties to six of the eleven plants he described in his Mémoire sur les plantes qui sont dans la caise B.82 Yet as he described these medicinal properties, he embedded discussions of utility in narratives of colonial and indigenous usage that emphasized the distance between the study of the plants in Europe and his firsthand experience of indigenous and colonial communities. The plant that he named simply ―plante marine‖ had been used to treat worms in infants ―perfectly well,‖ a treatment for an illness ―very frequent in this country not only to children but even more

1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 4. Matthew Dennis writes that ―Americans would continue to see the continent as a magazine of resources and commodities and justify its expropriation through its exploitation and transformation.‖ ―Cultures of Nature: To ca. 1810,‖ in A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 215. See also William Cronon, Change in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1987; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 166 – 70.

81 It also seems possible that identifiably French lifestyles were themselves a product of colonial experience and an effort to reify and maintain traditional lifestyles in the colonies. See Saliha Belmessous, ―Etre français en Nouvelle-France: Identité française et identité coloniale aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles,‖ French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (2004): 507 – 540.

82 François-Madeleine Vallée, ―Mémoire sur les plantes qui sont dans la caise B,‖ [~1725], Laboratoire de phanérogamie, Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle, Paris, np.

47 to those of an advanced age.‖83 These were plants that cured colonial and indigenous populations of illnesses that were of local concern. The same was true in Louisiana where authors such as Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny showed himself less interested in the uses that novel plants might be put into in Europe than how they maintained colonial lives; rice was made into bread, cypress could make canoes, and the wax myrtle could be used to make candles.84

Other accounts of the discovery of the cirier (wax myrtle or Myrica cerifera) by the Jesuit Sébastien Râles in the early eighteenth-century Northeast, showed that he had adapted local flora to familiar ends.85 ―I have no need to economize in wax,‖ he wrote.

―[F]or this country furnishes me with abundance. The islands of the sea are bordered with wild laurel, which in autumn bears berries closely resembling those of the juniper-tree.

Large kettles are filled with them and they are boiled in water; as the water boils, the green wax rises, and remains on the surface of the water. From a minot of these berries can be obtained nearly four livres of wax; it is very pure and very fine, but is neither soft nor pliable. After a few experiments, I have found that by mixing with it equal quantities of tallow, — either beef, mutton, or elk, — the mixture makes beautiful, solid, and very serviceable candles. From twenty-four livres of wax, and as many of tallow, can be made two hundred tapers more than a royal foot in length. Abundance of these laurels are found

83 Ibid.

84 Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, Regards sur le monde atlantique, 1715 – 1747, eds. Shannon Lee Dawdy, Gordon M. Sayre, Carla Zecher (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2008), 405, 407, 409.

85 The cirier was also an object of study for colonial naturalists in Louisiana. There both the apothecary Alexandre Vielle and the royal doctor Jean Prat described the plant for scientific and administrative patrons in the hopes of establishing a market for the wax. See Chapter 4 and Gilles-Antoine Langlois, ―Deux Fondations Scientifiques à la Nouvelle-Orléans (1728-30): La connaissance a l‘Eprouve de la Realité Coloniale,‖ French Colonial History 4 (2003): 99 – 115.

48 on the Islands, and on the shore of the sea; one person alone could easily gather four minots of berries daily. The berries hang in clusters from the branches of the shrub. I sent a branch of them to Quebec, with a cake of wax, and it was pronounced excellent.‖86

Likewise, when a French officer at Fort de Chartres in the Illinois made wine from local grapes, he himself was the intended market for his product. He wrote a friend in 1729 to explain that ―I have already told you that I made a barrel and a quart of wine with the firm resolution that I would only open it next spring, but having this wine continually under my feet in a cellar where I often descend to make sure that no accidents have arrived I let myself have just a quart at [the day of] Sainte Martine even though it was still green.‖87 This was import substitution rather than botanical innovation and aimed primarily at the maintenance of identifiably French cultures and ecologies.

French names likewise implied an expectation of the properties of a plant and considerations of the usage of North American plants extended equally to their effects on

French bodies. While noting that the leaves of capillaire du Canada (Adiantum pedatum or maiden-hair fern) were bigger than the more commonly known variety collected near

Montpelier, for example, the Jesuit traveller Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix promised that ―Its quality is well above that of other Capillaires.‖88 ―Nowhere else is this plant so tall and lively,‖ he wrote, ―as in Canada.‖89 Such guarantees, however, simultaneously also inserted such plants in a different register entirely, promising

86 JR 67: 87.

87 Sieur Terrisse de Ternan, in Henry P. Dart, ―Cabildo Archives: French Period IV,‖ The Louisiana Historical Quarterly, vol. 3, 2-3 (October, 1920): 534.

88 Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix. Journal d'un voyage fait par ordre du Roi dans l'Amérique septentrionale, ed., Pierre Berthiaume (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1994), 4: 303.

89 Ibid.

49 economic values and potential trade in American plants with an already established market in France. Charlevoix‘s confrère Louis Nicolas also transitioned quickly between discussions of common medicinal properties and the economic value of capillaire. He wrote that ―it is precious for this virtue that it has to refresh the chest through the excellent syrup that one makes with it and that is so sought after in France that is sold for

4 or 5 ecus per pot‖90 Nicolas‘ confrère Joseph-François Lafitau described the American ginseng that he discovered near Montréal similarly, claiming both that the plant had the same medicinal effects as the well-known Chinese drug and that, once properly prepared,

American ginseng would worth three times its weight in silver.91

Nicolas and Lafitau went to great lengths to assure their readers that the capillaire du Canada and American ginseng would have the expected effects on French bodies, arguing that morphological or ecological differences masked more subtle commonalities.92 More often still, usage and morphology alike were implied in the simplified name of the plant. The capillaire du Canada, for example, was also frequently simply listed in catalogues, denied even a cursory discussion of the morphological and medicinal differences that warranted the qualifier ―du Canada.‖93 The name a plant

90 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 12.

91 Joseph-François Lafitau, Mémoire presenté a son altesse royale Monseigneur le duc d'Orléans, regent du royaume de France, concernant la précieuse plante du gin-seng de Tartarie, découverte en Canada par le P. Joseph François Lafitau, de la Compagnie de Jesus, missionnaire des Iroquois du Sault Saint Louis (Paris: Chez Joseph Mongé, 1718), 45 – 46.

92 For a more detailed discussion of Lafitau‘s study of ginseng, see Chapter 3.

93 See Boucher, Histoire veritable, 86; Capillaire was one of the few American plants integrated into colonial medicine and that acquired a reputation in the French medical marketplace. For a discussion of the medical use of and commerce in capillaire see Rénald Lessard, ―Pratique et praticiens en contexte colonial: Le corps médical canadien aux 17e et 18e siècles (PhD diss., Université Laval, 1994), 238 – 42. For a brief discussion of the capillaire of Louisiana see Antoine-Simon Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane (Paris: Bure, Delaguette, Lambert, 1758), 2: 49 - 50. See also Chapter 5.

50 carried therefore inserted it into a number of registers, simultaneously laying claim to familiar medicinal properties, economic value, and ecological and morphological features.

Cultural and Natural Difference in Seventeenth-Century French North America

In many cases morphological differences between New and Old World species of plants were considered red herrings, more apparent than real. Observable differences were frequently understood to be mutable and were credited to the influence of the local

North American environments and aboriginal ecological practice. When colonial authors described various American plants such as lemon, cherries and oats as wild, for example, they implicitly suggested that American flora was an imperfect or degraded version of those which existed in France. These accounts focused particular attention on food plants that were either wild or cultivated, with French tastes and aesthetics the implied standard by which these plants were judged. 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 grape vines, for instance, it was understood that the grapes that produced bitter and unremarkable wines from Louisiana to Acadia were a product of aboriginal neglect. 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.‖94 In

94 Champlain, Works, 1: 129; References like this are countless. See, for example, Denys, Histoire naturelle, 351; Louis Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte au sud‟oèuest de la Nouvelle-France (Paris: chez la veuve Sébastien Huré, 1683), 2; Nation Iroquois: A Seventeenth-Century Ethnography of the Iroquois, ed. José Antonio Brandao (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 52.

1668, Jacques Bruyas wrote similarly about the vines near his mission amongst the

Haudenosaunee at Saint François-Xavier (Kahnawake), arguing that, ―I believe that, if they were pruned two years in succession, the grapes would be as good as those of

France.‖95 Although it seems likely that the particular quality of the vine that the French encountered throughout North America would have differed greatly from one region to the next, a common discourse suggested that, from New Orleans to Acadia, all that was needed to erase observable defects was French stewardship. Henri Joutel, in his account of the areas of the Mississippi that he explored with René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La

Salle in the late seventeenth century, wrote simply that ―One finds there vine that is lacking only a little culture.‖96 The result was an invitation to import French ecological practice and the delegitimation of the knowledges and ecological practices of local aboriginal peoples.

French discussions of wild American plants were closely interwoven with early assessments of aboriginal peoples. Numerous historians have written about the etymology and significance of the French word sauvage as it was used to refer to the aboriginal communities of North America in the seventeenth century.97 The American sauvage, explains Olive Dickason for example, blended ―the well-known Renaissance

95 JR 51: 121.

96 Henri Joutel, Journal historique du dernier voyage que feu M. de LaSale fit dans le golfe de Mexique, pour trouver l‟embouchure, & le cours de la riviere de Missicipi, nommeé à present la riviere de Saint Loüis, qui traverse la Louisiane : où l‟on voit l‟histoire tragique de sa mort, & plusieurs choses curieuses du nouveau monde (Paris: chez E. Robinot, 1713), viii.

97 See, for example, Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the beginnings of French colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984); Thomas GM Peace, ―Deconstructing the Sauvage / Savage in the Writing of Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith,‖ French Colonial History 7 (2006): 1 – 20; Gordon Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)

52 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.‖98 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.99 If it did not carry many of the pejorative connotations of unrestrained violence that the English translation as 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.

Naming the aboriginal peoples of French North America sauvage encouraged treating them in a similar fashion to the wild grape vines that, from the perspective of early missionaries, were ―… lacking only a little culture.‖100 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 could be ―cultivated‖ through their encounters with French missionaries and colonists. This agriculturally inspired language was particularly evident in the writing of early missionaries. Jesuit missionaries, for example, often wrote about the introduction of Christianity in a language that evoked the intentional introduction of an Old World plant. In 1636, Jean de Brébeuf wrote that ―You

98 Dickason, Myth, 63 – 84. (quote on 63)

99 James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 43 - 46; Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632 – 1650 (Kingston and Montréal: McGill – Queen‘s University Press, 2000), particularly Chapter 3; Dickason, Myth; Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French- Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), 31; Cornelius J. Jaenen, ― ‗Les Sauvages Ameriquains‘ : Persistence into the 18th century of traditional French concepts and constructs for comprehending Amerindians,‖ Ethnohistory 29, no. 1 (1982): 43 – 56; Peace, ―Deconstructing,‖ 3 – 5; Sayre, Sauvages, 126 – 27.

100 Joutel, Journal historique, viii.

53 remember that plant, named ‗the fear of God,‘ with which it is said our Fathers at the beginning of our Society charmed away the spirit of impurity; it does not grow in the land of the Hurons, but it falls there abundantly from Heaven, if one has but a little care to cultivate that which he brings here.‖101 Aboriginal peoples were themselves understood within a botanical idiom that made their connection to a wild and untended nature explicit. Paul Le Jeune explained in the Relation of 1640, that ―When we first came into these countries, as we hoped for scarcely anything from the old trees, we employed all our forces in cultivating the young plants; but, as our Lord gave us the adults, we are turning the great outlay we made for the children to the succor of their fathers and mothers, —helping them to cultivate the land, and to locate in a fixed and permanent home; we still retain with us, however, some little abandoned orphans.‖102 The mission to

New France became both a vineyard and a garden, aboriginal peoples became plants in need of attention, and missionaries explained their activities in a horticultural discourse that justified the colonization of the New World as rehabilitation project.103

The Jesuit mission to New France aimed at a wholesale reorientation and redefinition of human, spiritual and ecological relationships that were understood to be mutually reinforcing in the creation and maintenance of Native American environments.

A key facet of the moral rehabilitation of the nomadic peoples of the Northeast and Saint

Lawrence Valley, for example, involved teaching them to become agriculturalists; a transformation of both ecological relationships and the gendered division of labour that

101 JR 10:109.

102 JR 18:77.

103 For an overview of the policies of Frenchification see Axtell, Invasion Within, 68 - 70; Belmessous, ―Assimilation and Racialism.‖ See also Havard and Vidal, Histoire, 333 – 37.

54 saw agricultural roles as naturally feminine. Although short lived because of native resistance, the effort to establish a reduction at Sillery modeled after Jesuit experience in

Paraguay sought to ―civilize‖ natives and induce them to take up agriculture as a precursor to their Christianization.104 Yet colonists continued apace in their own parallel efforts to reclaim American environments from their state of wilderness, leveling forests and creating fields and gardens in their stead.105

If missionaries discursively transformed their mission into a garden and themselves into God‘s gardeners, they were joined in their cause by colonists who read

104 For a history of French efforts to settle and sedentarize aboriginal peoples in the Saint Lawrence, see Alain Beaulieu, Convertir les fils de Caïn: Jésuites et Amérindiens nomades en Nouvelle-France, 1632- 1642 (Québec: Nuit blanche, 1990), Marc Jetten, Enclaves amérindiennes: les “réductions” du Canada, 1637-1701 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1994), and Jan Grabowski, ―The Common Ground: Settled Natives and French in Montréal, 1667 – 1760,‖ PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 1993, 43 – 58. For work that inserts the history of the early missionary program in a broader Atlantic and global context, see also Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire : Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003) and Allan Greer, ―Towards a Comparative Study of Jesuit Missions and Indigenous People in Seventeenth-Century Canada and Paraguay,‖ in Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, eds. Aparecida Villaça and Robin M. Wright (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 21 – 32.

105 A history of agriculture in French North America is beyond the scope of this present chapter. For an overview of the history of gardens in New France, see Marie-José Fortier, ―Les jardins d‘agrément en Nouvelle-France (aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles)‖ (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 2007) and Martin Fournier, Jardins et Potagers en Nouvelle-France: Joie de vivre et patrimoine culturelle (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2004). For work on orchards, see Sylvie Dépatie, ―Jardins et vergers à Montréal au XVIIIe siècle,) in Habitants et Marchands Twenty Years Later: Reading the History of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Canada, eds. Sylvie Dépatie, Catherine Desbarats, Danielle Gauvreau, Mario Lelancette and Thomas Wien (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 1998): 226 – 53, and Guillaume Teasdale, ―The French of Orchard Country: Territory, Landscape, and Ethnicity in the Detroit River Region, 1680s – 1810s (PhD diss., York University, 2010), particularly Chapter 5. For work on agriculture in New France see Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes 1740 – 1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), and Louise Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth Century Montreal, trans. Liana Vardi (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 1992). For work on agriculture in the Pays d‟en Haut (including the Great Lakes and upper Louisiana) see Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), and M.J. Morgan, Land of Big Rivers: French & Indian Illinois, 1699 – 1778 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), and Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans – Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994), particularly supplementary section. For work on agriculture in Louisiana see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), particularly Chapter 5, and Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), particularly Chapters 5 and 6.

55 their role in North American ecosystems through an idealized sense of mesnagement, or stewardship. Chandra Mukerji writes that ―During the reign of Louis XIV, good governance was equated with effective land management,‖ but already during the reign of Henry IV and the explorations of Champlain, French reactions to North American environments were inspired by recent horticultural advancements with the same imperative.106 As Henry IV looked to land management to claim moral legitimacy for his rule, Champlain implied that French intervention and transformation of New World environments justified a colonial presence and rule over the land.107 Just as many authors were convinced that French cultivation would transform wild fruits and produce passable wines, others were convinced that French stewardship could transform weather patterns, animal life and, in effect, to transform New France into a more perfect copy of Old.

Champlain explained that the negligence of aboriginal peoples had even made the environment toxic; with proper management, he assured his readers, even scurvy could be avoided. ―The winter is also a cause [of scurvy] in part, which seals in the natural heat

[and] causes the greatest corruption of the blood,‖ he explained.108 He continued, ―and also when the soil is open certain vapors which infect the air when enclosed escape; we have seen this by experience at other habitations that after the first year when the sun shines on the cleared land, … the air is much better and the sickness is not as harsh as

106 Chandra Mukerji, ―Stewardship Politics and the Control of Wild Weather: Levees, Seawalls, and State Building in 17th-Century France,‖ Social Studies of Science 37, no.1 (2007): 128. See also Chandra Mukerji, Territorial ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

107 Chandra Mukerji, ―Map and Territory: The (New) France of Samuel de Champlain,‖ (unpublished manuscript), 7 – 9; ―Drayton, Nature‟s Government, Chapter 2.

108 Champlain, Works, 2:60.

56 before.‖109 Nicolas Denys explained that much of New France was at the same latitude as

France, and that French colonists needed only to push back the forests and open the soil to the sun‘s light to increase the temperature and decrease the amount of snow that fell annually.110 Saved from the hands of benighted savages, the stewardship of North

American plants became an integral facet of a larger colonial ambition to recast both the human and natural landscapes of colonial North America.

Yet anxieties about the fate of this project clearly persisted. Several authors addressed their works to concerns expressed by their French audience directly related to the viability of both French stewardship over American flora and the survival of familiar

French plants such as wheat and grapes that were key cultural resources throughout

Europe. This meant that efforts to familiarize French readers with colonial environments frequently focused on how colonists and missionaries lived with North American plants and in colonial environments, making guarantees both that French lifestyles and ecological regimes could be maintained in American colonies and that the French presence was having a positive effect on North American ecologies. In the Relation of

1636, Paul Le Jeune, superior of the Jesuit mission to New France, wrote reassuringly to his French audience; addressing nine specific ―propositions submitted to me from

France,‖ the missionary focused a particular attention on assuring his readers of the familiarity of the environments in which he lived and proselytized. While some of these nine questions focused on the fauna and geography of the region, many asked Le Jeune to address concerns about the flora of New France and the prospect for the imposition of

109 Ibid.

110 Denys, Histoire Naturelle, 6 – 8.

European ecological regimes in the Saint Lawrence Valley. Question three, for example, asked ―Is there any hope of apple or other fruit trees producing fruit here?‖ To which, Le

Jeune responded that:

I cannot answer positively, as I have had no ocular proof of this. Sieur Hebert

planted some apple trees during his lifetime, which have borne some very good

fruit, as I have been assured; but the cattle spoiled these trees. We have grafted

some wild trees this year, and the scions have united very well. Time will show us

what there is in it. One sees here pear, apple, plum, cherry, and other trees

bearing wild fruit; if they can stand the severity of the winter, I do not see why

they should die for being grafted with good shoots. In some places there are many

wild vines loaded with grapes; some have made wine of them through curiosity; I

tasted it, and it seemed to me very good. Many are sure that the vine would

succeed here; and, when I urged against this the rigor of the cold, they replied that

the vine-stock will be safe all Winter under the snow, and that in the Spring it

need not be feared that the vines will freeze as they do in France, because they

will not sprout so early. All this seems probable.111

Elsewhere Le Jeune similarly wrote that:

As to wheat, experience has given us faith. Meadows can be made in a thousand

places. There are some upon the banks of the great River, but these are greatly

injured by the tides. There is no need to bring over grains as seed; they will be

found here in exchange for other grains, or something else. March wheat sown in

the spring succeeds better than wheat sown before winter. Not that I have not seen

111 JR 9:153.

some very fine wheat that was sown in October. But as we are not yet thoroughly

acquainted with the weather and the nature of the soil and climate, it is safer to

sow in the Spring than before the Winter. Common barley and hulled barley

succeed to perfection, and rye does very well; at least I can assert that I have seen

all these grains grow here, as beautiful as they have in France. The peas are better

and more tender than those they bring over in ships. Pot-herbs do very well, but

the seeds must be brought over. It is true that the nearness of the forests, and so

much rotten wood, of which the land is, as it were, formed and nourished,

engender, at times, insects which gnaw everything; as these animals die during the

heat of Summer, everything comes to perfection, but sometimes later than is

desirable to secure the grain and seed.112

Le Jeune therefore made guarantees of both continuities between the floras of New

France and Old and the power of Old World plants to survive and thrive in new soils. His responses therefore worked at several levels, promising that visible differences between the plants and environments of North America and Europe were more apparent than real and that, like the branches of French fruit trees grafted onto their wild American cousins,

French culture could impose itself materially onto the newly settled spaces.

Le Jeune‘s botanical reassurances were echoed by other colonial authors who similarly responded to popular concerns about the nature of American nature. Pierre

Boucher similarly responded to questions he had been asked in chapter thirteen of his

Histoire veritable et naturelle. Hinting that the success of grape vines was viewed as emblematic of the promise of larger French efforts at colonization in North America,

112 Ibid., 161.

Boucher wrote ―I will start then by one fairly common [question], which is if the vine does well there. I have already said that the wild grapes are there in abundance, and that some have already tested that of France, and that it does well enough there.‖113 He continued in a botanical vein, detailing the market prices of wine, wheat, peas, hay and oats, again demonstrating that his French audience‘s encounter with the New World was often mediated by their appetites and expectations of colonial flora. Ultimately, while still ensuring that his readers understood the dangers colonists faced in New France, Boucher dismissed concerns about the nature of American plants and environments. ―[T]he country is good, capable of producing all sorts of things like in France, ... one carries on well, we lack nothing, the country is extremely large, and undeniably there are great riches that we have not been able to discover,‖ he explained, ―because we have an enemy that keeps us holed up in a little corner, and who impedes us from moving.114‖

Such passages brimmed with confidence in the ability of French ecological practice to establish order in the New World, and offered hope that a combination of native and introduced plants could be cultivated to support a colonial presence. The previous experience of French travellers with American plants in Europe likely gave them hope for the future of this project. There was a very real possibility that the French colonists, missionaries and explorers who travelled the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi

Valleys and the Great Lakes in the seventeenth century had already experienced

American flora before they ever crossed the Atlantic and had seen it domesticated

113 Boucher, Histoire veritable, 135 – 36. From the first voyages of Cartier, the presence of grapes was read as a symbol that French culture could survive in the New World. See Cathérine Ferland, Bacchus en Canada: Boissons, buveurs et ivresses en Nouvelle-France (Québec: Septentrion, 2009), 28 – 30; Brian Brazeau, Writing a New France, 1604 – 1632: empire and early modern French identity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), Chapter 2.

114 Boucher, Histoire veritable, 143.

60 firsthand. Already by the sixteenth century, a number of American plants from areas that would become part of French colonial North America had taken root in French gardens and appetites. These plants arrived soon after contact between the Old World and the

New and before any organized expeditions by the French had been organized. The France that Champlain and those who followed him left was as much a product of the Columbian

Exchange as anywhere else in the early modern Atlantic World.115

A recent analysis of a prayer book written between 1503 and 1508 in Touraine, the Grandes Heures d‟Anne de Bretagne, reveals the introduction, already by this early date, of a North American squash. An analysis of the morphology of the plant has led the botanist Harry Paris to tentatively identify the plant named the ―Quegourdes de Turquie‖ in the Grandes Heures as an example of Cucurbita pepo subspecies texana likely collected from the northern coasts of the Gulf of Mexico.116 Paris suggests that this is a variant of the same species that was represented in frescos at the Villa Farnesina in Rome dated to between 1515 and 1518, where the South American species C. maxima also appeared.117 The eighteenth-century botanist Antoine de Jussieu, likewise inspired by this curious book, also identified a New World bean now known as Phaseolus vulgaris in the

Grandes Heures.118 How these plants arrived in the Loire Valley by 1508, and how they

115 See Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).

116 Harry S. Paris, Marie-Christine Daunay, Michel Pitrat, and Jules Janick, ―First Known Image of Cucurbita in Europe, 1503 – 1508,‖ Annals of Botany 98 (2006): 41 – 47; Promenades dans des jardins disparus: d‟après les Grandes Heures d‟Anne de Bretagne, ed. Michèle Bilimoff (Rennes: Ouest-France, 2005), 92.

117 Jules Janick, Harry S. Paris, ―The cucurbit images (1515 – 1518) of the Villa Farnesina, Rome,‖ Annals of Botany 97 (2006): 165- 176; Paris, ―Cucurbita,‖ 41.

118 Paris, ―Cucurbita,‖ 46.

61 came to grow in the garden of Anne de Bretagne, then Queen of France, remains an open question, although the botanist Harry Paris suggests that the Queen‘s strong personal ties with 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.119

In the gardens of Fontainebleau, North American oak and specimens of an Arbor vitae that cured Jacques Cartier and his men of scurvy in 1535 were growing by the publication of botanist Pierre Belon‘s De arboribus coniferis in 1553.120 Cartier likewise brought back the plant that today is a symbol of Canada known the world over, the sugar maple.121 In the Netherlands, Sarracenia purpurea, today known as the Purple Pitcher-

Plant, was described by the well-known naturalist Carolus Clusius, who likely acquired the plant from Portuguese sailors travelling to the Grand Banks to fish.122 Frequently these plants were circulated in networks that valued their novelty and were planted in gardens and featured in books that brought them alongside plants such as the Opuntia cactus that came from the Caribbean and Central and South America. If these plants were originally acquired from Portuguese and Spanish travellers, naturalists and physicians, they nonetheless became the common property and part of the common experience of a

119 Ibid.

120 Jacques Mathieu, Le premier livre de plantes du Canada: Les enfants des bois du Canada au Jardin du roi à Paris en 1635 (Sainte-Foy, QC: Les presses de l‘Université Laval, 1998), 83 – 84.

121 Victoria Dickenson, Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 88.

122 A. Ubrizsy and J. Heniger ―Carolus Clusius and American Plants,‖ Taxon 32, no. 3 (1983): 424-435; Recent work by Canadian historians have erred in assuming that the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort named the plant after Michel Sarrazin, his correspondent in New France who sent him specimens of the plant in the early eighteenth century. See Kathryn A. Young, ―Crown Agent--Canadian Correspondent: Michel Sarrazin and the Academie Royale des Sciences, 1697-1734,‖ French Historical Studies 18, no. 2 (1993): 426.

62 broad swath of European society. In the decades before the establishment of the Paris- based Académie Royale des Sciences and the organized regular transport of plants that began with the placement of official correspondents in the colonies, shipments were irregular and idiosyncratic.123 The first book ostensibly about Canadian plants, Jacques-

Philippe Cornut‘s 1635 Canadensium Plantarum, was written from study of (mostly)

North American plants that took place entirely in Paris from plants that are thought to have been sent by Louis Hébert, an early colonist in Acadia and Québec and a trained apothecary.124 Other plants, however, travelled in networks determined by patronage, kin and religious order. The Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard recorded that North

American flowers were blooming in the Parisian gardens of his order in 1632.125 The

Ursuline Marie de l‘Incarnation, for example, sent pumpkin seeds to her son in France.126

In both urban gardens and rural farms, the domestication of American plants was a highly visible project. Chandra Mukerji suggests that French horticultural masterpieces such as the gardens at Versailles or the Louvre were conceived as territorial demonstrations of the crown‘s power, but were soon recognized to be ill suited for a colonial context; the display of American plants in gardens such as those at Versailles and Paris‘ Jardin du Roi therefore became a demonstration of imperial reach that was often impossible in the colonies themselves.127

123 For more on early transports of American plants to France see Chapter 5.

124 Mathieu, Premier livre, 194.

125 Sagard, Grand Voyage, 145.

126 Claire Gourdeau, Les délices de nos coeurs: Marie de l‟Incarnation et ses pensionnaires amérindiennes: 1639 – 1672 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1994), 68.

127 Chandra Mukerji, ―Dominion, Demonstration, and Domination: Religious Doctrine, Territorial Politics, and French Plant Collection,‖ in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern

Yet perhaps more important in familiarizing potential travellers and colonists were texts that offered suggestions about growing American crops in French soils.

Horticultural texts such as the L‟Agriculture et Maison rustique suggested that the displays of the power of French ecological practice over American plants was central to the early spread and popularity of plants such as corn. Estienne wrote that ―Turkish wheat

(blé de Turquie), so called, or rather Indian wheat (blé d‟Inde), for it 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.‖128 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.‖129 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 introduction of the crop into Northern Europe awaited a second introduction of corn from North America.130 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.131 The

World, eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 19 – 33; Luis Millones Figueroa, ―The Staff of Life: Wheat and ‗Indian Bread‘ in the New World,‖ Colonial Latin American Review 19, no.2 (2010), 309.

128 Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault, L‟Agriculture et Maison Rustique (Paris: 1586), 302.

129 Ibid., 303

130 P. Revilla, P. Soengas, M.E. Cartea, R.A. Malvar, A. Ordas, ―Isozyme variability among European maize populations and the introduction of Maize in Europe,‖ Maydica 48 (2003): 141 – 152. This article argues that there were at least two introductions of corn into Europe; the first from Central America into Spain and the Mediterranean and the second from North America into Northern Europe.

64 plant had already been visually assimilated in the major works of sixteenth-century naturalists such as Leonhart Fuchs.132 Corn, along with other well-known plants such as tobacco or pumpkins, became common features of French landscapes and texts.

By the end of the seventeenth century, authors still commented on the American origins of plants such as corn, but provided clear evidence that they had been thoroughly integrated into the social and natural worlds of early modern France. 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 (froment); 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.‖133 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.‖134 After describing the method and timing necessary to plant the crop, Liger continued to situate the plant within a French geographical and social setting. He wrote that:

131 See Pierre Ponsot, ―Les débuts du maïs en Bresse sous Henri IV: Une découverte, un mystère,‖ Histoires & Sociétés Rurales 23, no.1 (2005): 117 – 36.

132 Henry Lowood, ―The New World and the European Catalog of Nature,‖ in America in European Consciousness: 1493 – 1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 299.

133 Jean Baptiste de Ville, Histoire des plantes de l‟Europe, et des plus usitées qui viennent d‟Asie, d‟Afrique & d‟Amérique (Lyon: Jean-Bapt de Ville, 1689), 32.

134Louis Liger, Moyens faciles pour rétablir en peu de temps l‟abondance de toutes sortes de grain de fruits dans le royaume (Paris: chez Charles Huguier, 1709), 4.

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 labourers 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.135

While French authors in the New World continued to discuss the aboriginal custom of planting corn in mixed fields with beans and squash, they were nonetheless equally informed by a growing French confidence in the ability to assimilate the plant to French ecological regimes, and to incorporate it into French lives.

The Emergence of Difference

The French authors who first described North American flora found that the floral templates of French folk classification were flexible enough to incorporate many newly discovered plants. Over the course of the seventeenth century, missionaries and would-be natural historians frequently simply adapted existing plants names as they settled throughout Canada, the Pays d‟en Haut and Louisiana. The classifying grid that assigned

European identities to American plants was surprisingly robust and at higher orders (as

135 Ibid.

66 trees, shrubs or even plants) remained unchallenged, yet colonial botanical knowledge became progressively more local as regional names, aboriginal-inspired practices and terminology, and an awareness of difference took root.136

In her recent book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna

Lowenhaupt Tsing describes what she terms ―the grip of encounter.‖137 Beyond resistance, local realities force ―compromise and collaboration‖ from globalizing forces she explains.138 The anthropologist Neil Whitehead has similarly worked to problematize the ability of European authors to impose a universalizing order on New World peoples and places in printed texts that were the products of specific scenes of encounter. He argues that these written accounts, often the only surviving evidence of early episodes of encounter and exchange in the colonial Americas, gained texture as the authorial voice of

European observers became contested and contingent on the participation of indigenous peoples.139 Historians of science and science studies scholars have likewise suggested that the agencies of the non-human world also intervened to mediate the designs of human authors, creating networks of distributed agencies in which identifiable authors speak only with a negotiated voice.140 By the late-seventeenth century, botanical

136 This also seems to have been the case in Spanish America. See Miguel de Asua, ―Names which he loved, and things well worthy to be known: Eighteenth-century Jesuit Natural Histories of Paraquaria and Rio de la Plata,‖ Science in Context 21 (2008): 49.

137 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.

138 Ibid.

139 Neil L. Whitehead, ―Introduction,‖ in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 33 – 39.

140 On non-human agency, see Latour, Reassembling the Social, 63 – 86. Michel Callon, ―Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,‖ in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986), 196 – 223;

67 discourses and knowledge that were nonetheless Atlantic in ambition and operation became thoroughly entangled in the cultural and ecological particulars of the vast stretches of French North America. The botanical knowledges of French colonists and missionaries were emergent cultural forms, neither truly European nor entirely indigenous.

At times the novelty of some North American plants imposed itself and the limitations of European floral types presented colonial authors who sought to describe visibly novel species with a pressing problem. One solution was to break down the new plants into individual parts that, on their own, resembled familiar French flora more closely. Some Jesuits, for example, cobbled together new plants as assemblages of more familiar European genera. In describing Haudenosaunee territory in the 1650s Claude

Dablon wrote that ―Fruits grow there which are of the color and size of an apricot, whose blossom is like that of the white lily, and which smell and taste like the citron.‖141

Describing the same region in 1672, Jacques Frémin wrote that ―there also grows on the prairies a kind of lime resembling that of France, but having no bitter taste — not even in its rind. The plant bearing it slightly resembles the fern.‖142 With plants broken down into discrete sections, simile remained a powerful trope, even as the divisions became more numerous and the plasticity of French botanical types was tested.

Henri Joutel similarly described a plant that he had found growing along the

Mississippi in his late seventeenth-century travels. ―It resembles a palm, whose long and

Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

141 JR 43:257.

142 JR 56: 133.

68 wide branches spread out like a Latanier (a fan palm),‖ he wrote.143 Uses of French names in this fashion most often, but not exclusively, suggested visual similarities.

Vaugine de Nuisment, a French soldier who resided in Louisiana in the mid-eighteenth century described the Pecan as ―a type of tender nut a little fatter than an olive and as long, … the taste is more delicate than the nuts of France.‖144 Where an entire plant presented colonists, missionaries and travelers with an intellectual challenge, simile and discursive dissection aided the assimilation of even the most exotic of novel flora. In the process, however, the botanical templates that authors had brought with them from

France were stretched almost beyond recognition.

As novel plants upset these extensions of European botanical types the repertoire of these authors grew. Texts increasingly featured distinctly un-botanical analogies, along with indigenous names and ecological knowledge. The Jesuit Gabriel Marest, writing from the Illinois mission at Kaskaskia, wrote:

But among the fruits of the Country those which seem to me to be the best, and

which would certainly be appreciated in France, are the Piakimina (Persimmon) and

the Racemina (Pawpaw tree?). The latter are perhaps twice as long as the finger and

about as large as an infant‘s arm: the former resemble medlars somewhat, except

that the crown is smaller… Our Savages are not accustomed to gather fruit from the

trees; they think it better to cut down the trees themselves; for this reason, there are

scarcely any fruit trees in the vicinity of the villages.‖145

143 Joutel, Journal historique, 133.

144 Etienne Martin de Vaugine de Nuisement, Journal de Vaugine de Nuisement: Un témoinage sur la Louisiane au XVIIIe siècle, eds. Steve Canac-Marquis and Pierre Rézeau (Sainte-Foy, QC: Presses de l‘Université Laval), 37 – 38.

145 JR 66:227.

Trying to reduce their experience of North American plants to discourse, Jesuit authors tried to assemble novel plants as composites of known ones. Where they failed, these authors groped for a means to make these plants knowable, and, increasingly, used information about the peoples that used them, in the process shifting the focus of their descriptions from plant morphology. As time went on and descriptions lengthened,

American plants in colonial texts drew deeper roots not only into indigenous ecologies, but into indigenous cultures as well.

In contrast to the many lists of North American plants that became understandable as new versions of such standbys as maple, cherry or capillaire, there were at least a few plants whose novelty impressed its early observers enough that they never became the target of French generic plant names. Already by the late seventeenth century, the Jesuit

Louis Nicolas suggested that he saw generic botanical names as little more than conveniences, ultimately unable to capture the novelty of American flora but necessary for effective transatlantic communication. ―Even though several authors have treated all of the trees that I have described,‖ he wrote, ―I do not want to miss a word in the certainty that I have that all that they have reported is hardly similar to all that I must say, and that if I have given the same names as them to simples and to trees, I must say that this is only to accommodate myself as much as is possible to the ideas that able botanists have formed from books; even if to speak the truth the thoughts that one gathers in reading books of this nature are very different than those that one forms where one has seen the things of which one speaks.‖146 Yet where plants were demonstrably new, the

Illinois colonist Pierre Deliette hinted that aboriginal language plant names could be

146 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 43

70 preferable to French neologisms with limited appeal to wider audiences. Deliette wrote, for example, that in the Illinois region ―There were other trees as thick as one‘s leg, which bend under a yellowish fruit of the shape and size of a medium-sized cucumber, which the savages call assemina (Pawpaw Tree). The French have given it an impertinent name.‖147 Likewise, Nicolas Perrot described a plant that he encountered in the seventeenth-century Great Lakes when he wrote that ―The Sauvages call this root

Pokekoretch in their language, and the French do not give it any other name because it is not seen in Europe.‖148

Contact with indigenous cultures introduced French travellers to a range of new plants, and often provided them with new names and botanical knowledge about their possible uses. Aboriginal names, standardized and inserted within French folk taxonomies that still understood them as plants (or better still shrubs, trees and or grasses), were attached to many of the truly novel plants discovered in French North

America. Atoca (Cranberry), for example, was known simply by variants on this Wendat name after it was first described by the Récollet Gabriel Sagard.149 This missionary first transcribed the name as ―toca,‖ and wrote that with ―neither pit nor seed, the Hurons eat it raw, and also put it in their little loaves,‖ demonstrating the interwoven nature of botanical and cultural exchange.150 The Jesuit Paul Le Jeune also recorded the fruit

147 Pierre Deliette, ―Memoir of Pierre Liette on the Illinois Country,‖ in The Western Country in the 17th Century: The memoirs of Lamothe Cadillac and Pierre Liette, ed. Milo Milton Quaife (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1947), 104.

148 Nicolas Perrot, Mœurs, coutumes et religion des sauvages de l‟Amérique septentrionale, ed. Pierre Berthiaume (Montréal: Presses de l‘Université de Montréal, 2004), 268.

149 Georges E. Sioui, Les Hurons-Wendats: Une civilization méconnue (Sainte-Foy, QC: Les Presses de l‘Université Laval: 1994), 220.

150 Sagard, Grand Voyage, 311

71 amongst 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.‖151 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 unripened grapes.152 Over time these references to the indigenous peoples who harvested this plant would decline, but the name, standardized as Atoca, remained the same.153 The engineer Gedéon de Catalogne wrote that it was used to make

―confitures‖ in 1712.154 Antoine-Denis Raudot added that it was useful against dysentery and Charlevoix suggested its use for digestive ailments.155 Orthography, descriptions of morphology and the expected effects of the plants (tastes, medicinal effects, etc.) became fixed as plants such as Atoca became part of French Atlantic folk taxonomies even as linguistically they retained their linkage to American soils and cultures.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many plants retained their linguistic linkage to aboriginal cultures even as they became accepted and familiar facets of colonial environments. However, some only gained indigenous language names gradually as they became, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more American

151 JR 43: 145.

152 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 20.

153 Indigenous names and knowledge could become standardized and appropriated as they increasingly circulated in texts. See Daniela Bleichmar, ―Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica,‖ in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 91 – 95.

154 Cited at TLFQ.

155 Ibid.

72 and more closely associated with indigenous cultures. The history of American persimmon, for example, demonstrates how a plant‘s novelty could be discovered only gradually.156 Marc Lescarbot was the first French author to describe the plant in what became French North America. His description was spare, and he wrote only that, in

Acadia, ―There is a kind of medlars, the fruit of which is bigger and better than that of

France.‖157 Even in the early eighteenth century other colonial naturalists continued to affix the plant with the name of already familiar plants. The English naturalist Marc

Catesby, for example, called the plant the Guajacana in his Natural History of Carolina,

Florida and the Bahama Islands, naming the plant after a related species that had been brought to Europe from Africa in the early seventeenth century.158 Yet, by the time that the French began to explore the Mississippi River watershed and discover this plant in greater numbers, they recognized that this French name did not quite hold. Henri Joutel, who travelled with the Sieur de la Salle on his exploration of the Mississippi, displayed unease with an over-confident identification of the plant. Instead, he described ―a sort of

Fruit they call Piaguimina, not unlike our Medlars, but much better and more delicious.‖159 Also in the Illinois region, the Jesuit Jacques Gravier wrote in 1701 that

156 The rough chronology (and particularly early references to medlars that I would not have connected to persimmon) was made in C.H. Briand, ―The Common Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana L.): The history of an underutilized fruit tree (16th – 19th centuries) Huntia 12, no.1 (2005): 71 – 89.

157 Marc Lescarbot, History of New France, trans. W.L. Grant (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1914), 257.

158 Marc Catesby, Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (London: 1731 – 43), 2:76.

159 Joutel, Journal historique, 154.

73 local indigenous peoples brought him ―a large platter of ripe fruit of piakimina. It is pretty much like the French medlar.‖160

In this case both explorers and missionaries understood that their floral templates were insufficient for the task of describing the plant, and they both transcribed an approximation of indigenous language names for the plant and showed an increasing commitment to inserting their discussion of the novel plant in a larger consideration of aboriginal lives. If, as I have argued above, the identity of a plant was at least in part determined by what could be done with it, French authors embedded discussions of aboriginal ecological practice in their discussions of newly discovered plants. Gravier, for example, noted both that he was brought a platter of persimmon fruit and that the Illinois people with whom he lived made cakes of the plant.161 The anonymous Relation de la

Louisianne added that aboriginal peoples used it to ―stop the bloody flux.‖162 The Jesuit

Charlevoix added a more detailed description of the ―loaves‖ that aboriginal peoples made of the fruit and wrote that ―The flavour appears at first a bit tasteless, but one gets accustomed to it easily.‖163 Finally, news of the novelty of the plant impressed itself in

Europe. Both aboriginal knowledge and indigenous seeds were transported. The famous botanist and agricultural reformer Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau assured his readers that the plant grew well in France, adding that ―The Plaqueminiers are grown from seeds‖ and that ―these trees survive our winters,‖ even if their native habitat was

Louisiana. While he noted that at least one Norman colonist in Louisiana had succeeded

160 JR 65: 115 – 17.

161 Ibid.

162 ―Relation de la Louisianne,‖ 231.

163 Charlevoix, Journal d‟un voyage, 762.

74 in making cider from the fruit of the plant, it was added as an afterthought and paled in comparison to the amount of information presented about the indigenous preparation of the fruit.164 Describing the loaves recorded by many overseas authors, he advised his readers that ―To make these galettes, one crushes the fruit in a clear sieve which separates the flesh from the skin and seeds: the flesh is then reduced into a think porridge or a paste, and is then made into loaves a foot and a half long, a foot wide, and as thick as a finger which are put to dry in the sun or by a fire. These galettes have a better taste when dried by the sun.‖165 Like chocolate or tobacco, the importation of plants such as the persimmon became vehicles for the unwitting diffusion of aboriginal ecological and culinary practice in Europe.166

Exploration and contact with indigenous cultures encouraged French authors to reconsider whether they were in fact seeing medlars or, as they would ultimately suggest, a tree that only happened to look something like a medlars.167 Likewise, contact with

American maples made French colonists and missionaries reconsider what they knew about the plant. Missionaries such as Sagard and Le Jeune recorded what seems to have been a fairly common aboriginal practice of collecting the liquid from specific trees in the

164 Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, Traité des Arbres et Arbustes qui se cultivent en France en pleine terre (Paris: chez H.L. Guerin & L.F. Delatour, 1755), 1: 284.

165 Ibid.

166 This is not unlike what Marcy Norton suggests happened with chocolate in early modern Spain. ―Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,‖ American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 660 – 91.

167 The daily contact between French and indigenous peoples in many parts of French North America – and particularly at the periphery of empire in the Pays d‟en Haut – often also facilitated the encounter with indigenous flora as foods, botanical commodities and as wild and cultivated live plants. For recent studies of cultural contact and exchange in these regions that touch upon botanical exchange, see Arnaud Balvay, L‟épée et la plume: Amérindiens et soldats des troupes de la marine en Louisiane et au Pays d‟en Haut (1683 – 1763) (Sainte-Foy, QC: Les presses de l‘Université Laval, 2006), particularly Chapter 8, Havard, Empire et métissages, particularly Chapter 9, and Usner, Frontier Exchange.

75 spring. Le Jeune named the tree Michtan and compared the product to honey.168 Sagard recollected collecting the sap from a beech tree, and ascribed medicinal properties to the liquid.169 Chrestien Leclercq, Sagard‘s Récollet confrère who work in Acadia in the late seventeenth century, was the first to record the incorporation – and adaptation – of this indigenous ecological knowledge. He wrote that:

The ordinary drink of our Gaspesiens is the natural water that they drink with

pleasure during the summer. In the winter, they are often obliged to melt snow in

their pots, to drink water which always smells a little smoky. For the maple water,

which is the sap of the same tree, it is equally delicious to the French and the

sauvages, and in springtime brings joy to the heart. It is also true that it is very

agreeable and abundant in the Gaspesie; for by a small opening that is made with

an axe in a maple, one can gather ten or twelve pots. That which has always

appeared remarkable to me about the maple water, is that after it has been reduced

to a third, it becomes a true syrup, which hardens almost like sugar and takes a

reddish colour. Little loaves are formed and are sent to France because of their

rarity, they often take the place of French sugar. I have several times mixed it

with eau-de-vie, clove and cinnamon which make a very agreeable type of rossoli.

An important observation is that there must be snow at the foot of the tree for it to

let its sugary water flow.170

168 JR 6: 272, cited in Réal Ouellet, ―III. Le Sirop d‘Erable,‖ in Chréstien Leclercq, Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie, ed. Réal Ouellet (Montréal: Presses de l‘Univertsité de Montréal, 1999), 657.

169 Sagard, Grand Voyage, 172.

170 Leclercq, Nouvelle Relation, 305 – 06. See also Denys Delâge, ―L‘influence des Amérindiens sur les Canadiens et les Français au temps de la Nouvelle-France,‖ Lekton 2, no. 2 (1992): 132 – 33; Havard, Empire et métissages, 600.

Leclercq‘s note is the first mention of the production of maple sugar. Before the French began to produce maple sugar, aboriginal peoples had simply drank the sap or boiled it into a slightly thicker syrup, presumably because of technological limitations. The Jesuit

Charlevoix explained that ―It appears that the sauvages, who know the virtues of their plants very well, have used this water often, and that they continue to use it today; but it is certain that they did not know how to form it into sugar, as we have taught them to do.‖171 The French learned from aboriginal peoples certainly, but they soon worked to improve upon an indigenous knowledge that was perceived as incomplete. French knowledge of North American flora was not simply indigenous knowledge but was rather an emergent cultural form, forged from often ambiguous encounters with aboriginal cultures that took place within broader processes of colonization.

Beyond providing the French with a new source of sweetener and a potential commodity, the encounter with indigenous knowledge of maple trees encouraged French authors – travellers, colonists, missionaries and botanists alike – to reconsider what they knew about the plant. Authors attempted to ascertain why certain maple trees produced sugar and others not. Why, when maples were noticed across the continent, did they only produce syrup and sugar in certain areas? Could this mean that, given the right conditions, European maples were also capable of producing syrup or sugar? Certainly some authors assured that, even if less productive, other trees could also produce syrup.172 Lahontan argued that the trees that were called maples in North America were in fact different from those of Europe. ―The maples are almost the same height and width,

171 Charlevoix, Journal d‟un voyage, 308.

172 See J.C.B., ―Voyage au Canada,‖ 165; This source mentions ―le plane, le merisier, le fresne et le noyer‖ specifically as trees that would produce syrup.

77 with the difference that their bark is brown and the wood reddish. It has no rapport with that of Europe. Those of which I speak have an admirable sap.‖173 The amateur botanist

Pierre-Joseph Buc‘Hoz wrote that experiments with European maples had proved that they could also produce syrup, but that no European varieties were as productive as

American maples.174 Charlevoix pointed to ecological differences between North

America and Europe to explain this difference, and suggested that ―Our maples might have the same virtue, if we had as much snow in France as in Canada, and if it lasted as long.‖175 J.C.B. informed his readers that it was important to ensure that it would be cold the night before the sap was collected, and to only pierce the side of the tree that faced the sun.176 Even botanists such as the royal physician Michel Sarrazin had trouble explaining why some maples produced so much more syrup than others. Yet Sarrazin, who ultimately sent specimens of four different newly identified species of maple to the

Jardin du Roi in Paris, was able to identify a particular species (which he called Acer

Platanoides) and climatological factors that explained why ―There are maples whose sap produces no sugar at all. There are maples that do not produce much. Finally there are some that do not produce it predictably.‖177 As indigenous ecological practices became a

173 Quoted in Ouellet, ―Le Sirop d‘Erable,‖ 658.

174 Joseph-Pierre Buc‘Hoz, Dictionnaire universel des plantes, arbres et arbustes de la France (Paris: 1770), 557 – 61. See also Duhamel du Monceau, Traité, 1:35-36 for a discussion of why American maples transplanted in France did not produce as much syrup. Linnaeus apparently also tried this in Sweden. See Staffan Müller-Wille, ―Walnuts at Hudson Bay, Coral Reefs in Gotland: The Colonialism of Linnaean Botany,‖ in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 37 – 38.

175 Charlevoix, Journal d‟un voyage, 307.

176 J.C.B., ―Voyage au Canada,‖ 164.

177 Bernard Boivin, La Flore du Canada en 1708: Étude d'un manuscrit de Michel Sarrazin et Sébastien Vaillant (s.l.: s.n., 1978), 213. Sarrazin‘s account of four species of Canadian maples was published in

78 facet of colonial knowledges they became the common property of colonial communities and, through printed texts such as those cited above, reading publics in the wider French

Atlantic World. Yet reliance on aboriginal peoples themselves diminished as their botanical knowledges were transcribed and inserted into circuits of textual exchange.178

As they realized the limits of their knowledge of North American flora, French colonists also began to appreciate their limited ability to impose European ecological relationships and transform North American plants by incorporating them into ordered gardens and fields. If early authors such as Champlain and Boucher were optimistic about the ability to transform the sauvage grapes of the New World into recognizable plants with palatable wines, their hopes were disappointed by the eighteenth century as authors increasingly recognized both the diversity of grape populations throughout North

America and the failure of efforts to cultivate them in the manner of their French counterparts. The anonymous author of the Relation de la Louisianne, for example, outlined the lengths to which French colonists had gone to domesticate native grapes and showed an awareness of indigenous classifications of the plant. He recognized that ―there are three types of them,‖ each with its own taste profile, ecology and potential for cultivation.179 He explained that ―there is one that the sauvages call succo, which has a leaf like the sycamore and has a similar fruit, like little prunes without bunches: the skin is very thick and the inside of it is not exquisite. The other is called panko and the leaf is like the chasselas, it has bunches like those in Europe… and always an acrid taste. The

―Observations botaniques,‖ Histoire de l‟Académie Royale des Sciences avec les Mémoires de Mathématique & de Physique, pour la même Année (1730), 65 – 66. [Hereafter HMARS]

178 Bleichmar, ―Books, Bodies and Fields.‖

179 ―Relation de la Louisianne,‖ 232.

79 other carries the name Panco, the sauvages do not recognize any difference, but there is one nonetheless.‖180 He continued by describing that while local indigenous peoples made loaves of the fruit (not unlike these aboriginal communities did with persimmon),

French efforts to produce palatable wine had been frustrated. This author did not argue that such efforts were in vain, only that they would take a great deal of time and effort.

He wrote:

I saw some Frenchmen who wanted to make wine from them. They were

obligated to add water, the liquor which came out of the grape was naturally very

thick and could not flow, and this wine is good only lightly fortified because as

soon as it is fermented it turns bitter. Maybe if it was well cultivated it would be

better after it had been pruned. Though I knew a captain named Mr. de la Tour

Vitrac, a gentleman from Brive, who has tried to prune them at his habitation on

the coast at mobile, he even tried it for several years without success. Mr Diron

commandant of the same post did the same thing as unsuccessfully at his

habitation. ... what he did wrong was to transplant it. ... My opinion is that this

vine growing naturally in the woods, covered in leaves for centuries, sheltered

there from the winds, from great heat and from the injury of time; ... being

transplanted to a habitation which is exposed to the open air ... changes its natural

being: in consequence no longer being in its centre, one should not be surprised if

it no longer yields like it did beforehand. It can only be after many years,

accustoming itself to this type of climate change that it could become capable of

180 Ibid., 233.

bearing good fruit, and being cultivated by old men who would have studied the

climate and properties of each season.181

The sole success that this author recorded was the growth of Muscat grapes that had been brought from France and transplanted.182 Like the missionaries who found that tending the figurative vineyard of the Lord by converting aboriginal peoples to Christianity had been a far slower process than originally expected, those who worked with the sauvages grapes of French North America found their initial ambitions upset, or at least postponed.

French authors also began to notice differences between European plants that grew in France and those that had been successfully imported into North America.

Frequently, the abundance of these transplanted plants was cause for celebration, but anxiety lingered. Observable differences between New and Old World populations of

French plants were attributed to the disruptive – and implicitly degenerative – influence of American environments. The travelling surgeon Diéreville, for instance, wrote about the apples of Acadia in 1708:

Let‘s return again to the food of the Acadians. The have many different types of

apples that they conserve carefully in their cellars to eat during the winter, but I

was surprised to be unable to recognize any of them, the Norman that I am. I

examined them carefully. I did not learn anything more. They apparently take a

little bit of their sauvage country. But what can I say? Can I lie impudently? I did

181 Ibid., 236.

182 Ibid.; Dumont de Montigny also notes the success of introduced Muscat grapes. See Dumont de Montigny, Regards sur le monde atlantique, 401.

have many beauties of Calville (a type of apple) of which I know how to make a

refreshment as agreeable as it is useful.183

Hinting that they carried ―a bit of their sauvage country,‖ Dièreville wrote about the influence of the colonial environment on plants much as other early colonial authors studied the influence on European bodies, describing the ―seasoning‖ of flora in terms that echoed the humoral and neo-hippocratic medical thought in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic.184 The Swedish traveller and botanist Pehr Kalm observed a similar anxiety at work towards the end of the French regime in colonial Canada, writing that

European seeds had to be re-introduced every couple of generations, as those gathered locally degenerated and became less productive.185

At least discursively, some plants did truly become American, losing their mooring in French folk classifications and gaining indigenous language names and a new identity which confused colonial authors. Louisbourg-based surveyor and amateur naturalist François-Madeleine Vallée, for example, underestimated the complexity of botanical exchange between local Mi‘kmaq peoples and colonists in a 1725 Mémoire that

183 Diéreville, Relation du voyage du Port Royal de l‟Acadie, ou de la Nouvelle France (Rouen: Chez Jean- Baptiste Besongne, 1708), 107.

184 Discussions of changes to human complexions often centered on considerations of climactic difference. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ―The Puzzle of Climate in the Early Colonial Period,‖ The American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (1982): 1262 – 89, and Jan Golinski, ―American Climate and the Civilization of Nature,‖ in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, eds. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (London: Routledge, 2008), 153 – 74. Historians have also recently shown that patterns of colonial food consumption revealed anxieties about the effect of diet on humoral complexion. See Rebecca Earle, ― ‗If you Eat Their Food...‘ Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America,‖ American Historical Review 115, no. 3 (2010): 688 – 713; Trudy Eden, ―Food, Assimilation, and Malleability of the Human Body in early Virginia,‖ in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, eds. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 29 – 42. See also Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, ―New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America,‖ American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999): 33 – 68.

185 Pehr Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada En 1749, eds. Jacques Rousseau and Guy Béthune (Montréal: Pierre Tisseyre, 1977), 223.

82 aimed to attract the attention and support of metropolitan administrators and scientists; the best evidence that his text provides of botanical exchange was offered unwittingly in his description of ―KocoKar.‖ Identified tentatively as Plantago major (common or broadleaf plantain) from the pressed leaf that accompanied the written text, Vallée‘s brief description of ―KocoKar‖ provides a glimpse of the cultural and ecological incorporation of an introduced plant in North America.186 English authors who discussed the flora of colonial North America such as John Josselyn and John Clayton were aware that plantain had been introduced from Europe. Josselyn, for example, wrote that the aboriginal peoples of New England called plantain ―English-Mans foot, as though produced by their treading,‖ suggesting that these Native communities were also aware that the plant had been introduced following colonization.187 Vallée, on the other hand, clearly thought that the plant that he called ―KocoKar‖ was indigenous to Ile Royale, a fact he made plain by sending the plant to the Jardin du Roi in Paris.188 Beyond proving that Vallée was not a particularly skilled botanist, his description of ―KocoKar‖ suggested that it was its use by aboriginal communities that led Vallée to assume that the plant was native to North

America. Vallée wrote, for example, that the plant was used by nearby native communities to treat hydropisy, an illness that made the body swell with fluid.189 More

186 Vallée, ―Mémoire,‖ np.

187 John Josselyn, New-England‟s Rarities: Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country (Boston: William Veazie, 1865), 138; See also Calloway, New Worlds for All, 14.

188 On the eighteenth-century history of Paris‘ Jardin du Roi, see E.C. Spary, Utopia‟s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

189 ―Hydropisie,‖ Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D'Alembert. University of Chicago : ARTFL Encyclopédie Projet (Spring 2010 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/

83 recent ethnobotanical research demonstrates that Plantago major is still used as a remedy by the descendants of the Mi‘kmaq people that Vallée encountered in 1725.190

Vallée‘s Mémoire therefore complicates the narrative of biological invasion in which discussions of introduced and invasive plants and animals are normally framed. It demonstrates that introduced European plants were yet another resource that aboriginal communities could use to develop their own medical and cultural traditions. As Frieda

Knoblich has written about the American West, ―Plantain was … certainly not a harbinger of cultural ―defeat‖ but became a plant with sustaining material and spiritual uses entirely separate from the geographical and cultural context it came from.‖191

Vallée‘s Mémoire sur les plantes qui sont dans la caise B therefore demonstrates that the borders between the cultures and ecosystems of colonial North America were far more fluid and porous than have often been assumed. It also demonstrates that plants, as much as peoples, were in danger of going native in colonial French North America.

Conclusion

In 1757, Louis-Antoine the Comte de Bougainville wrote a mémoire ―sur l‘état de la Nouvelle France,‖ in which the future naval explorer and aide-de-camp provided a brief overview of the colonies‘ natural and social landscapes. As he turned to describe the flora of New France, he wrote that ―Canada produces almost no fruit, save for many

190 See Shirley N. Hooper and R. Frank Chandler, ―Herbal remedies of the maritime Indians: Phytosterols and triterpines of 67 plants,‖ Journal of Ethnopharmacology 10, no. 2 (1984): 181 – 94; Laurie Lacey, Micmac Remedies: Remedies and Recollections (Halifax: Nimbus, 1993), 77, 90, 98.

191 Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 123.

84 types of admirable apples, principally renettes, calvilles and api.‖192 He went on to mention only a few native species such as the cranberry, but ultimately continued his dismissal of North American plants and a celebration of the success of introduced crops.

In a few short lines Bougainville therefore signaled a definite end to the optimism that had fuelled seventeenth-century efforts to reshape both the natural and moral landscapes of French North America; privileging a discussion of plants imported from Europe, he neglected to mention many plants that, only a century earlier, were targeted in French plans to transform North American plants to more perfectly resemble European analogues. His summary reflected a growing sense of an essential difference between the floras of New France and Old that persisted in spite of considerable success in introducing the botanical cornerstones of French life to gardens and fields across the continent.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, as the first colonists and missionaries arrived in the Saint Lawrence Valley, they wrote accounts of local plants and environments that minimized the difference between North America and Europe; the language and form of their accounts suggested that observable difference between New and Old World flora was mutable, and subject to the ameliorating influence of European ecological practice. Yet, by the eighteenth century and the end of the French regime, the amateur naturalists among settlers and missionaries who still sought to convey their experience of North American environments to French audiences instead suggested that many facets of North American environments were without parallel in France, and argued that aboriginal knowledges offered unique insight into novel flora. This chapter

192 Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Ecrits sur le Canada: Mémoires, Journal, Lettres (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2003), 79.

85 therefore demonstrates that the encounter with indigenous peoples influenced French relationships with American flora. As they were introduced to new areas of the continent and new plants and ecosystems, as they acquired food through trade and hospitality and as aboriginal peoples offered new insights into seemingly familiar plants, aboriginal peoples demonstrated the significance of indigenous botanical knowledge time and time again.

Over time different understandings of what made North American flora unique took hold in both Paris and French North America. Ultimately, this transformed colonial relationships both with American flora and metropolitan naturalists. While colonial authors maintained an ambiguous relationship with both North American flora and indigenous ecological knowledge, they almost certainly would have disagreed with

Bougainville‘s dismissal of indigenous plants. They had learned, often from native cultures, that, while different, North American flora offered new possibilities. Wild grapes may not have made excellent wine, but they could season the native corn dish sagamité. Corn may not have made a desirable bread, but it flourished in areas such as early eighteenth-century Louisiana where wheat failed or where the French depended on aboriginal peoples for food.193 As will be discussed in greater details in Chapters 3 and 4, missionaries and amateur naturalists in the colony increasingly sought to explain North

American flora to French audiences through a larger study of the human and natural environments of North America. They presented indigenous ecological knowledge, as it was translated or adapted by colonial authors, as a legitimate avenue for knowledge about colonial environments, and they bristled when metropolitan naturalists claimed a

193 See note 128, above.

86 privileged perspective for themselves. If tension grew as amateur and academic naturalists produced competing accounts of North American flora and as naturalists at the

Académie Royale des Sciences showed an increasing interest in disciplining the scientific practice of their colonial counterparts, it did little to halt the creation of new botanical knowledges that reflected the cultural and ecological realities of a New France.194

194 Little evidence survives to suggest that French North America participated in the earliest phases of the disputes about New World nature that have since become known as the Dispute of the New World. See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

CHAPTER TWO

The Natural History of Secrets: Jesuit and Indigenous Botanical Knowledge in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Lakes

This chapter will analyse the Jesuit encounter with Iroquoian and Algonquian botanical knowledge in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the transmission of medical and ecological knowledge. Historians of colonial North America have repeatedly stressed the importance of indigenous plants for the survival and growth of French colonies in North America.195 The Society of Jesus has been recognized as an influential mediator in the transmission of indigenous plants and ecological knowledge within the colonial Americas and across the Atlantic.196 By the time that French Jesuits arrived in North America in 1611, their confrères had contributed substantially to the natural history of the New World.197 Authors such as John O‘Malley

195 Delâge, ―L‘influence des Amérindiens‖; Havard, Empire et métissages, 520 – 23, 597 – 600; Usner, Frontier Exchange Economy, 192 – 195, 204 – 210.

196 Luc Chartrand, Raymond Duchesne and Yves Gingras, eds. Histoire des Sciences au Québec de la Nouvelle-France à nos jours (Montréal: Boréal, 1987), 41 – 73.

197 For a recent overview of Jesuit natural history in North and South America see the essays in Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledesma, eds. El Saber de los Jesuitas: Historias Naturales y el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005) and Stephen J. Harris, ―Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540 – 1773,‖ Isis 96 (2005): 71 – 79. Jesuit natural histories of Spanish American colonies are better known than their French confrères. See, for instance de Asua‘s discussion of Jesuit natural history in Paraguay – ―Names which he loved,‖ and Sabine Anagnostou ―Jesuit Missionaries in Spanish America and 87

88 and Peter Dorsey have argued that the ideology of the Society of Jesus promoted an active engagement with the world; the emphasis placed on the senses in the Spiritual

Exercises and the sanctification of study and education encouraged a commitment to empirical observation and rational study of the natural world.198 From missions scattered throughout North America, Jesuit naturalists such as Louis Nicolas, Joseph-François

Lafitau, Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix and the many authors who contributed to the annual Relations and the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses provided their European audience with unique insights into regions of the continent rarely visited by literate observers.199 Yet these Jesuits wrote descriptions that evoked North American environments that were both human and natural. Expanding their focus beyond the discussion of plant morphology and distribution that typified contemporary botanical texts, Jesuit authors interwove descriptions of American flora with accounts of the culinary, medical, and agricultural practices of native North America.

the Transfer of Medical-Pharmaceutical Knowledge,‖ Archives internationales d‟Histoire des Sciences 52 (2002): 176 – 97. For studies of individual Jesuit naturalists who studied American flora and fauna, see Walter Mignolo ―Commentary‖ in José de Acosta,, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan, trans. Frances López-Morillas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 451 – 517 and Juan Pimentel, ―Baroque Natures: Juan E. Nieremberg, American Wonders, and Preterimperial Natural History‖ in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500 – 1800, eds. Daniela Bleichmar, Paula de Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 93 – 114.

198 John O‘Malley quotes Jéronimo Nadal, an early follower of Ignatius and a contributor to the Jesuit Constitutions, as declaring that ―We are not monks … the world is our house.‖ John O‘Malley. The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 68. On Jesuit empiricism in New France see Peter A. Dorsey, ―Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France,‖ William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 55, no. 3 (1998): 404 – 05 and Peter Goddard, ―Science and Scepticism in the Early Mission to New France,‖ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 6, no. 1 (1995): 43 – 58.

199 Both the Relations and the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses were serial publications that featured writing from Jesuit missionaries overseas. The Relations, which ran from 1632 to 1673 focused on the Society of Jesus‘ mission to French North America, while in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses which began publishing in 1702 accounts of American missions were assembled with accounts of the Society‘s global mission, but which focused particular attention of the missions to South East Asia.

The French Jesuits that immersed themselves in aboriginal communities from New

Orleans to Québec and Port Royal were uniquely qualified to describe indigenous knowledges.200 While many scholars have analyzed the influence of European social and cultural contexts on Jesuit representations of American peoples and ecologies, this chapter argues that too few have considered how aboriginal cultural contexts shaped the content and character of missionary texts such as the Jesuit Relations; what Jesuits were ultimately able to write about indigenous American environments was shaped by the character of the indigenous knowledge systems that they met. Jesuits reacted viscerally to the spiritually suffused botanical knowledge of Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures and demonstrated that they saw themselves as gatekeepers rather than simple intermediaries in the exchange of knowledge between the Old World and the New. Yet French Jesuits were also excluded from the kin and gender-based circuits of knowledge transmission that operated within these aboriginal communities. Together, these features of indigenous botanical knowledges had the effect of limiting its oral transmission to Jesuits. Instead,

Jesuit missionaries learned indigenous knowledges as they ate, as they were cured and as they watched indigenous men and women interact with their local environments; these knowledges were learned as they were lived and experienced. Jesuit knowledge of

American flora was indigenous botanical knowledge, but as it was observed in indigenous lives and as it had been distilled into discourse for a European audience.201 As

200 For an overview of the Jesuit mission to the Americas see Nicholas P. Cushner. Why have you come here? The Jesuits ad the First Evangelization of Native America. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Axtell, Invasion Within. For a detailed analysis of the early history of the American mission and an analysis of its global contexts, see Deslandres, Croire et faire croire.

201 The intended audience of Jesuit writings was never simple. See Florence C. Hsia. Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 16 – 18. Luke Clossey similarly points out that the first Jesuit letters from foreign missions were sent in multiple copies and were distributed to multiple audiences. Salvation and Globalization in

90 the product of an eclectic mix of observations and experiences, however, Jesuit knowledge of American flora was therefore as likely to be ―frustrated‖ as it was syncretic.202

Jesuit Observers and the Flora of the Great Lakes Region

The Jesuits who arrived in New France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were representatives of a religious order that saw learning as a key component of ―apostolic spirituality,‖ elevating study to the level of prayer.203 The Jesuit missions to

New France and Louisiana are often seen as synonymous with the French presence in colonial North America itself.204 This is in large part because the Society of Jesus was able to establish itself as a principal source of information about both North American cultures and environments. Jesuits integrated their research into Atlantic and global circuits of epistolary exchange to position themselves as influential knowledge brokers,

early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 195. For examples of recent work that has analyzed the impact of audience on the writing of the Jesuit Relations, see Thomas Worcester, ―A Defensive Discourse: Jesuits on Disease in Seventeenth-Century New France,‖ French Colonial History 6 (2005): 2 – 3. and Micah True, ―Maistre et Escolier: Amerindian Languages and Seventeenth-Century French Missionary Politics in the Jesuit Relations from New France,‖ Seventeenth-Century French Studies 31, no.1 (2009): 60.

202 On ―frustrated knowledges‖ see Neil Safier, ―Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu‘s South American Odyssey,‖ in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, eds. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (London: Routledge, 2008), 205.

203 Steven Harris, ―Jesuit Ideology & Jesuit Science: Scientific Activity in the Society of Jesus, 1540 – 1773,‖ (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1988), 232 – 236.

204 Luca Codignola suggests that relying on Jesuit sources, and particularly the Relations, has produced an account of Catholic networks in colonial North America that underestimates the role of Récollet, Capucin and Cordelier missionaries; by the end of the seventeenth-century they would be joined by missionaries from the Société des missions-étrangères and the Sulpicians. Luca Codignola, ―Few, Uncooperative, and Ill Informed? The Roman Catholic Clergy in French and British North America, 1610 – 1658,‖ in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500 – 1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 173 – 185.

91 and they attracted an audience in Europe because of their unique proximity to the indigenous cultures and environments of colonial North America.205

The Society of Jesus first established a presence in the Great Lakes as they took part in the Récollet mission to the Wendat after 1625. They consolidated their control over the Wendat missions in 1632 as their order was granted a virtual monopoly on missionary activity in New France.206 Following the Haudenosaunee conquest of

Wendake in 1649, Jesuit missionaries expanded their presence into the borderland regions that the French called the Pays d‟en Haut and travelled throughout the Great

Lakes and further south along the Mississippi.207 In the process Jesuits such as Jean de

Brébeuf, Claude Allouez, Jacques Marquette and Jacques Gravier brought their faith and their culture into sustained contact with the diverse populations and ecosystems of aboriginal North America.

Regular correspondence from the American missions followed a pattern that had emerged as early as 1540 as their Order‘s Constitutions tried to overcome the organizational difficulties posed by the increasing scale of their European and global missions.208 From the first letters received from Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary who travelled throughout Southeast Asia preaching to lapsed Portuguese Catholics and potential converts in the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuits in distant missions had reported

205 For a recent study of the global dimensions of these networks, see Clossey, Salvation and Globalization

206 For an overview of the early history of the Jesuit mission to New France see Deslandres, Croire et faire croire.

207 For an overview of the Haudenosaunee conquest of the Wendat, see Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 1976 (Montreal: McGill-Queen‘s Press, 2000), 725 – 766, and White, Middle Ground, 1 – 49.

208 Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land, 14.

92 the results of their spiritual labours to an information hungry audience back in Europe.

Yet as the historian Luke Clossey write, ―In the pre-modern world information was less likely than other commodities to travel great distances intact.‖209 The success of the

Society of Jesus was therefore directly related to the fact that, ―by the end of the third quarter of the sixteenth century the elements necessary for the maintenance of long- distance networks had become permanent features of the Society‘s administrative apparatus.‖210 By 1583 the Order‘s centre in Rome began publishing the correspondence received from Jesuit provinces as the Annuae Litterae Societatis Jesu.211 Even if multi- year delays could still wreak havoc on the operation of distant missions in East Asia, the elaboration of these networks by which information was both received and diffused allowed for a level of coordination that would have otherwise been unimaginable; increasingly global Jesuit networks offered missionaries in French North America both models and networks of diffusion as they looked to communicate information about their

American missions to France, Europe and the world.212

When Pierre Biard wrote what would become the first instalment in a series of annual Jesuit correspondence from North America that, with some significant breaks, stretched well into the eighteenth century, he was clearly aware that both his patrons at court and his confrères expected news from his mission. ―I am now taking the first opportunity which presents itself to write to Your Reverence,‖ he wrote in 1611 to

209 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 45.

210 Steven Harris, ―Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science,‖ Early Science and Medicine 1, no. 3 (1996): 297.

211 Ibid., 301.

212 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 46.

Christopher Baltazar, Jesuit Provincial of France, ―and to communicate to you news of ourselves and of our present situation. … I will try to describe to you not only what happened in our voyage, but also all that we have been able to learn of these peoples since our arrival, as I believe all our good noblemen and Friends, as well as Your

Reverence, expect and desire me to do this.‖213 Biard published several more accounts of the French mission to Acadia from 1612 to 1616 destined both for the French province and Claude Acquaviva, General of the Society in Rome. Several letters were also written by Charles Lalemant who arrived to take up a Récollet invitation to join their mission to

Canada in 1625. Yet Jesuit writing from American missions was only institutionalized in

1632 with the publication of Paul Le Jeune‘s Brieve Relation du voyage de la Nouvelle

France at the Cramoisy press in Paris. Among the most famous examples of Jesuit serial publications, the Relations, published between 1632 and 1673, became a primary source of information about North American cultures and environments, as it remains to this day.214

The Relations were shuttered in 1673 as the Roman office De propaganda fide attempted to exert greater control over the diffusion of accounts from foreign missions.

Yet even as the Relations were in press and after they were stopped, the letters of individual missionaries continued to flow to French confrères, family members and grateful patrons. In 1702, Jesuits in French North America (for by this time their missions had expanded well beyond the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi region and

213 JR 1: 137.

214 The writings on the Relations are almost as voluminous as Relations themselves. For an introduction to their context and content, see Allan Greer, ed. The Jesuit Relations: Native and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin‘s, 2000). For an influential literary analysis of the Relations see Marie-Christine Pioffet, La tentation de l‟épopée dans les relations des Jésuites (Sillery: Septentrion, 1997).

Louisiana) again reached a significant European audience with the inclusion of their letters in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, a publication that collected reports from

Jesuit missions throughout the world and prepared them for a popular French and

European audience.215 While the specific discursive strategies and genres that Jesuits deployed in these texts evolved over time and could vary from location to location, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these accounts blended reports of new peoples and new lands as Jesuit authors placed from Louisiana to Québec leveraged their access to the New World and established themselves as indispensable authorities on colonial North America.

In effect, Jesuits fashioned their texts into obligatory points of passage for knowledge about much of France‘s North American presence as they soon recognized their unique position and the opportunities that it presented them. While specific accounts bore the imprint of the many genres in which they were written, Jesuit authors universally sought to establish themselves as credible observers of American environments in their own right. Louis Nicolas, for example, suggests the ultimate incommensurability of experiencing new world nature and simply reading about it when he wrote that:

Even though several authors have treated all of the trees that I have described, I

do not want to miss a word because of the certainty that I have that all that they

have reported is hardly similar to all that I must say, and if I have given the same

names as them to simples and to trees, I must say that this is only to accommodate

myself as much as is possible to the ideas that able botanists have formed from

books; even if to speak the truth the thoughts that one gathers in reading books of

215 For a recent account of the American content in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses see Charles Le Gobien and Catherine Desbarats, eds., Lettres Édifiantes Et Curieuses (Montréal: Boréal, 2006)

this nature are very different that those that one forms where one has seen the

things of which one speaks…216

While it is tempting to see Jesuit writing such as this as a result of the shock of newness and the new importance of autoptic evidence in the Americas, recent research by

Fernando Vidal and Peter Dear has shown a similar emphasis on empirical observation in

Catholic studies of the natural and supernatural worlds in early modern Europe.217 As

Jesuit authors penned descriptions of the plants and environments that they encountered at their missions and as they travelled throughout the Pays d‟en Haut, they drew on a new moral economy of observation that privileged authors such as themselves who were able to claim firsthand experience of the extra-European world.

Appeals to autoptic evidence, however, were neither universal nor uncomplicated.

With authors such as Nicolas assuring firsthand experience of sea monsters, unicorns and cedar trees in the same breath, it is clear that appealing to experience was as much a discursive strategy as it was an objective fact.218 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 ―worthy of faith‖ in their own right. Yet much of their evidence was either collected from others or offered without provenance. Le Jeune wrote in 1633, for instance, 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

216 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 43.

217 See Fernando Vidal, ―Miracles, Science, and Testimony in Post-Tridentine Saint-Making,‖ Science in Context 20, no. 03 (2007): 481-508 and Peter Robert Dear, Discipline & Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Chapter 1 of this dissertation.

218 This is particularly true in his Codex Canadiensis, a sketchbook of naturalistic drawings that include indigenous peoples, animals and plants as well as sea monsters, passion flowers, unicorns and lions.

96 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.‖219 In many of the Relations, statements about nature appear authorless, as simple statements of fact. Le Jeune wrote in 1636 that, ―One sees here pear, apple, plum, cherry, and other trees bearing wild fruit…,‖ neatly skirting the issue of witnessing and authorship with the use of an impersonal pronoun.220 When Jacques Bruyas similarly wrote in a letter from the mission to the Haudenosaunee at Saint Xavier in 1668 that

―apple, plum, and chestnut trees are seen here‖ he provided little sense of when or by whom they were seen.221 The literary scholar Marie-Christine Pioffet has analysed such juxtaposition of eyewitness accounts with biblical and mythological allusions in the

Relations and has highlighted frequent breaks into universal history that were signalled by changes in both tense and point of view (i.e. between first and third person). Pioffet argues that Jesuit accounts both expanded the field of their own experience and added details to their accounts that they could not possibly have lived. Both, she suggests, were the products of an after-the-fact rationalization of extraordinary and otherwise unexplainable events that took place in the Society of Jesus‘ American missions.222

Pioffet ultimately contends that this ―come and go between the real and the imaginary‖ served to transform simple Jesuit descriptions of their mission into an epic conflict with the devil.223 Thus, as Stephen Greenblatt has written, ―eye-witness testimony, for all its

219 JR 5:97.

220 Ibid., 9: 153.

221 Ibid., 51: 121.

222 Pioffet, Tentation, 187.

223 Ibid.

97 vaunted importance, sits as a very small edifice on top of an enormous mountain of hearsay, rumour, convention and endlessly-recycled fable.‖224 Jesuit experience of

American flora emerged as a composite of multiple experiences by multiple authors and witnesses.225

Although in observing American flora Jesuit and other missionary documents from the seventeenth century clearly privilege the visual as the surest basis of botanical knowledge, sight was rarely deemed sufficient in and of itself. Jesuit authors such as

Bressani and Nicolas clearly appreciated the aesthetic qualities of American flora, yet they rarely failed to also reference the tastes, smells, and aboriginal uses of new plants and foods. This separated Jesuits from a growing tendency in renaissance and early modern natural history to focus relentlessly on the visual characteristics of plants and similarly set them apart from a growing tendency to deny the importance of the loci of the plant. While the historian Brian Ogilvie has traced a close relationship between the increased use of textual descriptions and dried herbarium specimens in lieu of direct observation of living plants, Jesuits in North America increasingly situated novel flora in a distinctly American cultural and ecological context.226 Their observations that blended a wide range of sense impressions allowed for considerable flexibility in describing new plants and encouraged the inclusion of the author as a knowledgeable and reputable

224 Stephen Greenblatt, quoted in Wylie J., ―New and Old Worlds: The Tempest and early colonial discourse,‖ Social & Cultural Geography 1 (2000), 50.

225 Also see the work of Thomas Worcester and Micah True who both argue that Jesuits intended their texts to legitimate their position as authorities on American peoples and spirituality. See Worcester, ―A Defensive Discourse‖ and True, ―Maistre et Escolier‖

226 Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006), 214. See also Lucile Allorge and Olivier Ikor, La fabuleuse odyssée des plantes : Les botanistes voyageurs, les Jardins des plantes, les Herbiers (np: Jean-Claude Lattès, 2003), 94.

98 witness. It also speaks to a relative openness about the distinguishing features of plants that only increased as time went on.227

Both to create and satisfy an expectant audience in Europe composed of secular and religious readers, French Jesuits turned their focus to the curiosities of their New

World, including the aboriginal communities with whom they worked and lived. Yet as they wrote descriptions of their missions and the communities they served, Jesuit authors not only failed to divide their accounts of the human and natural worlds of colonial

French North America, but suggested that such a distinction was impossible. Within their larger study of aboriginal cultures there was a clear interest in indigenous botanical knowledge.

French Jesuits conflated cultural and natural environments in descriptions of

American flora that they encountered in their travels and at their missions scattered across the continent.228 For example, in 1639 the Jesuit superior of New France Paul Le

Jeune wrote that:

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 flavour, 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

227 For more on this see Chapter 1 of this dissertation.

228 This is not unlike what Iñes Županov has described as the ―geo-ethnographic mode‖ of Jesuit discourse in early modern India. See Iñes G Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 103.

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.229

His description of the blueberry mixed testimony from aboriginal informants with the knowledge acquired from Le Jeune‘s own eyes, hands and mouth in an account that blended genres as easily as it did sources. Le Jeune‘s description of the blueberry also 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. Yet it cannot be said that the blueberry simply offered an avenue to discuss otherwise intangible facets of aboriginal cultures. Instead, Le Jeune‘s readers learned about the natural, human and supernatural environments of New France as they were irrevocably entangled.

Only thirty five years later, the first descriptions of wild rice (which the French called folle avoine, or wild oats) and the Menominee peoples of the Great Lakes similarly conflated descriptions of plants and aboriginal peoples. Jacques Marquette wrote in 1673 that:

The first Nation that we came to was that of the wild oats (folle avoine). I entered

their river, to go and visit these peoples to whom we have preached The Gospel

for several years, — in consequence of which, there are several good Christians

229 JR 16: 189.

100

among them. The wild oat, whose name they bear because it is found in their

country, is a sort of grass, which grows naturally in the small rivers with muddy

bottoms, and in swampy places. It greatly resembles the wild oats that grow amid

our wheat. The ears grow upon a hollow stems, jointed at Intervals; they emerge

from the Water about the month of June, and continue growing until they rise

About two feet above it. The grain is not larger than That of our oats, but it is

twice as long, and The meal therefrom is much more abundant. The Savages

Gather and prepare it for food as Follows. In The month of September, which is

the suitable time for The harvest, they go in Canoes through These fields of wild

oats; they shake its Ears into the Canoe, on both sides, as they pass through. The

grain falls out easily, if it be ripe, and they obtain their supply In a short time. But,

in order to clean it from the straw, and to remove it from a husk in which it is

Enclosed, they dry it in the smoke, upon a wooden grating, under which they

maintain a slow fire for some Days. When The oats are thoroughly dry, they put

them in a skin made into a bag, thrust It into a hole dug in the ground for This

purpose, and tread it with their feet — so long and so vigorously that The grain

separates from the straw, and is very easily winnowed. After this, they pound it to

reduce it to flour, — or even, without pounding it, they Boil it in water, and

season it with fat. Cooked in This fashion, The wild oats have almost as delicate a

taste as rice has when no better seasoning is added.230

Marquette explained that this name was applied to both the culture and the plant folle avoine because of their shared habitat. Yet Marquette‘s description hinted that this

230 JR 59: 91 – 93.

101 relationship extended beyond simple proximity. Offering an account that quickly transitioned between the possibilities for spiritual conversion, the plant‘s ecology and morphology and the place and processing of the plant within Menominee culture,

Marquette hinted at an integrated moral and natural environment that existed in the Great

Lakes. He also offered an indication that the Society of Jesus was interested in American flora at least in part for the insights it offered into aboriginal cultural and spiritual life.

Le Jeune‘s description of the blueberry mixed testimony from aboriginal informants with the knowledge acquired from Le Jeune‘s own eyes, hands and mouth in an account that blended genres as easily as it did sources. Marquette‘s account of wild rice made it virtually impossible for his readers to develop a picture of aboriginal cultures independent of the natural environment in which they lived. Jesuit authors described other indigenous plants as both cultural and natural objects in a similar fashion. The result was that, where modern readers might expect botanical descriptions that focus on morphology, accounts of indigenous people are interwoven. 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.‖231 This, in itself, was neither out of the ordinary for natural historical texts, nor was it 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 all that pleases us, that they esteem all that we dislike, they cannot suffer our best odours, saying that they smell bad. Several

231 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 19.

102 say that the French stink and plug their nose so as not to smell them.‖232 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.233 Rather, it hinted at the belief in a complex web of relations between people and place. As Jesuits worked to convert souls, they became aware of the importance of flora as emblematic of broader features of the

North American natural and cultural landscape.

Indigenous Knowledge and Jesuit Observers

Understanding the Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures of the Great Lakes was no easy feat for early colonists and missionaries. Some of the Jesuits that came to French

North America began their education in aboriginal cultures before they even left France, but there were limits to what could be learned an ocean away and in the absence of aboriginal teachers.234 Most missionaries began an apprenticeship in native languages and cultures when they arrived in New France. Copying manuscript dictionaries and working alongside missionaries who had worked in the field for decades, newly arrived Jesuits also apprenticed themselves to aboriginal peoples who instructed them in their languages

232 Ibid.

233 See Lorraine Daston, ―The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,‖ Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 149 – 172.

234 Allan Greer suggests that it was learning about aboriginal cultures that pushed some Jesuits to the American mission. Jesuits such as Chauchetière learned a great deal about Canada and understood the opportunity for martyrdom at the hands of aboriginal peoples before they left France, Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 80 – 82. Lalement similarly looked to Canada after discovering the particularly difficult missionary life there, see Peter Goddard, ―Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity?‖ in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500 – 1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 186 – 199.

103 and cultures.235 The study of these dictionaries and word lists reveal the daily proximity of Jesuit and aboriginal communities and suggest that Jesuits language instruction was part of a broader study of aboriginal culture.236 Lalement reported receiving ―entire narrations‖ from indigenous women of the Tionontate (Petun), a practice that Victor

Hanzeli suggests was common as Jesuits looked to accomplish more than mere ―word hunting.‖237 As Jesuits sought to learn about aboriginal communities they watched and listened as much as they interrogated, and became, in the process, deeply knowledgeable about many facets of indigenous culture. Yet even if native informants were an essential source of information about American plants and environments, there were limits to what

Jesuits were willing or able to learn by speaking to them.

Jesuit accounts suggest that the success of exchanges of botanical knowledge between missionaries and indigenous peoples was often inversely related to their competency in aboriginal languages.238 Conversations with potential indigenous informants often complicated exchanges of botanical knowledge, instead of facilitating

235 See Victor Egon Hanzeli, Missionary Linguistics in New France; a Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Descriptions of American Indian Languages (The Hague: Mouton, 1969). Leahy cites the examples of the Jesuits Nouë and Chabanel to counteract the image that every Jesuit who entered an American mission soon mastered the local language, see Margaret J. Leahey, ―"Comment peut un muet prescher l'evangile?" Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France,‖ French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1995): 112 - 116.

236 JE Bishop, ―Comment dit-on tchistchimanisi8 en français? The Translation of Montagnais Ecological Knowledge in Antoine Silvy‘s Dictionnaire montagnais-français (ca. 1678 – 1684),‖ (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2006), 32 – 33.

237 Leahy, ―Comment peut un muet,‖ 124; Hanzeli, Missionary Linguistics, 49.

238 The work of Robert Morrissey suggests that this was not limited to the exchange of botanical knowledge but was part of a broader pattern that saw tension between missionaries and aboriginal communities increase as Jesuits gained fluency in indigenous languages. See Robert Morrissey, ―Bottomlands, Borderlands: Empires and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Illinois Country‖ (PhD. Dissertation, Yale, 2006), particularly Chapter 3.

104 them.239 For example, in 1637 a Wendat (Huron) shaman was willing to teach the Jesuits

François Le Mercier and Jean de Brébeuf the medical use of ―two roots.‖240 However, the quote below demonstrates that linguistic competency could be a liability rather than an asset when Jesuits were able to fully appreciate the larger discussions of religious and cultural beliefs in which the exchange of botanical knowledge was situated. The Relation of 1637 described this encounter in close detail:

On the 1st day of October, I felt some touches of illness; the fever seized me

towards evening, and I had to give up, as well as the others. But I became free

from it too cheaply; I had only three attacks, but the second one was so violent

that I condemned myself to be bled; my blood was obstinate, however. … I have

not told your Reverence that Tunnerouanont, one of the famous Sorcerers of the

country, having heard that we were sick, came to see us. To hear him talk, he was

a personage of merit and influence, although in appearance he was a very

insignificant object. He was a little hunchback, extremely misshapen, a piece of a

robe over his shoulders,—that is, some old beaver skins, greasy and patched. …

Now in order to make our mouths water, and to sell his Antidote at a better price,

he said ‗I am not of the common run of men; I am, as it were, a Demon; therefore

I have never been sick. In the three or four times that the country has been

afflicted with a contagion, I did not trouble myself at all about it; I never feared

the disease, for I have remedies to preserve me. Hence, if thou wilt give me

239 References to conflicts between missionaries and shamans are numerous. See Axtell, Invasion Within, 77 – 78; Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, Chapter 5; Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 1: 391, 407, 530, 598, 707.

240 JR: 13: 103.

105

something, I undertake in a few days to set all thy invalids upon their feet.‘ The

Father Superior, in order to get all the amusement he could out of it, asked him

what he wanted. ‗Thou wilt give me,‘ said he, ‗ten glass beads, and one extra for

each patient.‘ The Father answered him that, as for the number, he need not

trouble himself about it, that it was a matter of no consequence; that the efficacy

of his remedies did not depend upon that; ... Thereupon he told us that he would

show us the roots that must be used; but that, to expedite matters, he would, if we

desired it, go to work himself, that he would pray, and have a special sweat,—in a

word, perform all his usual charlatanries,—and that in three days our sick people

would be cured. He made a very plausible speech. The Father satisfied him, or

rather instructed him thereupon; he gave the sorcerer to understand that we could

not approve this sort of remedy, that the prayer he offered availed nothing, and

was only a compact with the devil, considering that he had no knowledge of, or

belief in, the true God, to whom alone it is permitted to address vows and prayers;

that as far as natural remedies were concerned, we would willingly employ them,

and that he would oblige us by teaching us some of them. He did not insist further

upon his sweat, and named to us two roots,—very efficacious, he said, against

fevers,—and instructed us in the method of using them. But we hardly took the

trouble to observe their effects,—we are not accustomed to these remedies, and

besides, two or three days later, we saw all our patients nearly out of danger. 241

As these Jesuits fully understood the spiritual contexts of Wendat medical knowledge, their discomfort grew. Rather than accept morally suspect knowledge from Wendat

241 Ibid.

106 healers such as Tunnerouanont, Jesuits acted as intellectual gatekeepers, ensuring that their readers would remain in ignorance and refusing to profit from indigenous knowledge themselves.242

Jesuit authors saw something far more sinister at work in remedies and ecological practice that were often too effective to be entirely natural; while Jesuits represented bountiful crops and miraculous healings as evidence of divine favour for their mission, they were equally wary of possible manifestations of diabolical influence.243 Missionaries such as the Récollet Chrestien Leclercq and the Jesuit Charlevoix were more worried when indigenous knowledge such as shamanic healing and predictions actually worked than when it seemed misguided ―superstition.‖244 So while references to indigenous

―superstition‖ were rife in the Relations and the more sceptical Lettres édifiantes, there was an underlying suspicion of aboriginal ecological and botanical knowledge that remained consistent throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bringing the standard of Christ to New France and representing their entire enterprise in the same militaristic discourse that framed missions in Europe, South America and Asia, Jesuits were keenly aware of the human and supernatural enemies that faced them and searched the natural world and indigenous ecological knowledge for traces of diabolical influence.

242 The study of the cultural production of ignorance has recently been introduced to the study of early modern Atlantic science as ―agnotology‖ in the work of Londa Schiebinger. See Londa Schiebinger. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 226 – 241. See also Robert Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008)

243 JR 14: 125. See also Allan Greer, ―The Exchange of Medical Knowledge between Natives and Jesuits in New France,‖ in El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Neuvo Mundo, ed. Domingo Ledezma (Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2005), 135 - 46. This was not unique to the missions to New France. See Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), Chapter 1.

244 Chris Parsons, ―Medical Encounters and Exchange in Early Canadian Missions,‖ Scientia Canadensis 31, no. 1-2 (2008), 57.

107

In the eighteenth century the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau sought to distance his own work from the discourse of diabolism used by his confrères, but he nonetheless continued to show concern about the origins and moral status of indigenous environmental knowledge. Lafitau was as much concerned by the methods of indigenous knowledge systems as he was of their content. He wrote in his 1724 Mœurs des Sauvages américains… that ―The basis of all the secrets of paganism has been that spirit of curiosity which leads men to wish to penetrate into the future or into the secret of the things which God, in his wisdom, has wished to hide in the secret places of his wisdom and the knowledge of which being above the natural forces, can only be made manifest to us by him, through the power of his goodness whenever he wished to give men some extraordinary mark of favour, or they can be imparted to us by the angels of darkness, by his divine permission and by virtue of the power He has given them.‖245 This passage signalled an ambivalence in Lafitau‘s thought; he was not sure if indigenous botanical knowledge was simply the product of an illicit curiosity or if it was the product of a darker influence that his confrères had been chronicling for over a century. Regardless of its source the natural knowledge of aboriginal cultures was not presumed to be innocent and was approached with considerable distrust.

As Jesuits discussed botanical knowledge with aboriginal peoples with an increasing fluency, they understood that the exchange of botanical and ecological knowledge was fraught with moral danger. For while Jesuits clearly believed that both the devil and God had the ability to intervene in the natural world and effect miraculous cures or harvests, it was increasingly obvious to Jesuits that the Iroquoian and

245 Joseph-François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974 – 77), 1: 227.

108

Algonquian cultures of the Great Lakes traced the properties of plants to the intervention of what the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell has called other-than-human beings.246

Hallowell wrote of the Ojibwe with whom he worked that when considering these beings,

―a natural-supernatural dichotomy has no place.‖247 Instead, these were beings who possessed powers sought by aboriginal peoples of the Great Lakes (power termed manidoo by Algonquin peoples, orenda by Iroquoian peoples, and wašicun by Siouan peoples) able to intervene and influence the human and non-human world with what the ethnohistorian Bruce White has referred to as ―control power.‖248

Jesuits frequently commented on efforts to propitiate the spirits of bears, beaver, deer and natural sites such as lakes and waterfalls, yet descriptions of the relationship with those powers involved in the growth and protection of wild and cultivated crops and the medicinal properties of plants were relatively rare.249 Jesuits were nonetheless aware that there was a close affiliation between powerful plants and other-than-human-beings, even if they misunderstood and thought that it was the plants themselves that were worshipped. Julien Binneteau claimed that the Illiniwek (Illinois) amongst whom he preached, ―… claim that medicinal herbs are gods, from whom they have life, and that no others must be worshiped. Every day they sing songs in honour of their little manitous, as

246 Hallowell wrote that in a culture in which ―natural forces‖ as such did not exist, these beings were ―neither the personification of a natural phenomenon nor an altogether animal-like or human-like being.‖ A. Irving Hallowell, ―Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,‖ in Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 367, 369.

247 Ibid.

248 Relationships with the non-human world might best be still thought of as social relationships. Bruce M. White, ―Encounter with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota Theories about the French and their Merchandise,‖ Ethnohistory 41, no.3 (1994): 380 - 81.

249 See, for representative examples, JR 9: 211, 67: 157 – 59.

109 they call them. They inveigh against our religion and against the missionaries. ‗Where is the God,‘ they say, ‗of whom the black gowns tell us? What does he give us to induce us to hear them? Where are the feasts they give us?‘ ‖250 In fact, while the plants themselves were not worshipped in their own right, aboriginal people were keenly aware that their encounter with a specific plant was mediated by their relationship with the other-than- human beings who were the ultimate source of the plant‘s power and the knowledge of how to properly use it.

Iroquoian and Algonquian botanical knowledge was neither fixed nor universal and the properties of the plants themselves were mutable and understood to be an effect of negotiations between the human and other-than-human world. Aboriginal peoples therefore understood that the exchange of knowledge with European colonists and missionaries necessitated educating the newcomers in how to maintain good relationships with the other-than-human beings that were responsible for the efficacy of medicinal plants and the growth and productivity of food crops. For particularly powerful plants, those most important for the well being of the particular community, Iroquoian and

Algonquian peoples renewed their bonds seasonally.251 In ceremonies timed to coincide with seasonal markers such as the planting of agricultural crops, the arrival of green corn or strawberries or the fall harvest, Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples offered thanks to

250 JR 65: 63.

251 Examples of these ceremonies abound. See James W. Herrick. Iroquois Medical Botany ed. Dean R. Snow (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 2; John Steckley. Words of the Huron (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2007), 113 – 15; George Sioui. Les Wendats, 56 – 79; Elisabeth Tooker. An ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615 – 49 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 62; Thomas Vennum. Wild Rice and the Ojibway people (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988), 70 – 76; See also Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League i nthe Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 10 – 15, and Dean R. Snow. The Iroquois (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1994), which is organized around the Haudenosaunee calendar.

110 the creator and other-than-human beings on whom they depended and renewed their bonds by offering these same powers specific objects that they desired such as tobacco.252

Reminiscent of what Richard Nelson has referred to as ―the watchful world‖ of the Koyukon peoples, it is clear that Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples of the Great

Lakes understood that their own behaviour influenced the botanical world.253 An eighteenth-century account by Joseph-François Lafitau suggested that maintaining the appropriate respect for plants that could change their locations and properties lay at the heart of the relationship with the other-than-human world. Lafitau wrote that certain plants prized chastity and demanded it of those that would collect them for medicinal use.

―They are persuaded that the love of this virtue extends as far as the natural sentiments of plants,‖ he wrote, ―so that there are [among them] those which have a feeling of modesty as if they were animate; and so that, to be effective in remedies or even when the diviners are not called upon, they expect to be employed and put to work by chaste hands, lest they lose efficacy. Several have said to me often, speaking of their illnesses, that they knew very well secrets for curing them but that, being married, they could no longer make use of them.‖254 Where aboriginal peoples were willing to share their botanical knowledge with Jesuits, they understood that imparting knowledges of ceremonies and commitments to the other-than-human world was essential.

252 Tobacco was understood to provide a bridge between the human and non-human world. See Joseph C. Winter, ―Traditional Uses of Tobacco by Native Americans,‖ in Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, ed. Joseph C. Winter (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 9 – 58; Alexander von Gernet, ―Chapter on Mythology to be included in a book on the Iroquoian tobacco complex‖ Ms. Coll. 20, Series IV, William N. Fenton Papers, ca. 1933 – 2000, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 2.

253 Richard K Nelson. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 14 – 33.

254 Lafitau, Customs, 1:218.

111

Relationships with the other-than-human world were maintained at an individual and societal level. Some knowledge was given to specific individuals in dreams or by close relatives and was contingent on keeping the details of the relationship secret from the uninitiated.255 The account of the ―Neh Gan-Da-Yah of the Fruits and Grains‖ that the

Moravian missionary William Martin Beauchamp recorded amongst the Haudenosaunee over a century ago details what these relationships could involve. These ―Little People‖ that protected and nurtured plants started their annual work with the strawberry, where they ―loosen the earth around each strawberry root, that its shoots may better push through to the light.‖ 256 They made certain that the plants on which the spiritual and material survival of the Haudenosaunee depended grew and flourished. Throughout the growing seasons, they ―are ever vigilant… and vigorous are their wars with the blights and diseases that threaten to infect and destroy the corn and the beans.‖257 They were also, however, jealous of their privacy and agreed to continue their work only so long as the secret of their existence was not betrayed. If it was, it was feared that vines would freeze over the winter, birds would not travel south and ground animals might forget to burrow.258 Working amongst the Wyandot, descendants of the Wendat who were moved to Oklahoma in the nineteenth-century, the anthropologist Marius Barbeau similarly learned that the efficacy of maple syrup harvesting depended upon indigenous women who kept a piece of magic sugar that had been given to them by the female spirit of the

255 Tooker, Huron Ethnography, 90 – 91, 109; Kenn Pitawanakwat and Jordan Paper, ―Communicating the Intangible: An Anishnaabeg Story,‖ American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1996): 451-465.

256 William M Beauchamp. Iroquois Folk Lore: Gathered from the Six Nations of New York (Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman, Inc., 1922): 49.

257 Ibid., 50.

258 Ibid., 50 – 51.

112 tree safe and to themselves.259 William Fenton has suggested that, if the relationship with specific medicinal plants was upset, the Haudenosaunee expected that plants would hide from would-be collectors or, worse still, poison rather than cure the intended patient.260

Plants that were common could quickly become rare. Those that remained might become slippery to evade an ill-intentioned or –prepared collector.261 Plants demanded both respect and acknowledgement as they were collected and used.

Some Jesuits such as Lafitau thought of indigenous belief as superstition or the remnants of an ancient and universal knowledge of the natural world.262 There were many in his religious order, however, who were willing to forsake morally suspect and possibly diabolically influenced indigenous botanical knowledge, even if it meant reduced or restricted access to knowledge of American flora. The more that these French Jesuits appreciated the cultural and spiritual dimensions of indigenous ecological knowledge, the less willing they were to appropriate it and present it to a European audience.

259 Marius Barbeau, Mythologie huronne et wyandotte: avec en annexe les textes publieés antérieurement trans. Stephan Dupont (Montréal: Presses de l‘Université de Montréal, 1994): 94.

260 Herrick, Iroquois Medical Botany, 35 – 36.

261 Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Our Knowledge is not primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 64.

262 Lafitau‘s view of Native American cultures was influenced by his confrères in China who had come to believe that ancient Chinese texts contained evidence of the Judeo-Christian God. See Arnold H. Rowbotham, ―The Jesuit Figurists and Eighteenth-Century Religious Thought,‖ Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 4 (1956): 471 – 485. See also William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore, ―J.-F. Lafitau (1681-1746), Precursor of Scientific Anthropology,‖ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 25, no. 2 (1969): 173; Andreas Motsch, Lafitau Et L'émergence du Discours Ethnographique (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2001): 39. and Anthony Pagden. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, first paperback ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 198 – 209. On Jesuit scepticism about diabolical influence in aboriginal cultures, see Goddard, “Science and Scepticism.‖

113

Medical Knowledge and Secret Knowledge

Although it has become common to privilege the linguistic nature of ―biocontact zones,‖ Jesuit efforts to translate and appropriate indigenous ecological and botanical knowledge in French North America were eclectic.263 Their immersion in aboriginal cultures meant that Jesuits learned indigenous knowledges as they were lived. As often unwitting apprentices in aboriginal lifeways, however, Jesuits frequently found themselves subject to gender and social roles that determined their access to particular sorts of knowledge; as unmarried men and enemies of the many medicine societies and shamanic healers of the Algonquian and Iroquoian communities of the Great Lakes, they were excluded from many of the existing circuits of knowledge transmission in these indigenous cultures.264

Jesuit accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American ecologies show that aboriginal peoples of the Great Lakes expected much of their botanical knowledge, whether economic, agricultural or medical, to remain secret. Clearly establishing motives is difficult when this secret knowledge, by its very nature, escaped mention in many of

263 Londa Schiebinger‘s Plants and Empire is the most vocal advocate of deploying the Mary Louise Pratt‘s notion of a ―contact zone‖ in the study of the early modern Atlantic World. While the definition of a biocontact zone involves more than language, Schiebinger has highlighted linguistic mediation as a limiting factor in the exchange of knowledge between natives, slaves and European and colonial naturalists. Schiebinger writes that ― ‗Noise‘ – or intellectual interference – in biocontact zones was often deafening. Loudest perhaps was the cacophony of languages. Europeans only scratched the surface of local peoples‘ knowledges of plants and remedies because they were often unable or unwilling to speak local languages.‖ Plants and Empire, 83 – 84. Schiebinger acknowledges her intellectual debt to Mary Louise Pratt‘s concept of the ―contact zone‖ developed in her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). For an overview of aboriginal medicine in North America, see Virgil J. Vogel, American Indian Medicine (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970)

264 On the tensions caused by Jesuit celibacy, see White, Middle Ground, 60 – 61, Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 2000): 360 – 61. Jesuits adopted aboriginal kinship metaphors when preaching to potential converts and in trying to situate themselves into the social fabric of indigenous communities. See John Steckley, ―The Warrior and the Lineage: Jesuit Use of Iroquoian Images to Communicate Christianity,‖ Ethnohistory, 39, no. 4 (1992): 494 – 502.

114 the extant accounts of colonial encounter in French North America. While colonial expansion and the antagonistic relationships between Jesuit missionaries and Algonquian and Iroquoian healers, medicine societies and women limited access to indigenous ecological and botanical knowledge, however, it is overly simplistic to frame all limits placed on what Euro-American communities could learn as aboriginal resistance to colonialism. Indeed, nineteenth and twentieth-century anthropological studies of

Haudenosaunee, Wendat and the Algonquians cultures of the Great Lakes suggest that secrecy was an integral aspect of indigenous knowledge systems that obstructed the circulation of knowledge both with colonial populations and within aboriginal communities themselves.265

Jesuits understood that indigenous peoples were hesitant about teaching

Europeans all that they knew about American flora but failed to appreciate that these cultures wished to keep much of their botanical knowledge within their own communities. As a result, missionaries sought to learn from observations of indigenous knowledge in practice; Jesuits and other Europeans watched closely as aboriginal peoples practiced medicine and harvested crops in indigenous villages. But this did not imply consensual knowledge transmission. While historians such as Gilles Havard have written that in the Great Lakes French colonists and missionaries apprenticed themselves in the

―school of the shamans,‖ it may be more appropriate to describe their actions as biopiracy.266

265 On the importance of secrecy, see also William Wykoff, ―Botanique et Iroquois dans la vallée du St- Laurent,‖ Anthropologies et Sociétés, 2, no. 3 (1978): 157 – 162. See also William N. Fenton, Contacts between Iroquois herbalism and colonial medicine (Seattle: Shorey Book Stores, 1971), 523 and Herrick, Iroquois Medical Ethnobotany, 73.

266 Havard and Vidal, Histoire, 349. On biopiracy in the early modern Atlantic world, see Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 35 – 44.

115

Missionaries and colonists thought that botanical knowledge was generalized within indigenous cultures, particularly as it related to knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants. The Récollet missionary Chrestien Leclerq suggested that ―They are all by nature physicians, apothecaries, and doctors, by virtue of the knowledge and experience they have of certain herbs, which they use successfully to cure ills that seem to us incurable.‖267 His confrère Louis Hennepin would similarly write that in Louisiana,

―One finds here several medicinal herbs which are not in Europe, of which the effect is infallible according to the experience of the sauvages who use them every day to heal all sorts of wounds, for quaternary and tertiary fevers, to purge, and to appease pains of kidneys and other similar pains. There is also a quantity of poisons that these peoples use to kill themselves.‖268 More recent studies, however, have suggested that such knowledge was closely guarded by the families and individuals to whom it had been entrusted.269

While a basic shared knowledge of local flora may have been common in both Iroquoian and Algonquian communities, knowledge about the medical use of local flora was far more restricted.270

While agricultural and ecological knowledge was often kept from Jesuits as men, medical knowledge was kept from missionaries who were outsiders to the social world of aboriginal communities of the Great Lakes. Both as they refused to marry and resisted

267 Chestien Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia; with the Customs and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians, ed. and trans. William F. Ganong (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910), 296.

268 Louis Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane, 5.

269 See William Fenton‘s papers at the American Philosophical Society and particularly "Iroquois Use of Plants as Medicines" Ms. [1954], Box 8, Ms. Coll. 20, William Fenton Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

270 Fenton, Contacts, 504; Tooker, Huron Ethnography, 84 – 85.

116 incorporation and ritual adoption, Jesuits kept themselves outside of the normal circuits within which botanical knowledge circulated. Even if he clearly underestimated the transfer of knowledge between women, the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau showed at least a partial understanding of the circuits of cultural transmission within

Haudenosaunee communities when he wrote in 1724 that knowledge had been transmitted from father to son since time immemorial.271 Other Jesuits commented on the oral transmission of origin stories and histories.272 In general, however, the relative silence of Jesuit sources on the oral transmission of botanical knowledge suggests that the

Society of Jesus was excluded from these conversations.

The anthropologist William Fenton has demonstrated that both men and women in Iroquoian cultures could possess herbal knowledge, but recorded that his modern—day informants deliberately restricted the transmission of knowledge to members of their own family.273 Knowledge was network specific and lineage dependent; Fenton found that even where the flora remained constant from one community to the next, usage varied according to the line of descent.274 Fenton claimed that much of the knowledge that he

271 Lafitau, Customs, 1:54.

272 See JR 16: 226, for a representative example that concerns the origin story of the Wendat. This is not to suggest that aboriginal cultures were simply ―oral cultures.‖ Recent work by literary scholars and ethnohistorians has challenged the narration of cultural encounter in the New World as the meeting of literate and pre-literate societies. In the Great Lakes and Northeastern North America studies of the use and significance of wampum have demonstrated the resilience and adaptability of the technology. See Birgit Brander Rasmussen, ―Negotiating Peace, Negotiating Literacies: A French-Iroquois Encounter and the Making of Early American Literature,‖ American Literature 79, no. 3 (2007): 445 – 473 and Brooks, Common Pot. Scholars have also challenged the assumption that European colonists were ―people of the book‖ and have shown the importance of orality and bodily gesture in New England communities. See Cohen, Networked Wilderness, and Sandra M. Gustafson. Eloquence is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

273 See William Fenton‘s ethnobotanical notebooks for the years 1938, 1939 and 1940, catalogued respectively as ―Plants,‖ ―Plants. Field Notes 1,‖ and ―Plants. Field Notes 2‖ in Box 6 – Series 5, Ms. Coll. 20, William Fenton Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

274 Ibid.; Fenton, Contacts, 507.

117 was able to acquire from his Haudenosaunee informants came from tricking them into speaking about knowledge that they had intended to keep secret. ―One of the surest ways to get an Indian‘s confidence is to get him talking about plants,‖ he wrote. ―He may freeze up if asked directly what he knows about the old medicines, but he is more likely to pluck some plant growing at hand, for example toad rush (Juncus bufonius), and relate that it grows everywhere along the village paths and that because it springs up when stepped on, the Senecas call it oge‘o‘dja‘geon.‖275 Even then, when the informant ―Jim‖ collected a plant in Fenton‘s presence, he specifically asked the plant being collected to excuse the anthropologist‘s presence, stating: ―Do not in the least restrain your power.

And do not think that he is merely a white man.‖276 Similarly, among the Anishnaabe,

Wendy Makoons Geniusz suggests that healers frequently prepared remedies in such a fashion that their ingredients could not be deduced by overly curious observers. Geniusz cites Huron Smith and Frances Densmore, both anthropologists who worked among

Great Lakes cultures early in the twentieth century, who saw healers both grind medicinal ingredients to make them unrecognizable and add aromatic herbs to mask the scent of the remedy.277 Geniusz similarly claims that some Anishnaabe healers would not even reveal the contents of a remedy even to their patients.278

Accounts of the transmission of this sort of oral knowledge were largely absent from Jesuit texts. Where information surfaced in Jesuit accounts, it was the result of the

275 William Fenton, "Iroquois Use of Plants as Medicines"--Ms. [1954], Box 8, Ms. Coll. 20, William Fenton Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

276 Ibid.

277 Geniusz, Our Knowledge, 66.

278 Ibid. This is not unlike the intentional production of ignorance studied as agnotology by Londa Schiebinger and other scholars. See Proctor and Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology.

118 breakdown of circuits of knowledge transmission rather than their extension to include the French. When the Haudenosaunee women Lute Andotraaon converted to Catholicism, for instance, the knowledge that had been imparted to her as part of her membership in a medicine society was made public as she renounced ―… a certain dance, — the most celebrated in the country, because it is believed the most powerful over the Demons to procure, by their means, the healing of certain diseases. Be this as it may, that dance is only for chosen people, who are admitted to it with ceremony, with great gifts, and after a declaration which they make to the grand masters of this Brotherhood, to keep secret the mysteries that are entrusted to them, as things holy and sacred.‖279 Knowledge was legitimately transmitted when communities and families shared the stories of their origins and the history of their peoples, in the seasonal collection and farming that sustained indigenous communities, and through the ritual practice that renewed relationships with the other-than-human-beings and the creator who were the ultimate source of the plants, their medicinal and nutritive properties and the knowledge about their proper use. As the brief account above makes clear, the knowledge that was transmitted to Jesuits was imbedded in ritual practice and the lifeways of indigenous cultures. At the margins of much of indigenous ritual and social life, Jesuit access to the sorts of knowledge that circulated within medicine societies and through families was therefore rare.

Where aboriginal peoples of the Great Lakes demonstrated and explained the qualities of specific plants to French missionaries and colonists, it seems that the exchange was at least partially motivated by a fear that the French, if left unsupervised, were likely to hurt or poison themselves. Writing of his time amongst the Wendat in the

279 JR 30:21.

119

1620s, the Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard recounted how both missionaries and lay

French workers were taught the poisonous nature of two indigenous plants that he identified as Ondachiera and Ooxrat. Even here, however, it seems that these qualities were explained after the plants had been ingested and after nearby Wendat had been forced to intervene to save the lives of hapless Frenchmen. He recounted, for example, that ―One day we had a great apprehension for a Frenchmen, who after having eaten on

[Ondachiera], became greatly ill in an instant & pale as death, he was nonetheless cured by the vomitives that the sauvages made him swallow.‖280 Absent this sort of danger, these sorts of conversations were rare, and Jesuits were often left to figure out the medicinal properties of plants on their own.

In the eighteenth century, Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix‘s frustration was evident as he discussed the tendency of aboriginal peoples to jealously guard their botanical knowledge. Describing a ―fire dance‖ that he said that he observed amongst the

Algonquian Mississauga in the journal of his expedition from New France to the

Mississippi, he wrote that, ―I really wanted to know how a man could hold a lit coal in his mouth such a long time without burning it and without putting it out; but all that I could learn is that the sauvages are familiar with a plant which renders the part of the body that is rubbed with it insensible to the fire and that they have never wanted to give this knowledge to the Europeans. We know that garlic and onion could produce the same effect but for a very short time.‖281 Given only fragments of hearsay, known or suspected botanical properties and an observation of Mississauga practice, Charlevoix was left to

280 Sagard, Grand Voyage, 271.

281 Charlevoix, Journal d‟un voyage, 498.

120 reassemble indigenous botanical knowledge on his own. ―One thing that constantly surprises me,‖ he wrote, ―is the impenetrable secrecy in which they keep their remedies.‖282

When this otherwise secret knowledge was gathered by Jesuit observers it was treated as cause for celebration. The Jesuit Louis Nicolas, who worked amongst the

Odawa and other Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes in the 1660s and 1670s, made his excitement at discovering a secret remedy plain to see in his Histoire naturelle.

Describing the American oak, he stated that ―The leaf of white oak is very good for healing wounds, and the sauvages make nails come back after they have been ripped out with teeth. I have discovered by trial the secret from an [Native] American … who had all of his nails removed, a finger cut, and his arm pierced…‖283 He went on to write not only about where to collect the plant but how to prepare and administer it, a rare level of detail for missionaries often deprived of access to the medical knowledge of indigenous peoples.

Written in 1674 as part of a larger account of his voyage down the Mississippi,

Jacques Marquette similarly described how he followed up on a clue left by an earlier missionary that had travelled to the southern Great Lakes:

I also took time to look for a medicinal plant which a savage, who knows its

secret, showed to Father Allouez with many Ceremonies. Its root is employed to

counteract snake-bites, God having been pleased to give this antidote against a

poison which is very common in these countries. It is very pungent, and tastes like

282 Ibid., 622.

283 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 41.

121

powder when crushed with the teeth; it must be masticated and placed upon the

bite inflicted by the snake. The reptile has so great a horror of it that it even flees

from a Person who has rubbed himself with it. The plant bears several stalks, a

foot high, with rather long leaves; and a white flower, which greatly resembles the

wallflower. I put some in my Canoe, in order to examine it at leisure while we

continued to advance toward Maskoutens, where we arrived on The 7th of

June.284

Jesuits pieced together indigenous medical knowledge not only from fragments that they had observed in practice but also from those that they had read or heard from other missionaries.

In the Iroquoian and Algonquian cultures of the Great Lakes, medical knowledge was legitimate when it was secret knowledge. With restricted access to the knowledge of indigenous shamans with whom Jesuits waged a long-term battle for the souls of aboriginal communities, and unable to access knowledge that was the property of specific families that they would never marry into, Jesuits assembled the botanical knowledge that they presented to Europe in forums such as the Relations and Lettres édifiantes et curieuses from fragments that they observed and experienced.

The Lived Knowledge of Aboriginal Women in the Great Lakes

In contrast to their almost total exclusion from indigenous medical knowledge,

Jesuits learned a great deal about Iroquoian and Algonquian ecological knowledge as they lived and worked in aboriginal communities. Yet while Jesuit access to medical

284 JR 59: 151.

122 knowledge was limited by their exclusion from indigenous families and their conflicts with medicine societies and shamanic healers, Jesuits were kept from the full range of indigenous ecological knowledge as men. Much of the ecological knowledge of the

Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Ojibwe and Illiniwek (Illinois) was feminine in nature and was deliberately kept from men, be they native husbands and brothers or Jesuit missionaries.

The complexity of Aboriginal ecological practice was in effect hidden from the view of missionaries that either neglected or who were not permitted to take part in the seasonal agricultural and foraging activities of indigenous women.

It is well documented that agricultural crops were the material, intellectual and spiritual preserve of indigenous women.285 Even if they disapproved of what they saw as a dereliction of a duty central to the definition of masculinity, Jesuit authors noted that it was women who planted, maintained and harvested the fields of corn, beans and squash that were central to the economic and spiritual life of Haudenosaunee and Wendat cultures.286 In the western reaches of the Great Lakes Region, French fur traders were similarly forced to accommodate the desires of female indigenous consumers when they sought an undeniably feminine plant, wild rice.287 Missionaries were aware that the

285 Accounts of the gendered division of labour can be found in any survey of Iroquoian and agricultural Algonquian peoples. See Cronon, Changes in the Land, Snow, The Iroquois or Bruce G Trigger, The Huron: Farmers of the North (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). See also Roland Tremblay, Les Iroquoiens du Saint-Laurent: peuple du maïs (Montréal: Editions de l‘Homme, 2006), 74 – 77, and, for a more focused study of the role of Haudenosaunee women in both the production and distribution of agricultural products, see Judith K. Brown, ―Economic Organization and the Position of Women among the Iroquois,‖ Ethnohistory 17, no. 3/4 (1970): 151 – 167.

286 Dean Snow, who wrote that Iroquoian agriculture was maintained by ―a society of women in each village…‖ which ―maintained the ceremonies needed to propitiate the spirits of the three sisters,‖ demonstrates that Jesuit observations were well-founded. See Snow, The Iroquois, 69; French observers generally misunderstood this division, however, and many saw aboriginal women as the slaves of indolent aboriginal men. See Havard, Empire et métissages, 636.

287 Bruce M. White, ―The Woman Who Married a Beaver: Trade Patterns and Gender Roles in the Ojibwa Fur Trade.,‖ Ethnohistory 46, no. 1 (1999): 123 - 27; Thomas Vennum suggests, even more specifically,

123 knowledge to cultivate and collect these plants was restricted to aboriginal women. The

Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard informed his readers, for example, that ―Just as the little boys have their special training and teach one another to shoot with the bow as soon as they begin to walk, so also the little girls, whenever they begin to put one foot in front of the other, have a little stick put into their hands to train them early to pound corn.‖288

Lafitau wrote that the cultivation of corns, beans and squash was the work of ―all the women of the village‖ and that it was overseen by a ―mistress of the field‖ that distributed seed and coordinated planting.289 In his Moeurs des Sauvages américains

Lafitau described indigenous cultivated plants such as wild rice and sunflower under the general heading of ―Occupations of Women.‖290 In the nineteenth century, Lewis Henry

Morgan wrote that the plants themselves were understood to be essentially feminine in nature and were known collectively as De-o-há-ko, or ―Our life, Our supporters‖ underscoring the significance of these plants in Haudenosaunee life.291 Iroquoian and

Algonquian women had a special relationship both with specific plants and the other- than-human beings who maintained and nurtured them. While Jesuits were careful to observe and record much of what they were able to see, it is clear they remained apart and excluded as men. Jesuits quickly appreciated that this was a world to which they could never fully belong and understood that women constituted both a unique source of

that among the Menominee wild rice was the property of specific totemic clans, the Bear and Sturgeon. See Vennum, Wild Rice, 59 – 60.

288 Quoted in Greer, Mohawk Saint, 34.

289 Lafitau, Customs, 2: 54 – 55.

290 Ibid., 2: 47.

291 Lewis H. Morgan. League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois, ed. Herbert M. Lloyd (New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904), 153.

124 information and a singular threat to the fate of their mission.292 ―At first we believed that it was only the young boys who were brought up in these stupid notions,‖ wrote Claude

Dablon from Sault Saint Marie in 1670, ―but we have since learned that the little girls also are made to fast for the same purpose; and we find no persons more attached to these silly customs, or more obstinate in clinging to this error, than the old women, who will not even lend an ear to our instructions.‖293 Yet it was to these same women that Jesuits were frequently forced to turn when they sought ecological or agricultural knowledge.

Scholars such as historical linguist John Steckley have commented on the relative absence of information about ecological practices in Jesuit texts and have argued that the

Society of Jesus simply was not as interested in ecological knowledge as it was in the political organization of indigenous cultures.294 Indigenous scholars such as Barbara

Mann have argued, however, that European and Euro-American ignorance of the importance of indigenous women‘s ecological and cultural knowledge was an intentional

292 For work analyzing the confrontation between Jesuits and aboriginal women see Karen L Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (London: Routledge, 1991) and Carol Devens, Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); for a more recent moderation of the claim that Jesuits undermined the position of women in aboriginal societies see Susan Sleeper-Smith, ―Women, kin, and Catholicism: New perspectives on the fur trade,‖ Ethnohistory 47, no. 2 (2000): 423 – 52, and Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)

293 JR 54: 143.

294 Steckley, Words of the Huron, 113.

125

FIGURE 2 – “On travaille aux champs” Figure 2 - “On travaille aux champs” Claude Chauchetière, Narration de la mission du Sault depuis sa fondation jusqu‟en 1686, ed. Hélène Avisseau (Bordeaux: Archives départmentales de la Gironde, 1984): np.

126 product of aboriginal lifeways.295 Accounting for the relative absence of women‘s oral traditions and the under-appreciation of female figures such as Sky Mother and her daughter Lynx in the writings of missionaries, travelers, fur traders and contemporary anthropologists, she argues that these stories were often too important to be told to men.

She adds that the focus of European observers on the role of the male twins Sky Holder and Flint remained consistent not because it was the most important to Haudenosaunee cultures, but because it was the most accessible to Jesuits as men.296

Jesuits were distanced from much of aboriginal ecological practice by their status as men in a world where women kept their knowledge to themselves. Claude

Chauchetière, a Jesuit missionary who worked and lived at the mission at Kahnawake between 1677 and 1694, was also an amateur artist. Most famous for his image of the

Mohawk convert Kateri Tekakwitha and his account of her life at Kahnawake,

Chauchetière also wrote the ―Narration annuelle de la Mission du Sault depuis la fondation jusqu‘à l‘an 1686.‖297 While the narration provided a rare glimpse into life at the mission over the course of almost two decades, one of the text‘s accompanying images hinted at the distance that separated Jesuit observers and female ecological knowledge. Entitled ―on travaille aux champs,‖ [FIGURE 2] the image might seem to suggest that Jesuits enjoyed a daily proximity to aboriginal agriculture and foraging that would promote the exchange of knowledge about local plants. Yet, while the visual details of the image demonstrated a familiarity with aboriginal ecological practice, it also

295 Barbara Mann, ―The Lynx in Time: Haudenosaunee Women‘s Traditions and History,‖ American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1997), 425.

296 Ibid.

297 Claude Chauchetière, Narration de la mission du Sault depuis sa fondation jusqu‟en 1686, ed. Hélène Avisseau (Bordeaux: Archives départmentales de la Gironde, 1984): np.

127 suggested that Jesuits watched these practices rather than engaging in them. While the image showed that Jesuits observed the ecological practices of indigenous women closely

(in this case showing how aboriginal women shaped the earth to plant corn and collected eggs), it hinted at the limits that this mode of knowledge exchange placed on the transmission of medical, economic or cultural usage. Positioned as a detached observer,

Chauchetière illustrated the absence of discursive exchange and a lack of familiarity with the specific plants being used. Yet absent any of the problematic spiritual associations that derailed oral exchange, ―on travaille aux champs‖ demonstrated why non-participant observation could nonetheless function more effectively than conversations with indigenous informants.

While Chauchetière was clearly able to personally observe aboriginal women at work in the fields, the social distance created by aboriginal gender roles often translated into spatial distance as well.298 Images such as a circa 1721 - 1745 representation of the mission at Kahnawake [FIGURE 3] demonstrate a spatial separation of aboriginal and missionary lives and suggest an intellectual distance that could result.299 Indeed, while

Jesuits and male colonists occasionally accompanied families on winter hunting trips, their participation in the harvesting expeditions that brought nutritional and culinary diversity to aboriginal cultures seem to have been scarce. Jesuits rarely saw and equally rarely described those ecological practices that took women beyond the sight of their villages; drawing on seasonally available nuts, fruits, berries and vegetables that recent

298 There are numerous examples of Jesuits who joined semi-nomadic aboriginal peoples as they broke into smaller family groups and hunted through the winter – see JR 60: 223 – 25, for example. Jesuit resistance to joining similar trips in Iroquoian societies limited access to the ecological knowledge of these communities – see JR 54: 117 for example.

299 Thanks to Vera Palmer for directing me to this image and Jean-François Lozier for dating it.

128

FIGURE 3 – Mission Sault Saint Louis, circa 1721 – 1745 Figure 3 - Mission Sault Saint Louis, circa 1721 – 1745 Mission Sault Saint Louis, VD-208 (1) FOL, Estampes et photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

129 paleoethnobotanical research has demonstrated constituted a major part of aboriginal diets in the Great Lakes the year round, aboriginal subsistence patterns were far more nuanced than the Jesuit record suggests.300 Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples traveled fairly significant distances to collect the diverse assemblage of ―wild‖ fruits and vegetables that have been recovered in paleoethnobotanical excavations.301 Indeed, one recent examination of midden sites and storage pits associated with Wendat settlements argues that current ethnohistorical research based on missionary and colonial accounts that focused on the production of staple crops such as the three sisters and wild rice perpetuates an ignorance of the diversity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aboriginal diets. Stephen Monckton argues, for example, that the historical geographer

Conrad Heidenreich‘s reconstruction of the Wendat diet vastly overemphasized the contribution of corn to aboriginal diets because of his reliance on Jesuit sources that made the same mistake.302

Jesuits were therefore best able to comment on the products of female agricultural practices when corn, beans, squash, wild rice and assorted fruits and berries were brought back to villages and either consumed, processed or stored for later use. Early descriptions

300 Stephen G. Monckton, Huron Paleoethnobotany (Toronto: Ontario Heritage Foundation, 1992), 107 – 125.

301 The most thorough discussion of plant use amongst contemporary and historical aboriginal communities of the Great Lakes are Richard Yarnell, Aboriginal relationships between culture and plant life in the Upper Great Lakes Region (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1964); see also Frances Densmore, Strength of the Earth: The Classic Guide to Ojibwe Uses of Native Plants (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2005), F.W. Waugh. Iroquois Foods and Food Preparation (Ottawa: Canada Dept. of Mines, Geological Survey, 1916), See also Herrick, Iroquois Medical Botany, and Monckton, Huron Paleoethnobotany.

302 Monckton, Huron Paleoethnobotany, 112 – 117. Monckton provides an estimate of the importance of wild fruits in the Wendat diet based on archaeological findings that is three times larger than Heidenreich‘s. See Conrad Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600 – 1650 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), Chapter 6.

130 of the variety of methods of preparation and consumption such as those by Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard testified to a profound interest in the culinary traditions of aboriginal people. Knowledge about American flora was obtained as Sagard and others following him observed and ate with indigenous people. Lafitau, for instance, provided a description and analysis of the processing of corn at Kahnawake that stretched eight pages in a recent translation.303 Another anonymous Jesuit author who wrote ―a long article … on corn (blé)‖ revealed the depth of personal experience that individual missionaries could draw on as they sought to describe aboriginal botanical knowledge.

Critiquing a confrère‘s account of aboriginal cuisine, his account included a discussion of the different types of corn and their preparation, and he wrote that: ―The ideas of roasted corn and of popcorn are not accurate. 1 it is not at all corn that is still in the ear and still green that one uses, but one uses it husked and quite ripe. 2. One does not at all grill it on coals but in hot ash, or in the sand that one has made redden in the fire, and that one packs down after, or even in a trowel or in an appropriate pot (marmite) like that which we use to roast coffee with the difference here that one adds a bit of fat. 3. It is not at all a particular type that makes popcorn: of the totality of corn that one roasts, there is a part sometimes more sometimes less often that blossoms in the manner of a flower.304‖

―Perhaps the subject does not merit the effort to write so much and with such a bad pen,‖ this author acknowledged, ―but in the end when you speak of things, you must describe them such as they are.‖305

303 Lafitau, Customs, 1:56 – 63.

304 Charlevoix, Journal d‟un voyage, 664.

305 Ibid.

131

Bressani similarly described Iroquoian houses that featured ―great pieces of bark supported by beams, which serve to hold up their corn, to dry it in winter.‖306 Jacques

Marquette included information on how food was processed when he described the

Illiniwek, an aboriginal confederacy that lived just to the south of the Great Lakes along the Mississippi river. He wrote that ―Their Squashes are not of the best; they dry them in the sun, to eat them during the winter and the spring.‖307 Those Jesuits who travelled with the Algonquian communities of the Western and Northern Great lakes were allowed a unique perspective on aboriginal seasonal migrations and subsistence strategies that drew upon the ecological richness and diversity of the region. In 1674 the superior of the

American missions, Claude Dablon, recounted that, ―Our other missionaries among the

Outaouais [Odawa] labour holily and usefully, each in his Mission. Within a year, they have baptized more than five hundred infidels; and, this summer, Father Bailloquet alone baptized in two months a hundred children and some adults, fully one-half of whom are sure of paradise. He gathered this harvest while the Savages with whom he was were gathering that of certain small blue fruits, on which they and the Father lived during those two months.‖308 Dablon later increased the botanical detail, and wrote that ―Father

Bailloquet also proceeds there, from time to time; but, as a rule, he lives with the

Algonquins of lakes Huron and Nipissing. He it is who, as I have related, lived for two months this summer, with more than a thousand Savages, on small fruits here called blueberries (bluets), which grow only on rocks or in rocky soil.‖309 Bailloquet was able to

306 JR 39: 245.

307 Ibid., 59: 129.

308 Ibid., 59: 67.

309 JR 59: 69.

132 comment on indigenous knowledge because he lived it. What was transmitted was ―not really ‗knowledge‘ at all,‖ but rather, ―more of a way of life.‖310

Out of the innumerable possible botanical discoveries to be made in French North

America, Jesuits therefore focused on those objects which had been highlighted by aboriginal usage. Yet, where botanical knowledge was not exchanged with indigenous peoples, Jesuits were often forced to be satisfied with access to the products that indigenous cultures produced from local flora. In a letter written by the Jesuit

Chauchetière in 1694, the author made this clear as he explained to his brother that, ―I send you a piece of bread which has come from a place 500 leagues from here. It comes from the Illinois country; it is made of medlars or services, and has a very good taste.‖311

The botanical knowledge of the Illiniwek peoples was implied but remained out of reach in an account that, while highlighting the finished product and its natural source, remained silent on specific indigenous ecological or culinary practices that produced this bread.

For lack of indigenous knowledge about their collection, knowledge of the preparation and economic use of local plants was frequently the product of Jesuit observation and experiment.312 Empirical descriptions were produced in accounts that substituted firsthand observation for knowledge acquired from indigenous peoples.

Writing in Huronia 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

310 Paul Nadasdy, Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003), 60 quoted in Bishop, ―Comment dit-on tchistchimanisi8 en français,‖ 20.

311 JR 64: 133.

312 Steckley, Words of the Huron, 113 – 49.

133 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.‖313 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 Savages had patience to let them ripen, there also grows on the prairies a kind of lime resembling that of France…‖314 Jesuits lived in 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 observations that were couched in wider discussions of aboriginal ecological lives.

Jesuits based their descriptions on their own experiences in accounts that positioned their own bodies as instruments in the production of natural knowledge. In

1640, for example, 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.‖315 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

313 JR 38: 241.

314 Ibid., 56: 121.

315 JR 18: 15.

134 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.‖316

Chaumonot and du Peron translated indigenous ecological knowledge in the register in which it was learned, and they learned a great deal about gender and familial relations, culinary traditions and relationships with domesticated plants; the missionary body itself became an essential mediator as aboriginal ecological practice was translated into discourse in Jesuit accounts.

While social and physical distance led Jesuit accounts of American environments to overemphasize the cultivation of indigenous staple crops, a conceptual gap in Jesuit discourse also left missionaries unable to see and explain the complexity of aboriginal ecological practice. Figure 3, for example, depicts a world split into cultivated areas and wilderness, with little evidence that Jesuits appreciated aboriginal practice that blurred this line. In 1653, The Jesuit missionary Bressani betrayed the existence of this gap when he wrote that besides squash, the Wendat had ―no other fruits but wild ones.‖317 Jesuits failed to recognize what recent archaeological and anthropological work has clearly demonstrated: that both through the selective pressure exerted on plant populations by regular harvesting and collecting and occasional and localized burnings that created habitats for fruit and nut trees, many of the ecosystems of the Great Lakes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were anthropogenic.318 For example, whereas

316 Ibid., 15: 167.

317 JR 38: 241. For more on the failure to acknowledge aboriginal use of ―wild‖ plants, see Chapter 1 of this dissertation. For a more in-depth study of cognitive gaps and their effect on perceptions and use of colonial environments, see Tsing, Friction, Chapter 5.

318 The question of whether or not agricultural crops were native to Eastern North America, or whether plants were entirely imported from the Mexico region, has been debated for some time. Yarnell suggests that many plant domestication began in the late archaic in the East and included plants such as ―giant

135 explorers such as Nicolas Perrot demonstrated an awareness that plants such as folle avoine were planted and managed, the Jesuit Claude Dablon described wild rice as ―a kind of marsh rye which we call wild oats, which the prairies furnish them naturally.‖319

The result was that, while Jesuits recorded many of the agricultural practices of indigenous societies, they missed the multiple uses of ―the mosaiclike landscape of agricultural fields, villages and ceremonial centers, managed woods, and larger expanses of forest that were used for hunting…‖ that recent ethnobotanical research suggests was the norm throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Great Lakes Region.320

Missionaries were increasingly aware of the cultural specificity of what they learned. Early in the seventeenth century, Gabriel Sagard, author of the first Wendat dictionary, clearly believed that any number of words referred to a single salient object writing that ―For example, the Hurons call a dog Gagnenon, The Epicerinys Arionce, & the Canadians or Montagnets Atimoy: thusly can one see what a great difference there is between these three words, who signify nonetheless one single thing.‖321 He is thus able

ragweed, two wild beans, Jerusalem artichoke, groundnut, maypop, black nightshade, purslane, carpetweed, a spurge, and perhaps other species.‖ Richard Yarnell, ―The Importance of Native Crops during the Late Archaic and Woodland Periods,‖ in C. Margaret Scarry, ed. Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 22; More recently, genetic evidence has been used to demonstrate conclusively that marshelder, chenopod, squash and sunflower were indigenous to Eastern North America, see Bruce D. Smith, ―Eastern North America as an independent center of plant domestication,‖ Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 103, no. 33 (2006), 12223 – 12228; Controversy over the extent of aboriginal burning has abated archaeologists have suggested that fires were locally important and carefully set in those areas with readily available water and away from settlements, see James S. Clark and P. Daniel Royall, ―Local and Regional Sediment Charcoal Evidence for Fire Regimes in Presettlement North-eastern North America,‖ Journal of Ecology 84, no. 3 (1996), 365 – 382.

319 JR 55: 167; Perrot, Moeurs, 255.

320 Gayle J. Fritz, ―Levels of Native Biodiversity in Eastern North America,‖ in Paul E. Minnis, Wayne J. Elisens, eds. Biodiversity and Native America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 224.

321 Gabriel Sagard, Dictionaire De La Langve Hvronne, Necessaire À Ceux Qui N'ont L'intelligence D'icelle, & Ont À Traiter Auec Les Sauuages Du Pays (Paris: Librairie Tross, 1865), 4.

136 to write some pages later that word for ―Grain of all sorts‖ was simply ―Onneha.‖322 Not only would later dictionaries add additional information about the flora of French North

America but they would prove that these sorts of facile translations were impossible for those plants used by indigenous peoples. For if the Jesuit Chaumonot was able, in one of his Wendat dictionaries, to continue to offer direct translations for trees such as apples, maple and cedar,323 he nonetheless recognized over a dozen different types and preparations of corn that clearly stretched the limits of Jesuit botanical ontologies.324

Similarly hinting at the incommensurability of aboriginal and Jesuit knowledges, his colleague Jacques Bruyas identified a new type of wood found amongst the Mohawk as that ―which is used to make torches to hunt turtles at night.‖325 Working amongst the

Abenaki, the Jesuit Sebastien Râles would include a ―stinking wood to force vomiting‖ and, as further evidence of his inability to translate indigenous plants into European terms, would translate the fruit Masiman simply as ―red, little.‖326 Even as Jesuits continued to rename both landscapes and converts, the more they knew of indigenous languages and cultures, the less confident they were in fully appropriating indigenous plants and knowledge.

Jesuits did in fact learn a great deal about aboriginal ecological knowledge and the use and character of North American flora, but it was a partial view of a complex

322 Ibid., np. – This word most likely actually referred specifically to corn

323 Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot, Dictionnaire huron, [before 1697] sme 13/ms-062, 5, La Collection de manuscrits, Séminaire de Québec, Centre de référence de l‘Amérique française, Québec.

324 Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot, French Huron Dictionary and Vocabulary, Codex Ind 12, 12, John Carter Brown Library, Providence.

325 Jacques Bruyas, Radices verborum iroquaeorum, ed. J.M. Shea (New York: Cramoisy Press, 1862), 32.

326 Rasles, Dictionary of the Abnaki Language, 386.

137 knowledge system. If knowledge was learned as it was lived, there were definite limits to the reach of Jesuit experience. Jesuits were most often able to describe the product and practice of ecological knowledge in aboriginal villages where their missions were located, but their access to ecological practice that took place out of Jesuit sight largely remained a mystery. Limitations on the transmission of ecological knowledge were determined by the gendered nature of ecological knowledge within the Algonquian and

Iroquoian cultures of the Great Lakes. If it is nonetheless certain that knowledge of

American flora circulated between indigenous and French communities in colonial North

America, it is clear that the process of transmission was haphazard even if the results were nonetheless impressive.

Conclusion

In 1718, the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau lamented that, when compared to the natural histories that had been produced in the Spanish Americas, his confrères had little to show for over a century of living with the indigenous cultures of French North

America. In spite of the wealth of indigenous botanical knowledge described in missionary texts, Lafitau and historians since have been misled into believing that if knowledge was not spoken or written, it was not exchanged. Yet it seems clear that Jesuit missionaries learned a great deal about North American flora. They learned about seasonality and aboriginal ritual life, and about the proper methods for collecting and cooking the riches of indigenous fields and, occasionally, of the forests that otherwise terrified them. Even as they resisted the temptations of botanical knowledge that seemed diabolical in origin, missionaries learned about the social lives of North American plants

138 in indigenous communities and the ever present other-than-human beings that gave them life and power. This was not knowledge, however, that often presented itself as such; it escaped the sort of anecdotal form which normally dominate discussions about the exchange of knowledge between native and newcomer in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Great Lakes Region.

Jesuits were men of letters, par excellence. Yet in their encounter with indigenous botanical knowledges discourse not only showed its limitations but became a hindrance.

The accounts of their encounter with indigenous knowledges therefore cast these highly literate observers in an uncomfortable position. Bound to discourse by their training in multiple languages and their mission to carry the word of God the world over, Jesuits nonetheless found themselves unable or unwilling to talk to Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples about American nature and were ill-equipped to translate the spiritually suffused botanical knowledge of aboriginal cultures. Discourse became a facet of the exchange as it was mobilized by Jesuits to transcribe and translate their encounters with indigenous cultures for their European audiences. Historians of science have begun to appreciate how knowledge was transmitted as practice within European communities but, at least in this case, knowledge was transmitted as it was practiced with the exchange defined not by linguistic mediation but by the limitations that Jesuits experienced as unmarried men with a deep distrust of aboriginal spirituality.327

327 See Pamela H Smith. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Chandra Mukerji, ―Tacit Knowledge and Classical Technique in Seventeenth-Century France: Hydraulic Cement as a Living Practice among Masons and Military Engineers,‖ Technology and Culture 47, no.4 (2006): 713 – 733. See also, David Turnbull. Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers.

139

Jesuit texts transcribed the products of a long-term exchange of botanical knowledge that was subtle and rarely understood as such. Interwoven with descriptions of the daily experience of living in aboriginal communities, accounts of the botanical practices of indigenous peoples were conveyed in multiple genres and to multiple audiences. As statements about the gendered division of labour in indigenous societies, as finely grained analyses of aboriginal cuisine or as blow-by-blow accounts of their spiritual battles with shamanic healers, Jesuits sent indigenous botanical knowledge to

Europe as fragments of aboriginal lifeways.

CHAPTER THREE

“I report only what I have learned from my sauvages” : Jesuits, Ginseng and Scientific Community in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic World

On Saturday the 12th of March, 1718, the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau presented a

―little book‖ to those members of the Académie Royale des Sciences who had gathered for its twice-weekly meeting in Paris. This book outlined his controversial claim that he had discovered ginseng, an undeniably Asian plant still little understood in France, in the forests south of Montréal near the mission at Kahnawake. Many of the leading naturalists, mathematicians and astronomers of France numbered amongst Lafitau‘s audience; among those assembled whose presence was recorded in the Académie‘s minutes were the perpetual secretary of the society, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, the naturalist René

Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, and the noted botanists Antoine de Jussieu, Jean Marchant and Antoine-Tristan Danty d‘Isnard.328 This was a meeting with France‘s scientific elect.

The minutes were virtually silent, however, on the content of the book that Lafitau delivered, aside from adding a note that it was ―sur le Gin-seng‖ and that it was delivered

328 Académie Royale des Sciences, Procès-verbaux 36 (1717), 11; Although this paper focuses exclusively on the Académie Royale des Sciences, there were similar academies devoted to the arts and, later, such scientific fields as agriculture All references to the Académie refer to the Académie Royale des Sciences.

140

141 after those assembled learned of the death of the King‘s doctor and former director of the

Jardin du Roi, Guy-Crescent Fagon.329

It appears that the members of the Académie took little notice of the book that

Lafitau brought to them. There is no mention of any accompanying speech or introduction to the text. Yet the Jesuit‘s work, entitled Mémoire presenté a son altesse royale

Monseigneur le Duc d'Orléans, regent du royaume de France, concernant la précieuse plante du gin-seng de Tartarie, découverte en Canada, spoke for itself.330 In addition to claiming to have discovered ginseng, Lafitau‘s Mémoire argued that he and his confrères possessed a unique and privileged insight into the cultural and natural environments of

French North America; Lafitau closely interwove his own study of American ginseng into his study of both American flora and of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) culture.331 With the publication of his 1718 Mémoire, Lafitau therefore privileged the position of the Society of

Jesus as intermediaries between the Old World and the New in the position to speak for both exotic flora and the indigenous cultures who knew its secrets. He positioned himself and his order as overseas collaborators with the Académie who contributed to French botanical science in their own right, rather than as mere informants.332

329 Ibid.; As you will see below, there was no standard spelling for ginseng in the eighteenth-century. Rather than standardize the spelling, or including [sic] in each instance where the spelling varies, I have left the original spelling of the word unaltered.

330 Lafitau, Mémoire.

331 Jesuits named the mission Saint François-Xavier, but it was also known for its geographic location at the Sault Saint Louis. This chapter will refer to Kahnawake throughout. Lafitau lived and worked at Kahnawake between 1712 and 1717. For a brief overview of the mission at Kahnawake, see Grabowski, ―Common Ground,‖ 54 – 56.

332 The French Jesuits in North America such as Joseph-François Lafitau who sought to contribute to the Académie Royale des Sciences were not unique. See Chapter 2, note 197 for recent studies of Jesuit scientific activity throughout the early modern world.

142

On the surface, Lafitau‘s visit to the Académie attracted little attention from the

French scientific community, and it has been virtually ignored by historians since. Yet, even if this was the Jesuit‘s first visit to the Académie in person, it was the third time in fifteen months that the Académie had discussed Lafitau‘s investigations of ginseng. In

January of 1717 many of the same members who received Lafitau the following year discussed an article on his claims that had been published that same month in the Jesuit edited Mémoires pour servir à l‟histoire des sciences et des arts, better known as the

Journal de Trévoux for the city in which it was initially produced. Almost a full year later, on December 4th 1717, the Académie again discussed Lafitau‘s research. This time, however, Lafitau‘s work met its critics. The botanist Danty d‘Isnard led the charge against the Jesuit and his claims, arguing both that the Jesuit had conflated two distinct botanical species and that his method, which involved a close comparison of the plant‘s cultural contexts in North America and East Asia, was illegitimate. Ultimately, even those members of the Académie who were convinced by Lafitau such as Antoine de Jussieu and Sébastien

Vaillant credited the discovery to their own Académie and Michel Sarrazin, then the sole corresponding member of their Académie in North America. In manuscripts and printed works produced in 1717 and 1718 and in discussions at the meetings of the Académie, these authors neatly excised the Jesuit from accounts that emphasized the reach and efficacy of the Académie‘s own Atlantic networks.

The history of the competing narratives of the Jesuits and the Académie is inseparable from that of ginseng itself. In this chapter I am less interested in analyzing these texts to gauge accuracy and to assign credit to those authors who got it right than I am in understanding the relationship between the circulation of these narratives and the

143 representation of both the plant and the scientific community of the French Atlantic World.

The conception of the plant itself bore the imprint of each new text, whether written by

Jesuits or naturalists at the Académie Royale des Sciences. There was only one ginseng, but each account emphasized specific facets of the plant‘s human and natural histories, accentuating morphological, etymological or medicinal characteristics of the plant in such a way that it quickly becomes possible for us to describe American ginseng in the plural. In the texts of Lafitau and his confrères, ginseng was first and foremost a root, valuable both for its prominence in global trading networks and as concrete evidence of the contributions of the Society of Jesus to the French people. While influenced by the methods common to contemporary botanical sciences, Lafitau‘s study of ginseng inserted the plant into global commercial economies and ennobled the otherwise unremarkable plant by associating it both with the global mission of the Society of Jesus and the efforts of the French crown to develop an Atlantic empire. For naturalists such as Sébastien

Vaillant, Antoine de Jussieu and Danty d‘Isnard, ginseng was instead defined by its floral structure, and the analysis of each pistil and stamen inserted American ginseng into a scientific economy where the plant was principally valued for its novelty. Each text experimented with and tested ginseng, deploying new methods of investigation and drawing inspiration from competing narratives.

Visually the plant that botanists now call Panax quinquefolius stands out little from the flora of the Saint Lawrence Valley where it was described and collected by Lafitau.333

Yet the debate over ginseng‘s identity quickly grew out of proportion to the physically diminutive plant, as attempts to fashion ginseng‘s botanical identity became closely linked

333 Today botanists recognize P. quinquefolius as closely related, but not identical, to the P. ginseng that grows in Asia.

144 to the efforts of the Académie Royale des Sciences and the Society of Jesus to bring divergent visions of an Atlantic scientific community to life. Between 1716 and 1718, both

Lafitau and his confrères and naturalists at the Académie Royale des Sciences sought to shape the evolution of an intellectual community that was still inchoate. Each attempt to claim discovery therefore rested not only upon different descriptions and conceptions of the plant, but also upon the efforts of different networks of collection and communication that collectively gave life to the early modern French Atlantic World.

As American ginseng became the focal point of competing narratives, the fate of the plant itself - how it was identified, named and understood – therefore became inextricably tied to a larger debate about the character and constitution of a scientific community in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic World. The members of the

Académie sought to impose a geography that centred scientific activity on Paris onto the scientific networks of the Atlantic World. Akin to what Ralph Bauer has called the

―epistemic mercantilism‖ of the Spanish and Anglo-Atlantic empires, the Académie sought to map a division of scientific labour onto the French Atlantic World, producing a typology of scientific actors as rigidly structured and hierarchical as the botanical taxonomies that defined ginseng.334 Individuals such as Lafitau and the indigenous peoples with whom he lived were given a limited role in this vision as providers of the raw materials from which

Parisian naturalists could wrench scientific truths. The debate over the identity of ginseng therefore demonstrated that colonial naturalists such as Lafitau were willing to articulate visions of an Atlantic scientific community which opposed those of the Académie.

Inverting the Académie‘s epistemic geography, Lafitau claimed a central role for aboriginal

334 Bauer, Cultural Geography, 4, passim. Parrish refers to this same phenomenon as ―epistemic arrogance.‖ See Parrish, American Curiosity, 114.

145 peoples and indigenous ecological knowledge and positioned the Society of Jesus as a mediator between European audiences and American environments. Lafitau‘s method drew upon linguistic and anthropological skills that he claimed were essential for understanding flora and environments that were both human and natural.

The history of American ginseng in the early eighteenth century therefore offers us a unique vantage point from which to study the evolution of scientific practice and community in the Atlantic World. The competing narratives of ginseng‘s discovery hinted at a dialogue that emerged between two organizations – the Académie Royale des Sciences and the Society of Jesus – from which we more often expect one-sided pronouncements.

This dialogue about the identity and nature of American ginseng made social and cultural practices that were most often invisible in surviving scientific texts explicit. Inspired and written against competing visions of both the plant and the proper means to study it, each new narrative refined arguments and demonstrated a continued commitment to mutually incompatible visions for the future of botanical research in the Atlantic World. The clamour raised by these competing narratives will become our Ariadne‘s thread, leading us through a consideration of the changing nature and interaction of the many knowledge systems of

French North America and the French Atlantic World.

Early Whispers of the Discovery of Ginseng in the Journal de Trévoux

The earliest report of Lafitau‘s discovery of ginseng near the Jesuit mission at

Kahnawake was an article that appeared in the January 1717 edition of the Journal de

Trévoux entitled ―Le Genseng, Plante si precieuse à la Chine, découverte dans le

146

Canada.‖335 The Journal de Trévoux was a predictable venue for an article that, while authored by Jesuits, was aimed at an audience beyond members of the Society of Jesus.336

The account itself, like all others that appeared in the Journal de Trévoux, was presented with neither author nor comment. Yet, based on similarities between some of the phrasing in the Journal de Trévoux and Lafitau‘s 1718 Mémoire, it is clear that even if Lafitau was not the sole author of the article, the text was at least based on some of the Jesuit‘s written work.337 The article in the Journal de Trévoux did not claim to know when Lafitau made his discovery but it nonetheless established a brief narrative that would serve as the structure for a much longer Mémoire that was published the following year.

The publication of Lafitau‘s discovery furthered a growing interest in adapting

Jesuit work for a scientific audience that grew out of a larger commitment to their

―ministries among the learned‖ that went back to Ignatius.338 By the time that Lafitau began his work on ginseng, his society had a fairly successful track record of integrating their astronomical observations with the work of Cassini, Huygens and other members of the Académie Royale des Sciences.339 Part of a larger commitment to their efforts to

335 ―Le Genseng, Plante si précieuse à la Chine, découverte dans le Canada,‖ Mémoires pour l‟Histoire des Sciences & des Beaux-Arts (1717): 121 – 24.

336 The Journal de Trévoux sought a popular, although still educated, audience and was intended to compete for the attention of readers who might otherwise turn to protestant journals for coverage of recent scientific discoveries and publications – See Stéphane Van Damme, ―Education, Sociability and Written Culture : the case of the Society of Jesus in France,‖ Blumenthal lectures – Cornell University, October 2002, Les Dossiers du Grihl, http://dossiersgrihl.revues.org/752.

337 Both the article in the Journal de Trévoux and Lafitau‘s Mémoire contain the phrase ―sans une communication d‘idées, & par consequent de persones,‖ – see ―Le Genseng, Plante si précieuse,‖ 122, and Lafitau, Mémoire, 16.

338 Harris, ―Confession-Building," 292.

339 Florence Hsia, ―Jesuits, Jupiter‘s Satellites, and the Académie Royale des Sciences,‖ in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540 – 1773, ed. John W. O‘Malley S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, T. Frank Kennedy S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 248 – 249.

147 engage the intellectual and political elites of Europe, these efforts provided Jesuits with a new set of material and discursive practices with which to study colonial plants and ecologies.340

By 1717 Lafitau had spent five years at the mission at Kahnawake and had acquired a respectable command of local languages and at least some familiarity with the local natural environment.341 Nonetheless, the Journal de Trévoux cautioned that ―The Pere

Lafitau has not yet had the time to prove if the genseng of Canada has the same virtue and the same properties as those which the Chinese attribute to their genseng.‖ 342 Lafitau had only had a few months of experience with the plant before he sent his report and some specimens to Paris in 1716 and he could initially claim only limited firsthand knowledge of the plant. While this preliminary study of ginseng relied on the knowledge of

Haudenosaunee culture assembled by Lafitau‘s confrères at Kahnawake such as Jacques

Bruyas and Julien Garnier, Lafitau‘s discovery was presented as an extension of the pioneering botanical work of Pierre Jartoux, a Jesuit who had been in China since 1701 and who had written an account of his own discovery of ginseng. The Journal de Trévoux did not specifically name Jartoux as the Jesuit who had inspired Lafitau‘s research, yet the account made it clear that Lafitau had been inspired by a letter that his confrère had written to the ―Procureur-Général des missions des Indes et de la Chine,‖ from Beijing on the 12th of April, 1711 and that had been distributed globally as part of the tenth edition of the

340 Harris, ―Confession-Building," 292.

341 Lafitau clearly profited from an apprenticeship with Jesuit missionaries who had spent decades in the missions of French North America while he was at Québec, Sillery and at Kahnawake. The best overview of the training in aboriginal language and custom that Lafitau acquired is in Fenton and Moore, ―J.-F. Lafitau (1681-1746), Precursor of Scientific Anthropology,‖ 173. For more on the Jesuit encounter with indigenous languages see Hanzeli, Missionary Linguistics and Leahey, ―"Comment peut un muet.‖

342 ―Le Genseng, Plante si précieuse,‖ 122.

148 collection of missionary reports known as the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses published in

1713.343 Published between 1702 and 1773, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses bridged a gap between Asia and Europe and between the Old World and the New, providing

European audiences with rich view of non-European cultures and the global Jesuit mission; if, as Catherine Desbarats has written, ―over the course of centuries the Jesuits played a primordial role, more and more recognized, in the constitution and the transmission of knowledge about the non-European world,‖ it was periodicals such as the Lettres édifiantes that became the sinews of their global information networks.344 The account of Lafitau‘s discovery in the Journal de Trévoux not only cited Jartoux‘s letter but claimed that it had made an etymological and morphological comparison of Chinese and American ginseng possible, permitting Lafitau to prove that that they were both in fact the same plant.345

Jartoux‘s letter had provided Lafitau and its otherwise primarily European audience with the first comprehensive written and visual descriptions of the ginseng plant. Yet

Jartoux‘s discovery of ginseng was at least initially little more than a distraction from his involvement in the effort to provide new, more accurate maps of the Chinese empire demanded by the Kangxi emperor and executed primarily by Jesuits.346 As the mathematical, astronomical and engineering skills of the Jesuits had provided the Society

343 Pierre Jartoux, ―Lettre du Père Jartoux, missionaire de la Compagnie de Jèsus, au père Procureur- Général des missions des Indes et de la Chine,‖ Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des Missions étrangeres vol. 10 (1713): 71.

344 Desbarats, ed., Lettres Édifiantes Et Curieuses, 226. For a recent study of the global reach and organization of Jesuit information networks see Clossey, Salvation and Globalization.

345 ―Le Genseng, Plante si précieuse,‖ 121 – 24.

346 For a brief overview of the 10 year mapping project directed by the Jesuits, see Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York & London: WW Norton & Company, 1999), 112 – 14. For a broader introduction to Jesuit scientific activity in their Chinese missions, see Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land.

149 of Jesus with access to the intellectual and cultural elite of China for over a century, so too had Jartoux‘s participation in the mapping of China permitted access to environments that had rarely been observed or describe by European authors.347 In 1709, Jartoux was in the north of China in a region that he knew as Tartarie where, he wrote, he was able to observe the organized collection of ginseng and its preparation for Chinese markets.348

―The map of Tartarie, that we are making by order of the Emperor of China, has provided us with occasion to see the famous plant gin-seng, so esteemed in China and little known in Europe,‖ Jartoux wrote.349 He soon made clear, however, that his access to local plant collectors and the ability to observe the processing and consumption of the plant was as important as unfettered access to Asian ecosystems. As Lafitau would also do, Jartoux focused much of his description on the local cultural contexts of ginseng. Jartoux wrote that

―The most intelligent doctors of China have produced entire volumes on the properties of this plant.‖ 350 His account drew both from his own observations in Tartarie in 1709 and the research of his confrères into these Chinese medical texts.351 Jartoux was able to collect a great deal of information about the place of ginseng in Chinese medicine and its putative medicinal qualities. For example, Jartoux repeated accounts that suggested that ginseng

―dissolves phlegm, that it cures weakness in the lungs and pleurisy, that it strengthens vital

347 Waley-Cohen, Sextants of Beijing, 64 – 72.

348 For an overview of the collection, preparation and sale of ginseng in China, see Brian L. Evans, ―Ginseng: Root of Chinese-Canadian Relations,‖ Canadian Historical Review 66, no. 1 (1985): 1 – 26.

349 Jartoux, ―Lettre du Père Jartoux,‖ 71.

350 Ibid., 72.

351 Ibid.; for another summary of Jesuit research into ginseng see Jean-Baptise Du Halde, Description Géographique, Historique, Chronologique, Politique, et Physique de l‟empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (Paris: P.G. Le Mercier, 1735), 3: 460 – 74. This ―Recueil de differentes recettes, employées par les médecins chinois pour la guerison de divereses maladies‖ quotes numerous Chinese sources on the plant and reveals the extent of Jesuit research into Chinese medical texts and history.

150 spirits and produces lymph in the blood; it is also good for vertigo and for blindness induced by glare, and it prolongs the life of the elderly.‖352 Indeed, the fact the Chinese wrote so frequently and effusively about ginseng was marshaled as proof in and of itself of the plant‘s medicinal power.353

In addition, Jartoux provided analysis and evidence drawn from his own experiments with ginseng. After providing a drawing of the plant, for instance, he wrote that ―… I tested my pulse to understand the situation it was in: next I took half of the root entirely raw, without any preparation, and one hour after I found my pulse much fuller and lively; I had an appetite, I felt much more vigorous and a facility for work that I had not had beforehand.‖354 Jartoux wrote that four days later, when he was exhausted from the labour and travel that accompanied his cartographic mission to Tartarie, ―a mandarin of our group … gave me one of these roots‖ which promptly revived his flagging spirits.355 This mandarin also introduced Jartoux to Chinese methods of consumption and preparation of the root. Jartoux wrote that later he even made tea with the leaves of the plant, after the custom of the local ―Tartares.‖356

Jartoux‘s account was also the first that provided a complete botanical description of ginseng as it existed before being processed and readied for trade as a commodity.357

352 Jartoux, ―Lettre du Père Jartoux,‖ 72.

353 Ibid.

354 Ibid., 73.

355 Ibid.

356 Ibid.

357 Earlier images had circulated in the texts of seventeenth-century naturalists such as Nehemiah Grew and John Ray. Both of these naturalists, for example, based their own accounts of the plant on images drawn ―drawn from life‖ in Willem Piso‘s De Indiae utriusque re natural et medic Mantissa aromatica that had been published in 1658. Piso‘s work, in turn, was inspired by (some at the time, claimed stolen from)

151

While Asian ginseng had been arriving in Europe since the expansion of the Dutch trading presence in East Asia in the early seventeenth century, the botanical identity of the plant had long remained elusive. The specimens that arrived in Europe had been transported along European commercial networks which drew upon the wider Asian pharmaceutical marketplace in which the plant had been prepared to meet the aesthetic and medical needs of a market far larger than the handful of European botanists interested in plant morphology. What arrived in Europe was a shriveled root that lacked any of the characteristics necessary to accurately identify or name it. The European botanists that first

―discovered‖ ginseng therefore encountered it as a product, lacking the material cues that botanists claimed to need to understand it fully and that were required to fit it into the increasingly elaborate taxonomies created by renaissance and early modern naturalists.358

Throughout the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries in China had been invaluable in amassing information about ginseng‘s uses and medicinal effects, but they had thus far contributed little to the botanical study of the plant itself.359 Jartoux‘s account therefore found an eager audience in Europe and was soon endorsed by the Académie Royale des

Jacobus Bontius, a Dutch naturalist who worked for the Dutch East India Company and worked in East Asia. See John H. Appleby, ―Ginseng and the Royal Society,‖ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 37, no. 2 (Mar, 1983): 124 and Cook, Matters of Exchange, 214 – 225.

358 For an overview of the evolution of botany in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Ogilvie, Science of Describing, Scharf, ―Identification Keys and the natural method,‖ and Roger Williams, Botanophilia in Eighteenth-Century France: The Spirit of the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). For a more general account of the history of botany from antiquity to early modern Europe, see Anna Pavord, The naming of names: the search for order in the world of plants (London: Bloomsbury, 2005) and Julius von Sachs, History of Botany (1530 – 1860), trans. Henry E. F. Garnsey (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press,1890)

359 See Appleby, ―Ginseng,‖ 121 – 22.

152

Sciences. In 1713 a shorter version was translated into English and published in the Royal

Society of London‘s journal, the Philosophical Transactions.360

The account of Lafitau‘s discovery published in the Journal de Trévoux made it clear that the labour of his confrères in Asia had directly informed Lafitau‘s own investigations. Yet in the Journal de Trévoux the details of his discovery and identification of the plant itself were sparse and, for example, contained no reference to either colonial or indigenous collectors. Writing only that Lafitau ―had searched for it carefully, and had finally discovered it,‖ the article made it clear that his study of the plant had involved far more than wandering through Canadian forests looking for a recognizable leaf shape and floral colour.361 The text instead emphasized Lafitau‘s intellectual contributions to the study of the plant and, in particular, his comparison of Chinese knowledge of ginseng (as it had been recorded by Jartoux) with his own firsthand observations of Haudenosaunee cultures.362 The text therefore assigned Lafitau a dual role in the narrative. As both an empirical investigator and as an analyst and compiler of other people‘s work, this discovery narrative thrust Lafitau into a position of botanical authority normally occupied by naturalists at the Académie Royale des Sciences.

If the Journal de Trévoux cautioned that Lafitau‘s experience with the plant was limited, it nonetheless offered some insights into the methods that he had used to study the plant. It stated, for instance, that ―he assures … that a sauvage, long tormented by a violent

360 Pierre Jartoux, ―The Description of a Tartarian Plant, Call‘d Gin-Seng: with an Account of Its Virtues. In a Letter from Father Jartoux, to the Procurator General of the Missions of India and China. Taken from the Tenth Volume of Letters of the Missionary Jesuits, Printed at Paris in Octavo, 1713,‖ Philosophical Transactions (1683 – 1775), 28 (1713): 237 – 247.

361 ―Le Genseng, Plante si précieuse,‖ 122.

362 Ibid.

153 fever, had been cured in a few days after drinking water to which he had added this root that had been ground between two stones.‖363 The article situated Lafitau‘s work as the product of observations of both indigenous peoples and the ginseng plant, claiming that

―The sauvages most knowledgeable of simples have similarly assured this missionary that they use it with success for several sicknesses.‖364 In the end, it was this cultural knowledge, and the comparisons with the Chinese use of ginseng that it permitted, that was displayed most prominently in the Journal de Trévoux. Rather than focusing on the comparison of the botanical features of American ginseng with the descriptions and images provided by Jartoux, Lafitau‘s research was said to be best exemplified by the etymological analysis of the Chinese and Iroquoian words for the plant. ―This plant is called garentoguen in Canada, & this Iroquoian word signifies the same thing as the Chinese word ginseng,‖ the article argued.365 Both, it was written, meant roughly ―representation of man, resemblance to man.‖366 Providing evidence not only that the plant existed in both

American and Asian ecosystems, the article hinted at an argument that would later define

Lafitau‘s study of American aboriginal cultures. It explained that ―… two names so similar in their signification could not be given to the same thing without a communication of ideas, & by consequence of people: from this one could conclude that these oriental

Tartares whose customs resemble those of the sauvages, are not so distant from Canada as

363 Ibid., 122 – 23.

364 Ibid., 123.

365 Ibid., 122.

366 Ibid.

154 one thinks.‖367 Lafitau‘s discovery was botanical and anthropological, and argued for a new understanding of both ecosystems and cultures in Asia and North America.

Although the article that appeared in the Journal de Trévoux in January 1717 appeared to offer the first written presentation of Lafitau‘s discovery, it also suggested that at least some contemporary naturalists had already responded critically to what the Jesuit proposed. It is impossible to know how word reached these critics, but they might have become aware as specimens of the plant were presented to the Regent of France, the Duke of Orléans.368 The text itself did not identify any specific critics, referring instead only to

―some people.‖369 It does, however, outline the grounds of their criticism: the fact that the specimens sent from North America differed from the images of ginseng produced by the physician Engelbert Kaempfer. Kaempfer had travelled to Japan via Russia and the Middle

East and had established himself as a reputable source of information about the extra-

European world as he worked for the Swedish crown and, later, the Dutch East India

Company. His description of ginseng, produced ―under the botanist‘s knife‖ he wrote, exhibited the same focus on plant morphology that defined the work of contemporary

European botany.370 Ginseng, or ninjin as Kaempfer called it, appeared as part of his

Plantae Japonicae, a text that Kaempfer wrote about his botanical research between 1689

367 Ibid.

368 Ibid., 123.

369 Ibid.

370 Wolfgang Muntschick, ―Plants that Carry His Name: Englebert Kaempfer‘s Study of the Japanese Flora,‖ The Furthest Goal: Engelbert Kaempfer‟s Encounter with Tokugawa Japan, eds., Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey and Derek Massarella (Kent, UK: The Japan Library, 1995), 81. See also Englebert Kaempfer, Kaempfer‟s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed, eds., Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999)

155 and 1692 when he had resided in Nagasaki.371 In the early eighteenth century Kaempfer had become an irrefutable source for information on ginseng, as reputable for his method and his training as his extensive travels in the Middle East and Asia.

The Académie’s Response: Danty d’Isnard and Vaillant

While this passage in the article in the Journal de Trévoux neglected to name

Lafitau‘s early detractors, the physician and botanist Antoine Tristan Danty d‘Isnard was soon Lafitau‘s most public critic. A member of the Académie since January 1716, Danty d‘Isnard was also a former botanical demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi.372 Lafitau‘s work was first discussed at the Académie‘s meeting of January 16, 1717. Yet the minutes of the meeting do not permit an analysis of the initial response to Lafitau‘s research. Directly copying roughly two of the four pages of the article that had appeared in the Journal de

Trévoux that same month, the minutes of the meeting demonstrate only that naturalists at the Académie were aware of Lafitau‘s claims to a remarkable botanical discovery at

Kahnawake.373 Whether Danty d‘Isnard kept his concerns to himself or whether they simply were not recorded is impossible to know. What is certain is that by the time that the

Académie met on the fourth of December of that same year, Danty d‘Isnard had prepared a detailed critique of both Lafitau‘s claim to have discovered ginseng in North America and

371 Muntschick, ―Plants that carry his name,‖ 79 – 80, 89; Modern botanists and historians believe he had confused ginseng with the Asian perennial ―sugar root‖ (Sium sisarum L.) see Ibid., 89.

372 ―In memoriam – Liste alphabétique I – Les membres de l‘Académie des sciences,‖ Institut de France, Académie des sciences, http://www.academie- sciences.fr/membres/in_memoriam/in_memoriam_liste_alphabetique_i.htm

373 Académie Royale des Sciences, Procès-verbaux T.36 (1717), 11.

156 the work of his confrère Jartoux that had inspired him. The remarks that Danty d‘Isnard made ―on the ginseng of China and that of Canada,‖ revealed both his lack of faith in the

Jesuit method of studying Chinese and North American floras and a demonstration of the means that Danty d‘Isnard considered appropriate in their place.374

In December of 1717, Danty d‘Isnard attempted to refute statements about Lafitau‘s discovery line by line. He quickly declared his support for Kaempfer‘s research and systematically repudiated the Jesuits‘ claims that the German physician‘s work had been inferior to their own. Whereas the Jesuit authors at the Journal de Trévoux had asserted, for instance, that ―Mr. Kaempfer says, that the plant that he is describing, grows in China, it does not grow there, the Chinese themselves assure it,‖ Danty d‘Isnard countered that by citing ―the statements of Mr. Kaempfer that one obtains Ginseng from Korea, and that it grows on the mountains of this country, and not in China.‖375 While the Jesuits had been magnanimous enough to suggest that Kaempfer may have actually described Asian ginseng even if he was mistaken in some key details, Danty d‘Isnard rejected both Jartoux‘s and

Lafitau‘s accounts equally.376

For the anonymous Jesuits who first wrote a narrative of Lafitau‘s discovery in the

Journal de Trévoux, botanical similarities between the plants described and drawn by

Jartoux and presented as specimens by Lafitau had been entirely adequate; presented with few significant details, however, their text provided little sense of what parts of the plants had been compared or how the analysis had been conducted. Within the Journal de

374 Ibid.

375 Ibid., 309 – 10.

376 ―Le Genseng, Plante si précieuse,‖ 123 – 24.

157

Trévoux, hints of botanical similarities had instead been nested within a larger argument about cultural continuities and human and botanical migrations from the Old World to the

New.377 This larger argument privileged ethnographic data collected by the Jesuits from personal observations of indigenous cultures at the expense of botanical analysis, and had challenged the superiority of the methods extolled by contemporary botanists as the sole means for sure knowledge of the natural world. Danty d‘Isnard‘s attack was therefore more than a criticism. It was instead a careful dissection and demolition of Lafitau‘s methodology and research.

In addressing his concerns to the gathered members of the Académie, Danty d‘Isnard proceeded to highlight the facile equivalencies established between Asian and

American plants and the descriptions provided by Kaempfer and Jartoux. After quoting the

Jesuit statement that ―After all the difference is not so great between the description of P.

Jartoux, and that of Mr. Kaempfer, that they could not fit the same plant‖ which had appeared in the Journal de Trévoux, Danty d‘Isnard carefully demonstrated that the Jesuit account was rooted in observational error.378 ―One only need read these two descriptions and see these two figures of very different plants to be convinced of the contrary,‖ he argued. Danty d‘Isnard outlined Kaempfer‘s description of ginseng as he wrote that: ―The root is composed of several tubers (navets), from its collar (collet) emerges a fluted and branched stem, with many winged and alternating leaves, similar to those of ordinary chervis. The umbels that finish the stem and its branches are loaded with white flowers, composed of five petals cut away at the heart, which proceeds to dry fruit, to two seeds

377 Ibid., 121 – 22.

378 Académie Royale des Sciences, Procès-verbaux T.36 (1717), 310.

158 which are an obscure russet when they are ripe.‖379 In the article published in the Journal de Trévoux there was little botanical description of American ginseng provided and so, as

Danty d‘Isnard continued his critique, it was to the description in Jartoux‘s account of

Asian ginseng that he turned. ―In the Gin-seng represented and described by P. Jartoux,‖ he wrote: ―the root is a single tuber (navet), most often whole, and sometimes forked, from where a simple stem, surrounded half way up by several leaves open like a hand, these leaves start with a long stalk (queuë) which divides itself at its end into five other little stalks, of which each one supports a leaf.‖380 Danty d‘Isnard was no doubt well trained in this sort of thick botanical description from his time as a botanical demonstrator at the

Jardin du Roi and his summary of each description was detailed and precise. As he produced a verbal image of the plants described by Jartoux and Kaempfer, he clearly felt that the differences were self-evident. At the bottom of a page littered with the scientific names of morphological features, his description finished simply. Without any grand argument or analysis required, Danty d‘Isnard remarked simply that ―One sees by what I have said, that these plants are of different genera.‖381

As a physician himself, it was possible that professional chauvinism inclined Danty d‘Isnard to favour Kaempfer‘s description. Yet as he attacked Jartoux and Lafitau, he provided few concrete clues as to why he preferred Kaempfer‘s descriptions beyond refusing to discuss the ethnographic facets of Jesuit research that they themselves had considered essential to their study of ginseng. For example, he did not even mention the

379 Ibid.

380 Ibid.

381 Ibid.

159 etymological analysis of the Iroquoian name for the plant, garentoguen, and its association with the Chinese word ginseng. He similarly ignored the analysis and comparison of the plant‘s preparation and medical usage that the article in the Journal de Trévoux had suggested further testified to botanical continuities between East Asia and northeastern

North America. Danty d‘Isnard considered Jesuit discussions of these continuities illegitimate, rather than simply implausible. The Jesuits‘ accounts were instead judged by their botanical descriptions alone, which he dismissed as inadequate and erroneous. Lafitau and Jartoux may have found the same plant in Tartarie and Kahnawake, Danty d‘Isnard allowed, but neither matched the description produced by the more reputable and adequately educated Kaempfer.382 Neither could therefore claim to have discovered ginseng in its native habitat, whatever their study of extra-European cultures suggested.

Yet the account of Lafitau‘s discovery also found at least some support among the members of the Académie. While Danty d‘Isnard hinted that he knew other members of the

Académie who shared his concerns about Lafitau‘s claims, the botanist Sébastien Vaillant soon publicly stated his belief that ginseng had been found in North America. Yet

Vaillant‘s support soon revealed itself to be as problematic for Lafitau as Danty d‘Isnard‘s criticism had been. Like Danty d‘Isnard, Vaillant had been elected a member of the

Académie in 1716 but he had already been employed at the Jardin du Roi for over two decades where he had worked under the supervision of and in collaboration with the celebrated botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.383 On the 9th of February, 1718, only two months after he had first publicly criticised Lafitau‘s research, Danty d‘Isnard read a paper

382 Ibid.

383 Williams, Botanophilia, 12 – 13.

160 written by Vaillant (who did not attend the meeting himself) to the members of the

Académie. The paper established a new genus of plant named Araliastrum and was published later that same year as an appendix to Vaillant‘s Discours sur la structure des fleurs, leurs differences et l‟usage de leurs parties. The Discours was itself a copy of a lecture that had been ―pronounced at the opening of the Jardin du Roi de Paris, the 10th day of the month of June 1717.‖384 Vaillant‘s text identified two other genera as well, with all three serving as models for a new means of identifying plants that focused on floral structure and that, prefiguring the contributions of Carolus Linnaeus, suggested that plants reproduced sexually.385

Vaillant‘s text announced the creation of ―a new genus of plant named

ARALIASTRUM of which the famous Ninzin or Ginseng of the Chinese is a species.‖386

Like Joseph Pitton de Tournefort before him, and in following the standard practices of

European botany since the early seventeenth century, Vaillant focused his description on the botanical genus rather than the individual species.387 This meant that individual species could be distinguished with the greatest possible economy, highlighting only those features

384 Académie Royale des Sciences, Procès-verbaux T.37 (1718), 65, and Sébastien Vaillant, Discours sur la Structure des Fleurs, leurs differences et l‟usage de leurs parties; Prononcé à l‟Ouverture du Jardin Royal de Paris, le Xe. Jour du mois de Juin 1717 ET L‟etablissement de trois nouveaux genres de plantes, L‟Araliastrum, La Sherardia, La Boerhaavia. Avec la Description de deux nouvelles Plantes raportées au dernier genre (Leiden: Pierre Vander, 1718).

385 Roger Williams makes the case that Vaillant‘s Discours is a landmark in botanical history that has been overlooked in the centuries since because of Vaillant‘s own fall from grace within the Académie that followed his challenge to the intellectual legacy of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. See Williams, Botanophilia, 9 – 18.

386 Vaillant, Discours, 40.

387 See Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, and Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations, 151 – 181.

161 that differed from the more abstract description of the genus.388 Describing this genus, he wrote that: ―The Araliastrum is a genus, ... of which the flower … is complete, … regular, polypetaled, & hermaphroditic, … the ovary crowns the calyx which has several points, becoming a base…, in which are ordinarily found two flattened seeds, cut like a kidney or in half circle, which represent together a type of heart. Additionally, the simple stem is terminated by an umbel, of which each pedicel (rayons) carry only one flower, & this root is attached above its middle, like that of the Anemone, by a circular assemblage of some stalks (queuës), at the end of which appear several leaves disposed in rows.‖389 Ginseng was further identified below as the first of four species of Araliastrum and given the name

Araliastrum Quinquefolii folio, majus, Ninzin vocatum, D. Sarrazin. In a text where morphological descriptions drowned out discussions of medicinal properties or commercial value, ginseng was therefore only recorded as a species of Araliastrum that was differentiated by its five large leaves. There was no mention of Lafitau, the

Haudenosaunee, or even of North America in this description. The only other information attached referenced the Académie‘s sole North American member, the royal physician of

New France Michel Sarrazin, and the Japanese name for the plant, Ninzin, that had been used in Kaempfer‘s published work.390 Vaillant‘s account inserted the plant into networks in which authority circulated among a small body of trained and reputable botanical observers and published botanical texts.

388 This is what Staffan Müller-Wille has called the ―taxonomic gaze.‖ See ―Walnuts in Hudson‘s Bay,‖ 37 – 38.

389 Vaillant, Discours, 40.

390 Michel Sarrazin was elected a corresponding member of the Académie in 1700, and was officially bound to the botany professor and academician Joseph-Pitton de Tournefort. For more on Michel Sarrazin see Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien, and Young, ―Crown Agent,‖ See also Chapter 4 of this dissertation.

162

Both as it was presented to the assembled members of the Académie by Danty d‘Isnard and as it was delivered to the reading public of France as a printed text, Vaillant‘s description of ginseng redefined and erased the contributions of the Society of Jesus and

American indigenous peoples to the discovery of the plant. Vaillant began his own discovery narrative earlier than the contributions of either Jartoux or Lafitau. He explained to his audience that the species of Araliastrum ―are common in Canada, from where Mr.

Sarrazin councilor to the Superior Council, Royal Physician and Correspondent of the l‘Académie Royale des Sciences had sent [them] to the Jardin du Roi of Paris for the first time in the year 1700.‖391 Suggesting that Sarrazin sent more than just specimens to his

Parisian correspondents, Vaillant also offered some hints about the local ecological contexts of the plant. Vaillant noted, for instance, that ―The Ninzin, or first Araliastrum, can be found in the woods situated under the 45th & 46th degrees of latitude; & the second under the 47th.‖392 Otherwise, much of the information provided discussed Aralia caulo aphylo, radice repente, a plant called Salsepareille by the colonists that was closely related to ginseng and which, having been the basis of medical and botanical experiments in New

France, was more familiar to Sarrazin.393

From Vaillant‘s text it seemed that Sarrazin had barely noticed American ginseng beyond a few key morphological and ecological features when he had collected it in 1700.

This ambivalence was mirrored in the few surviving texts that document the Académie‘s early study of the plant before Lafitau recognized it as ginseng. The earliest surviving

391 Académie Royale des Sciences, Procès-verbaux T.37 (1718), 32 – 33.

392 Vaillant, Discours, 46.

393 Ibid., 44.

163 reference to the plant was written in 1704 in a manuscript entitled Plantes envoyees de

Canada par Mr. Sarrazin. Likely assembled by Vaillant, this text was little more than its title, simply listing the plants that been sent from Canada with only rare glimpses into aboriginal and colonial use of American flora. This text tentatively named the plant

―Plantula marilandica foliis in summo cauliculo ternis, quorum unum quodque quinquefarium dividitur, circa marginis serratis, Raii. Hist. 3‖ but placed it in a section towards the end of the document that grouped together ―Plants to name.‖394 With this tentative naming, the plant was discursively associated with another plant that had been collected in Maryland a decade earlier and that had been named in the most recent edition of the botanical work of the English botanist John Ray. As this book was likely not yet available to Sarrazin, it would appear that this identification was the work of Vaillant.395 In

1704 little was therefore known about the plant beyond its North American provenance and a possible range that extended from New France to Maryland. It was simply one of many unnamed plants interesting only because of its novelty and its contributions to growing

French taxonomical systems.

In 1708 Sébastien Vaillant compiled the letters, plant lists and specimens sent from

Canada by Sarrazin and produced the first French botanical text devoted exclusively to

North American plants, a manuscript entitled Histoires des plantes de Canada. This

394 ―Catalogue des plantes envoyées de Canada par Mr Sarrazin, conseiller du Conseil suprême et médecin du Roy en Canada,‖ MS 944, BCMNHN, 14.

395 While it is not possible to prove that Sarrazin did not have access to Ray‘s book, at the very least he did not own it at his death. See Rénald Lessard‘s analysis of Sarrazin‘s after death inventory in ―Le livre médical au sein du corps de santé canadien aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,‖ Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 12 (1995), 237 – 38, note. 27. Stéphanie Tésio‘s research suggests that medical texts were available in New France fairly quickly after they were first published in Paris, either as they were ordered by colonial medical practitioners or as they arrived with new colonists, Histoire de la pharmacie en France et en Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe siècle (Sainte-Foy, Québec: Les Presses de l‘Université Laval, 2009), 115 – 32.

164 manuscript reaffirmed the name Plantula marilandica… and stated that Sarrazin had sent the plant to Paris as specimen no. 73 in 1700.396 Likely copying Sarrazin‘s own account of the plant, the Histoire des plantes de Canada described the plant as follows: ―Its roots are plump like that of the Ornithogalum. It releases a stem so delicate that it is impossible not to break when collecting it. It has a length of around a foot and produces 2 / 3 leaves arranged in a collar supported by inch long pedicels. They are oval and toothed. At the middle of these leaves the stem elevates two or three inches higher and support a bouquet of flowers arranged like an umbel. They have five pink petals… The pistil that exits from the base of the flower becomes a fruit that resembles a hemp seed and that I have only seen while green.‖397 Presented as an assemblage of specific morphological parts, the plant was studied without reference to a colonial or indigenous cultural context. In fact, the plant was studied without even once describing the strange shape of its roots.

Even if it was clear that neither Sarrazin nor Vaillant knew that Plantula marilandica was ginseng in 1700, 1704 or 1708, the narrative that Vaillant produced in his

1718 Discours privileged the preliminary investigations of the plant‘s morphology and erased the subsequent contributions of the Haudenosaunee and the Society of Jesus beyond their role in providing the Académie with specimens. In fact, Vaillant‘s narrative of the

American discovery of ginseng was a sort of non-narrative, demonstrating clearly that while plants could be found in North America, they could only be studied and named in

Paris. Vaillant implicitly denied that the plant had had a history before it was studied by

396 The earlier work of Jacques Cornut, author of Canadensium Plantarum aliarumque nondum editarum historia (Paris: S. Le Moyne, 1635) purported to deal exclusively with American plants but in fact included many from other parts of the world. See Chapter 5.

397 Boivin, La Flore du Canada, np.; The French were unable to grow the plant from seeds that Sarrazin and Lafitau sent to France so it seems likely that any account of the plant would be based on Sarrazin‘s observations.

165 members of the Académie. In privileging Sarrazin‘s earlier efforts to transport American flora as they studied ginseng, Vaillant and the Académie made a powerful statement to collectors such as the Jesuits who sought to bypass the Atlantic networks of the Académie and produce their own botanical research.

Lafitau’s Mémoire

By March of 1718 Lafitau was able to personally present his research to the

Académie and its members, yet by then he had to defend his work from both its critics and its supporters. This was a defence of his own research in French North America that had led to the discovery of ginseng and a more general argument for the legitimacy of the scientific work of the Society of Jesus in Europe and the wider world. Indeed, the Mémoire went beyond defending missionary-naturalists and was instead an effort to claim a central role for the Society of Jesus in studying the extra-European world, redefining the participation of missionary-naturalists at the peripheries of the French Atlantic World and challenging the Académie‘s arrogation of a privileged understanding of colonial environments. To do this, Lafitau penned more than a defence of his particular methods, and instead sought to demonstrate a new model of colonial science that embraced the knowledge (if not always the participation) of indigenous and colonial communities.

Intended therefore to be as much a manifesto as a rebuttal to the critiques of Danty d‘Isnard and the support of Vaillant, it was not surprising that Lafitau‘s Mémoire à son Altesse

Royale Mgr. le Duc D‟Orléans concernant la précieuse plante du gin-seng de Tartarie,

Découverte en Amérique stretched to 88 pages. Lafitau‘s Mémoire was a clear statement

166 that he would not capitulate to the members of the Académie who had attempted alternately to ridicule or silence him.

The accounts of ginseng‘s discovery produced by members of the Académie had sought to reduce the number of actors present in the narrative, limiting major roles to its own members and emphasizing the centrality of its own networks in the French Atlantic

World. The rising stature of the Académie Royale des Sciences had been tied closely to its ability to cultivate global networks while redefining and minimizing the contributions of collectors and correspondents.398 The Académie was emerging as the scientific authority in

France by challenging the right of individuals and bodies such as the Society of Jesus to investigate the natural world without its supervision and approval. In 1716, the members of the Académie had redefined membership yet again and had excluded Jesuits from even those minimal roles that had been left to them after a previous re-organization in 1699.399

Lafitau instead sought to enlarge the cast of the narrative dramatically, simultaneously positioning the Society of Jesus as an obligatory point of passage between the Académie and the indigenous and colonial communities who were otherwise beyond its reach.

Lafitau wrote that he ―had never heard anyone speak about Gin-seng in France.‖400

As he recounted it in his Mémoire, the business of the mission at Kahnawake had brought

398 For more on the expansion of the Académie Royale des Sciences in the French Atlantic World, see Chapter 4. See also, François Regourd and James McClellan III, ―French Science and Colonization in the Ancien régime : the ‗Machine coloniale‘,‖ Osiris vol. 15 (2000): 31-50 and François Régourd, ―Sciences et colonisation sous l'Ancien Régime. Le cas de la Guyane et des Antilles françaises, XVIIe - XVIIIe siècles‖ (Thèse, Université Bordeaux III - Michel de Montaigne, 2000). For more about the Académie Royale des Sciences as a scientific authority in France, see also Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666-1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 46 – 47, 58 – 60 and James McClellan III, Specialist Control: The Publications Committee of the Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris), 1700 – 1793 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003) 61 – 76.

399 Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land, 116 – 21.

400 Lafitau, Mémoire, 5 – 6.

167 him to Québec in the fall of 1715. There he took the opportunity to read the ―collection of edifying letters of the missionaries of our company who work throughout the world.‖401

This was neither new nor out of the ordinary, as reading the collected letters of his confrères was, he wrote, ―a powerful motive to sustain the difficult work of our missions with constancy. In effect nothing is more capable of softening our struggles, & of animating us, than the example of those of our fathers who are in the same situation as us, who appear to disregard their fatigue, and consider themselves happy when it has pleased the Lord to give some success to the Gospel that they preach, or to console those for whom obstacles & setbacks render their work sterile.‖402 As historians such as Luke Clossey and

Dominique Deslandres have shown was common throughout the history of the Society of

Jesus, Lafitau conceived of the Jesuit enterprise in global terms. Reading the accounts written by his confrères working throughout East Asia, Lafitau was inspired to continue to expand the scope and scale of his own work in the Saint Lawrence Valley, acting locally but thinking globally.403

Juxtaposing local investigation in Paris and New France with accounts from his confrères the world over, Lafitau‘s effort to signal the inspiration that he drew from the work of his confrères also highlighted an ambivalence about the scale at which his work operated. If, as Stéphane Van Damme has argued, French science was epistemologically legitimated by making Paris a non-place, one free of the bias and local entanglements that undermined the legitimacy of amateur science, Lafitau‘s narrative was instead rooted in

401 Ibid., 6 - 7.

402 Ibid., 7.

403 See Clossey, Global Salvation, and Deslandres, Croire et faire croire.

168 multiple places that stretched from one end of the earth to the other.404 The site of ginseng‘s discovery was itself left undefined as Lafitau‘s narrative shifted between Asia, the

Americas and Europe from one line to the next. Specific sites such as Kahnawake and

Tartarie continued to feature prominently in the narrative of Lafitau‘s research but the discovery was ultimately presented as multi-local, a product of the polycentric networks of the Society of Jesus. Likewise, Lafitau‘s self-representation oscillated between a single member of a globally active religious order and an intrepid investigator in his own right. In effect, Lafitau both distributed authority for the discovery throughout the information networks of the Society of Jesus and took credit personally. Lafitau highlighted the importance of specific nodes of this network, himself and Jartoux for example, but left the overall question of priority in the discovery ambiguous and unresolved. What emerged was a polycentric and fluid narrative that contorted French botanical and natural historical genres even as it sought to contribute to them, undermining the distinctions between centre and periphery that defined the Académie‘s presence in the eighteenth-century French

Atlantic World.

True to its title, the tenth volume of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses featured accounts of everything from ―a white and luminous cross‖ that appeared above a chapel built by Chinese converts in Kin-kia-kiao to the recently discovered ―horned fish or devil,‖ and the thousands of converts who were like ―children purified by the waters of baptism‖ in

404 These were the physical and institutional spaces created in Paris and other European capitals in the early modern period in which legitimate knowledge could be made and which were both created by and helped solidify trajectories and patterns of scientific mobility, sociability and the circulation of knowledge. Steven Van Damme has commented that although these spaces were created as the centres of vast networks, they functioned by making themselves invisible, thus allowing for the sorts of universal knowledges sought after by enlightenment botanists. See Stéphane Van Damme, Paris, capitale philosophique: De la Fronde à la Révolution (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005), 23, 191 - 219, and Steven Van Damme and Antonella Romano, ―Penser les savoirs au large (XVIe – XVIIIe siècles)‖ Revue d‟Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine vol. 55, no. 2 (2008), 4.

169

Peking.405 Lafitau recounted that he was ultimately drawn, however, to a letter that promised benefit to the Society of Jesus, the French state and the colony of New France: the description of ginseng that Jartoux had written in the spring of 1711. As Lafitau later related it, his curiosity was aroused by the detail of the account and he was struck, in particular, by Jartoux‘s hint at the possible existence of a Canadian connection to what was otherwise a thoroughly Chinese story.406

Lafitau was unimpressed with what nearby colonists and his confrères had thus far learned from indigenous cultures and lamented that the Jesuit missionaries in North

America had missed opportunities for acquiring indigenous botanical knowledge that had been profitable for the Society of Jesus in other missions and on other continents.407 Lafitau singled out Peru and Brazil as examples of where Jesuit investigations into indigenous botanical knowledge had brought new drugs to Europe and praise to the Society of Jesus.

In South America, his confrères had discovered entirely new plants such as the febrifuge

Cinchona, then better known as Jesuit‘s bark, and Jesuit naturalists such as José de Acosta and Juan Eusebio Nieremberg had established themselves as influential authorities on

American flora and fauna.408 As he compared the record of France‘s American missions with descriptions of fantastic discoveries from the mission to China and other exotic

405 M.L. Aimé-Martin, ed. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (Paris: Société du panthéon littéraire, 1843), 10:348, 434.

406 Lafitau, Mémoire, 10.

407 Ibid., 13.

408 Ibid.; Matthew Crawford writes that ―Quina came to be called ―Jesuit‘s Bark‖ primarily as a result of the prominent role of Jesuit missionaries in the distribution of the bark especially within Europe. In the context of various Reformation movements and confessional divisions, physicians in England came to suspect quina as a Catholic plot to poison Protestants‖ see ―Empire‘s Experts: The Politics of Knowledge in Spain‘s Royal Monopoly of Quina (1751 – 1808)‖ (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2009), 18.

170 environments, Lafitau made his hopes to raise the profile of the Society‘s North America missions and the indigenous cultures with which he lived evident. He suggested that his study of aboriginal cultures left him optimistic. ―I must admit,‖ he wrote, ―that they have admirable secrets for illnesses which our doctors cannot cure. They treat themselves a little harshly and dose their purgatives and their vomitives as they would for horses; but they excel in the treatment of all sorts of wounds and fractures… and the remedies that they apply are simple, natural, and with little artifice.‖409 Inspired and perhaps provoked by his confrères‘ botanical discoveries, Lafitau wrote that ―I felt a particular interest in knowledge of plants, which made me read the letter of Père Jartoux by preference over the other letters of the same collection.‖410

As it provided both inspiration and verification, Jartoux‘s account was foundational to Lafitau‘s narrative. This was not a simple case of Jesuit epistemological chauvinism, but was instead a clear privileging of the sort of firsthand observation restricted to Jesuits and those like them who had left the confines of European academies and gardens to see and collect foreign flora at its source. ―It seems natural,‖ he wrote, ―to believe the P. Jartoux who has seen the plant in Tartarie, the place where everybody accepts that it is collected … and who has given us an image and an idea more just than M. Kaempfer & the other authors who have never been there.‖ 411 If, as Lafitau wrote ―All the difficulty follows the authority that one should give to Père Jartoux,‖ he made his support for his confrère explicit.412 Yet not all witnesses were equal and where Lafitau drew on other sources of

409 Lafitau, Mémoire, 12.

410 Ibid., 9.

411 Ibid., 37.

412 Ibid., 35.

171 information in New France, he reduced their role in relation to his own and his confrères‘.

It seems almost certain, for example, that in addition to the generalized and anonymous support of nearby Mohawk women, Lafitau turned to Michel Sarrazin, then royal physician and the official correspondent of the Académie Royale des Sciences. While he credited ―an intelligent man‖ at Québec to whom he turned ―so that he compared it [the Canadian plant] with the letter and with the engraved plate that represents the Gin-seng of China,‖ he nonetheless maintained his own centrality in the narrative of ginseng‘s discovery.413

Lafitau challenged and contorted the role envisaged for colonial collectors and fashioned himself both as an investigator in his own right and, along with the Society of Jesus, as an information broker in the scientific networks of the French Atlantic World.

When Lafitau first read Jartoux‘s account winter was already on its way; there was little that he could do until the following year. The next spring, however, Lafitau was again struck by the greenery through which he had frequent cause to travel and he began his search for ginseng in earnest. He initially turned to local Mohawk women with whom he lived and to whom he ministered for help finding the plant. Yet he was only able to produce an approximation of the image provided in Jartoux‘s account from memory and his aboriginal informants were of little help at this early stage.414 He could confirm

Jartoux‘s hypothesis only with the arrival of summer and the appearance of the plant‘s vermillion fruit that had been described in such detail in the Lettres édifiantes. Lafitau attributed all credit for finding the plant to his own efforts and analysis of Jartoux‘s text.

413 Ibid., 16.

414 This has been a point of confusion in recent literature. The historian Steve Harris suggested that it was a female Mohawk healer who found the plant for Lafitau. ―Jesuit Scientific Activity,‖ 77 – 78. Sandra Harding, who cites Harris, similarly used Lafitau as an evidence of the contribution of indigenous women to colonial science. ―Postcolonial and feminist philosophies of science and technology: convergences and dissonances,‖ Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 408.

172

―The questions that I had asked the Sauvages about Gin-seng,‖ he wrote ―did not advance me very much.‖415 Even if it was a nearby Mohawk sauvagesse who first confirmed the identity of the plant at his request, he made clear that he had ultimately found American ginseng on his own.416 As soon as he found the plant, the self-evidence of the discovery impressed him. ―I did not consider it for long,‖ he wrote ―without suspecting that this could be the plant for which I was searching.‖417

Although his encounter with the plant with vermillion fruit in 1716 had left Lafitau convinced that he had found ginseng, he was hesitant to make a public claim without closer comparison of the American plant and Jartoux‘s written and visual descriptions of its Asian counterpart. ―Whatever presumptions that I had that the plant was Gin-seng, I did not dare assume anything, having only some confused ideas from the letter of Pere Jartoux, that I did not have in hand, & of which the copy was in Québec,‖ he wrote cautiously.418 From

Québec Lafitau collected not only Jartoux‘s letter in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses but the ―intelligent man‖ who seems likely to have been Michel Sarrazin.419 Together with this anonymous field assistant, Lafitau collected specimens of the plant in the woods outside of

Montréal and proceeded to compare them with the ginseng described by Jartoux. Lafitau recruited aboriginal peoples to the same end. ―At a single view of the plate the Sauvages

415 Lafitau, Mémoire, 13.

416 Lafitau was primed to notice the vermillion fruit by Jartoux‘s emphatic description of it. Jartoux described it when he wrote that, ―La couleur du fruit, quand il en a, dinstingue cette plante de toute les autres…‖ Ibid., 79.

417 Ibid., 14.

418 Ibid., 15.

419 Ibid.

173 recognized their Canadian plant,‖ he recollected.420 Specifically countering the criticisms of Danty d‘Isnard, his Mémoire claimed that, ―And as we had on hand the different species, we had the pleasure to see a description so exact and in such just proportion with the plant, that there was not the smallest doubt that we had the proof before our eyes.‖421

It was while working with these aboriginal informants that Lafitau became aware of the etymological association between the Iroquoian garentoguen and the Chinese ginseng.

His ―surprise was extreme‖ too learn, via Jartoux and the Jesuit polymath Athanasius

Kircher, that the Chinese had named the plant for its ―Resemblance of man‖ or to ―Man‟s

Thighs.‖422 Lafitau argued that these were all simply different words for the same idea. ―In effect Garent.oguen is a word composed of Orenta, which signifies the thighs and the legs,

& d‘Oguen, which means two things separated,‖ he explained.423 Ginseng could be discursively dissected to produce the same etymology.424 For Lafitau, this was the crux of his discovery. This argument also revealed that Lafitau was searching not only for an Asian plant, but for the roots of a unified moral and natural history of the world. The narrative of his discovery suggests that he grasped the significance of this etymological evidence immediately. ―I could not stop myself from concluding that the same signification could not have been applied to the Chinese word & to the Iroquoian word without a communication of ideas, & by consequence of people,‖ he wrote.425 He then followed this

420 Ibid., 16.

421 Ibid.

422 Ibid., 16 – 17.

423 Ibid., 17.

424 Ibid.

425 Ibid.

174 evidence to a conclusion that would have seemed remarkable to any audience that simply expected a description of American ginseng. ―By this I confirmed an opinion that I already had,‖ he wrote, ―that America was the same continent as Asia, to which it was connected by Tartarie to the north of China.‖426

As Lafitau‘s Mémoire progressed it soon became evident that its 88 printed pages represented an effort to intensify, rather than transform, the argument first presented in the

Journal de Trévoux in January 1717. Lafitau‘s Mémoire sought to expand the earlier narrative and recreate his discovery for his readers, demonstrating the empirical basis of his claim to authority and distancing criticisms of his expertise and claims to firsthand experience of ginseng. In the early pages of his Mémoire, Lafitau initially provided his readers with a sense of the setting and dramatis personae of his account. He next sought to discursively recreate his own experience with ginseng. Whereas the 1717 account of his discovery stated simply that Lafitau had proceeded ―by comparing that [ginseng] of China which is described in this tenth collection [of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses], with that which he has sent to France,‖ in his 1718 Mémoire, the Jesuit tried to train his reader to see the plant as he had, walking the reader through an analysis of the plant‘s morphology that proceeded inch by inch and from root to flower.427 Lafitau was determined to prove that both he and Jartoux had seen, touched, tasted and described the same plant and he layered detail upon detail, rhetorically demonstrating his own authority as witness and guiding his readers to discover the plant for themselves in his text.

426 Ibid. Lafitau was not the first Jesuit to suggest a physical connection between Asia and North America. José de Acosta offered a similar theory in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590). For an analysis of Acosta‘s ―Bering Strait theory,‘ see Anthony Pagden, The fall of natural man, 195.

427 ―Le Ginseng, Plante si précieuse‖ 121.

175

Lafitau also sought to provide both his supportive readers and academic naysayers with the same opportunity to physically inspect and experience the plant that he had had.

Along with his first written accounts of ginseng, Lafitau had also sent physical specimens preserved in alcohol, an engraved plate and seeds to Paris.428 As he returned to Paris in

1717, he had an image that more accurately captured the morphology of the plant produced, and brought more specimens of the plant stored in eau-de-vie to Paris, delivering them both to academicians such as Sébastien Vaillant of the Jardin du Roi and members of his own religious order.429 He told his readers, for example, that the specimens that he had collected ―are conserved to this day in the cabinet of Monsieur de Jussieu … who today fills … the post of Royal Professor of Plants at the Jardin du Roi‖ and that the Regent, the

Duke of Orléans, had personally been given both physical specimens and a copy of his

Mémoire.430 Lafitau wrote that also he had high hopes that ginseng would flower that year in Paris.431 Through these varied means Lafitau worked to make both the plant and his own experience of it travel to his academic and royal audiences.

As he prepped ginseng for transport to France as a visual, material and discursive object, Lafitau focused his attention on those features of the plant that he understood to be the most essential to conserve for future study. Not all parts of the plant were equally significant, and Lafitau was not shy about forcing his readers‘ attention to the part of the plant that he considered to be the most important. Even as he outwardly adopted the methods of his academic critics, the botanical focus of his text, image and specimen

428 Lafitau, Mémoire, 32.

429 Ibid., 33.

430 Ibid., 33, 65 -66, 87.

431 Ibid., 66.

176

FIGURE 4 – Aureliana Canadenis, Sinensibus Gin-seng, Iroquoaeis Garent-oguen Figure 4 - Aureliana Canadenis, Sinensibus Gin-seng, Iroquoaeis Garent-oguen Joseph-François Lafitau, Mémoire .... Concernant la précieuse plante du gin-seng, Paris: J. Mongé, 1718

(Image courtesy of John Carter Brown Library)

177 samples therefore revealed a consistent deviation from academic norms. The engraved plate that he had produced [FIGURE 4] was a clear statement that Lafitau‘s method remained essentially different from the Académie‘s. Sébastien Vaillant, in the text that prefaced his own description of ginseng, wrote that ―… between the parts that characterize the plants, those that are called flowers, are, without contradiction, the most essential.‖432

Yet while representations of the plant‘s floral structure and leaf shape were present in

Lafitau‘s image, it was the root itself that dominated the composition and that, by extension, defined the plant. The fixity of the leaf shape and floral structure was conveyed by their uniform representation and a singular close up of a leaf. Lafitau, however, overwhelmed the composition of his image with representations of ginseng‘s root, a part too irregular to be of use for taxonomic purposes by French and European naturalists. His image recognized and even emphasized this irregularity as he visually suggested that the root was nonetheless the key to understanding the nature of the plant and to properly identifying it. This mirrored a textual description of the plant that started with, and lavished attention upon, the shape, texture, colour, and taste of ginseng‘s roots. This focus on ginseng‘s roots was also present in the preparation of the physical specimens that Lafitau sent and brought to Paris. Rather than herbarium specimens that normally preserved pressed flowers, stems and leaves, he sent roots stored in alcohol, a method of preservation that kept roots fresh at the expense of those parts required by botanists for identification.433

432 Vaillant, Discours, 2. Essential qualities were considered those least likely to change from place to place and were considered a more stable basis of classification than those parts of the plants that were ―accidental‖ and that seemed the product of chance and local ecological conditions

433 Lafitau, Mémoire, 32, 61; For a comparison with the type of herbarium specimen that the Académie produced, see FIGURE 5, below.

178

Lafitau‘s focus on the ginseng‘s roots quite literally turned French botanical norms on their head.

Rather than providing evidence of Lafitau‘s slavish emulation of French botanical science, the images, specimens and written descriptions of American ginseng that Lafitau produced were evidence of an effort to twin the study of North American flora and cultures. Written across the top of the plate in his Mémoire, Lafitau also highlighted the name of the plant as an essential facet of the plant itself, more than a simple or artificial tag.

Written as ―Aureliana Canadensis, Sinensibus Gin-Seng, Iroquœis Garent-Oguen,‖ it was the plant‘s name and the associated etymological and ethnobotanical evidence that provided key evidence of continuity between Chinese and Iroquoian cultures and that justified his identification of the roots as the most important part of the plant.434 Like the roots in the image or the medical uses of the plant, the differences in the name were only apparent; both garentoguen and ginseng demonstrated a common focus on the human-like shape of the plant. Manifest differences masked an essential continuity that proved that the morphology of the plant and its ―idea‖ were inseparable. Lafitau inverted the descriptive strategies of the Académie as a result of his belief in the existence of larger cultural and geographical continuities between Northeast Asia and North America. The Jesuit was proposing nothing less than a culturally inflected botany.

Lafitau‘s descriptions lacked the precision and much of the specific vocabulary characteristic of contemporary botanical texts but showed a similar attention to the

434 Lafitau explained that he chose the name Aureliana Canadensis in honour of the Duc d‘Orléans. Ibid., 86 – 87.

179 morphological features of the plant.435 Describing ginseng‘s flower that he observed in the spring of 1717, for example, he wrote that: ―It has five white-ish leaves in the form of a star, as are common for flowers in a parasol or umbel. They are supported by a calyx, at the centre of which one sees a pistil curved into two little filaments, & surrounded by five stamens covered by an extremely white, lumpy flour.‖436 Lafitau mimicked the discourse of

French botanists such as Joseph Pitton de Tournefort which had the effect of abstracting plants from local social and cultural contexts and producing a timeless and authorless quality in written descriptions. For the naturalists at the Académie, situated knowledge was understood to be partial or illegitimate knowledge; Lafitau‘s morphological descriptions of ginseng therefore aimed to transform the individual and varied ginseng specimens that he had observed near his mission into an exemplar, distilling natural diversity into morphological traits of the species that could then be considered typical or universal.437 It was an attempt to drop the adjectives Canadian or Chinese from the study of ginseng, and to move the discussion towards a plant (and, in effect, cultures) that demonstrated universal characteristics that were only loosely masked by local variation. This mirrored his treatment of the root‘s etymological continuities, and twinned the study of cultural and botanical universals.

435 Lorraine Daston has written that enlightenment naturalists held that there were no inherently interesting scientific objects. Rather it was the attention and focus that an experienced investigator brought to bear that revealed the wondrous nature of the most common object. This encouraged close observation of minute features of the natural world that otherwise escaped notice. ―Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,‖ in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100 – 126; See also Scharf, Identification Keys and the natural method,‖ 42; Daniela Bleichmar, ―Training the Naturalist‘s Eye in the Eighteenth Century: Perfect Global Visions and Local Blind Spots,‖ in Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards, ed. Cristina Grasseni (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 175 – 76.

436 Lafitau, Mémoire, 25.

437 Lorraine Daston, ―Type Specimens and Scientific Memory,‖ Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 165 – 68.

180

Lafitau‘s analysis of the plant quickly extended to a consideration of the physiological effects of consumption as well. Even as he argued that ―Plants are almost everywhere the same,‖ the Jesuit recognized that the ―virtues‖ of a plant such as ginseng could vary across time and space.438 Documenting the identical medicinal properties of

American and Chinese ginseng was therefore an essential part of his argument, and one that rested on proving the existence of the larger ecological continuities that Jartoux had hinted at in 1711. Lafitau understood that the properties and characteristics of plants changed as a result of their adaptation to local environments, but argued that identical ecological conditions in China and New France made ginseng from one continent indistinguishable from the other. Lafitau argued that ―This [plant] grows naturally in

Canada as in Tartarie; it is almost the same terroir and the same climate in each country, it is therefore natural to conclude that the Gin-seng that grows in Canada is similar in its virtues to that which grows in Tartarie, which resembles it in its figure; but the experiments that will be done, and those that will be done after that, will resolve this problem even more effectively.‖439 Lafitau briefly subjected American ecosystems to the same analysis that he brought to the Haudenosaunee culture and to ginseng, arguing as a result that Northeastern North American and Northeast Asia ginseng were essentially ecologically identical.

Lafitau also looked to compare indigenous uses of the plant with those recorded by

Jartoux and other Jesuit editors such as Jean-Baptiste du Halde who had collected and

438 Lafitau, Mémoire, 49.

439 Ibid., 49.

181

Chinese medical knowledge and its foundational texts.440 Where he noticed differences or lacked the basis for an adequate comparison of Asian and Iroquoian medical cultures, however, he experimented. For example, not content to simply find out the local uses of

―one of their ordinary remedies,‖ Lafitau encouraged the sauvagesse who had initially confirmed the identity of the plant to combat an intermittent fever with ginseng.441 This was not, Lafitau suggested, a normal Iroquoian usage, but instead represented an effort to confirm medicinal effects that had been observed in China and Europe.442 Stretching aboriginal usage of the plant and introducing Chinese usage into North America, he was able to demonstrate physiological effects in Canada identical to those observed the world over. Lafitau universalized usage to demonstrate the universal nature of the plant itself.

From nearby aboriginal peoples, Lafitau learned that the plant was used as a purgative and from Wendat and Abenaki informants he learned that it was used to treat dysentery.443 Lafitau also tested the plant‘s qualities himself. ―These responses and the experiment of the sauvagesse of which I have already spoken, who was cured three times of fever,‖ wrote Lafitau, ―were all that I knew when I sent the Gin-seng of Canada to Paris and that the Père le Blanc had the honour to present to your royal highness. I had experimented on myself, and I was persuaded that by its use I was cured of a bout of

440 See Du Halde, Description géographique, 3: 460 – 74.

441 Lafitau, Mémoire, 15.

442 Ibid. In subjecting the Iroquoian sauvagesse to this medical experiment, Lafitau joined many other colonial naturalists who experimented on the bodies of aboriginal and African peoples. Londa Schiebinger, however, writes that such aboriginal bodies, like those of prisoners, slaves and the poor were not ―epistemologically weighty.‖ Instead, Lafitau‘s self-experimentation would have carried more weight with his audience. Londa Schiebinger, ―Human Experimentation in the Eighteenth Century: Natural Boundaries and Valid Testing,‖ in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 384 – 408.

443 Lafitau, Mémoire, 48.

182 rheumatism of which I was very tired, and which I have not felt again. I have since used some for a flux of blood that I beat with a single dose.‖444 For Lafitau, similarity was not enough. Instead, outlining both the physical and medicinal qualities of the plant, Lafitau argued that both American ecosystems and the ginseng populations that it produced were, in effect, extensions of those in northeast Asia.

The two subjects of Lafitau‘s research, American aboriginal cultures and ginseng, alternated and competed to become the principal focus of the text. Yet this missionary- naturalist remained a missionary first and foremost and his primary goal remained the salvation of American aboriginal communities. For even as Lafitau couched his interest in ginseng in a broader concern for uncovering potentially useful aboriginal medical and ecological knowledge, ginseng was ultimately ―a clinching piece of evidence for his argument that North America was joined to the Asian mainland somewhere north of

China.‖445 His desire to establish cultural continues between Asia and North America informed his search for botanical continuity and was at the heart of the narrative strategy of his text. Lafitau again hinted of the influence of the global mission of the Society of Jesus on his project and, specifically, the work of confrères in China who had argued that

Chinese histories showed evidence of a Judeo-Christian origin.446 Although their defence of Chinese culture was not without controversy, Jesuit authors such as Jean-François

Foucquet and Joachim Bouvet argued that Chinese texts that described Fu Hsi, ―the traditional founder of Chinese culture,‖ were actually acknowledging the Christian God.447

444 Ibid., 50.

445 Evans, ―Ginseng," 10.

446 Rowbotham, ―Figurists,‖ 473 – 85.

447 Ibid.

183

They similarly pointed to specific Chinese ―ideographs‖ as evidence for a single origin of both Chinese and European cultures.448 As with ginseng and garentoguen, differences between European and foreign cultures were only skin deep, masking a more fundamental continuity that provided evidence of a universal human history. Both in his Mémoire and later work, Lafitau‘s challenge was therefore nothing less than to ―demonstrate rationally that the Amerindian difference was only, in effect, an apparent difference, superficial and contingent, and to thus reduce Amerindian alterity to a familiar identity.‖449 Questions surrounding the identity of ginseng and that of aboriginal cultures were inseparable.

Lafitau therefore argued that neither ginseng nor aboriginal communities such as the Haudenosaunee were originally indigenous to North America. Ginseng, he wrote, was once also known in Western Europe as mandrake. He hypothesized that, prized for its unique properties still evident amongst the indigenous cultures of French North America and China, the plant had been driven to extinction in Europe. Ginseng, he argued, had been described in the works of Theophrastus, a naturalist in the third century BCE and a student of Aristotle. Analyzing passages that described the plants ferule and mandrake, Lafitau suggested that the ―superstitious‖ practices related to the collection and consumption of the plant in the ancient Mediterranean might profitably be compared with those that were still being practiced in North America.450 Finding other plants in North America such as wild celery that had been associated with mandrake in the writing of classical botanists such as

Dioscorides, Lafitau in effect made an argument for a larger botanical migration from

448 Ibid., 476 – 79.

449 Motsch, Lafitau et L'émergence, 39.

450 Lafitau, Mémoire, 74 – 79.

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Northeast Asia to prehistoric North America.451 If Lafitau framed his efforts to bring the plant back to European gardens and pharmacopeias as a discovery, his Mémoire suggested instead that it was a reintroduction.

As Lafitau studied and described ginseng, he therefore wed the study of the plant and its cultural context. Lafitau took the botanical knowledge of the Haudenosaunee seriously in his Mémoire, even as he subjected it to the same sort of dissection that botanists normally reserved for plants. Ultimately he tied much of what he claimed to be able to know about ginseng to statements collected from specific aboriginal informants. Yet

Lafitau nonetheless suggested that the Haudenosaunee were largely unaware of the significance of their own symbolic vocabulary and he denied that they were capable of speaking for their knowledge systems in their own right. Lafitau echoed his predecessor, the Jesuit Louis Nicolas, in asserting that indigenous peoples could not be relied upon to fully understand the basis of their own knowledge. In his Histoire naturelle Nicolas wrote that ―Our sauvages will get us through it all, despite the greatest obstacles of oaks, firs with their branches broken by the violence of the winds and frosts, pines, hemlocks, spruces, cedars, beeches, maples [ ... ] . They will get out of anywhere, like wild animals or like spirits accustomed to this land of shades.‖452 Where Nicolas saw instinct, Lafitau saw the pale shadows of an original knowledge shared by all humanity, as he wrote that ―Necessity has made the Sauvages doctors and herbalists; they search plants with curiosity, and try all;

451 Ibid., 82 – 83.

452 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 28; Quoted in Nancy Senior, ―"Sathans inventions and worships": Two 17th-century clergymen on Native American religions,‖ Studies in Religion/ Sciences Religieuses 35, no. 2 (2006): 279.

185

… they have found [medicinal plants] by long usage which for them takes the place of science.‖453

Lafitau‘s Mémoire argued that investigators such as himself who had the skills necessary to interact with native informants possessed an essential and rare insight into colonial environments. The Jesuit therefore redefined the moral economy of knowledge in the French Atlantic World, tying the legitimacy of colonial science to its experience of both local floras and indigenous cultures. He himself had acquired the linguistic competency necessary to communicate with aboriginal informants from Jesuits who the anthropologist

William Fenton called the ―old boys‖ at Kahnawake. These included such veterans of the mission to New France as Jacques Bruyas and Julien Garnier. Lafitau also gained access to manuscript dictionaries produced over the course of the seventeenth century and stored at the Kahnawake and at Québec.454 Yet Lafitau attributed his discovery as much to his sizeable experience of aboriginal cultures as to his knowledge of indigenous languages. It was this lived experience of aboriginal cultures that the Jesuit credited with providing real knowledge of the natural and social history of ginseng, the absence of which he felt had mired the work other naturalists in confusion and error.455

453 Senior, ―Sathans,‖ 8.

454 Fenton and Moore, ―J.-F. Lafitau (1681-1746), Precursor of Scientific Anthropology,‖ 176.

455 The work of Lafitau is therefore akin (but not identical) to the ―patriotic epistemology‖ of his Spanish confrères analyzed by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra in his How to Write the History of the New World, Chapter 4, and the Jesuit reaction to European naturalists that claimed to have discovered the degenerate state of American nature from Europe. See also Kristin Huffine ―Raising Paraguay from Decline: Natural History, Ethnography, and the Science of Race in the Eighteenth-Century Accounts of the Paraguayan Jesuit Fathers,‖ El Saber de los Jesuitas: Historias Naturales y el Nuevo Mundo, eds., Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledesma, (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005): 279 – 302. While these authors point to a critical moment in the eighteenth century where American naturalists began to self-consciously privilege their own studies of American environments, scholars of the Spanish and Anglo-Atlantic World have also shown earlier attempts to translate the privileged access to and experience of American environments into epistemic authority. See Bauer, Cultural Geography and Egan, Authorizing Experience, and Pagden, European Encounters, particularly Chapter 2.

186

Lafitau therefore contended that the distance that separated his own work from that of other naturalists who had claimed to have observed ginseng in its native habitats in Asia was not one that could simply be overcome by travel or the use of aboriginal language dictionaries. Lafitau explained that it was his attention to and immersion in non-European cultures that separated the work of his confrères from that of contemporary botanists as he wrote that ―That which could have even more contributed to the error of M. Kaempfer and of several other authors, is that in Japan they probably give the name Nisi to several plants of different types, but for which the roots have some resemblance to the significance of the word.‖456 Later he added that, ―An author of good faith could fall into the same inconvenience in Canada with regards to this plant itself, if somebody who did not know

Ginseng went to ask for it from an Iroquois with the name of Garent-oguen that our sauvages give to it, they could present him with another plant that has the same name as

Garent-oguen, and of which the root resembles even more perfectly the shape of a man.‖457

Clearly, travelling to exotic environments and interrogating aboriginal informants in a botanical pidgin was not enough. Instead, the key to understanding a foreign plant began with assembling the tools with which to understand and decode the cultures in which the plant was already known and used.

Lafitau sought to inject an attention to culture into the botanical and ecological science of the Académie, proposing, in effect, a new method for studying colonial environments. For as he ultimately credited himself with the discovery of ginseng, he positioned much of what he claimed to be able to know about it as the product of, and a

456 Lafitau, Mémoire, 39 – 40.

457 Ibid., 41 – 42.

187 result of his own expertise in, intercultural exchange and what Londa Schiebinger has called the ―biocontact zone‖; that is to say, the intermediate space created between knowledge systems that appeared as they groped towards a mutually comprehensible language of exchange.458 Lafitau strove to justify a prominent place for the Society of the

Jesus in the scientific networks of the French Atlantic World, emphasizing the difficulties inherent in a cultural and geographic space where ―We reason with people who we do not understand at all, and we are not understood. We understand a part of the things that are said by gestures and signs, and we think we understand the rest and it is there that ordinarily a confusion is born.‖459 Lafitau claimed that it was their inability to overcome these difficulties that limited the reach of European botanists, and he wrote that ―It therefore appears reasonable that all the authors who have given us different figures of this plant, are based only on unreliable memories, fooled themselves by others who were fooled before them.‖460 Only with a new method could European botanists claim to truly understand the flora and environments of the extra-European world. Only with the help of the Society of Jesus could the Académie extend its reach beyond the shores of France.

Lafitau‘s Mémoire boldly claimed that it was at the peripheries of the French

Atlantic World that knowledge of new flora could best be produced, and that European naturalists were necessarily dependent on educated foreign observers such as the Jesuits.

The result of this emphasis on the importance of the ―biocontact zone‖ was an inversion of

458 Londa Schiebinger, ―Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West Indies,‖ in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) 125 – 129. See also Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 90.

459 Lafitau, Mémoire, 37.

460 Ibid.

188 the epistemic geography produced in the networks of the Académie Royale des Sciences and a subtle critique of his Parisian colleagues‘ claims to know and define North American flora. For even if ginseng would soon grow in France in the Jardin du Roi under the careful watch of France‘s pre-eminent naturalists, as Lafitau eagerly predicted, these naturalists would never possess the unique insights into aboriginal cultures that yielded a sure path to a more nuanced and reliable understanding of indigenous flora. Paris was quite simply too far away.

The Académie’s Synthesis

It is hard for a reader not to be impressed with the amount of information and the sophistication of the argument presented in Lafitau‘s Mémoire. Citing classical and contemporary botanical authorities, marshaling indigenous languages and informants and including research made possible by the information networks of the Society of Jesus,

Lafitau made a complex argument that aimed to create a more diverse scientific community in the French Atlantic World. The response of the botanists at the Académie suggested that, in the wake of his Mémoire, Lafitau and his research could no longer simply be ridiculed or ignored as Danty d‘Isnard and Vaillant had done in 1717 and early 1718. Yet even as

Lafitau‘s work forced itself into the Académie‘s discussions of ginseng, the aim of the

Académie‘s naturalists remained the same. As Danty d‘Isnard and Vaillant had done before, two new narratives of ginseng‘s discovery produced in 1718 asserted the superiority of the Académie‘s scientific method and the centrality of its members in ever-expanding

Atlantic scientific networks: Antoine de Jussieu‘s manuscript ―Histoire du Gin-sem et ses

189 qualités‖ and the anonymous but thorough ―Sur le gin-seng‖ that was published in the 1718 edition of the Histoire de l‟Académie Royale des Sciences. These two texts praised the contributions of the Society of Jesus to the study of ginseng but synthesized its research within accounts that privileged the role and authority of the Académie itself. The academic synthesis of 1718 demonstrated that the Académie acknowledged its dependence upon correspondents in the extra-European world but that it continued to define itself as the ultimate scientific authority in the French Atlantic World.

It is impossible to know exactly when the botanist Antoine de Jussieu wrote his

―Histoire du Gin-sem et ses qualités‖ although several textual clues suggest that it was written after the author had consulted Lafitau‘s Mémoire. It is also possible, however, that

Jussieu had formed his narrative after consultation with Lafitau himself.461 At the very least, Jussieu‘s manuscript demonstrated that its author had made himself well-informed about the botanical research of both Jartoux and Lafitau; both of their accounts featured prominently in his own. ―Gin-sem is one of those plants whose merit has been recommended by the relations of almost every traveller to China,‖ Jussieu wrote.462 Yet it was Jartoux who had distinguished himself by his attention to detail and the ―description and image that he has made after nature.‖463 It was this account and the image that accompanied it that encouraged the American discovery of his confrère Lafitau, who, having found the plant in New France, sent specimens to his order in Paris.464 While

461 Lafitau, Mémoire, 38, 84; Lafitau‘s Mémoire makes several references to Jussieu, suggesting that he and Vaillant were early supporters of his claim to have discovered ginseng, and that Jussieu was attempting to grow the plant in the Jardin du Roi in Paris.

462 Antoine de Jussieu, ―Histoire du Gin-sem et les Qualités,‖ MS 1151, BCMNHN, 1.

463 Ibid.

464 Ibid.

190

Jussieu clearly acknowledged the central role that the Jesuits had played in the history of the study of ginseng, however, their role in Jussieu‘s narrative ended as quickly as it began.

By the bottom of the first page of his manuscript, Jussieu instead highlighted the central role of the corresponding member of the Académie Michel Sarrazin, who, he wrote, had noticed ginseng ―among the number of unique plants of that country.‖465 Jussieu stated that

Sarrazin deserved credit for the find because he had sent the plant, albeit named Aralia humilis fructu majore, to the Jardin du Roi in Paris by 1704.466

Jussieu presented himself as a compiler and analyst of accounts more than an independent researcher as he confirmed that American and Asian ginseng were in fact the same plant.467 Yet as he reached this conclusion he made it clear that not all accounts, and not all research, were equal. When he recounted the evidence that Jartoux‘s descriptions of

Asian ginseng matched those of the American plant, he visually prioritized and ranked the existing accounts on the page. First he listed Sarrazin and John Ray, both reputable botanists and the first to hint at ginseng‘s presence in North America. Lafitau was credited only with sending the plant to France.468 When Jussieu‘s discussion turned next to the virtues of the plant, an area where he was again forced to rely on information collected by the Society of Jesus, he showed his hesitancy to rely solely on Jesuit sources. When he

465 Ibid.

466 Ibid., 2; Jussieu also mentioned the possibility that the plant had been first found in Maryland.

467 This was in fact an accepted role for sedentary naturalists who were forced to rely upon – and weigh the merits of – the recorded observations of a wide assortment of travellers and would-be correspondents. See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), particularly Chapter six ―Knowing about People and Knowing about Things: A Moral History of Scientific Credibility.‖ See also See Kathleen S. Murphy ―Portals of Nature: Networks of Natural History in Eighteenth-Century British Plantation Societies‖ (Ph.D. diss., the John Hopkins University, 2007), particularly 82 – 138.

468 Jussieu, ―Histoire,‖ 2.

191 discussed the virtues of the leaves, for example, he noted that he had only Jesuit authors to rely upon. He wrote that these missionary-naturalists had claimed ―that the leaves of this plant have a virtue approaching that of the root.‖469 Yet, Jesuit sources remained partial and could not match the ―confirmed experience of the efficacy of the root‖ established by a multitude of Asian and European experience.470 The contributions of the Society of Jesus were discursively marked as preliminary investigations that necessitated the confirmation of more reliable authorities such as himself and his Académie. Jesuit research into the etymology and cultural contexts of American and Asian ginseng went unremarked entirely.

The most thorough account of ginseng‘s discovery was published in 1718 as ―Sur le gin-seng‖ in the 1718 edition of the Histoire de l‟Académie Royale des Sciences. There is no record of when this histoire was presented to the Académie or who it was authored by.

It is possible that it was also authored by Antoine de Jussieu, and that the manuscript

―Histoire du gin-sem…‖ was an early version of the final printed text.471 By 1718, however, other members of the Académie such as Claude Joseph Geoffroy were demonstrating their own interest in the virtues and identity of the plant.472 Whoever it was, the author of ―Sur le gin-seng‖ was well read and had assembled all of the relevant texts that documented the Académie‘s history with the plant, expanding the narrative to include research that had never been mentioned previously. Predictably, the account began the

469 Ibid.

470 Ibid., 3.

471 Jussieu delivered several papers to the Académie in 1718 but, unfortunately, the minutes of the Académie‘s regular meeting did not record either the title or content of his contributions. It is possible, although it is impossible to verify, that one of these was about ginseng.

472 Geoffroy, for example, sent a letter to Hans Sloane, then secretary of the Royal Society, describing the Académie‘s ginseng research. See Appleby, ―Ginseng,‖ 130.

192 narrative of ginseng‘s discovery not with Jesuit naturalists but with the introduction of the plant to the Académie in 1697. That year the botanist and member of the Académie Claude

Bourdelin read a report on the use of ginseng among the Chinese. The source of this information was not revealed, and this narrative therefore established the Académie itself as the original authority on the plant.473 The Académie became both a central setting and actor in the history of ginseng research.

Similar to Jussieu‘s manuscript, ―Sur le gin-seng‖ devoted a considerable amount of time to characterizing the contributions of Jartoux, Lafitau and the Society of Jesus.

Jartoux and Lafitau were both lauded for their work. Jartoux‘s description was praised as

―the most exact & the best detailed that one had yet seen‖ when it appeared.474 Yet this narrative also suggested that his principal accomplishment was the confirmation of what the Académie had already known or had, independently, begun to suspect following

Bourdelin‘s investigations.475 Unlike in Jussieu‘s manuscript, Lafitau received more attention than Jartoux in ―Sur le Gin-seng.‖ It even offered a backhanded affirmation of the legitimacy of the ecological knowledge of the Haudenosaunee who were ―very curious about plants, without being botanists.‖476 This 1718 account was particularly appreciative of the level of detail in Lafitau‘s Mémoire that had been published that same year, and of

Lafitau‘s visit both to the Académie and the Jardin du Roi. It acknowledged the early criticism of those such as Danty d‘Isnard who had been more likely to trust Kaempfer than

473 ―Sur le Gin-seng,‖ HMARS (1718): 51 – 55; The fact that Bourdelin obtained his samples of ginseng from Jesuits who had recently returned from China was not mentioned.

474 Ibid., 53.

475 Ibid.

476 Ibid.

193 the Jesuit naturalists but explained that these doubts were laid to rest after Lafitau himself had come to Paris and explained his work in his Mémoire.477

Yet the praise lavished upon Lafitau was double-edged and echoed the accounts of

Vaillant and Jussieu who had sought to subordinate Lafitau‘s role in the narrative of ginseng‘s discovery to the Académie itself. Of Lafitau‘s Mémoire, it stated that ―One sees there a description of the Gin-seng of Canada or Garent-onguen yet more nuanced than that of P. Jartoux.‖ The author, however, soon diminished Lafitau‘s role. ―One found in

Lafitau‘s Mémoire,‖ the author wrote, that ginseng‘s ―virtues were proven by the P. Lafitau as much as he could at the time, & [were] the same as those of the Mémoire of M.

Bourdelin & that common opinion attribute to Gin-seng.‖478 So it was not that Lafitau or

Jartoux were wrong, only that they were single observers who lacked the authority of the

Académie; Lafitau was presented as a corroborator and collector rather than as a naturalist.

The dismissal of the naturalist-missionaries closely mirrored the faint praise shown to the

Haudenosaunee also quoted above.479 For while the Jesuits were rightly acknowledged for bringing information about ginseng‘s use and distribution to Europe, it was the Académie itself that maintained the authority to name and study the plant scientifically. ―M. Vaillant has assigned this Plant under a new genus, that he has named Araliastrum,‖ it told its readers.480 Lest its audience overvalue the contributions of the Society of Jesus, it reminded its readers that the Académie had already been studying the plant for over a decade by the time that the Jesuit research hinted at its true identity. ―We were familiar with the plant

477 Ibid.

478 Ibid.

479 Ibid.

480 Ibid., 54.

194 before knowing that it was Gin-seng‖ it argued.481 It went on to clarify that the rights of discovery went to the Académie itself as ―M. Sarrazin, councilor and royal physician in

Québec, very skilled botanists & correspondent of the Académie, was no sooner in Canada than he remarked it [ginseng] among the many unique plants of that country, and he put it under the name Aralia humilis fructu majore amongst those that he sent to M. Fagon in

1704 for the Jardin du Roi.‖482 So even if the account reminded its readers that the arrival of ginseng and the subsequent enrichment of European medicine, ―is due as much as

Cinchona to the Jesuit missionaries,‖ it still restricted the role of the Society of Jesus in the scientific networks of the French Atlantic; networks that remained ever-centred on Paris and the Académie Royale des Sciences.483

Sarrazin was therefore firmly rooted in the Académie‘s narratives of the discovery of ginseng. It may have surprised Sarrazin that he found such ready support in the

Académie, however. The colonial naturalist and royal physician had already offered his opinion on the new opportunities that Lafitau‘s method offered and had apologized that he had not uncovered the true identity of the plant himself. In a 1717 letter that he wrote to the

Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon, then president of the Académie Royale des Sciences, Sarrazin apologized for failing to discover the plant that had been hiding in plain sight in France‘s

North American colonies, attributing his failure to his lack of exposure to indigenous cultures and languages.484 Sarrazin had trained with Tournefort before travelling to New

481 Ibid.

482 Ibid., 54 - 55.

483 Ibid., 55.

484 Bignon was president of the Académie Royale de Sciences and nephew of minister of the marine Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain

195

France in 1697 and had, since becoming a corresponding member of the Académie in 1700, been integral to the Académie‘s efforts to extend their networks of collection deep into the

American continent. The frustration and disappointment that he felt was palpable when he wrote to the Académie that ―There appears here a plant that is believed to be the geinseng of Tartarie or of China, that the sauvages have found and that they have given to the

Jesuits: they have made their accounts and we rest in the dark, … I have been a botanist here for twenty years and yet this plant has unfortunately escaped me.‖485 Yet he still assured the Abbé and Académie that ―I am sending live roots of geinseng to the Jardin du

Roi.‖486 This in spite of the fact that he had been rendered largely superfluous by Lafitau who, in addition to presenting his findings directly to the Académie, had already presented a specimen of the plant to the regent of France, the Duke of Orléans.487 The letter thus reads like a botanical mea culpa, evidence that France‘s first royal botanist in their North

American colonies felt that he had failed his patrons, his Parisian colleagues and, perhaps most importantly, the French scientific community to which he clearly felt he belonged.

Yet the Académie evidently saw little reason for Sarrazin to apologize, either at that time or as the decades passed. Indeed, Sarrazin‘s role in the histories of the plant produced by members of the Académie only grew. This was most evident in a manuscript entitled

Description de plusieurs plantes du Canada written in 1749. The author of the text, Jean-

François Gaultier, was also a corresponding member of the Académie and Sarrazin‘s

485 Sarrazin to Bignon, 5 November 1717, in Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien, 216.

486 Ibid.

487 Lafitau, Mémoire, 86. Lafitau was not only in seeking a royal audience for his work and in framing his contributions as a product of royal support for colonial science. See Emma Spary, ― ‗Peaches Which the Patriarchs Lacked‘ : Natural History, Natural Resources, and the Natural Economy in France,‖ History of Political Economy vol. 35 (2003): 16 – 20.

196 successor to the post of royal physician in New France.488 Gaultier‘s description of ginseng was fairly long considering it was just one entry in his text, and was detailed enough to demonstrate that the Académie‘s synthesis produced in the immediate wake of Lafitau‘s

Mémoire not only survived but flourished in the Académie‘s Atlantic networks. Like

Vaillant and Jussieu, Gaultier excused Sarrazin and Vaillant equally for failing to recognize the plant that they had named ―araliastrum quinquefolii folio major‖ was ginseng.489 Unlike these other authors, however, Gaultier also rehabilitated Sarrazin as a researcher and botanist in his own right. Gaultier, for example, asserted that it was Sarrazin that first introduced ginseng to the Jesuits as he grew the plant in their gardens for future study.490

Gaultier also suggested that it was not Vaillant but Sarrazin who first hinted that it might be ginseng, but that he lacked the proof to offer any conclusions with certainty.491 Sarrazin‘s hardworking and cautious nature was repeatedly emphasized and was set in distinction to

Lafitau, who was presented as both ―fortunate (heureux)‖ and ―more self-assured (hardi) than M. Sarrazin.‖492 The choice of these words was significant as both signified that

Lafitau profited as much from luck and other people‘s research as he did from his own investigations. Calling Lafitau hardi was particularly telling as it subtly played with the multiple meanings of the word as courageous or self-assured and immodest or

488 On Gaultier see Michel Lamontagne, ―L‘Influence de Maurepas sur les sciences: le botaniste Jean Prat à La Nouvelle Orléans, 1735 – 1746,‖ Revue d‟histoire des sciences 49, no. 1 (1996): 114, note 4, and Chartrand, Duchesne and Gingras, Histoire des sciences au Québec, 56 – 60.

489 Jean-François Gaultier, ―Description de plusieurs plantes du Canada par M Gaultier,‖ Cote: P91,D3, Fonds Jean-François Gaultier, Bibliothèque et Archive nationale de Québec, Québec, 117.

490 Ibid., 117 – 18.

491 Ibid.

492 Ibid., 118.

197 audacious.493 While still recognizing the importance of Lafitau‘s contributions to the discovery of ginseng, Gaultier nonetheless signaled that Lafitau had not known his place.

Sarrazin could be forgiven for not knowing the proper name of the plant because, far from

Paris in Québec and Montréal, he could only ever produce a partial account of the plant. He had done what was expected of him when he sent specimens of the plant to Paris.

The Académie Royale des Sciences established itself as a scientific authority in the

French Atlantic World not by dismissing its competitors but by incorporating them into its own projects and networks. Focused on Paris and the members of the Académie who worked at affiliated institutions such as the Jardin du Roi, the Académie‘s networks evoked an epistemic geography that harshly distinguished centre from periphery.494 While naturalists such as Sébastien Vaillant, Danty d‘Isnard and Antoine de Jussieu are best known for their economical descriptions of plants and taxonomic schemas, the narratives of scientific discovery in which they situated their work were essential to the success of their efforts to redefine the scientific community of the French Atlantic World in their favour.495

Arrogating the authority to name and define flora the world over, these narratives defined not only plants but people too. In the eyes of the Académie, Lafitau simply did not understand his proper place.

493 ―Hardi,‖ University of Chicago: ARTFL Dictionnaires d‘autrefois, http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi- bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=hardi

494 Spary, Utopia‟s Garden, Chapter 2.

495 This was also true among the correspondents of the Académie. See E.C. Spary, ―Of Nutmegs and Botanists: The Colonial Cultivation of Botanical Identity,‖ in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 187 – 203.

198

Epilogue – The Botanical Agnosticism of the Ginseng Trade

Lafitau had originally returned to Paris in 1717 to present a Mémoire on the sale of alcohol to indigenous communities to the French court and to argue for new lands with better soils for the mission at Kahnawake.496 Yet much of what Lafitau had sought to accomplish for his mission at Kahnawake was ultimately undermined by his discovery of ginseng and his effort to make his account public. While Lafitau was interested in ginseng‘s value only insofar as its sale might profit his religious order and the French

Atlantic empire, he was well aware of its marketability. Indeed, Lafitau framed his justification for French interest in the plant in a mercantilist discourse; citing the plant‘s value to the Chinese, he also suggested that New France might replace China as the source of ginseng consumed in France.497 His encouragement to the French state to act quickly on his discovery was in part also a fear that if they did not, it was a virtual certainty that protestant traders to the south would beat them to it. ―The Flemish of New York will profit from it,‖ he warned his readers, adding that, ―Some of them have seen it sold at Montréal by the Sauvages, and it will no doubt be sent to England after this year.‖498 Lafitau was aware that word of his discovery would spread and he knew that while his own work proved that the plant had long roots in Haudenosaunee culture, it likely also grew elsewhere in North America.

It seems that few in France aside from Lafitau and members of the Académie

Royale des Sciences such as Vaillant or Danty d‘Isnard became fully engaged in the debate

496 An overview of this mémoire and his efforts to aid the Haudenosaunee can be found in JR 67:38.

497 Lafitau, Mémoire, 85.

498 Ibid., 64.

199 about the true identity of American ginseng. Instead, many French authors throughout the eighteenth century seem to have remained undecided about the botanical identity of the plant and maintained a primary focus on its commercial value. The author of the article

―Gin-seng‖ in Diderot‘s Encyclopédie, for example, would cautiously state only that ―all seem to presume that the two ginsengs are the same plant.‖499 French consumers who

Lafitau had originally hoped to supply with a fresher product nonetheless continued to prefer ginseng from China.500 Yet for many, the only relevant litmus test was the acceptance of the Chinese market. In the wake of Lafitau‘s Mémoire, the Jesuit‘s hopes for a new source of revenue for the colony seemed vindicated as, within a decade, the

Compagnie des Indes Occidentales began shipping American ginseng to Chinese ports via

La Rochelle. The profits were impressive; ginseng that could be bought for 3 francs per pound in New France commanded 180 francs in China, representing a 3000% mark-up that was more than enough to cover the costs of the long transport.501 As the author of the article on ginseng in the Encyclopédie wrote, ―In the end, without the need to seduce the

Chinese with any preparation, it is certain that they do not know how to distinguish natural and pure ginseng from Canada from that of Tartarie: our Compagnie des Indes profits from their error, skillfully selling them one for the other, and has held the secret to this day to

499 ―GIN-SENG,‖ Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D'Alembert. University of Chicago : ARTFL Encyclopédie Projet (Winter 2008 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.

500 Evans, ―Ginseng,‖ 11.

501 Ibid., 11 – 12.

200

FIGURE 5 – Panax quinquefolium (photo by author) Figure 5 - Panax quinquefolium Panax quinquefolium, Herbier d‘Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, Laboratoire de phanérogamie, Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle, Paris

201 send three or four thousand pounds of ginseng from New France to China.‖502 As long as the Chinese were willing to pay for it, few cared if the North American plant was actually ginseng.

Lafitau‘s Mémoire provided a virtual how-to guide for would-be aboriginal and

Euro-American ginseng traders. Lafitau equipped French and British traders with the language necessary to enlist a broad spectrum of collectors from the indigenous communities of colonial North America. He provided clues not only to where ginseng might be found but who might be able to find it and how to communicate with them.

Haudenosaunee and other indigenous peoples also seemed to have quickly learned about ginseng‘s value to European and Chinese markets. As the trade expanded, so too did the reach and impact of Lafitau‘s discovery. Lafitau‘s work similarly found a receptive audience among Lafitau‘s North American confrères who expanded the geographic focus of his research. The Jesuit Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, who travelled throughout

French North America both before and after Lafitau‘s stay at Kahnawake was unambiguous in his support. ―P. Laffitau, who was the first to bring it to France,‖ wrote

Charlevoix, ―has written about it under the name Aureliana Canadensis: at least from its image, it is absolutely the same plant as that which comes from China, & that the Chinese gather from Korea and Tartarie.‖503 Charlevoix noted the presence of ginseng among the

Miami who, he had discovered, also used the plant medicinally. ―The Sauvages who apply themselves at all times more than others to medicine, make a great deal of Gin-Seng, & are persuaded that this plant has the virtue to make women fertile. I do not believe however

502 ―GIN-SENG,‖ Encyclopédie, 7: 665 – 66.

503 Charlevoix. Journal d'un voyage , 640 – 41.

202 that it is for this reason that they call it Abesoutchenza, which means a child; it owes this name to the image of its root, at least among the Iroquois.‖504 By the mid-1730s the Jardin du Roi in Paris had already received a sample specimen of the ―ginseng des natchès‖

[FIGURE 5] that Jean Prat, correspondent to the Académie in New Orleans, had collected the specimens from Jesuit missionaries.

As Lafitau had initially feared, word of his discovery also quickly reached British

North America, spurring a booming trade based in Albany that drew aboriginal peoples from French North America in much the same way that the fur trade had. During

Franquet‘s stay at the Abenaki mission at Bécancour he noted, ―All the Sauvages had left to trade in New England, or were collecting geinseing; all the cabins were closed, in a league all that remained were those for whom infirmities or age impeded their ability to walk.‖505 The historian Gail MacLeitch has recently written that these effects of the trade were also common in British North America. ―When a Moravian minister, J. Martin Mack, traveled through Iroquoia in 1752,‖ MacLeitch writes, ―he noticed villages virtually abandoned as men, women, and children scoured the woods for the root.‖506 Members of

London‘s Royal Society and colonial merchants eagerly opened up the market for

American ginseng in Britain. Colonial naturalists such as John Bartram and William Byrd soon searched for the ―king of plants‖ and found it and willing suppliers in Pennsylvania and Virginia.507 For local officials such as William Johnson, superintendent of Indian

504 Ibid., 640.

505 Louis Franquet, Voyages et mémoires sur le Canada par Franquet (Montréal: Editions Elysée Montréal – Institut Canadien de Québec, 1974), 99.

506 G. D. MacLeitch, ―"Red" Labor: Iroquois Participation in the Atlantic Economy,‖ Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1, no. 4 (12, 2004): 81.

507 Appleby, ―Ginseng,‖ 130.

203

Affairs in New York, the plant was soon grafted onto the networks established by the fur trade. In 1752, for instance, he reported that he had sent ―three Hogheads & a Cask of

Ginseng, with three Bundles of Bear Skins‖ to John George Libenrood in a trade that, writes Timothy J. Shannon, exchanged peas, wheat, furs and ginseng for ―clothing, tools, weapons, and liquor.‖508

In 1751 the trade in ginseng was worth over 750 000 francs to the Compagnie des

Indes.509 Yet, by 1752 the trade had collapsed as merchants and collectors neglected the plant‘s cultural contexts that had been a primary focus of Lafitau‘s text. The value of

American ginseng was undermined as plants were picked out of season and were improperly processed, driving Chinese consumers away from the American plant. The

Abbé Raynal described the ginseng trade as a paradigmatic example of colonial greed and the inefficient exploitation of what might have been a sustainable resource. In his 1770

Epices et produits coloniaux, Raynal wrote that ―It finished itself in 1752 for five hundred thousand francs. The eagerness that this plant excited pushed the Canadians to collect in the month of May that which ought to have been collected in September, & to dry in the oven that which must be dried slowly in the shade.‖510 Colonists were driven to biological essentialism by greed. Ignoring the information provided by Jartoux, Lafitau and their confrères about the aesthetic expectations of the Chinese market, colonial merchants

508 ―Sir William Johnson to John George Libenrood,‖ The Papers of Sir William Johnson, James Sullivan, ed. (Albany: The University of the State of New York, 1921), 1:376; See also Timothy J. Shannon, ―Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,‖ William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 53, no. 1 (1996): 19 – 20.

509 Evans, ―Ginseng,‖ 12; By the 1750s officials began to complain about improperly processed, stored and collected plants in the 1750s. By 1752 these same officials lamented the fall in prices that resulted from decreased interest in Canadian ginseng in the Chinese market. See, for representative examples Centre des Archives d‘Outre-mer, C11A, vol. 98, 460 – 61. [Hereafter CAOM]

510Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Epices et produits coloniaux. (Paris: Ed. la Bibliothèque, 1992 / 1770), 65.

204 bought plants that had been collected early, giving them an off colour. Based upon the work of his confrères who had written in China, Lafitau had warned that ―When one pulls it out of the ground, it is necessary to wash it carefully, cut the root along its length so that it dries more easily. It is better to dry it in the shade than in the sun or by the fire, and store it in a dry place.‖511 Yet colonial merchants compounded their error in collecting the plant early by neglecting to follow the process that gave ginseng root its trademark near transparency which Chinese consumers demanded.512 In China, where earlier unscrupulous

Chinese merchants had mixed American and Chinese ginseng together to maintain prices and profit, American ginseng soon acquired a bad reputation as its difference became noticeable.513 American ginseng was not much different from Chinese biologically but, through French inattention to the cultural construction of the plant in Asia, it was soon understood to be a distinct and inferior product by Chinese consumers.

Conclusion

Although historians since the eighteenth century have been willing to credit Lafitau with what was perhaps the greatest botanical discovery in the history of New France, the certainty of his findings remained a subject of debate throughout his lifetime. In taking the reception of Lafitau‘s botanical discovery for granted, historians have missed an opportunity to better understand the complicated integration of France‘s North American

511 Lafitau, Mémoire, 68.

512 Evans, ―Ginseng,‖ 14.

513 Ibid.

205 colonies into Atlantic scientific networks centred on the Parisian Académie Royale des

Sciences and the problematic place of colonial and indigenous knowledges in the early modern French Atlantic. Debating the identity of the plant, its legitimate discoverer, the role of indigenous peoples and knowledges, and the proper sites of knowledge production in both France and her colonies, the divergent efforts of naturalists and missionaries to apprehend an American plant revealed the contours of a French Atlantic World transformed by the influence of the recently founded Académie Royale des Sciences. These writings also reveal, however, a debate not only about the proper methods of botanical science but a more fundamental disagreement over where legitimate knowledge could be produced and which actors could be mobilized in its production. For as much as Lafitau bitterly defended his work against accusations of an erroneous method by members of the

Académie such as Danty D‘Isnard, he was as much interested in challenging the epistemic mercantilism of the Académie in a bid to admit both himself, the Jesuits and, crucially, indigenous peoples as knowledge producers in a more epistemologically diverse and decentred French Atlantic World. In spite of the fact that botanists at the Académie Royale des Sciences ruthlessly effaced discussions of human cultures from their research, their narratives of ginseng‘s discovery were as much about people as the Society of Jesus and

Lafitau had been.

There was therefore a great deal at stake in the debate over the identity and discovery of ginseng. The study of ginseng‘s multiple discoveries reveal that even as plants were collected and circulated between Jesuit and Académie networks their identity remained fluid and contextual; the differences in the representation of ginseng in the texts of authors such as Lafitau, Vaillant or Jussieu can be traced not only to particular methods

206 of study but to larger beliefs about where and by whom scientific knowledge could be produced.

CHAPTER 4

The Académie enters the Atlantic: Centres and Peripheries in French Atlantic Science

In 1708 Sébastien Vaillant, a naturalist and botanical demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi in Paris, wrote the first scientific text that focused exclusively on flora from

France‘s North American colonies. Entitled the ―Histoire des plantes de Canada,‖

Vaillant‘s text laid claim to a privileged and unparalleled understanding of American flora, emerging from a growing interest in local floras in Europe and the wider world.514

Frequently, discussions of morphological properties, species distribution or medicinal properties were presented as authorless matters of fact.515 When Vaillant described

Alcanna major, latifolia, dentata, (common winterberry) for example, he wrote that ―The leaves alternate. It grows to 3 or 4 feet and forms a dense bush. Its branches are full of very little flowers which have the figure of a rosette divided from the centre into 6 areas;

[it] has 6 stamens supported on a calix of the same shape.‖516 Timeless accounts of plants

514 Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 22; Dickenson, Drawn from Life, 78.

515 A commitment to producing ―Matters of fact‖ erected a distinction between abstracted experience and often contentious interpretation. See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 507.

516 Boivin, La Flore du Canada, np.

207

208 that had been abstracted from their cultural or ecological contexts in American soils, these descriptions followed many of the generic conventions that had become common in botanical texts.517 Yet, as often as Vaillant‘s manuscript masked the origins of his research specimens, his text still occasionally framed his knowledge of North American flora as the product of a transatlantic conversation with Michel Sarrazin, then the only corresponding member of the Paris-based Académie Royale des Sciences in French

North America.518 The Alcanna, for example, was listed as ―Envoy de 1703 no 10,‖ hinting at the extra-European origins of the plant.519 Some claims to firsthand observation quite obviously came from a credible American source. Elsewhere, however, these connections were made more explicit. When discussion turned to Abrotanum (field sagewort), Vaillant wrote that ―M. Sarrazin thought that it was a Verge dorée (Canadian goldenrod).‖520 Sarrazin was cited because of the insights he offered into both the natural and cultural worlds of colonial French North America; the references to interviews with

―nos Dames sauvagesses‖ complemented Sarrazin‘s claims to have observed plants such as Dens Canis flore luteo (dogtooth violet) both in both Canadian soils, and French and aboriginal soups.521 Distinctions of authorship and authority blurred as Vaillant revealed

517 Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, Chapter 5; Müller-Wille, ―Walnuts at Hudson Bay,‖ 38 – 39.

518 For more on Michel Sarrazin see Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien.

519 Boivin, La Flore du Canada, np.

520 Ibid.

521 Ibid.

209 his dependence on both Sarrazin and the vast American networks of amateur colonial and indigenous collectors that supplied him.522

Sarrazin‘s ambiguous presence in this text highlighted the fundamental tension in the designs of an Académie that sought to focus the circulation of knowledge in the early modern French Atlantic World on Paris but which drew upon the knowledges and collections of an ever widening array of colonial and indigenous populations to do it.523

Sarrazin and the other correspondents that the Académie and closely associated Jardin du

Roi of Paris sent to the French colonies in North America came to embody this tension between an increasingly centralized academic culture and the need for colonial correspondents that could engage and negotiate with colonial and indigenous collectors; caught between a recognition of the centrality of the ―cultural borderlands‖ or ―biocontact zone‖ which furnished the plants and knowledges required by their metropolitan patrons,

522 In the context of French Atlantic science, the division between amateur and academic science was a matter of both education and recognition by the Académie Royale des Sciences, and in many cases was also reflected by inequalities in the state‘s financial support of colonial botany and plant collection. Those contributors who I define as amateur naturalists were self-educated and only rarely received financial compensation from the French state, even when it was a matter of compensation for expenses accrued while collecting rare and novel plants. By contrast, while colonial naturalists and members of the Académie Royale des Sciences such as Québec-based Michel Sarrazin did not receive the annual pensions which were provided for Paris-based members, they routinely received ―gratifications‖ that recognized their service both to the crown and Académie with nearly-annual payments. See Young, ―Crown Agent,‖ 427-28, for a discussion of the payments received by Michel Sarrazin. For a recent analysis of the French state‘s financial support for academicians in Paris, see Maurice Crosland, ―The Financial Support of Men of Science in France, c. 1660 – c.1800: A survey,‖ History of Science 45, no. 149 (2007): 327 – 355. For a more general analysis of the financial support of the Académie Royale des Sciences, see Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For a recent study of the eighteenth- century networks of the Jardin du Roi, see Spary, Utopia‟s Garden, Chapter 2.

523 Cities such as Paris were fast becoming ―nerve centres‖ in both European and global scientific networks, or ―privileged sites for the global articulation of knowledge.‖ Antonello Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, ―Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th – 18th century),‖ Itinerario 33 (2008): 84 – 85, and Romano and Van Damme, ―Penser les savoirs au large.‖ See also Van Damme, Paris.

210

North American correspondents were nonetheless clearly situated at the social and epistemological periphery of the Académie‘s scientific networks.524

Even as the scientific culture of France and wider Europe continued to undermine the autonomy of colonial science, the Académie depended on its American correspondents for the raw materials with which its increasingly complicated taxonomic systems and studies of chemical properties could proceed. Determined to reinforce their own centrality in French scientific networks, the members of the Académie and Jardin du

Roi could nonetheless never escape a serious consideration of the needs and limitations of their colonial correspondents. At the same time, as American correspondents attempted to expand their limited role in the Académie‘s networks, they were forced to become mediators rather than collectors, translating the desires of their patrons at the

Académie into material rewards and official recognition to create networks of their own that stretched into the interior of the continent. While few traces of their encounters with indigenous and colonial knowledges survive, those that do show that much of what would typify French enlightenment botany‘s study of North American flora started its life in the encounter of knowledges and peoples at the ecological and intellectual borderlands of

France‘s North American colonies.

This chapter therefore traces a more complicated geography of ecological and botanical knowledge production in the early modern French Atlantic than has often been depicted. To say that a centre and periphery in the French Atlantic World did not exist is to mistake the limits of the influence of the Académie for powerlessness. Brokering

524 For a discussion of polycentricity and its place in current discussion of colonial science both in the Atlantic and World history see Fan, ―Science in Cultural Borderlands," For a discussion of biocontact zones, see Schiebinger, Plants and Empire," 83 - 84. Also see the introduction to this dissertation.

211 access to the resources and rewards of the state, the Académie was able to keep their colonial correspondents in check more often than not; participants in a scientific culture that privileged the sorts of comparative and systematic study of the world‘s flora that was only possible in metropolitan scientific capitals such as Paris, correspondents were forced to content themselves with the accolades of the Académie and the warm words of their patrons. In the annual shipments that sent specimens and descriptive accounts from west to east across the Atlantic Ocean, Paris was made a scientific centre and Québec and New

Orleans became scientific peripheries.

Yet it is also clear that the French Atlantic was polycentric and depended upon negotiations with knowledges and peoples that disappeared in the final products of the

Académie and its members. If correspondents found themselves in an inferior epistemic position relative to their Parisian patrons, they recognized that their success depended upon their ability to extend their reach into the continent and in their ability to translate the demands of academic science into the economic and social realities of Louisiana and

New France. These were scientists who were forced to take the concerns of their collectors seriously and, if they reproduced their own relationship with the Académie in their encounters with colonial networks, they nonetheless accepted that American indigenous and colonial networks were a necessary part of the scientific study of the colonial flora.

212

Michel Sarrazin and the Académie Royale des Sciences

The life and work of Michel Sarrazin reveal that he, like the Académie itself, served two masters: science and the state.525 Bound to the scientific community by election as the correspondent of the botanist and academician Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in 1699, Sarrazin was equally enmeshed in colonial administration, owing much to patronage from the colony‘s intendants, his place on the colony‘s superior council and his position as the royal physician to New France.526 While in Paris in the mid-1690s,

Sarrazin had been able to benefit from the tutelage and patronage of Tournefort, a member of the Académie since 1691 and, then only a few years after the publication of his Institutiones rei herbariæ, a hugely influential botanist in Europe and professor at the

Jardin du Roi.527 Sarrazin‘s botanical research in North America began when his ship first touched land in 1697 after crossing the Atlantic to take up the newly created post of royal physician in New France.528 Modeled on earlier experiments with royally funded science

525 Numerous scholars have studied the close relationship between science and state in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. See, for example, Stroup, Company of Scientists, Spary, Utopia's Garden, and Charles Coulton Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Robin Briggs, ―The Académie Royale des Sciences and the Pursuit of Utility,‖ Past and Present 131 (1991): 38 – 88 argues that that the Académie‘s support for the state often remained hypothetical. The close connection between science and state has also been studied from an Atlantic and colonial perspective. See Regourd and McClellan, ―Machine coloniale,‖ McClellan, Colonialism & Science. Spary, ―Peaches Which the Patriarchs Lacked,‖ and Jordan Kellman, ―Discovery and Enlightenment at Sea: Maritime Exploration and Observation in the 18th-century French Scientific Community,‖ (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1998).

526 Sarrazin particularly benefitted from the patronage of intendants Michel Bégon and Antonie-Denis Raudot. See Young, ―Crown Agent," 420 - 22. Louis Prat got the job of royal physician and botanist over Alexandre Vielle, a local apothecary in Louisiana, because of the support of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, an on-and-off-again governor of Louisiana. Marcel Giraud, History of French Louisiana: The Company of the Indies, 1723 – 1731, trans. Brian Pearce (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 217 – 219.

527 Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien, 42.

528 Sarrazin had earlier served as a surgeon in the Marine in New France between 1685 and 1692, see Jacques Rousseau, ―Sarrazin (Sarrasin), Michel,‖ Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-

213 in the French Caribbean, this conflation of scientific and administrative roles was replicated by Sarrazin‘s successor to the post of royal physician in New France, Jean-

François Gaultier, and extended to the French colony of Louisiana with the settlement of royal physicians such as Jean Prat and a local apothecary Alexandre Vielle who, even if not named official members of the Académie, were closely integrated into the correspondence networks of the Parisian naturalist and academician Bernard de Jussieu.

Just as Sarrazin was originally sent both to report on the flora and fauna of New

France and to see to the health of its colonists and military personnel, so too was Louis

Prat (and later his brother Jean) sent to New Orleans some three decades later to found a botanical garden to help combat the malaria, venereal disease and plethora of other illnesses limiting the expansion of the colony and threatening its reputation in France, an often impossible task.529 During times of illness or war, the obligations to their colonial patients could conflict with those to the Académie and their Parisian patrons.530 Pierre

Baron, sent by the Académie to Louisiana in 1727, similarly found the demands on his time as an engineer left little for botany.531 Yet while other collectors – be they clergy, surgeons or soldiers – would add their efforts to the botanical collections sent from New e.php?&id_nbr=1091&&PHPSESSID=15iiicem2m7r9smuocou6bknj3; ―In memoriam – Liste alphabétique S – Les membres de l‘Académie des sciences,‖ Institut de France, Académie des sciences, http://www.academie-sciences.fr/membres/in_memoriam/in_memoriam_liste_alphabetique_s.htm; On Sarrazin‘s first botanizing trips, see Jacques Rousseau, ―Michel Sarrazin, Jean-François Gaulthier et l‘Etude prélinnéene de la flore canadienne,‖ in Les botanistes français en Amérique du Nord avant 1850 (Paris: Editions du Center national de la recherche scientifique, 1957), 153 – 54.

529 Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil‟s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 81 – 83; Giraud, Company of the Indies, 217 – 219; Langlois, ―Deux Fondations Scientifiques a la Nouvelle-Orleans,‖ 100 - 01

530 See Sarrazin to Réaumur, 29 October 1727, in Vallée Un Biologiste canadien, 241 or Gaultier to Réumur, 1 October 1750 in Arthur Vallée, ―Cinq lettres Inédites de Jean François Gaultier à M. Réaumur de l‘Académie des Sciences,‖ Mémoire de la Société Royale du Canada, 3rd ser., XXIV (1930), 37.

531 Dawdy, Building the Devil‟s Empire, 81 – 82.

214

Orleans and Québec to Paris, it was their dual positions as scientists and administrators that privileged the work of correspondents such as the Prats, Sarrazin, Gaultier and

Vielle; epistemologically their links to the Académie and its members gave their work a validity that impressed both colonists and officials alike, while their involvement in colonial administration gave them access both to the financial and social resources necessary to retain their value to the Académie and its members.

In botanists such as New France‘s Michel Sarrazin and Jean-François Gaultier or

Louisiana‘s Jean and Louis Prat or Alexandre Vielle, historians James McClellan and

François Regourd have seen the birth of what they term ―the colonial machine,‖ a long- term process by which scientific activity was brought under the supervision of the

Parisian Academies and was integrated into the administrative apparatus of the French

Atlantic empire.532 Regourd has more specifically traced the origins of this machine to larger efforts to centralize the production and circulation of knowledge in France following the majority of Louis XIV and the ascendance of ministers such as Jean-

Baptiste Colbert.533 Atlantic communication, if never entirely controlled, was effectively channeled towards Paris and Versailles; although the establishment of state-centred, bureaucratic institutions was a central means by which colonial correspondents became cogs in a transatlantic machine, recent work has shown the extent to which patronage

532 Regourd and McClellan, ―Machine coloniale‖; Jean-François Gaultier was royal physician at Québec in the 1740s and 50s and was a correspondent of Académie members Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, René Ferchault de Réaumur and Jean-Etienne Guettard. Louis and Jean Prat were physicians in New Orleans between 1720 and the 1750s. Jean trained and corresponded with Bernard de Jussieu. Alexandre Vielle was an apothecary and surgeon who settled in New Orleans in the 1720s. He corresponded with Bernard de Jussieu and would later receive a pension and recognition as a corresponding member from the Académie Royale des Sciences for his work on the arbre à cire.

533 Regourd, ―Sciences et colonisation sous l'Ancien Régime,‖ 264–70; McClellan, on the other hand, has more fully traced the growth of the colonial machine following the reorganization of the French Atlantic empire after the seven year‘s war. James E. McClellan III, Colonialism & Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

215 networks survived and evolved under Louis XIV who was able to mobilize and influence the individual patronage networks of his secretaries of state.534 At the same time, stemming from a simultaneous effort to expand France‘s Atlantic infrastructure through the construction of new ships and the expansion of Atlantic ports, Colbert‘s reforms gave the French Atlantic a salience that it had previously lacked.535

Colbert‘s efforts to centralize French cultural production had a direct influence on the relationships between the French scientific community and the state. Invested with royal authority after its founding in 1666, the Académie Royale des Sciences quickly became the centre of scientific knowledge production in France and, as Colbert and Louis

XIV seem to have initially intended, was soon the seat of scientific legitimacy both within France and throughout the French Atlantic.536 It was soon invested, not only with the authority of Louis XIV‘s state, but with much of its character as well; as Charles

Gillespie has written, the Académie ―exhibited in miniature the structural characteristics of the regime that sustained [it]: monarchical, hierarchical, prescriptive, and privileged.‖537 This meant an increasingly stratified membership, a rich visual culture representing and reinforcing royal authority, and little room for those at the margin of the institution to be anything but informants in networks of epistolary and specimen

534 Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), 23.

535 Ibid. See James Stewart Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 234 - 41 for an overview (albeit critical) of Colbert‘s colonial policy.

536 Hahn, Anatomy of a Scientific Institution, 46 – 47, 58 – 60. See also McClellan, Specialist Control, 61 – 76; David Stephan Lux, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France: The Académie De Physique in Caen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)

537 Gillespie, Science and Polity, 81.

216 exchange directed by the Académie or associated institutions such as the Jardin du Roi or the Observatoire Royal.538

While continuing to fulfill its dual mandate to both foster French scientific advancement and bring glory to the crown, the Académie that Sarrazin entered into was in the midst of a massive reorganization; reworking both the inner life of the Académie itself and the means by which academicians interacted with the wider world, a reorganization in 1699 codified and reinforced many of the practices that had already become common in the preceding three decades of the Académie‘s life.539 A major facet of the reforms involved creating more nuanced membership categories, clarifying the relationship of external correspondents to the Académie‘s Parisian members.540 Although it had initially drawn inspiration and members from many of Paris‘ existing scientific communities such as those centred around Melchisédech Thévenot, almost immediately after the founding of the Académie there was a clear effort to establish a division between those that worked within its confines and those that remained outside.541 Until 1691, for example, the bi-weekly meetings of the Académie were held behind closed doors in the

538Hahn, Anatomy of a Scientific Institution, 63, 73 – 75.

539 David L. Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie Royale des Sciences, 1666 – 1760 (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1995), 286; For an overview of the history of the reorganization of the Académie see Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, ―Les Savants, la société et L‘Etat: à propos du «renouvellement» de l‘Académie royale des sciences,‖ Journal des savants no.1 (1998): 79 – 114.

540 James E. McClellan, ―L'Académie royale des Sciences (1666 - 1793),‖ in Lieux de Savoir: Espaces et communautés, ed. Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), 719 - 722.

541 See Lux, Patronage and Royal Science, for a discussion of the precursors to the Académie and their survival during its early years.

217

Bibliothèque du Roi, physically and visibly signalling a concerted effort to distance local amateurs and foreign scientists alike from its workings and resources.542

Initially, even as there were clear differentiations in the amount of pay and prestige allotted to particular members of the Académie such as Christiaan Huygens or

Giovanni Domenico Cassini, for those admitted there was a rough equality in membership.543 While students and hired assistants remained largely invisible, it was at least initially hoped that full members would work together on collaborative and interdisciplinary projects that were collectively authored and that would represent their unanimous voice.544 Rather than being represented by differentiated membership categories, status in the Académie was represented by access to the patrons and protectors of the Académie and carried no official marker.545 The status of foreigners and correspondents was less clear. Even though as McClellan has written, ―Until 1699 … there were no official foreign members or correspondents,‖546 non-existent or ambiguous divisions between honorary, corresponding and standing members, along with the appointment of Jesuits sent to China at the behest of Louis XIV after the 1680s meant a confused relationship with de facto corresponding members.547 At the same time that these confused categories seemed to grant correspondents an equality with regular

542 Stroup, Company of Scientists, 15; Lux, Patronage and Royal Science, 53 – 56.

543 Stroup, Company of Scientists, 14.

544 Ibid., 29; McClellan, Académie, 721 – 22;

545 Stroup, Company of Scientists, 14.

546 James E. McClellan, ―The Académie Royale des Sciences, 1699 – 1793: A Statistical Portrait,‖ Isis 72, no. 4 (1981): 544.

547 See Hsia, ―Jesuits, Jupiter‘s Satellites.‖

218 members, the Académie‘s closed sessions reinforced a distinction between its members and the wider French and European scientific community and served as a tangible reminder of its ultimate role as the principal gateway to scientific patronage and legitimacy in France. The epistemological distinction between colonial and French science thus remained difficult to determine with any certainty even as the division between academic and amateur science was increasingly clearly delineated.

Following its official reorganization in 1699, however, the already hierarchical society became simultaneously more restrictive. Stratification increased as membership categories were further refined and multiplied. As full membership in the Académie was further split into subcategories, French religieux and amateur scientists were officially limited to the role of honoraire, prestigious for sure but a clear signal that their future intellectual contributions to the Académie would be limited.548 As Florence Hsia‘s research has shown, even as a lack of training limited the ability of Jesuits in China to do science in an ―academic mode,‖ the missionaries – and, indeed, all French religieux - were further ostracized as even more categories of membership were created in 1716.

While the Jesuit and accomplished astronomer Thomas Gouye had, as an honoraire, served as the Académie‘s vice-président throughout the early eighteenth century, after

1716 religieux could only serve the Académie as associés libres, ineligible for office and lacking the vote of regular members.549 Full membership was further restricted to those

548 Sturdy, Science and Social Status, 284.

549 Hsia, Sojourners, 118 – 19.

219 able to reside in Paris and take part in the bi-weekly meetings of the Académie that continued into the eighteenth century.550

Barred from full membership by their geographical location, for colonial scientists such as Michel Sarrazin the creation of the new membership category of correspondant in 1699 simultaneously ensured access to the prestige and resources of the

Académie and an inferior role in its scientific productions. As the inauguration of these new categories of membership accompanied an admission that the Académie‘s early experiments in collective authorship of scientific research had failed, however, it also meant that, henceforth, colonial correspondents would in effect become the property of individual members who were able to channel and discipline colonial scientific activity as never before.551 This convention was also followed with long-term correspondents in

Louisiana such as the Prats who were nonetheless never made official members of the

Académie even though they worked directly for and in close contact with the academician and botanist Bernard de Jussieu for decades. While communicating directly with the Académie had previously been difficult or even impossible for colonial naturalists, relationships such as those between colonial correspondents such as Sarrazin and Gaultier and their academic sponsors Tournefort, René Antoine Ferchault de

Réaumur and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau gave colonial botany a regular and attentive metropolitan audience, but at the same time severely circumscribed their role in the scientific networks of the French Atlantic World.

550 Sturdy, Science and Social Status, 286.

551 Ibid.; McClellan, Académie, 726.

220

Plants and Patronage

Following the lives and careers of early colonial botanists such as Charles Plumier and engineers, astronomers and surveyors such as Jean Richer, Estienne Surian and Jean

Deshayes, the historian François Regourd has convincingly shown how the French state and scientific community collaborated to establish a cadre of qualified and reliable correspondents in the wake of the foundation of the Académie Royale des Sciences.552

For the Académie the placement of official corresponding members and the cultivation of long-term relationships with royal physicians in French colonies in North America was part of a larger strategy to secure reliable and trustworthy sources of both information and specimens.553 This was an effort that was by no means restricted to either botany or natural history.554 Although the collection of plants entailed a particular set of unique logistical issues that were different than those that an adequately equipped and trained amateur astronomer faced, these were all ―big sciences‖ of their day, and were projects of an ever increasing scale that required the participation of an ever expanding network of correspondents and collectors that would provide the raw materials needed to make the global ambitions of French academic science a reality.555

552See Regourd, ―Sciences et colonisation,‖ 279 – 358 for a full discussion of the French scientific expeditions to the Caribbean in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. See also, Kellman, ―Discovery and Enlightenment,‖ 85 – 176.

553 Regourd, ―Sciences et colonisation,‖ 264 – 70.

554 See, for example, the work of Florence Hsia on the recruitment of observateurs by Cassini and other astronomer of the Académie. Florence C. Hsia, ―French Jesuits and the Mission to China: Science, Religion, History‖ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1999), 48 - 61.

555 For more information on the maritime shipment of plants see Yannick Romieux, ―Le transport maritime des plantes au XVIIIe siècle,‖ Revue d‟histoire de la pharmacie vol. 92, no. 343, (2004), 405 – 418; Harris, ―Long-Distance Corporations," 294. See also Chapter 5 of this dissertation.

221

Extending the reach of Parisian scientific institutions and integrating scientific research into the tissue of the French Atlantic empire, these networked correspondents, it was hoped, would both contribute to the development of French botanical science and develop the botanical resources of American colonies. With the support of marine officials such as Michel Bégon who had close ties to France‘s burgeoning scientific institutions through family and patronage networks, the first generation of state- sponsored and Académie endorsed naturalists were personally trained by academicians before being sent on foreign expeditions as collectors and observers.556 Convinced of the need for botanical exploration in the Caribbean, in the 1680s Bégon recruited Charles

Plumier, a Minim who had previously worked with Tournefort when they were both at the famous medical gardens of Montpellier.557 Under royal orders to ―work to discover the properties of plants, seeds, oils, gums and essences and to draw the birds and the fish and other animals,‖ he would undertake voyages in 1687, 1689 and 1694. Ultimately he described over 6000 new plants and received the newly minted title of royal botanist.558

Through Bégon the connections of botaniste voyageurs such as Plumier to the state were tangible, but in forwarding his collections to Guy Crescent Fagon, doctor to the King and director of the Jardin du Roi, Plumier simultaneously gave substance to the promise of an alliance between science and the state.559

556 Bégon, cousin to Colbert and a botanist himself, was successively intendant in the French Caribbean, the French ports of Rochefort and La Rochelle. His son Michel Bégon de la Picardière was named intendant of New France in 1710.

557 Allorge and Ikor, La fabuleuse odyssée des plantes, 176.

558 Regourd, ―Sciences et colonisation,‖ 285-86.

559 Ibid.; Yves Laissus writes that before Plumier, there was a much clearer separation between voyageurs (who had little scientific training to speak of) and naturalistes who awaited their arrival and their

222

While the botanists who travelled to New Orleans and Québec followed the example of Plumier in their submission to the designs and directives of the Académie, the expansion of French scientific networks into North America represented an institutional innovation. When the physician Michel Sarrazin was elected the first American correspondent of the Académie it signaled a shift from a strategy that had thus far relied on botanistes voyageurs whose scientific expeditions had been heavily influenced by the designs and desires of the Académie or, more frequently, the well-intended but often problematic contributions of amateur naturalists.560 As long-term residents of French

North American colonies, naturalists such as Sarrazin and Jean Prat enjoyed an intellectual freedom unimaginable for botanistes voyageurs who were often provided with firm suggestions about their possible itineraries and the focus of their investigations.561 Yet they simultaneously suffered from a social and intellectual isolation that made their institutional ties both to the Académie and the scientific networks of the

French Atlantic World far more tenuous than travelling naturalists such as Plumier. As correspondents such as Michel Sarrazin left the confines of the Jardin du Roi and the reach of their Parisian patrons, the problem of ensuring continued productivity and loyalty became a real concern.

collections in Paris. See ―Les voyageurs naturalists du Jardin du Roi et du Muséum d‘histoire naturelle: essai de portrait-robot,‖ Revue d‟histoire des sciences 4, no. 3-4 (1981), 263.

560 Kellman refers to this as the end of the ―heroic individual botanical‖ explorer. ―Discovery and Enlightenment,‖ 167.

561 The instructions provided to travellers and correspondents have not received a great deal of scholarly attention. For a brief discussion of their evolution in French scientific networks, see Kury Lorelaï, ―Les instructions de voyages dans les expéditions scientifiques françaises (1750 – 1830),‖ Revue d‟histoire des sciences 51(1) (1998), 65 – 92. See also Chapter 5 of this dissertation.

223

With the posting of official correspondents in North America the networks that the Académie stretched into the Atlantic took on an apparent fixity that was belied by the tenuous and often infrequent communications that bound naturalists in New France and

Old. The correspondence of colonial botanists and Tournefort, Vaillant and other members of the Académie brought Atlantic networks to life and, as they exchanged letters and specimens, gave substance to circuits that crossed the Atlantic and the early modern world. Sending letters and specimens from Québec with the last sailing of the royal ships – or in Louisiana, whenever the opportunity presented itself – American correspondents re-forged their relationship with the Académie each time that they reminded their patrons of their mutual obligations.562 Colonial correspondents leveraged their proximity both to local flora and local networks of plant collectors as, to bring far- flung networks to heel, their Parisian correspondents leveraged their own proximity to ministers of the Marine, the Académie Royale des Sciences and their access to sites such as the Jardin du Roi through which legitimate botanical knowledge could be made.

Placing permanent correspondents in American colonies represented a new opportunity to collect and investigate American flora, yet it posed unique problems for an

Académie that sought control over correspondents who were thousands of miles away from direct supervision.563 If the reforms of 1699 had more clearly delineated the relationship between that Académie and its correspondents, they did little to ensure that these investigators in the field followed the Académie‘s directives and regularly provided

562 Banks, Chasing Empire, 209 – 211.

563 Banks identifies this as a general tension in the French Atlantic World as the state‘s efforts to centralize communication confronted the reality of relatively unsupervised royal officials in both New France and Louisiana – Ibid., 184 – 216.

224 the sorts of information and specimens that they needed. They also did little to ensure that correspondents who found themselves with, at least theoretically, privileged access to

North American nature would voluntarily surrender their epistemological advantage to their Parisian correspondents. The pragmatic solution of the Académie was to adapt the language and ethos of the patron-client relationships that continued to thrive in the increasingly bureaucratized French state.564 Lacking contracts or any other means to ensure adequate control over colonial correspondents and to maintain the trust that was necessary for effective communication, members of the Académie framed the obligations of correspondents and the rewards that they could reasonably expect from Parisian naturalists as the reciprocal moral obligations of patron and client.565

The éloge for Sarrazin written in 1727 by governor Beauharnois and intendant

Dupuy made the contribution of this ―truly academic man‖ to the French scientific community a defining feature of his life.566 Sarrazin, like the members of the Académie to whom he reported, represented a new scientific ideal that, while still embracing the unbridled curiosity that had fuelled scientific activity in the seventeenth century, held up utility to crown and country as a primary source of inspiration.567 Yet in Sarrazin‘s surviving letters it was to his patrons – and not the Académie as a whole – to whom his

564 J. Russell Major, ―Vertical Ties Through Time,‖ French Historical Studies, 17:4 (1992), 871.

565 Spary, Utopia‟s Garden, Chapter 2; Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 210 – 13; Marie-Noëlle Bourguet and Christophe Bonneuil, ―De l‘inventaire du monde à la mise en valeur du globe. Botanique et colonisation (fin XVIIe siècle – début XXe siècle)‖ Revue française d‟histoirze d‟Outre-mer, 86, no. 322- 323 (1999), 11. For a larger discussion on the issue of trust in scientific correspondence see Shapin, Social History of Truth.

566 CAOM, C11A, vol. 120, 233v.

567 Emma Spary writes that ―curiosity, here characterized as private, was no adequate justification for travel and collecting. The voyager needed an eye to the public good, to exploitable natural resources.‖ Spary, ―Peaches which the Patriarch Lacked,‖ 15.

225 concerns, contributions and gratitude were directed. Sarrazin explicitly cast his scientific contributions and relationship with French academicians in the affective language of patronage, even if many members of the Académie lacked any personal ties with him. His surviving letters testify to the importance of maintaining fictive personal relationships between American correspondents and their Parisian patrons even where ties were becoming unmistakably institutional in nature. Sarrazin, for example, wrote letters to

Réaumur, his patron at the Académie after the death of Tournefort, in a tone that obfuscated the fact that the two had never met and that Réaumur had been chosen for him by then president of the Académie, the Abbé de Bignon.568 Similarly, Gaultier‘s letters to the academician Jean-Etienne Guettard, a mineralogist and student of Réaumur, spoke of the pleasure he found in corresponding with him and thanked him profusely for allowing him to participate in the production of a mémoire on geology that was presented to the

Académie in 1746; all this in spite of the fact that Guettard was first named to the

Académie after Gaultier had already left to take up his post in Canada.569 The trust upon which French Atlantic science depended was produced by a discourse that translated the institutional relationship of academician and correspondent into the personal and moral relationship of patron and client.570

568 Vallée, Sarrazin, 216.

569 Jean-François Gaultier, ―Documents sur la géologie et l‘histoire naturelle du Canada, par Gaultier (1749 – 1755),‖ MS 293, BCMNHN.

570 If this correspondence lacked the openness and absence of distinctions in status that Susan Scott Parrish has suggested defined scientific correspondence in the English Atlantic, it was still characteristic of a broader effort to adopt and adapt of existing social conventions to create trust in Atlantic communication. Parrish has suggested that the emotional language of scientific correspondence in the English Atlantic was a means to garner trust with correspondents that had never or rarely actually met - See Parrish, American Curiosity, 137 - 155. See also Thomas Hallock, ―Male Pleasure and the Genders of Eighteenth-Century Botanic Exchange: A Garden Tour,‖ The William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2005), 697 – 718.

226

The transatlantic relationships between American and French naturalists never ceased to mirror wider trends in patron-client relationships that were ―vertical, unequal alliances characterized by dependence and by dominance and submission.‖571 While

Sarrazin styled himself a colleague of his Parisian patrons such as Tournefort and

Réaumur, few traces of his scientific research appeared in print during his lifetime.

Instead, even as the plants that Sarrazin and other American collectors provided to

European naturalists circulated in European networks and appeared in many of the botanical texts of the day, academic botanists in Paris routinely claimed the final authority to name and know North American nature. The voices of Sarrazin and his colleagues were considered partial and incomplete, only to be cited in their own right when circumstance limited the ability of Parisian patrons to verify and complete their research. In his 1755 Traité des Arbres et Arbustes qui se cultivent en France en Pleine

Terre, Duhamel du Monceau translated the distance that separated New France and Old into a divide between amateur botany and legitimate science, which left correspondents such as Gaultier in an ambiguous position. He wrote, for example, that ―Uneducated travellers have often spoken to us of the Merisier de Canada (Wild Cherry) that is very different than that of Europe; but we have never been able to get a precise idea of this tree, but now with the seeds that have been sent to us from the same country, we have recognized that the tree that is called the Merisier in Canada, is in reality a Birch with the leaves of a Merisier. Similarly, the Canadians have often represented the Bonduc as a type of Noyer, but the botanists have given us an idea much more exact through the

571 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort died in 1708 and, while Sarrazin continued to correspond with Sébastien Vaillant for some time after that, by 1717 he was named the correspondent of Réaumur; Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 14.

227 methodical description that they have made.‖572 Duhamel, who was more generous in the praise he lavished on his North American correspondents than other French naturalists, disassembled the testimony of his correspondents, referencing only those facets that he was unable to supplant with his own experiences and observations. When he described a

Canadian maple, for example, he referenced Gaultier‘s accounts of Canadian winters.573

Sarrazin‘s description of the Assiminier, a small tree that grew in Canada and along the

Mississippi, was cited simply because the plant had failed to grow in Europe. ―All that we can know of this tree, we have from several Voyageurs, and in particular M. Sarasin,

Royal Physician in Canada and from M. de Fontenet, Royal Physician in Louisiana. We do not know if it has grown yet in France.‖574 Most often, however, Sarrazin and his

American colleagues were victims of the passive voice – if, as Duhamel suggested, it was true that plants and seeds ―had come from Canada,‖ there was little credit to accord the

North American naturalists who had sent them or who likely had studied them themselves.575

While part of this was a reflection of Sarrazin‘s inferior role as a corresponding member of the Académie, it also reflected several assumptions about the proper means by which to determine the essential character of a plant and strip away merely accidental morphological features that clouded proper systematic botany. If, as the botanist

Sébastien Vaillant suggested, plants ―are produced by Nature following an always simple and constant law, they have everywhere the same structure, from which they never

572 Duhamel du Monceau, Traité des arbres, v – vi.

573 Ibid., 31

574 Ibid., 56

575 Ibid., 108

228 distance themselves,‖ it was nonetheless understood that these morphological patterns were not visible to just any observer in any location.576 As astronomical data depended on the placement of observers the world over, so too did botany depend on multiple observations of the plant from multiple environments, most often in botanical gardens in

France and Europe that were involved in seed and plant exchanges with botanists at the

Jardin du Roi in Paris.577 These ―big sciences‖ always privileged the central role of the collectors and analyzers of these disparate and diverse observations, however. Through their extensive gardens, herbaria, books and correspondence that they had at their disposal at the Jardin du Roi and for the simple fact that they were in Paris, ―la ville philosophique,‖ naturalists such as Vaillant or Tournefort could claim to reorder and recast knowledge of flora the world over.578 To that end, while Sarrazin sent his own observations to his Parisian correspondents, his role was principally focused on sending specimens of dried plants for his patrons‘ herbaria as well as seeds and living plants.

Although Sarrazin and the other correspondents of the Académie in French North

America were epistemologically privileged in Québec and New Orleans they remained outlying nodes in a network centred on Paris; their epistemologically inferior relationship

576 Vaillant, Paris, np.

577 Staffan Müller-Wille, ―Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany,‖ Science in Context 16, no. 4 (2003): 461; This was akin to what Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison have referred to as the ―four-eyed‖ sight of naturalists and image-makers in the eighteenth century. Naturalists aimed for representations of the natural world that were true to nature, rather than true to life and they credited themselves with the unique ability abstract general patterns and characteristics from the seeming chaos of natural variability. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2007), 82.

578 Ibid., Van Damme, Paris, 191 – 218; For an example of how this process worked in late-eighteenth- century England, see also David Philip Miller, ―Joseph Banks, empire and ‗centers of calculation‘ in late Hanoverian London,‖ in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representation of Nature eds. David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21 – 36.

229 with the Académie and French botanists was reinforced each time that they sent their

Parisian patrons the raw materials of what would become legitimate botanical science.

In practice, Parisian naturalists such as Tournefort, Sébastien Vaillant or Bernard de Jussieu became power brokers in their relationships with colonial naturalists, transforming both the contributions and rewards of American naturalists into the product of moral obligations to one another. In exchange for specimens and scientific data, correspondents could expect both limited financial compensation and the right to bask in the reflected glory of the Académie. The research of French correspondents such as

Sarrazin, Gaultier or Jean Prat was often explicitly directed towards discovering the possible utility of American flora and they were often counted upon to provide expert advice to Atlantic administrators. In 1721, for example, the apothecary Alexandre Vielle, sent a mémoire entitled ―Description of the small tree that bears wax,‖ to Paris from

Louisiana, along with samples of the plant‘s flower, leaves, fruit and wax.579 Vielle tried to attract his audience‘s attention by hinting that the plant‘s wax was much like that

―which comes from our bees,‖ and could profitably support a candle making industry in the colony.580 Vielle also suggested that aboriginal usage hinted at potential medicinal properties, claiming that the tree was ―an almost infallible remedy for those sorts of maladies which are very common and stubborn in this country.‖581 Vielle hoped that, with these sorts of contributions, he might be named royal botanist, and he continued to send reports of the plant to other correspondents at the Académie.582 At the very least,

579 ―Sur un Abrisseau d‘Amérique qui porte de la Cire,‖ HMARS (1725): 39.

580 Ibid., 40. See also, Alexandre ―Description de l‘arbrisseau qui porte la cire,‖ MS 196, BCMNHN.

581 Quoted in Langlois, ―Deux Fondations Scientifiques a la Nouvelle-Orleans,‖ 102.

582 Giraud, Company of the Indies, 218.

230

Vielle attracted the attention of the ministry of the Marine, who asked for more information about this plant and about Vielle‘s experience with it. The apothecary was fashioned, in effect, into a colonial expert. Likewise, Jean-François Gaultier was directed towards investigating the forests of New France by his Parisian correspondent, Duhamel du Monceau; looking to Canada in his effort to improve the French navy, Duhamel du

Monceau requested that Gaultier investigate the production of tar and other shipbuilding materials, providing a detailed questionnaire and instructions to guide both the production and recording of the results.583 The only time that Michel Sarrazin‘s botanical work was published by the Académie, it dealt explicitly with the process of obtaining sugary syrup from Canadian maples.584 For metropolitan naturalists and authorities alike, the trained correspondents of the Académie provided important technical expertise.

Yet colonial naturalists such as Sarrazin or the Prats more often acquired credit with their Parisian patrons by regularly furnishing them with rare or previously undiscovered plants. While never divorced from the search for new botanical commodities, colonial correspondents responded to an academic culture that prioritized the identification of novel plants and the elaboration of taxonomic schemas. In his 1693

Elemens de botanique, Tournefort made his own – an by extension the Académie‘s – priorities clear when he wrote that ―Knowledge of the virtues of plants, which constitutes the second part of botany, is without comparison more useful than the first; but knowledge of the names of plants must necessarily precede that of their virtues.‖585 The

583 ―Maniere de faire du Bray,‖ Group no. 20, Duhamel du Monceau Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

584 ―Observations botaniques,‖ HMARS (1730), 65 – 66.

585 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Elemens botanique, ou, Méthode pour connoître les plantes (Paris: Imprimerie Royal, 1694; reprint, Chez Pierre Bernuset, 1797), 47.

231 pursuit of novelty lay at the heart of the relationship between the naturalists of the

Académie and their North American correspondents and the valorization of new plants deeply influenced scientific practice in French North America as colonial naturalists sought to appeal to and attract the support of their Parisian patrons. For naturalists in

Louisiana, the novelty of their contributions to the Jardin du Roi was often easily established. In 1735 Jean Prat, for example, sent specimens of ―copalme‖ (Liquidamber styraciflua), ―piacminiers‖ (Diospyros virginiana) which he wrote were ―a type of nefliers‖ as well as ―three other species of tree … that I do not believe that I saw at the jardin du roy.‖586 Yet novelty always remained relative; what was ―new‖ and therefore valuable, for one party to the exchange, was ―old‖ and redundant to the other. As in the scientific networks of eighteenth-century Europe, the economy of botanical exchange was therefore centered on the exchange of ―unlike-for-unlike.‖587

In the hunt for novel flora, correspondents and royal physicians such as Sarrazin,

Gaultier, and the Prats presented several distinct advantages for Parisian naturalists. This included at least some preliminary training in medical botany that set them apart from other would-be informants. Sarrazin‘s experience with Tournefort, who became as much a teacher and patron as correspondent, would be repeated by both Gaultier, his successor at Québec, who was vetted by his correspondent Duhamel du Monceau, and by Louisiana physician Jean Prat, himself trained by his long-time correspondent Bernard de Jussieu.

Practically, they learned the methods of botanical identification of Tournefort and, later, of Jussieu and were given firsthand experience of the Parisian botanical collections,

586 Prat to Jussieu, 3 May 1735, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 125.

587 Staffan Müller-Wille, ―Nature as marketplace: The political economy of Linnaean Botany,‖ History of Political Economy 35, Annual Supplement (2003): 160.

232 knowledge of definite use when deciding whether a foreign plant was already known in

Paris and therefore whether it was worth sending.588 While both Bernard de Jussieu and

Duhamel du Monceau wrote guides for their foreign correspondents outlining the procedures for collecting and preserving plants, the Parisian experience of American correspondents made them invaluable resources and elevated them above the rank of simple informants in the Académie‘s Atlantic networks.589 More importantly, however, as a result of their training, these American correspondents were not only reliable informants for their Parisian patrons, but entered the networks of the Académie as concretized examples of the scientific personae upon which French botany depended; equipped with the social and scientific skill-set required to expand the reach of French naturalists and the Académie, they simultaneously shifted the power that previously lay with geographically privileged colonists in the favour of the Académie and its members.590

Académie-trained naturalists such as Sarrazin brought with them not simply a particular skill-set, but a moral economy of observation that privileged close attention to visible natural phenomena as a legitimate source of knowledge.591 Tournefort, Sarrazin‘s first academic patron, wrote in his hugely influential Elemens de botanique that ―The

588 Lamontagne, ―L'influence de Maurepas sur les sciences,‖ 117.

589 Duhamel‘s guide was published several times, see: Roland-Michel Barrin de la Galissonnière and Henri- Louis Duhamel Du Monceau, Avis pour le transport par mer des arbres, des plantes vivaces, des semences, des animaux et de différens autres morceaux d'histoire naturelle (1752) –I was able to find reference to a guide written for the collectors of Tournefort only in passing. See: ―Copie d‘une lettre ecritte à Pensacola le 15 Janvier 1714,‖ in Memoranda on French Colonies in America, including Canada, Louisiana, and the Caribbean [1702-1750], MS 293, Edward E. Ayers Collection, The Newberry Library , Chicago, 18. These guides will be discussed in Chapter 5.

590 This is paraphrased from Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 38 – 39; Spary, Utopia‟s Garden, Chapter 2.

591 This is not unlike the attention described in Daston, ―Attention and the Values of Nature,‖ 100 – 126.

233 study of plants does not fatigue the imagination much when one proceeds with method.

Their figures present themselves easily to the mind, when one is accustomed to observe them by their essential parts.‖592 One had to be educated to recognize those ―essential parts‖ by which to study a plant, for sure, but the descriptions of North American flora that naturalists such as Sarrazin prepared for the Académie were authenticated as much by their method of observation as the technical aspects of their work. The truth was in the details, and it was the habits of these correspondents – their patience, their attention to the minute morphological features of their quarry and the precision of their language – that made them invaluable and trustworthy sources. This was particularly important in establishing the novelty of American plants that at least superficially seemed familiar.

When he described a Canadian fir, for example, Gaultier wrote that ―one counts two species of them which at the first view are very similar.‖593 Subjecting the fir to a more piercing gaze than might amateur naturalists, however, Gaultier asserted that in spite of the considerable similarities in floral and vegetative characteristics, the species could be distinguished by differences in the colour of their resin.594 Vaillant warned that local climatological differences could produce variations in plant morphology that could fool any but the most astute botanist. Describing the changes that could take hold once a plant had been transplanted in a French garden, for example, he wrote ―We could compare them to a harvester, who broken from labour, sunburnt, and accustomed to eating black bread and drinking water, was to be transported to an effeminate court, where he lived in

592 Tournefort, Elemens, 49.

593 Gaultier, ―Description,‖ 10 – 11.

594 Ibid.

234 idleness and softness (la mollesse).‖595 While the novelty of many plants from the New

World was evident at first sight, the fine-grained analyses that established the novelty of many North American plants were opportunities to demonstrate the careful and attentive gaze of the trained naturalist as much as they were statements about the floral populations of French North America.

The value placed on novelty meant that colonial botanizing resembled less a modern biodiversity survey than a cataloguing of North American plants. The botanizing surveys of correspondents such as Sarrazin placed little value on place, focusing instead on amassing a complete collection of plants that grew anywhere in France‘s American colonies.596 While only a traveller to New France himself, the Swedish botanist and student of Carolus Linnaeus, Pehr Kalm left the best accounts of what it meant to botanize in eighteenth-century New France. Having trained with Linnaeus at the

University of Uppsala, Kalm had been sent across the Atlantic to collect new and potentially valuable plants.597 Travelling between Philadelphia and Québec at the behest of Linnaeus between 1748 and 1751, in 1753 he published his travel diary as En Resa til

Norra America, a source that today still offers an unparalleled view of both the human and natural histories of British and French North America.598 At each stop, the Swedish botanist would set out into the nearby countryside and collect those plants that had been

595 Sébastien Vaillant, Botanicon Parisiense, ou Denombrement par ordre alphabetique des plantes qui se trouvent aux environs de Paris (Leiden: J & H Verbeek, 1727), np.

596 Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 214.

597 For an overview of Kalm‘s expedition, see Staffan Müller-Wille, ―Walnuts at Hudson Bay.‖

598 I have consulted a recently edited and annotated version which focuses on Kalm‘s travels in New France. See Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada.

235 requested by Linnaeus and those that seemed to him novel, rare or potentially valuable.599

The potential utility of American plants remained a consistent focus of Kalm‘s research, but his text made his overriding concern for novelty explicit. Describing his search near

Québec, for example, he lamented that ―I took myself next towards a group of beautiful prairies which had the appearance of magnificent copses of leafy trees; but I discovered nothing I had not seen before.‖600 The novelty of plants such as Gaultheria (Gaultheria procumbens, named for Jean-François Gaultier by Kalm and Linnaeus) was summed up in technical descriptions that stretched entire pages and that aimed to translate his experience of each morphological feature for his European audience.601 When Kalm did occasionally make a second reference to a plant that he had already discovered, it was cursory. Near Québec, for example, he wrote: ―Veronica. Plant described when I was at fort St. Fred. located here in several humid places,‖ suggesting that any further description was unnecessary.602

Québec and New Orléans, the Botanical Entrepôts of French North America

If Sarrazin‘s contributions to the Académie were most obviously judged by his unique insight into North American flora and fauna and were quantitatively assessed by the number and quality of the specimens which he provided his Parisian patrons, it was in the letters that he exchanged with Tournefort, Vaillant and Réaumur that he attempted to

599 For a list of the plants requested by Linnaeus, see Ibid., 533.

600 Ibid., 365.

601 Ibid., 233; Müller-Wille, ―Walnuts in Hudson Bay,‖ 44 – 48.

602 Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada, 247.

236 define his relationship with the Académie. Botanical specimens were ideally presented as a gift, with no explicit expectation of compensation or recognition; correspondents surrendered control over their discoveries when the ships transporting them to Europe left

Québec and New Orleans.603 Yet the letters that Sarrazin and other North American correspondents sent to their Parisian patrons sought to preserve their connection with the specimens and the written descriptions local plants that accompanied them. Efforts to increase the perceived value of botanical specimens grew as these colonial naturalists provided their Parisian patrons with accounts that emphasized the significant efforts and sacrifices that were necessary to complete the research which was being freely given.

While the experience of botanist Jean-Louis Guérin was rare - he died of a fever on his first trip to collect plants outside of Mobile in 1737 – the sacrifices and difficulties of colonial science were real.604 Most correspondents complained openly about the difficult nature of their work; the costs of colonial research, whether in time, health or money, were frequently discussed in letters sent to Paris and in the letters of intendants and governors who spoke on the behalf of colonial correspondents to the Marine and

French state. Expressing the frustrations associated with scientific practice in a colony that depended upon canoes and peaceful relationships with indigenous communities for effective communication and transportation, Michel Sarrazin wrote to Réaumur in 1718 to explain that, ―I do not know if you think that we herborise in Canada as in France. I could cross all of Europe more easily, and with less danger, than I could cross 100

603 Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen reminds us that in European collections of naturalia the commercial and representational value of collections were rarely separate, and that gift and commercial economies of specimen exchange frequently overlapped. ―Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science,‖ in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, eds. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds. (London: Routledge, 2002), 5 – 6. See also Chapter 5 of this dissertation.

604 CAOM, C13A, vol. 26, 158.

237 leagues in Canada.‖ 605 Prat echoed this sentiment in September of 1736 when he wrote that, ―I cannot forget to tell you that to do what you desire of me, I would be obligated to make several voyages to distant places. You would be content with me after you knew that beyond 15 leagues from here is nothing but swampy country, which is flooded for six months of the year (when the waters of the nississipi are high) without the levées that everybody makes along the river.‖606 French botanists had often travelled abroad as part of their own early careers and recognized the unique physical requirements of botanical research. Tournefort had travelled to the Levant, for example, and recognized that ―If it is tiring to herboriser, it is because it is often necessary to look for plants in the highest mountains, or in frightening precipices, whereas one can learn the other sciences in school or from a cabinet.‖607 Even if, as Tournefort continued, ―… one is compensated enough for this trouble by the pleasure that one has to see the most beautiful part of nature,‖ North American correspondents repeatedly felt the need to adjust the expectations of their Parisian patrons to colonial realities, and to valorize their botanical research in the heroic language of scientific explorers.608

Where these correspondents made requests for aid, they framed them as efforts to increase their productivity and preserve their health. Some of these requests, such as the scientific instruments that included dissection tools and thermometers required by

Sarrazin and Gaultier for their work, made the connection between what was requested

605 Sarrazin to Réaumur, 10 October 1726, in Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien, 219.

606 Prat to Jussieu, 30 October 1736, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 136.

607 Tournefort, Elemens, 49.

608 Ibid.; Terrall, ―Heroic Narratives.‖

238 and the scientific work of the Académie clear.609 Elsewhere, however, it seems that any improvement in the material life of a colonial correspondent was justified by the promise of greater focus and efficiency in their work as naturalists. Citing the difficulty of simultaneously working as a practicing physician and botanists, for instance, in the 1730s

Jean Prat sent repeated requests for compensation directly to Bernard de Jussieu, his primary correspondent at the Jardin du Roi. While asking for Jussieu to help arrange both his own financial position as well as his brother‘s, he repeatedly stated that his primary concern was arranging a better split between his responsibilities as a researcher and his work as a physician. Jussieu, he wrote, would find himself ―well compensated…, when until now I could only show you my good intentions.‖610 Prat later also requested a new house in New Orleans that would preserve his often fragile health, nearby land for a botanical garden and at least one slave to maintain it, promising shipments of plants that were ―more frequent, more considerable and in better condition‖ in return.611 In 1750

Gaultier similarly complained of a ―surprising fatigue‖ that lasted two months and added that to complete his scientific work on top of his medical practice, ―I sleep neither night nor day.‖612 This echoed Michel Sarrazin, who wrote in1717 that his medical practice left him with ―enraged headaches,‖ adding that ―In good French (en bon françois), I can say no more.‖613

609 Sarrazin thanks Réaumur for a ―louppe‖ that he would use in his dissections. Sarrazin to Réaumur, 10 October 1727, in Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien¸ 223.

610 Roland Lamontagne, ―Le dossier biographique de Jean Prat,‖ Revue d'histoire de l'Amerique française 16, no. 2 (1962): 223.

611 Prat to Jussieu, 8 September 1736, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 4.

612 Gaultier to Réaumur, 30 October 1750, in Vallée, ―Cinq lettres,‖ 2.

613 Sarrazin to Bignon, 5 November 1717, in Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien, 216

239

The historiography of American science has often attempted to portray colonial botanists such as Sarrazin as solitary geniuses single-handedly cataloguing New World ecosystems and packing them up for analysis by their grateful French counterparts. They are often described as having introduced modern science and medicine into the peripheries of the Western world.614 However, the life and work of Michel Sarrazin demonstrates that there was a finite limit to the work that could be done by any American correspondent, let alone those who by virtue of their status were simultaneously expected to treat the sick, manage their properties and families, maintain good relations with their patrons and superiors and to help govern the colonies as members of sovereign, and later superior, councils. Botanists such as Sarrazin, Gaultier and the Prats were intended neither to collect solely on their own nor to navigate and negotiate the extreme distances involved in collecting specimens in the interior of the continent. Rather, from the beginning of Colbert‘s efforts to reorganize scientific communication, the Académie‘s interest was in securing trustworthy and reliable sources whose reach extended into the interior of the colony and who could function as patrons and powerbrokers in their own right. At the same time that the Académie extended scientific networks across the

Atlantic and into the North American continent they became dependent upon the ability of their correspondents to manage networks of their own, drawing upon both the efforts and knowledges of the colonial and indigenous populations of French North America.

Firmly established in the hierarchy of the Académie that left little doubts about their epistemic inferiority to regular, Paris-based members, colonial correspondents such

614 For this sort of hagiography see the work on Sarrazin done almost a century ago, notably the work of Arthur Vallée, particularly his Un Biologiste canadien or J. C. K. Laflamme, ―Michel Sarrazin: matériaux pour servir à l‘histoire de la science en Canada,‖ Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 1st series, 5 (1887), 4:1–23.

240 as Sarrazin might seem simply a tangible example of what Ralph Bauer has referred to as

―epistemic mercantilism.‖615 Yet far from simply being reduced to the role of informants, these correspondents in fact created polycentric, if still stratified, Atlantic networks of scientific communication.616 Established in Québec and New Orleans, correspondents of the Académie reproduced the relationship between France‘s American colonies and

France itself in their relationship with the colonial informants on which they drew. At the same time, however, they reproduced the tensions inherent in a system of exchange that, while dependent on colonial and foreign collectors, rendered them invisible in academic networks.617 As a result, even as Sarrazin and his colleagues catalogued the flora surrounding the settled areas of New France and Louisiana, Québec and New Orleans were being fashioned into botanical entrepôts that drew the collections and translated the knowledges of colonial and indigenous plant collectors and readied them for transport to

France as scientific specimens.618

As local officials and academic correspondents, colonial naturalists such as

Sarrazin were able to draw upon resources unavailable to other local collectors and

615 Bauer, Cultural Geography, 4, passim.

616 For a discussion of polycentricity and its place in current discussion of colonial science both in the Atlantic and World history see Fan, ―Science in Cultural Borderlands.‖

617 These naturalists were, like other arms of the colonial presence in French North America ―simultaneously coerced and coercing.‖ See Frederick Cooper and Laura Ann Stoler, ―Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,‖ in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds., Frederick Cooper and Laura Ann Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1 – 56 (quote on 24).

618 There is not a single extant document suggesting specific sources of plants for Michel Sarrazin during his entire career in New France. Even as this changed under Gaultier or Prat, the vast majority of collectors remained anonymous and silenced. For a recent call to re-evaluate the importance of port cities in the history of science as entrepôts and contact zones, see Fa-ti Fan, ―Science in a Chinese Entrepôt: British Naturalists and Their Chinese Associates in Old Canton,‖ Osiris 2nd series, 18 (2003): 60 – 78 (particularly 61 – 62).

241 would-be correspondents to expand their reach into the interior of the continent. Within a decade of Sarrazin‘s arrival in New France as the first official American correspondent of the Académie, the ministry of the marine was making efforts to integrate his research into the military networks of the colony. In 1707 the minister of the marine Jérôme

Phélypeaux, the Comte de Pontchartrain wrote to New France‘s intendant Raudot, himself a supporter of Sarrazin‘s work, ordering the ―Officers of the King… to receive these cases of plants into their buildings without difficulty, to have them placed in an appropriate place where they will be preserved and to send them to my address.‖619 Even when Sarrazin departed on his own expeditions, his integration into these administrative networks meant that he was never alone. In the same year that Pontchartrain wrote the letter above, Raudot and governor general Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil informed their superior that they had provided Sarrazin with both voyageurs and a canoe to facilitate his collection of specimens.620 Combining his own research with the fruits of the labours of local collectors and workers who became ―invisible technicians‖ in written accounts,

Sarrazin and those that would follow him rationalized collection and gave the flora of

North America an official voice, even if it was one that remained unequal with those in

Paris.621

Records of correspondence preserved in France‘s colonial archives show that, within a few decades, academic correspondents and scientifically inclined administrators could draw upon a network of post commanders, medical personnel, clergy and the

619 CAOM, C11G, vol. 2, 104 – 104v.

620 Young, ―Crown Correspondent,‖ 425.

621 Shapin, Social History of Truth, Chapter 8; See also Steven Shapin, ‗‗Invisible Technicians,‘‘ American Scientist 77, no. 6 (1989): 554 - 63.

242 occasional colonist. In 1736 the governor general of New France Charles de la Boische,

Marquis de Beauharnois wrote to the minister of the marine, the Comte de Maurepas, assuring him that he had forwarded the minister‘s request for collection of a particular type of wood to the Sieur de Noyelle, post commander of Détroit.622 In the same letter he also praised the commander of Fort St. Joseph, Jacques-Pierre Daneau de Muy, author of a mémoire on medicinal plants of the Great Lakes that the intendant was also forwarding to his superiors in France.623 The Académie‘s correspondents could serve as brokers in these exchanges, collecting specimens and translating written accounts for an academic audience; in 1749 Gaultier received botanical specimens from the military officer

Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry, who had only recently returned from a trip to

Détroit. At the same time that Chaussegros de Léry‘s maps went to military officials,

Gaultier was entrusted with seeds and specimens that he was to preserve and ready for shipment to France.624

Pehr Kalm was clearly impressed with both the reach and efficacy of the network that centred in Québec on Gaultier and then governor general de la Galissonnière. The ease with which he was able to study soils from the interior of the continent and his evident satisfaction with the botanical collections of Québec testified to the successful creation of a botanical entrepôt in New France that integrated royal resources and

622 CAOM, C11A, vol. 65, 140.

623 Ibid.

624 CAOM, C11A, vol. 94, 67 - 67v; This was similar to realities at the Jardin du Roi where botanists received numerous gifts of specimens that had originally been sent to the king. Spary, Utopia‟s Garden, Chapter 2.

243 academic methods.625 The governor general had also requested that Gaultier produce a mémoire ―on the means to search for and discover all the trees, the plants, the animals, the types of rocks, the minerals,‖ that was then sent to post commanders throughout the colony. Kalm wrote that de la Galissonnière had promised that ―The people who made an original discovery were paid and had their names noted to remember them at the occasion of a vacancy of a post.‖626

Québec and New Orleans soon became obligatory points of passage between networks of continental and Atlantic exchange, and the academic correspondents living there became crucial in the translation and transmission of botanical knowledge and objects to France. Increasingly, Québec and New Orleans became botanical way-stations, kin to the royal gardens in Atlantic port cities such as Nantes and La Rochelle where foreign plants would be resuscitated before being sent on to Paris. While even this would not be enough at times, with whole shipments of plants such as those sent in 1717 dying on their trip across the Atlantic, the conflation of administrative and scientific communication was a surprisingly successful effort to mitigate the difficulties imposed by the distance between France and its American colonies.627

Correspondents such as Jean Prat and Sarrazin were ultimately able to extend their reach deep into the interior of the continent in a way that individual collectors never could because of their access to the resources of both the Académie and colonial

625 Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada, 314 – 15, 405, 408 – 10; The Marquis de la Galissonnière was also a respected naturalist in his own right, best remembered for his work with Duhamel du Monceau. Several examples of his work can be seen in Duhamel du Monceau‘s papers at the American Philosophical Society. For broader studies of Galissonnière‘s scientific activities see, Ronald Lamontagne, Le Galissonière et le Canada (Montréal: Presses de l‘Université Montréal, 1962), 68 – 88.

626 Ibid., 409 – 10.

627 Rousseau, ―Michel Sarrazin, Jean-François Gaultier,‖ 153.

244 bureaucracy. Louisiana colonist Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz saw his inability to draw on the voyageurs and others who frequently travelled into the Pays d‟en Haut as a weakness that fundamentally distinguished his own contributions from those of a successful academic correspondent. Clearly wishing he had access to the resources with which to create networks of his own, in his 1758 Histoire de la Louisiana he wrote that:

I do not doubt that Louisiana produces a great number of trees that merit mention

in its forests; but I do not know them, nor have [I] even heard others speak of

trees other than those that I have spoken of in the preceding chapters; because the

voyageurs, the sole source from which one can learn something, interest

themselves more in searching for game which they need for their subsistence,

than in observing the productions of nature in the vegetal kingdom.628

Jean Bernard Bossu, a French naval officer who travelled throughout Louisiana at the end of the French regime, also hinted at the limits of an amateur naturalist to establish their own networks into the interior of the continent. For while he reported that he had received reports of flora and fauna from coureurs de bois in his 1768 Noveaux voyages aux Indes occidentales, he was ultimately only able to collect descriptions, not specimens.629 As often as he complained about the difficulty of satisfying his Parisian patrons, Prat‘s ability to draw on networks of plant collectors that were beyond the reach of would-be naturalists such as Le Page du Pratz elevated his place in the Académie‘s

628 Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, 2: 50 – 51.

629 Jean-Bernard Bossu, Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales: Contenant une Relation des différens Peuples qui habitent les environs du grand Fleuve Saint-Louis, appellé vulgairement le Mississipi; leur Religion; leur gouvernement; leurs moeurs; leurs guerres & leur commerce (Paris: chez Le Jay, 1768), 2: 162.

245

Atlantic networks and demonstrates the importance of the resources that his affiliation with Parisian naturalists such as Bernard de Jussieu provided him.

In the narratives in which they situated the specimens that they provided their

Parisian patrons, academic correspondents positioned themselves as useful precisely because they had cultivated these sorts of contacts and were able to draw upon networks of collectors that stretched into the interior, covering vast stretches of the continent. In his regular correspondence with Jussieu in the 1730s and 1740s, Prat championed the possibilities that colonial collectors presented and promised that as node in the

Académie‘s network in his own right, he was able to extend the reach of Parisian naturalists into the colony. In 1735 he explained that, ―… I had hoped to augment the number of plants for the Jardin du Roi, but as I will succeed even more in forming correspondences with different posts in the interior, and with voyageurs, I have let you know what I have done in that regard.‖630 Their ability to draw on networks of plant collection that stretched deep into the continent were appreciated both by members of the

Académie and administrators. While, as corresponding members, they found their role within the scientific production of the Académie severely circumscribed, the Académie‘s

North American correspondents established their value as managers and facilitators. As they enlisted the communities of missionaries, traders, colonists and indigenous peoples that lived at the peripheries of the French presence in North America, their work began to consist as much of translation as collection and study.

North American correspondents therefore became key mediators between French naturalists and the amateur collectors of French North America. Oblique references in

630 Prat to Jussieu, 13 July 1735, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 2.

246 texts written by Paris-based naturalists suggest that they were aware of both the opportunities presented by amateur collectors and the difficulties inherent to mobilizing them. Duhamel du Monceau, for example, wrote that ―I also advise that in countries of large forests, such as Canada, one often finds store of very good seeds already made; these are the provisions that squirrels and several other animals make in the holes of trees. These collections are common enough to furnish a decent quantity of very good seeds, if loggers could be encouraged to pay attention.‖631 The letters of American correspondents therefore attempted to valorize the work of managing their networks and to render it analogous to the physical labour of botanizing. Only a year later in 1736 the challenges of managing such a network were clearly outlined when Prat wrote to Jussieu and outlined the difficulties involved in collecting naturalia from the interior of the colony:

I can promise you some [shells] when I have the possibility to travel or to encounter

some traveler who cares enough about them. These are the sorts of people that

promise everything but have no difficulty forgetting their promises; including even

missionaries and posted surgeons. I can see that if one does not hire them with

certain presents there is no way to obtain even the smallest thing. I told you in my

last letter that if you provided me with two tonnes of trade goods each year, I would

save nothing for myself and would even sacrifice my own to engage travelers such

as missionaries, officers, surgeons and others so that they collect and send me what

they find in the different areas that they cover.632

631 E.J. Turgot, Memoire instructif sur la maniere de rassembler, de preparer, de conserver, et d‟envoyer les diverses curiosités d‟histoire naturelle (Lyon: chez Jean Marie Bruyset, 1758), 213.

632 Prat to Jussieu, 30 October 1736, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 5.

247

Distancing himself from collectors-for-hire in the interior of the colony and complaining time and time again about their unreliability and base motives, he nonetheless reveals the reliance of colonial correspondents on networks of amateurs with vastly different objectives than his own.

In effect the North American correspondents of the Académie became mediators between divergent botanical economies, transitioning plants between the networks of the

Académie in which plants drew their value from their novelty and were offered freely as gifts and a colonial economy in which plants were acquired from indigenous and colonial collectors based on the commercial values of botanical commodities and the physical labour of transport and collection. In spite of their position as brokers, however, Sarrazin and his colleagues repeatedly demonstrated their commitment to the Académie‘s dismissal of materialist motivations for scientific research. Even if their official positions as royal physicians made their scientific work obligatory and even as they received payment throughout their work as colonial correspondents, the performance of disinterestedness functioned as a marker of epistemological legitimacy.633 Prat, writing in

June of 1736 from New Orleans, distinguished his own motivations from the focus on commerce that predominated in the colony, writing that his scientific work was done ad honores and that he was ―perhaps the only one who makes no profit in spite of being very busy and sought after.‖634 Many requests for compensation were couched as reimbursements or rewards for services already rendered to the state and Académie.

633 For a discussion of disinterestedness and its role in authenticating knowledge in early modern science see Shapin, Social History of Truth; Donna Haraway has examined the gendering of disinterestedness in Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan ₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997), 23 - 48.

634 Prat to Jussieu, 8 September 1736, in Lamotagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 4.

248

Sarrazin‘s requests for compensation for his research expenses were put to minister of the marine Pontchartrain on his behalf by the intendant Raudot; eventually he was rewarded with a payment of 500 livres annually for his research as reward for his ―zeal for the research of plants and animals‖ that he had demonstrated in years of service.635 In 1749,

Gaultier complained politely but directly to minister of the marine Maurepas about eight years in which he had failed to receive compensation for his expenses, asking for land and fishing rights in lieu of money.636 In his correspondence with the academician

Réaumur, Gaultier similarly emphasized the expenses of colonial natural history and thanked his patron for encouraging the minister to extend the gratification that he felt was his due for his years of service to the Académie and the crown.637 Situated in an Atlantic economy that traded collections for the favour of the state and the Académie, colonial naturalists were able to receive payment for their work without jeopardizing their privileged position as disinterested scientists but only as they referenced their service and commitment to their patrons and the crown, a move that simultaneously naturalized a status inferior to the Académie and the wider French scientific community.

Amateur collectors were as suspect for their motivations as they were for their methods and, as the reach of the Académie extended into North America, the relationship between Parisian naturalists, their colonial correspondents and amateur collectors became increasingly strained. Colonial botany in French North America was rarely a selfless pursuit. Roland-Michel Barrin de la Galissonnière, governor general of New France and a

635 CAOM, C11A, vol. 37, 31.

636 CAOM, C11A, vo. 94, 45v.

637 Gaultier to Réaumur, 30 October 1750, in Vallée, ―Cinq lettres,‖ 36.

249 respected naturalist in his own right, criticized the commitment of French colonists to botany and the natural sciences in a letter that he wrote to Henri-Louis Duhamel du

Monceau. In New France, he wrote, there was none of the selfless support of discovery on which science depended. Instead, self-interest reigned in a colony where naturalists such as himself and Jean-François Gaultier found few people willing to help them.638

Colonial collectors repeatedly demonstrated their inability to operate in the affective disinterested relationships which governed the scientific exchange of plants. Gaultier lamented in1753 that ―I would have wished that the collection and this shipment had been more considerable. But that has not been possible because of my correspondents who did not keep their word.‖639 The amateur collectors who annually supplied exotic and novel flora and fauna were understood to be a means to an end, and were denied any legitimate interest in the study of North American ecologies in part because of perceived moral failings. Their contributions were effaced as their specimens changed hands and crossed the Atlantic, and they only appeared in surviving correspondence as excuses for failure to satisfy the Académie‘s demand for specimens.

As collections passed from amateur collectors to Québec and the Académie, and as they entered the parallel transition from manuscript to printed text in Paris, the extent and diversity of the continental networks these colonial naturalists managed was effaced.

While the networks upon which Sarrazin drew in collecting those plants named in the

Histoires des Plantes du Canada were made untraceable, the best picture of the sorts of resources that colonial botanists were dependent upon comes from the writings of

638 Galissionnière to Duhamel du Monceau, 28 October 1748, Group no. 15, Duhamel du Monceau Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, np.

639 Gaultier to Réaumur, 3 September 1750, in Vallée, ―Cinq lettres,‖ 39.

250

Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm. Kalm opened his En Resa with the statement that ―not a single botanist had yet researched or carefully described that the plants that are found there‖ yet working routinely with Gaultier and drawing upon the networks of

Galissonnière, his text revealed the existence of French networks of plant collection upon which his own work would ultimately depend.640 Aboriginal peoples appear in Kalm‘s text as objects of study more often than as informants, yet his reliance on local soldiers and colonists is apparent even if his references to a generic ―les Français‖ are frequent.641

Naming informants such as a certain monsieur Cartier of Cap aux Oies or Father Coquart of Baye St. Paul was partly, he tells us, a strategy to stave off possible critiques, reminding his reader that not all those opinions expressed in his writings were his own.642

The information and specimens that these sorts of informants provided, however, were vital to the ultimate success of his work. This was based on his specific interest in finding and collecting useful and potentially valuable plants. By interrogating local residents to find out which plants they identified as noteworthy, Kalm was, for instance, able to learn about sugar maples from a monsieur Chambon at Sault aux Récollets.643 His reliance on local informants was also, however, a product of the nature and timing of his expedition.

With an itinerary that meant that he had often missed the appropriate season for fruits and flowers by the time that he arrived, local informants became crucial to the success of his work. Relying on locals who could connect their recollections of flower types with the

640 Ibid., 3.

641 See for example, Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada, 217 where he provides the common French names for Canadian maples. Aboriginal people do, on occasion, appear as guides but their contribution to his botanical study, while mentioned from time to time – see Ibid., 250 for example – are rare.

642 Ibid., 7, 359, 389.

643 Ibid., 470.

251 plants around him meant that he could, in effect, collect plants out of season that might otherwise have escaped his attention. Although he presented no evidence to explain why colonists would have helped him in the first place, the result was that even where a botanist like Kalm went out on his own collecting trips, his reliance on local collectors and informants meant that the distinction between corresponding, collecting and enlisting locals were blurred in practice.

Kalm‘s investigations into the natural environments of New France and the eastern Great Lakes were unique only insofar as he publicly credited informants that in the work of French naturalists such as Sarrazin and Gaultier frequently remained anonymous. Indeed, while the respected correspondents of Louisiana such as Prat and

Vielle proved that an official position within the Académie was not essential to becoming a long-term correspondent with its members and the Jardin du Roi, the reality is that most of those collectors who existed outside of the administrative and scientific apparatus of

France‘s North American colonies and the wider Atlantic World became anonymous in texts that clearly depended upon their existence. In Sarrazin‘s work (as it comes to us via

Sébastien Vaillant and the Histoire des plantes de Canada), amateur collectors in any part of the colony are virtually impossible to locate even if it is evident that they were essential to his success as a colonial botanist. Referring generally to the practice of colonists or indigenous peoples, the contributions of specific colonists are rendered invisible. Writing about the Sanguinaire (Bloodroot) that he sent in a shipment in 1698, he recounted that ―I have been assured that they provoke menstruation [les mois].‖644

Hinting at the existence of a vernacular colonial knowledge and potential sources of

644 Boivin, La Flore du Canada, np.

252 physical specimens, he nonetheless refused to identify a specific colonist or credit the information beyond recounting its existence. Instead, Sarrazin wrote simply that ―I do not believe‖ these aboriginal claims, furthering distancing and dismissing the legitimacy of indigenous contributions to French botanical science.645

This practice of erasing the contributions of the local collectors upon which colonial correspondents depended continued in the work of Jean-François Gaultier,

Sarrazin‘s successor at Québec. The descriptions in his manuscript Description de plusieurs plantes du Canada suggested that the simple fact that such correspondents were themselves long-term residents lessened reliance on local informants. While the need for knowledge of particular morphological features such as flowers, fruit and leaves made

Kalm reliant on informed locals, Gaultier‘s discussion of Abies conis sursum sive mas (a species of Fir), for example, testified to his year round observation of a plant that could have misled an itinerant naturalist as it changed its appearance in successive months and seasons.646 Yet in his descriptions of plants that included medicinal and other uses, it is clear that he was also forced to cast a wider net. Adding to Sarrazin‘s description of Arum

Canadense foliis ad Betam accedentibus (Skunk Cabbage), for instance, he wrote that

―The habitants of Canada employ the root of this arum for the flux with children‖647 As with Sarrazin, Gaultier‘s use of pronouns such as ―on‖ hid his reliance on specific sources of information and effaced the ethnic, gender and geographic contexts of much of the knowledge that he collected and presented to his patrons at the Académie.648 Even

645 Ibid.

646 Gaultier, ―Description,‖ 5 – 9.

647 Boivin, La Flore du Canada, np.

648 The French pronoun ―on‖ translates roughly as ―one‖ in English

253 where a specific source was mentioned, the details provided attested more to an anxiety about justifying the information to a Parisian audience than an effort to introduce colonial collectors into French scientific networks. When describing the medical use of a colonial maple, for example, he cited ―a Surgeon from the Isle d‘Orleans,‖ clear evidence that a degree of competency associated with medical education and training mattered more to the validity of colonial science than any ethnic, gendered or social distinctions.649 The result was that, while colonial botanists frequently named European contemporaries and the sources of their taxonomic conventions such as Bauhin, Gronovius and Linnaeus, aboriginal and colonial populations figured in a generic sense as habitants and indiens, evidence of commercial or medicinal possibilities inherent in the plant but never as sources of knowledge in their own right; women similarly remained almost entirely invisible.650

Ultimately, individual and unaffiliated collectors were almost always silenced in the accounts of colonial correspondents that stressed their own managerial and collecting capabilities; in inserting themselves more prominently in French Atlantic scientific networks as managers of vast human and natural resources, they blurred the presence and participation of the collectors upon which they depended.651

649 Gaultier, ―Description,‖ 29; See also Shapin, Social History of Truth.

650 Kathleen Murphy suggests that colonial naturalists in the Anglo-Atlantic World treated enslaved and indigenous people in a similar fashion, attributing their knowledges to a collectivize identity. ―Translating the vernacular: Indigenous and African knowledge in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic,‖ Atlantic Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 33.

651 Spary, Utopia‟s Garden, 13.

254

The Other Correspondents: Colonial Collectors in the Networks of the Académie

Information on some rather exceptional collectors does survive in the archives of administrative correspondence between New France and Old, but references are rare and the typicality of these particular collectors is difficult to ascertain. Tellingly, these collectors appear in documentation today because they sought to skirt the Académie‘s trained correspondents and contribute directly both to the Académie and the French state.

In the document series C11A that contains letters sent from colonial Canada to France, for example, it is possible to find reference to only eight named collectors, three who were in the military, three who were colonial clergy, a solitary widow and the colonial physician Hubert-Joseph de la Croix who, after Sarrazin‘s death, had hoped – for nought in the end – that collecting plants for the Jardin du Roi might make him an attractive candidate for royal physician.652 Alexandre Vielle, who did more than anybody else to raise awareness about the cirier (wax myrtle) of Louisiana, had similarly hoped that a demonstrated interest in colonial botany would make him a preferable candidate for the post of royal physician, with the same results. Vielle was passed over in favour of Louis

Prat, although he was later named a corresponding member of the Académie in recognition of his research into local flora.653 While de la Croix‘s interest in providing the

Académie with plants is clear, the motivation of many of these other collectors remains an open question.654 The parallel document series for Louisiana, C13A, is even more

652 See, for examples, CAOM, C11A, vol. 49, 519; C11A, vol. 64, 147 – 149; C11A, vol. 65, 140 – 141v; vol. 70, 113 – 114v; vol. 70, 124 – 126.

653 Giraud, Company of the Indies, 217. See also Dawdy, Building the Devil‟s Empire, 35.

654 Catherine Fortin Morisset, ―La Croix, Hubert-Joseph,‖ Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01- e.php?&id_nbr=1459&interval=20&&PHPSESSID=sooq9582eag8i4df601fc1qn41.

255 taciturn, naming only regular and recognized correspondents such as Guerin, Vielle, Prat and de Fontenette.

Often attempting to bypass correspondents such as Sarrazin, these amateur collectors nonetheless remained dependent on the resources of the state and, more specifically, the infrastructure of the French marine. In almost each of these cases, whether it be the three cases of plants that the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Gosselin sent in 1738 or the paquet sent by the widow Lepaillieur in 1740, would-be collectors were reliant on the royal ships to transport their plants and reliant on the network of gardens and correspondents that connected port cities such as Nantes, La Rochelle and Rochefort to

Paris‘ Jardin du Roi.655 At least in part, this was likely a recognition that the efforts to integrate scientific and administrative underway since the late seventeenth century had succeeded and that plants that were transported on state owned ships were more likely to arrive in France in a state that would please potential patrons and leave them scientifically useful.656

Relying on state-financed and supported networks was not always feasible or possible (Jean Prat was regularly forced to rely on merchant vessels for instance) and even making use of the royal ships was no guarantee that plants would survive their transatlantic trip. In a letter written in New Orleans in 1737, for instance, Prat asked his patron Bernard de Jussieu to ensure that ―the commandants of both merchant and royal vessels had orders from the minister to accept and to take care of all of the plants that I give them for the Jardin du Roi,‖ adding that it was hard to see the efforts that he had

655 CAOM, C11A, vol. 70, 113; C11A, vol. 73, 416.

656 There will be a more general discussion of what it took to keep American plants alive on the Atlantic and in French gardens in the next chapter.

256 spent to collect the plants go to waste as his collections arrived in France damaged, destroyed or dead.657 Yet, with few other alternatives, colonial plant collectors such as

Gosselin or the Québecois physician de la Croix made use of the networks established by the Académie and French marine. It was in these routine submissions that the colonies were made a scientific periphery; legitimating the ―epistemic arrogance‖ of the Académie as they loaded their plants aboard the ships of the marine, they accepted a role as collectors and informants and gave Parisian naturalists the capacity to speak about North

American flora in their stead.658 Prat‘s complaint, however, revealed that the Académie remained forced to continually divert botanical specimens from networks where they were defined and valued by their marketability as commodities, both at land in North

America and at sea in the Atlantic World.

The best records of the activities of individual collectors who sought to integrate themselves in French scientific networks are those that record their compensation for expenses incurred as they collected plants and other natural historical materials such as minerals and animal products. Yet it is clear from the reports of their expenses that these collectors relied on the labour of local colonial collectors as much as the Académie‘s correspondents did. The Abbé Gosselin, for instance, was compensated for 199 livres

―that he had spent in his research‖ for the year 1738 and, while the amount required grew to 250 livres, he was compensated again in 1739.659 As items such as ―five days labour of two canoers‖ that were on his list of his expenses make clear, most of the costs incurred

657 Quoted in Lamontagne, ―L'influence de Maurepas sur les sciences,‖ 119.

658 Parrish, American Curiosity, 114.

659 CAOM, C11A, vol. 70, 125; vo. 72, 174.

257 by colonial collectors such as Gosselin were related to transport of both himself and the plants that he was able to gather. Paying for provisions and the wages of the men that paddled for him, his expenses even included the costs of the cases in which the plants would eventually be sent to France.660 Gosselin was also cryptically compensated for twenty-three livres ―Paid to the sauvages for some new plants‖ near Beauport, hinting that colonial collectors such as Gosselin could be crucial links between Parisian naturalists and aboriginal peoples but providing precious little detail about the sorts of negotiations that this type of contact involved.661 As the Dictionary of Canadian

Biography explains, ―Although certain historians have called Gosselin a renowned botanist of the period, he deserves rather the title of plant collector.‖662 The reality is thus that, as collectors in a global network of plant collection, there was little beyond specimens that collectors such as Gosselin were permitted to contribute and for which they were (and continue to be) recognized.

The Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau presented a rare case where a colonial naturalist who sought to present his own specimens and natural historical research to an elite audience in France was able to do so.663 Sending a written account of his discovery to his confrères in the Society of Jesus in Paris in 1717, an excerpt that featured his ethnobotanical findings was published the same year in the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux.

660 CAOM, C11A, vol. 70, fol. 127.

661 Ibid; There is little evidence to study whether aboriginal peoples were routinely paid for botanical specimens. Kathleen Murphy, however, has recently suggested that this was common practice in British North America. Murphy, ―Translating the vernacular,‖ 35 – 36.

662 Catherine Fortin-Morisset, ―Gosselin, Jean-Baptiste,‖ Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01- e.php?&id_nbr=1378&&PHPSESSID=sooq9582eag8i4df601fc1qn41

663 A thorough analysis of Lafitau‘s discovery of ginseng is presented in Chapter 3 of this dissertation

258

This account was read by the Académie Royale des Sciences that same year and it was his reliance on indigenous sources that was deemed particularly noteworthy even if many present objected to its findings. Defending his work in his 1718 Mémoire, Lafitau‘s responses to the criticisms leveled by the Académie demonstrates how the Jesuit understood his place in French scientific community. Providing specimens both to the regent of France and the Jardin du Roi, printing his own account that silenced Sarrazin and the scientific apparatus that the Académie had extended into the French Atlantic

World and daring to suggest that Bernard de Jussieu and Sébastien Vaillant were epistemic equals in print, Lafitau‘s experience highlights the plight of collectors such as

Gosselin and de la Croix and the difficulty of contributing to French botanical science without going through the Académie‘s American entrepôt and the colonial correspondents that managed them. Lafitau‘s fault was that he wanted to contribute to

French science without recognizing the role of Académie Royale des Sciences as arbiter.

Just as fellow members of his society in China discovered as they sent the Académie silk worms and other pieces of naturalia, there was little room for outsiders to be anything but providers of specimens, particularly for those who, like Lafitau, sought to shift the centre of French scientific networks to the ―biocontact zones‖ of the New World.664

Even if colonial collectors were experts in the sorts of negotiations with aboriginal peoples that historians such as Londa Schiebinger suggests were vital to the success of colonial botany, the content of their scientific practice remains largely unknowable.665 Yet, thanks to a single mémoire that survives in the Muséum national

664 On ―biocontact zones‖ see note 263.

665 See Schiebinger, Plants and Empire.

259 d‘Histoire naturelle, it is possible to demonstrate that at least some of these collectors agitated for a greater role than they ultimately received in the scientific production of the

Académie Royale des Sciences and in the manuscripts of colonial botanists such as Prat and Gaultier. The manuscript entitled Mémoire sur les plantes qui sont dans dans le caise. B appears to have originated at Isle Royale around 1725, and was likely written by

François-Madeleine Vallée, an engineer recently exiled to the colony under a lettre de cachet.666 (See FIGURE 6) It is part of what would have been a number of texts that were included in the boxes of plants sent to France and the Jardin du Roi by anonymous colonial collectors in French North America in the eighteenth-century. To my knowledge the only document of its type to survive, the rarity of these texts testifies to the limited role envisaged for colonial collectors by the Parisian naturalists who received their specimens and the success with which the contributions of such collectors were ultimately erased.

The text itself is poorly written, poorly spelled and, in general, is illustrative of the problems that the creation of regular correspondents in American colonies were meant to solve. While the criteria by which botanical texts organized their descriptions of plants remained contentious throughout the early and mid-eighteenth century, this text

666 The dating was provided by researchers at the Laboratoire de phanérogamie at Paris‘ Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle and remains an estimate. While the text rests anonymous at the MNHN today, a list of possible authors was produced in consultation with Dr. Kenneth Donovan, historian at the Fortress of Louisbourg – Louisbourg was, after all, not so big a settlement in 1725 that there were too many possibilities. Working from this list, I compared handwriting samples and searched colonial archives for circumstantial evidence that might suggest the identity of the author. A parallel reading of archival documents demonstrated that François-Madeleine Vallée was known to colonial and metropolitan authorities for his interest in botany and that he later claimed to have some expertise in the subject. For Donovan‘s own analysis of botany and horticulture at Louisbourg, see Kenneth Donovan, ―Imposing Discipline Upon Nature: Gardens, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in Cape Breton, 1713 – 1758,‖ Material Culture Review 64 (2006): 20 – 37. For more on Vallée, see F.J. Thorpe, ―François-Madeleine Vallée,‖ Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01- e.php?&id_nbr=1696&interval=20&&PHPSESSID=sooq9582eag8i4df601fc1qn41.

260 which is neither alphabetical nor organized around any of the visible characteristics of the plants discussed displays a structure whose rationale was likely only visible to its author.

The plants, from Sarrazine (Purple Pitcher-Plant) to Thysaouyarde and herbe à jean hébert (Bloodroot), seem a hodgepodge most likely included together because of an ecological relationship or a common collection location; aquatic plants figure prominently and it seems likely that many were collected along the coasts and in the swamps near Louisbourg.667 For academic readers at the Jardin du Roi, the principal problem with the text would have been the inability or unwillingness of the author to situate the plants in taxonomic conventions that affixed and stabilized botanical identity on both sides of the Atlantic.668 Instead of drawing upon Tournefort or Vaillant to name these plants, the author instead relied upon vernacular and indigenous nomenclature that, while sometimes included in the work of Gaultier or Prat, was absent in the published works of Parisian naturalists.

The ecological and medical knowledge of both aboriginal peoples and French colonists figure prominently in this text that, while addressed to French naturalists, ultimately aimed to subvert the relationship envisaged by the Académie and Jardin du

Roi between themselves and colonial collectors as it privileged the cultural and ecological borderlands in which its author worked.669 Even where indigenous knowledge is not explicitly cited it is assumed that they might have had something to add to the

667 Vallée, ―Memoire sur les plantes,‖ np.

668 These conventions are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

669 Fan, ―Cultural Borderlands,‖ 215 explains the use of the term ―cultural borderland‖ and the rationale for its use in place of the more common ―contact zone‖ or ―trading zone.‖

261

FIGURE 6 – Kocokar and herbe à jean hebert (photos by author) Figure 6 - Kocokar and herbe à jean hebert Kocokar (Left) and Herbe à Jean Hebert (Right) in ―Memoire sur les plantes qui sont dans la caise B‖, Laboratoire de phanérogamie, Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle (Paris)

262 account. ―The sauvages say nothing of this plant‖ the author wrote about an unnamed plant that he nonetheless hoped his Parisian readers could identify, for instance.670 While dependent upon the plants included in ―caise B‖ readers such as Bernard de Jussieu or

Sébastien Vaillant would have been unwilling to accept that the identifications of the

―creoles‖ or sauvages were a legitimate contribution to botanical science, and, as these sorts of documents were neither preserved nor included as sources in published botanical texts, it is clear that they eventually disappeared. Yet, while dependent on state resources for the transport of their collections, it is also clear that at least some colonists imagined a far greater role for themselves in the production of knowledge about North American flora than Parisian naturalists ultimately permitted them.

This text, while providing evidence that colonial collectors were active in seeking to furnish Parisian naturalists with botanical specimens, is similarly effective at demonstrating the ease with which the participation of indigenous and colonial populations in French scientific networks was effaced. Indeed, it is almost solely through the glimpses provided by texts such as that above and the indexed expenses of Gosselin that it is possible to see how aboriginal people participated in continental and Atlantic networks. While colonial correspondence and travel accounts amply demonstrate, for example, that aboriginal people became key furnishers of plants such as American ginseng once commercial opportunities had been discovered, their role in producing scientific specimens is difficult to ascertain. The specimens that survive in the Muséum nationale d‘Histoire naturelle provide little fresh insight. Even where there is evidence of an interest in aboriginal or colonial usage, details on the acquisition of ginseng and other

670 Ibid., 10.

263 plants are scarce. For instance, while Prat‘s successor to the title of royal physician in

Louisiana, Bénigne de Fontenette, provided ethnographic data on the usage and indigenous names of American ginseng that was included with the physical specimen

(See FIGURE 5), this information served to cloud the origins of these specific plants rather than illuminate them. While attributing his information to the Natchez and the

Illiniwek, any specific aboriginal communities involved in the collection of the specimens was effaced.671 Looking at the specimens preserved in France‘s national herbarium today it is clear that this information was considered supplementary and was included to hint at potential medicinal properties, rather than to credit indigenous cultures with a unique insight into the plant‘s nature. Mentioning snake bites and the treatment of wounds, there is little included that does anything more than hint at the properties of the plant that at that time were being studied by the botanists such as the Jussieus and

Vaillant.672 Yet even this level of detail is rare in an archive that is devoted principally to the preservation of physical specimens that have been abstracted from specific cultural and ecological contexts.

This echoes the treatment of indigenous knowledge and peoples in the extant writings of Sarrazin, Gaultier and Vielle. Sarrazin treated indigenous sources in entirely the same manner as he did colonists, which is to say that he summarily dismissed them.

Similarly, Gaultier‘s writings often make it impossible to distinguish whether the source of information about the uses of a North American plant came from a colonial or indigenous community, and both were regarded with a cultivated detachment. When he

671 ―Panax quinquefolium,‖ Herbier d‘Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, Laboratoire de phanérogamie, Muséum national d‘Histoire naturelle, Paris.

672 See Jussieu, Gin-sem, Vaillant, Discours and Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

264 described wild rice, for instance, he conflated the usage of colonial and indigenous populations to a point where speaking of indigenous knowledges becomes impossible, instead hinting at broader mixtures of French and indigenous knowledges that ultimately remained unexplored in his scientific texts. He wrote simply that ―Our voyageurs who go into the Pays d‟en Haut eat it with pleasure, they cook it as well as the sauvages with the fat of meat.‖673

At least some of this may have been a reluctance on the part of aboriginal peoples to share their information with colonial naturalists with whom they had had little contact and with whom there was little prospect for a long-term relationship. Indeed, while this dissertation and the recent work of historians such as Gilles Havard and Allan Greer have hinted that the quotidian exchanges between colonial and indigenous populations at the margins of empire may have produced new forms of ecological and botanical knowledge, there is little evidence to suggest that colonial naturalists looked for, or were exposed to, the knowledges of local aboriginal peoples.674 The only inclusion of aboriginal knowledge in the work of Alexandre Vielle, for instance, comes from one of ―Several persons who have had sauvages from Carolina as their slaves.‖675 Providing information on the cirier (wax myrtle) that had been requested of him by the marine, it seems equally possible that here the presence of aboriginal informants served as a visible claim to an epistemologically privileged geographical position rather than as evidence of an interest or respect for indigenous ecological knowledge. Additionally, as in this case indigenous

673 Gaultier, ―Description,‖ 97.

674 Greer, ―The Exchange of Medical Knowledge," 135-36.

675 Alexandre ―Description de l‘arbrisseau,‖ 3.

265 knowledge provided little beyond a confirmation of his own empirical findings, Vielle seemed reluctant to grant legitimacy to any knowledge acquired through his own encounters with indigenous peoples. The result was that aboriginal peoples were almost altogether absent from the accounts of North American flora produced on either side of the Atlantic, sharing a silence also frequently imposed upon colonial populations.676

Conclusion

French Atlantic science was the product of ongoing tension between the centrifugal forces of early modern communication and the need for the participation of colonists and indigenous peoples, and the effort of the Académie to place itself at the centre of new scientific networks and transform Paris into a scientific capital. The history of the integration of North American flora into the transatlantic networks of the

Académie and its colonial correspondents thus sheds new light on larger patterns of scientific sociability that took shape in the early modern French Atlantic. Bound to their colonial correspondents by their need for specimens, French naturalists such as

Tournefort, Vaillant and Bernard and Antoine de Jussieu were nonetheless able to leverage their privileged access to the legitimacy and resources of the Académie to recruit and discipline royal physicians such as Sarrazin, Gaultier, Jean Prat and de

Fontenette and apothecaries such as Alexandre Vielle. Establishing the scientific and social conventions of Parisian science in networks of Atlantic and continental

676 The importance of indigenous knowledges to Jesuit accounts of ginseng and other American plants and more general discussion of the mediating effects of indigenous knowledge are studied in Chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation.

266 communication, both Parisian naturalists and colonial correspondents helped fashion

Paris into a scientific capital and reduce France‘s North American colonies to scientific peripheries.

The story of correspondents such as Sarrazin also reveals, however, that the

French Atlantic was a far more crowded place than the records of the Académie Royale des Sciences and Jardin du Roi would have us believe. As previous chapters in this dissertation have demonstrated, the records of the Jesuits and French merchants who also took an interest in colonial flora demonstrate clearly that the networks that the Académie extended into the North American continent were not alone in circulating novel plants and in maintaining networks of collectors and informants. Colonial naturalists such as

Michel Sarrazin were only able to succeed in fashioning themselves as authoritative voices on North American flora because of their ability to co-opt existing conversations about colonial environments between colonists and indigenous peoples. Sarrazin and his colleagues became mediators between the Atlantic networks of the Académie which were maintained by the affective bonds of patronage and the profit-centred networks of amateur collectors that stretched into the interior of the American continent. Extending the reach of the Académie into the interior of the continent and establishing themselves as key nodes in the port cities of Québec and New Orleans, these colonial correspondents were simultaneously implicated in the delegitimation of the activities and knowledges of colonial and indigenous plant collectors.

CHAPTER 5

Making Plants Portable

As the Académie Royale des Sciences expanded its influence into the Atlantic

World in the eighteenth century, its members increasingly concerned themselves with disciplining the contributions of their would-be correspondents and plant collectors. In

1732, the respected botanist and member of the Académie Antoine de Jussieu hinted at the limited role imagined for an ideal correspondent and collector, highlighting their part in making plants portable. "If the botanist is able,‖ he wrote, ―he must send figures and descriptions.‖677 Jussieu‘s interest in making the experience of novel plants of his extra-

European correspondents travel as readable inscriptions is reminiscent of projects to expand the reach of other ―big sciences‖ of the day such as astronomy through the use of properly calibrated instruments and effectively trained observers. Yet as Jussieu continued and his concern shifted to the transport of botanical specimens, the difference between colonial botany and the global astronomical projects of the Académie became clear. The same commitment to standardization, the same impulse towards ―metrology‖

677 Jussieu, ―Des avantages,‖ 1.

267

268 that drove the development and refinement of scientific instruments in other fields of study, here encouraged a close attention to the production of botanical specimens.678

Ideal correspondents would, he wrote, also send ―some seeds either dried or maintained at a temperature so that they arrive alive and in a state to be transplanted. After we will have them examined and make comparisons with those of this country which they resemble the most.‖679 To make the global ambitions of French enlightenment botany a reality, botanists such as Antoine de Jussieu wrestled with both discovering and diffusing effective methods to preserve plants – both alive and dead – during maritime transport. In the process Jussieu and other academicians were forced to come to terms with the limitations posed by existing networks in which plants circulated and the complex social and physical ecologies through which their desired plants passed as they travelled from the port cities of New Orleans and Québec to Paris.

Jussieu was attempting to maintain a division of labour between the collection of plants in North America and the study of them in Paris, and his attention to the material practices of colonial botany that made his own research possible revealed an anxiety present in other discussions between academicians and with their North American

678 Jan Golinski has defined metrology as ―the enterprise that works to secure the compatibility of standard means of measurement in different locations.‖ Making Natural Knowledge, 173. Steve Harris characterizes sciences such as botany and natural history – those which depended upon the mobilization and maintenance of vast networks of collectors and correspondents – as the ―big sciences‖ of the eighteenth century. Harris, ―Long-distance corporations,‖ 294. For an introduction to the changing role and use of scientific instruments in this period see Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ―Voyages, mesures et instruments: Une nouvelle expérience du monde au Siècle des lumières,‖ Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52, no. 5 (1997): 1115 – 51. Few in-depth studies of instructions written by French naturalists for travellers to aid in the collection of natural historical data exist, particularly for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For an analysis of the period after the focus of this chapter, see Lorelaï, ―Les instructions de voyages.‖ For a brief transnational analysis of these instructions see the introduction of Silvia Collini and Antonella Vannoni, Les instructions scientifiques pour les voyageurs (XVIIe – XIXe siècle) (Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2005), 15 – 54.

679 Jussieu, ―Des avantages,‖ 1b.

269 correspondents.680 In 1753, the academician Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau outlined the limited expectations of a colonial correspondent more explicitly still in a text that he wrote with Roland-Michel Barin, the Marquis de la Galissionnière, a future member of the Académie Royale des Sciences and governor general of New France between 1747 and 1749. Their Avis pour le transport par mer des arbres, des plantes vivaces, des semences, et de diverses autres curiosites d‟histoire naturelle advised potential correspondents on how to create a form with which to frame (and limit) their observations. Told even how to fold the paper used into eight sections, these correspondents were advised to provide only that information desired by Duhamel du

Monceau and other Parisian naturalists; this information could include common or indigenous names, the ―real names‖ of the plants if they were known by the collector, information about where the plant had been collected or what time of year the specimens had been collected.681 These instructions were overshadowed, however, by the meticulously detailed step-by-step instructions aimed at preserving live plants, herbarium specimens and seeds during maritime transport, instructions meant to enable amateur naturalists to translate the fruits of their labour into forms that made them useful to academic botanists.682 Duhamel and de la Galissionnière crafted these instructions based on decades of experimentation and hard experience, warning their readers that, ―Those

680 This is symptomatic about broader anxieties about the reliability and regularity of the information networks of European empires. See Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). For a discussion of anxiety in the administrative networks in eighteenth-century French Atlantic, see Thomas Wien ―Rex in fabula: travailler l‘inquiétude dans la correspondance adressée aux autorités métropolitaines depuis le Canada (1700-1760),‖ Outre-Mers. Revue d‟histoire, 97, nos. 362-363 (2009), 65 – 85. This was not simply a French phenomenon. For a discussion of similar concerns in the Anglo-Atlantic World see Murphy ―Portals of Nature,‖ 82 – 87.

681 de la Galissonnière and Duhamel Du Monceau, Avis pour le transport par mer, 158 – 160.

682 Ibid., 1 – 2.

270 who, for their utility, or to satisfy their tastes or those of others, want to transport plants or seeds, or other natural curiosities a great distance, must know that these transports are almost always a pure loss, for lack of necessary precautions.‖683

This chapter explores a facet of the history of science that has often remained hidden from view in botanical texts that discursively erased the contributions of aboriginal and colonial collectors. The invisibility of networks and modes of transportation of specimens in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World was part of a larger process by which the human dimensions of natural history and the contributions of aboriginal and colonial collectors were ―black boxed‖ by academic naturalists.684 Ships have been studied as scientific instruments and the ocean itself has been recognized as an object of intense interest for early modern and enlightenment scientists, yet the Atlantic

Ocean itself rarely figures prominently in recent work that has studied the history of

European botany from an Atlantic perspective.685 In the recent publications of historians such as Londa Schiebinger and Susan Scott Parrish, the Atlantic transport of plants has been virtually ignored in discussions that instead focus on the circulation of texts and abstract botanical knowledge. If, as these scholars have astutely pointed out, the physical distance that separated European scholars and American ecosystems and cultures permitted the selective erasure of morally offensive or epistemologically inferior colonial

683 Ibid.

684 Bruno Latour, who first coined and popularized this term, suggests that this process, where the production of natural knowledge is effectively obscured in accounts that emphasize their inevitability and universality, remains a common feature of scientific practice to this day. Latour, Science in Action, 2, 81 – 82.

685 See Kellman, ―Discovery and Enlightenment,‖ Richard Sorrenson, ―The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century,‖ Osiris 2nd series, 11 (1996): 221 – 236. See also Michael Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty‟s Navy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

271 and enslaved knowledges, there is little in their studies that suggest the role that maritime transport played in this process.686

By contrast, a study of scientific correspondence and instructions published for potential correspondents reveals that eighteenth-century naturalists were themselves well aware that taking control of the transport of plants – as discursive, visual and physical objects – was an essential facet of expanding the reach of the Académie‘s research. State- sponsored projects to discipline the social and material practices of botanical correspondents and collectors in the Atlantic World began in earnest with the establishment of the Jardin du Roi, and drew inspiration from earlier efforts to adapt and integrate merchant networks to scientific ends both in France and other European countries such as Spain and the Netherlands. For while numerous plants circulated in the

French Atlantic World as written descriptions and images in the texts of missionaries and colonists, they focused on features of the plant that made them comprehensible – or valuable – to audiences whose expectations and understandings of North American flora diverged drastically from that of an academic botanist. The same was true for those North

American plants that circulated in Atlantic networks as botanical commodities; packaged and prepared for markets whose principal concern was to verify the existence of largely

686 See Parrish, American Curiosity, and Schiebinger, Plants and Empire; Interestingly, this has not necessarily been the case in studies of the Spanish Atlantic World. See, for example, Paula de Vos, ―The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire,‖ Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 399 – 427. Scholars have, in general, paid much more attention to the transport of plants in the Pacific Ocean and in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See, for example, Nigel Rigby, ―The Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation, 1769 – 1805,‖ in Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margaret Lincoln (Rochester: Boydell Press, 1998): 81 – 100; Roger Lawrence Williams, French Botany in the Enlightenment: The Ill-Fated Voyages of La Pérouse and His Rescuers (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 33 – 50. Emma Spary‘s study of the Jardin du Roi also remains an exception, as her consideration of correspondence networks also directs its attention towards the transport of specimens (although not specifically in a maritime context). See Utopia‟s Garden, Chapter 2.

272 invisible medicinal properties, the morphological features upon which the systematic and comparative study of plants depended were frequently discarded.

This chapter therefore argues that the specific networks through which North

American plants travelled to France mattered a great deal. While they frequently overlapped, the participants in each network, whether missionary, merchant or naturalist, were forced to adapt to the challenging physical environments of maritime transport in their own way, whether they worked towards commercial, promotional, spiritual or scientific ends. Produced as written descriptions, as images and commodities or as physical specimens both dried and alive, different Atlantic networks understood plants in distinctive ways and made use of specific material practices that produced distinctive botanical objects.

The Early French history of North American Plants

As I discuss in the first chapter of this dissertation, the France that early explorers such as Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain left was already a product of the

Columbian Exchange.687 American plants such as corn, squash and tobacco steadily expanded their presence in French fields and cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The specific networks in which these plants circulated are difficult to trace, however, and they often seem to have been as European as they were Atlantic.688 Yet, by

687 See Chapter 1, and Crosby, Columbian Exchange.

688 Danièle Duport, ―La variété botanique dans les récits de voyage au XVIe siècle: Une glorification du créateur,‖ Revue d‟Histoire littéraire de la France 101, no.2 (2001): 195 – 212; Ogilvie, Science of Describing. Many of these plants first arrived in France via Iberian networks and from Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. See Sauer, "Changing Perception,‖ and Lowood, ―The New World.‖

273 the end of the sixteenth century an influx of North American plants from Acadian and

Canadian colonies arrived via by French colonists and explorers, establishing a more significant presence in the gardens and the everyday lives of Parisians. In the early seventeenth century, 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 Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Monts.689 Plants joined collections that also included cultural artifacts such as canoes, bows and arrows, and the aboriginal weapon known to the French as a casse-tête.690 New World plants were valued, like cultural artifacts and animals, less for their contribution to furthering knowledge about these newly claimed regions than for their novelty and rarity. They were most often gathered in individually owned and idiosyncratic collections that bore the heavy imprint of their curator in their organizational logic; the systematic study of these plants – the project at the heart of the Académie‘s later botanical research – was limited by their irregular arrival and frequently confused provenance.691

689 Bernard Allaire, Pelleteries, manchons et chapeaux de castor (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1999), 91; For a discussion of collecting in early modern France, see Antoine Schnapper, Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1988 - 1994).

690 Christian Feest, ―The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493 – 1750,‖ in America in European Consciousness, 1493 – 1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 329; see also Christian Feest, Premières nations, collections royales: les Indiens des forêts et des prairies d‟Amérique du Nord (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly, 2007)

691 Anthony Alan Shelton writes that ―The cultural origins of these items seem to have been of less importance than their broad geographical provenance. Frequently, the civilizations of the New World – Aztec, Toltec, Mixtec, Maya – were conflated, and the inhabitants of distinct city states and regions were subsumed under general rubrics.‖ See ―Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the New World,‖ in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 184.

274

As Claudia Swan has noted in her discussion of early seventeenth-century Dutch collections, the circulation of natural historical objects and knowledge was not synonymous.692 Sometimes this meant that American transplants failed to prosper in

French soils, whether from lack of horticultural ability, poor transport or ecological incompatibility. The Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard wrote in 1632, for example, 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.‖693 Sagard juxtaposed this anecdote with his description of the landscapes of the early-seventeenth century Saint

Lawrence Valley, suggesting that he had hoped to offer his French readers firsthand experience of colonial flora to complement his written descriptions of the plant‘s ―native soil.‖694 In more extreme cases, the separation of specimens and knowledge about them meant that the origins of the plants could become obscured. Some plants such as the Aster

Canadensis (Canadian Horseweed) described by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort became invasive after they arrived in Europe, leaving a difficult trail for botanists (and historians) to trace. In his 1698 Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris Tournefort wrote that its Canadian origins were ―supported by a sort of tradition, which appears likely enough.‖ Whatever the plant‘s origins, it had made a home for itself in Paris where it had become ―the most common plant in the fields of Paris.‖ Tournefort added that ―the winds have carried this grain beyond the Loire River; and Zadoni remarks with reason,

692 Claudia Swan, ―Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Early Modern Dutch Trade,‖ in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 233.

693 Sagard, Grand Voyage, 145.

694 Ibid.

275 that it infects all the places that it falls.‖695 For other plants this separation could mean that discussions of morphology were completely separated from an understanding of aboriginal origins and colonial cultural contexts. In the early seventeenth century, for example, early colonists in both Acadia and Québec suffered attacks from scurvy while the tree that had cured Jacques Cartier‘s crew of the same affliction a century earlier (and that he had brought back to France) was valued in French gardens for its aesthetic, rather than its medicinal, properties.696

Many of the plants introduced into Paris in the early seventeenth century arrived through the efforts of Jean Robin and his son Vespasien and first took root in the gardens managed by them. Jean Robin, a surgeon by training, was hired to create a garden for the faculty of medicine in Paris in 1597.697 His son was hired as a botanical demonstrator at the recently founded Jardin du Roi in 1633.698 The same year that Jean Robin began his garden, Vespasien was sent on a botanizing trip throughout Europe, where he gathered an array of plants both from these European regions and, where they had already been transplanted in European gardens, from the Americas and Asia.699 In 1601, Jean

695 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris (Paris: L‘Imprimerie royale, 1698), 173 – 74.

696 Jacques Mathieu, L‟Anneda: L‟arbre de vie (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2010), Chapter 3; Jacques Rousseau, ―L‘annedda et l‘arbre de vie,‖ Revue de l‟histoire de l‟Amérique française 8, no.2 (1954): 171 – 212.

697 Mathieu, Premier livre, 69; See also C. Laflamme, ―Jacques-Philippe Cornuti – Note pour servir à l‘histoire des sciences au Canada,‖ Mémoires et Comptes Rendus de la Société Royale du Canada 2nd series, vol. 8 (1901): 4: 61.

698 Ibid, 71; For the early history of the Jardin du Roi, see Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ―Gardens of Knowledge and the République des Gens de Sciences,‖ in Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion, ed. Michel Conan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005): 85 – 129; See also Yves Laissus, ―Le Jardin du Roi,‖ in Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. René Taton (Paris: Hermann, 1964): 287 – 341.

699 Mathieu, Premier Livre, 69 – 71.

276 published the Catalogus stirpium tam indigenarum quam exoticarum quae Lutetiae coluntur, cataloguing almost 1300 plants; at least three of these plants (the Arbor Vitae 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 became better known simply as snakeroot) had identifiable North American origins.700

Jean actively sought exotic plants for his garden, and drew on extensive networks that connected him with plants that were arriving from French, Spanish, Dutch and English colonies in the Americas, building a sizeable collection that would later form the basis of the Jardin du Roi.701

Jean Robin himself became emblematic of the early circulation of these plants when, over a century later, Carolus Linnaeus attached his name to what by then was increasingly known as a false-acacia (Robinia pseudoacacia or the Black Locust). Jean is frequently acknowledged as having introduced the plant into Paris – and more specifically into a left bank garden near Notre Dame Cathedral – in 1601, where it grows to this day. His son Vespasien planted another long-lived example from the seeds of this first R. pseudoacacia in 1636 in the recently founded Jardin du Roi where he worked as a botanical demonstrator and arborist.702 The tree soon spread 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

700 Ibid., 37 – 38.

701 Ibid.

702 Ibid., 71.

277 eventually used both medicinally and for woodworking.703 Still the exact origins of the tree planted in 1601 remain unknown and disputed to this day. 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 travelled to Virginia on a botanizing trip) or from correspondents who had settled in the colony.704 While some historians have offered Samuel de Champlain as 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.705 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. Although undeniably of North American origins, the exact history of the plant remains an enigma, and it is remembered and valued today as a curiosity or as testimony to the early reach of Parisian naturalists rather than an object of sustained scientific study.

Robinia pseudoacacia was first depicted in a 1635 book that purported to be focused on plants that had come from Canada, the Paris physician Jacques Cornut‘s

Canadensium plantarum.706 This text, in addition to garden catalogues and botanical texts published by the Robins over a decade earlier, showed that the expansion of the French colonial presence into North America was accompanied by a drastic increase in the number of North American plants growing in Paris. The 1620 L‟histoire des plantes by

703 Buc‘Hoz, Dictionnaire universel des plantes, 1:16-17; Nicolas Lemery, Traité Universel des drogues simple: mises en ordre alphabetique (Paris: L. d‘Houry, 1698), 625.

704 Frederick J. Peabody, ―A 350-year-old American Legume in Paris,‖ Castanea 47, no. 1(1982), 100.

705 Ibid., See also Jacques Rousseau, ―Samuel de Champlain, botaniste mexicain et antillais,‖ Cahier des Dix 16 (1951): 39 – 61.

706 Cornut, Canadensium plantarum.

278

Geoffroy Linocier included both an appendix describing the ―Plantes Aromatiques qui croissent en l‘Inde, tant Occidentale qu‘Orientale. Reveu & augmenté de plusieurs Plant vennuës des Indes lesqulles ont esté prises et cultivées aux Jardin de MR. ROBIN‖ in

1619, and a ―Histoire des Plantes nouvellement trouvées en l‘Isle Virgine, & autres lieux, lesquelles ont esté prises & cutivées au Jardin de Monsieur Robin Arboriste du Roy‖ that was apparently written in 1620 by Jean Robin himself.707 The historian Jacques Mathieu who has analyzed these texts counts five plants that are undeniably from New France or

Acadia; flowers such as the martagon de Canada are juxtaposed with those acquired from other European gardens such as the Ychnis Clachedonica flore multiplici minato, a plant acquired from another collector in Germany with no identified extra-European origin.708 The plants that had arrived from France‘s North American colonies remained few and little understood, although by the early 1630s enough had arrived for Cornut to attempt a regional flora of the new colonies.

Cornut‘s analysis of 38 North American plants (26 of which are identified as arriving from Canada) clearly demonstrates that a fairly significant number of plants began to arrive from France‘s Canadian and Acadian colonists in the third decade of the seventeenth century.709 Cornut‘s text, for example, drew on firsthand experience of plants that he was able to personally observe in the Robins‘ garden and those that belonged to the Morin brothers, gardeners and merchants who lived by ―cultivating, selling and

707 Geoffroy Linocier, L‟histoire des plantes, traduicte de Latin en François avec leurs pourtraicts, noms, qualitéz & lieux où elles croissent (Paris: Chez Guillaume Mace, 1620); Mathieu, Premier livre, 38 – 40, 197 – 98.

708 Linocier, L‟histoire des plantes, 10 - 11.

709 Mathieu, Premier livre, 11.

279 trading flowers‖ in Paris.710 After comparing the R. pseudoacacia to Egyptian acacia,

Cornut wrote, for example, that ―North America does not lack trees of this type, which, once planted in our botanical gardens, succeed very well, at which point they charm the eye by the beauty of their flowers and the regular arrangement of their leaves.‖711 For others he was able to offer insight into the life cycle and habitus of the plant. When he described the L‟apocynon majus syriacum rectum (Common Milkweed), he was able to note that ―This Apocynon is made up of a white root, the thickness of an inch, which is furnished with a few rootlets, and which spreading like water are deleterious to gardens.

This root persists during the winter, buried in the earth; towards the end of May, several round, soft shoots surge out and are difficult to break.‖712 The successful transplantation of American flora in Parisian gardens meant that botanists such as Cornut could lessen their reliance on colonial observers, strengthening their own claims to understand the plant and erasing the contributions of plant collectors.

Yet even if such descriptions as these written by Cornut demonstrate a depth of experience with novel American plants unimaginable only a few decades earlier, they reiterate Claudia Swan‘s suggestion that plants and colonial and aboriginal knowledges about them often travelled along considerably different paths. For example, while colonial authors such as the Jesuits Louis Nicolas or Pierre Françoix-Xavier de

Charlevoix attributed medicinal properties to the milky latex of the Common Milkweed

710 Elizabeth Hyde, Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 46; See also, Chandra Mukerji, ―Territorial Gardens: the control of land in seventeenth-century French formal gardens,‖ The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, eds. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91 – 92.

711 Mathieu, Premier livre, 311.

712 Ibid., 293.

280 based on their observations of colonial and indigenous medical practice, Cornut was only able to write what he saw and limited his account to a close description of the ―milky and viscous juice‖ without any references to medicinal usage.713 Likewise, when describing

R. pseudoacacia Cornut was dependent on his knowledge of what he understood

(incorrectly as it turned out) to be an Egyptian variety of the plant, drawn from both classical authors such as Dioscorides and his near contemporaries such as Andrea

Cesalpino, an Italian naturalist who published in the sixteenth century.714 Experienced through the intermediaries of the Robins, Morins and their European networks, Cornut remained coy about the sources of the plants he described. Cornut credited simply ―those moderns who, without being forced back by extraordinary perils, have crossed the ocean and discovered new lands.‖715 Perhaps this is why, in spite of the title he gave to the book, Cornut‘s research focused on plants from a wide and poorly-demarcated area of the extra-European world. Of the 93 plants that his work described, 15 were presented without an explicit provenance and 26 more came from regions as far away as India and

Asia.716 Decontexualized in the networks of seventeenth-century collectors who valued

713 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 6; Charlevoix, Journal d‟un voyage, 387.

714 Mathieu, Premier livre, 311; The historian Victoria Dickenson has seen the mixed reliance on personal observation, contemporary botanical research and classical authorities as emblematic of Cornut‘s position between early modern and renaissance botany and between the genre of the herbal and the regional flora. Dickensen, Drawn from Life, 81.

715 Ibid., 14.

716 Ibid., 11 – 12; James S. Pringle, ―How Canadian is Cornut‘s Canadensium Plantarum Historia? A Phytogeographic and Historical Analysis,‖ Canadian Horticultural History 1, no. 4 (1988): 190 – 209.

281

FIGURE 7 – Robinia pseudoacacia (1635) Figure 7 - Robinia pseudoacacia (1635) Jac Cornuti, Canadensium plantarum, aliarumque nondom ediarum historia (Paris: Simon le Moyne, 1635)

(Image Source: Google Books)

282 the plants primarily for their novelty, the scientific study of the flora of French North

America remained an impossible project.717

Introduced and cultivated through the efforts of Vespasien Robin and Guy de la

Brosse, physician to Louis XIII and first director of the Jardin du Roi, New World plants quickly established a sizeable presence in the garden then called the ―Jardin Royal pour la cultures des plantes médicinales.‖ When de la Brosse first catalogued the plants growing in this garden in 1636, he listed numerous American plants, discursively marked by the inclusion of identifiers such as Americanum, Virginiana, Peruvianus and Canadensis to their names.718 Plants from both English and French North American colonies were also listed for sale in the catalogues of French merchants who remained important sources of plants for both scientific and pleasure gardens.719 The limitations that irregular and informal networks of collection imposed upon the creation of the Jardin du Roi soon became apparent, however. The need for regular and reliable transport was clear to de la

Brosse, although he wrote that even though he had ―sent at our expense to one and the other Indies people intelligent enough in herbal knowledge, to search and bring ... all the seeds that they can recover,‖ the best he could say of the project was that it had thus far

―not been totally fruitless.‖720

717 Victoria Dickenson nonetheless suggests that Cornut‘s project is best understood as ―an attempt, however imperfect, to describe a regional flora.‖ Drawn from Life, 99; On the evolution of regional floras in seventeenth-century Europe, see Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 51 – 86.

718 Guy de la Brosse, Description du Jardin Royal des Plantes Medicinales (Paris: 1636), 94.

719 See Prudence Leith-Ross, ―A Seventeenth-Century Paris Garden,‖ Garden History 21, no. 2 (1993): 150 – 57.

720 Guy de la Brosse, Catalogue des plantes cultivées à présent au Jardin royal des plantes médecinales, estably par Louis le Juste (Paris: 1646), np.

283

Already in the early seventeenth century one of de la Brosse‘s early counterparts in Leiden, Carolus Clusius, had tried circulating instructions for ships surgeons travelling to East Asia to facilitate the collection of novel plants for his gardens. Like the Robins or de la Brosse, Clusius frequently found himself at the mercy of his correspondents and amateur collectors, and was forced to make do with what arrived each year with the return of ships from the east. In 1602, the same year as the founding of the East India

Company, Clusius wrote a set of instructions that specified the specific types of plants requested (plants such as nutmeg, pepper, betel and cotton, for example) as well as guidelines for their transportation. He requested branches loaded with flowers, leaves and fruit pressed between paper as herbarium specimens, and drawings of trees, which by their nature resisted easy transportation.721 In addition to these specimens and morphological descriptions, Clusius also requested information about local uses and names ―Because one must know all these things, in order to make a good description.‖722

Details about the transport of the specimens in the Robins‘ garden are scant, although there is some evidence that French collectors at the time were experimenting with methods of preparing seeds during maritime transport.723 Cornut, for example, specified that some of the plants that he studied to write his Candensium plantarum were grown from seed.724 The expansion of European botanical science in the early modern period

721 This was based on an earlier – although not entirely successful – effort to place a trained correspondent on Dutch ship bound for East Asia in 1599. Clusius and another professor at Leiden, Pieter Paaw, recruited a physician who, after he died on the trip, was also revealed to be a disorganized collector who had neglected to attach names or details to those specimens that he had collected. Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 254 – 55; Swan, ―Collecting Naturalia,‖ 235.

722 Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 255.

723 Mathieu, Premier livre, 185 – 87.

724 Ibid.

284 therefore increasingly involved efforts to transform the social and material practices of botanical collection in the extra-European world in a bid to translate the activities of travelers and regular correspondents into the registers of European science and preserve the physical specimens that enlarged academic collections.

The Académie Royale des Sciences and Transatlantic Plants

A key facet of the Académie‘s efforts to extend its influence into the French

Atlantic World and North America was therefore directed at refashioning the plants that travelled from North America to Paris, whether they arrived as images, discursive objects or as physical specimens for gardens or herbarium collections. For if the establishment of the Jardin du Roi and the settlement of correspondents in Québec and New Orleans ensured a regular supply of New World plants and a much clearer sense of botanical provenance, it did little – in and of itself – to ensure that those plants that travelled to

Paris arrived in the condition necessary to be of use for academic botanists. The maritime transport of plants destined for scientific study necessitated the preservation of those features – predominantly morphological but occasionally phytochemical as well – necessary for accurate identification. Plants from the extra-European world became what the science studies scholar Bruno Latour has referred to as ―immutable and combinable mobiles.‖725 Even more than inscriptions of carefully measured observation and

725 An immutable mobile was an object defined both by its portability and its stability. Both of these characteristics were key for enlightenment naturalists seeking to understand the non-European world. Additionally, however, these objects were prized because they were combinable and comparable, allowing for simultaneous study on a global scale. As Bruno Latour explains, this characteristic gave the local knowledges of European scientific academies the appearance of universality, and a decisive tactical advantage when they interacted with the local knowledges of the non-European world. See Latour, Science in Action, 215 – 257. See also Bruno Latour, ―Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon

285 experience, it was principally the collection of fixed material specimens that lent authority to the study of colonial plants in Paris.726

The transport of plants had been an integral aspect of many of the earliest voyages to French North America, and – as food, medicines and a host of botanical commodities – numerous plants from France‘s North American colonies arrived each year in seventeenth-century Paris.727 Yet even after the founding of the Académie, as plants travelled across the Atlantic through the efforts of merchants, missionaries, colonists and explorers, they took on the distinct and oftentimes incompatible characteristics of the networks in which they circulated.728 The plants that arrived in France from North

America were the product of specific material and social practices that aimed to insert them in distinctive economies with a maximum of their potential value intact. Not all features of a plant were equally desirable for intended French audiences, and decisions

Forest,‖ in Pandora‟s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 24 – 79.

726 This chapter is not the first to argue that making extra-European experiences travel to European academies was an essential facet in making the global ambitions of enlightenment science a reality. Scholars such as Maire-Noëlle Bourguet, Jordan Kellman, Neil Safier and Nicholas Dew have more often focused, however, on the inscriptions gathered by properly calibrated scientific instruments used to gather standardized information. Both superposable and comparable, this data created a new understanding of universal regularities in climate and astronomical phenomena. See Bourguet, ―Voyages,‖ Kellman, ―Discovery and Enlightenment,‖ Neil Safier, Measuring.

727 Dickenson, Drawn from Life, 91.

728 For an overview of the commercial networks of the French Atlantic World, see Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 189 – 229. Historians of science have recently called for a re-evaluation of the relationship between commercial and scientific expansion in the early modern world (see Cook, Matters of Exchange) but preliminary studies of the French Atlantic World suggest that the encounter between scientific and commercial networks in the French Atlantic World were far more often complicated than complimentary. See Nicholas Dew, ―Scientific Travel in the Atlantic World: the French expedition to Gorée and the Antilles, 1681 – 1683)‖ British Journal of the History of Science 43, no.1 (2010): 1 – 17, and Jordan Kellman, ―Nature, networks, and expert testimony in the colonial Atlantic: The case of cochineal,‖ Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives 7, no. 4 (2010): 373 – 95. François Regourd and James McClellan have suggested simply that ―Traders in Nantes or Bordeaux who grew rich from the slave trade, and planters and others who profited from sugar and coffee production, expressed little interest in research science.‖ ―Machine coloniale,‖ 48 – 49.

286 about those which were worth the effort to preserve during transport frequently meant that many plants arrived absent the morphological features that made them useful as a scientific specimen.

The different conditions in which North American flora circulated as commodities in the French Atlantic World were particularly problematic for academic naturalists. If it is undeniable that medicinal plants, for example, were commonly transported across the

Atlantic, the material practices of the colonial merchants and colonists who prepared these plants for travel rendered them nearly useless for scientific purposes. The medical marketplace of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France demanded that valuable

American drugs be packaged as such, and feared the loss of desired medicinal properties when they were not. The medical author Nicolas Lemery warned his readers to be attentive to the means by which the capillaire (northern maidenhair fern) which they sought to purchase had been transported from Canada. He cautioned that ―it is so common in several place in America, and principally in Canada, that the merchants package their merchandise in it in place of hay, when they want to send them to distant countries. It is by the means that we receive much of it. But it is better when it comes packed in paper bags, or closed in boxes, because the odour is better conserved. One must choose it new, green, odiferous, whole [and] moist to touch.‖729 Other authors advised their readers on how to produce a syrup from the plant that would preserve the plant‘s medicinal properties both in France and, presumably, as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

The medical author Philbert Guybert wrote that to produce a syrup of capillaire ―The herbs cleaned and washed will be put in three liters of hot water to infuse for twenty four

729 Lemery, Traité universel, 625.

287 hours, in a glazed terrine ..., at the end of which time you will pour it all in a basin, ... the decoction will be clarified with egg white and yolk, & cooked with three parts sugar into the consistency of syrup.‖730 Administrative and personal correspondence demonstrates that some capillaire was sent from North American ports already prepared as a syrup.

Writing from Michilimackinac in 1694, for example, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, complained about the loss of just such a syrup that he had sent to France from the Pays d‟en Haut.731 The Jesuit Louis Nicolas wrote that this syrup was ―sought after in France where it is bought for 4 or 5 écus per pot.‖732 Still others dried bunches of the plant, shaded from the sun, to prepare the plant for transport.733 More often still, however, the details both on how capillaire was prepared and packaged are scant; shipping records count simply the number of barrels of the plant that were transported, with little information on what shape the plants inside took during transport.734 The accolades lavished upon capillaire from Canada (and, in at least one text, from Louisiana as well) translated into a significant Atlantic economy. The statistics assembled by the medical historian Renald Lessard show that the amount leaving Québec fluctuated in the early to mid-eighteenth century, from lows of 160 livres worth in 1726 or 165 in 1757, to

730 Philbert Guybert, Toutes les oeuvres charitables de Philebert Guibert (Rouen: chez François Vaultier, 1667), 167.

731 CAOM, C11A vol. 13, 178r-191v; The medical historian Renald Lessard also shows that the superior of the Hôtel-Dieu shipped syrup made from the plant regularly in the early eighteenth century; ―Pratique et praticien,‖ 238 – 39.

732 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 12.

733 Gaultier, ―Description,‖ 61.

734 Lessard, ―Pratique et praticien,‖ 238 - 39; Records at the Amirauté de Guyenne record regular arrivals of cargoes of Canadian capillaire see ADG 6B-230, 6B-235, 6B-243, 6B-261, and 6B-268. Thanks to Bernard Allaire for these references.

288 highs of 7191 livres in 1744 and 12933 in 1752.735 Nonetheless, these numbers meant that commercial demand would have far outstripped that of the Académie; ensuring a reliable supply of specimens of a plant such as capillaire meant diverting plants from commercial networks that cared little for morphology except insofar as it supported comparisons to French varieties of the drug.

Likewise, when the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau provided instructions for the preparation of American ginseng, he had Chinese markets in mind, not the naturalists at the Académie. After cautioning his readers to only collect the plant at the end of August, he wrote that ―When one uproots it from the soil it is necessary to wash it carefully, [and] cut the root in slices lengthwise so that it dries more easily. It is better to have it dried in the shade rather than in the sun & by a fire, and conserve it in a dry place.‖736 Lafitau recognized that the characteristics demanded by the Chinese market he sought to tap into were an artifact of the processing of the root. He wrote that, ―being dried from the bottom until the middle, these roots acquire a resinous reddish colour and [are] almost transparent. It is the mark of their good quality.‖737 To produce this effect he offered two different methods, one described by his confrère the Père Jartoux and the other by the

German physician and naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer. Jartoux advised cleaning the root and dipping it in boiling water before smoking it over yellow millet, which Lafitau claimed gave it some of the desired colour.738 Kaempfer, on the other hand, suggested soaking the root in water in which millet or rice had been cooked before letting it dry

735 Lessard, ―Pratique et praticien,‖ 240 – 41.

736 Lafitau, Mémoire, 68.

737 Ibid., 70 – 71.

738 Ibid., 69 – 70.

289 over a fire.739 Lafitau wrote that ―I do not at all believe that this colour & this transparency adds anything to its virtue, I believe that this preparation is not at all necessary. If one nonetheless wishes to take it for sale in China, one can perform this preparation in Canada.‖740 Therefore, in spite of the vast amounts of ginseng that travelled across the Atlantic from New France to Old, only a small fraction of it would have been of use to botanists who required the floral and leaf structures sacrificed during the preparation of marketable ginseng.741

Repurposing a plant that arrived from North America as a botanical commodity was no easy feat. A manuscript detailing the Académie‘s efforts to study a plant from

Louisiana that had arrived via commercial networks is revealing.742 Written by Antoine de Jussieu, the ―Note sur une plante de la Louisiane,‖ demonstrated the limits that undisciplined accounts placed on the Académie‘s investigation of North American flora.743 Jussieu noted that several pounds of an unnamed root had come to him from

Louisiana via unnamed correspondents at the Compagnie des Indes. He seemed unsure of who the original collector had been, although he was evidently informed that the root could be used to treat ―gonorrhoea or hot piss.‖744 Experiments performed in Paris

739 Ibid., 70.

740 Ibid., 71.

741 For more on the Académie‘s study of ginseng, see Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

742 Appadurai suggests that for many objects the ―commodity phase‖ is just one phase in the social life of an object. This chapter, however, argues that botanical commodities could become decommoditified as scientific specimens only where they had maintained physical features that served to integrate them into taxonomic schema and botanical research. See Arjun Appadurai, ―Introduction: commodities and the politics of value,‖ in The Social Life of Objects: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986), 3 - 63.

743Antoine de Jussieu, ―Note sur une plante de la Louisiane,‖ MS 1140, BCMNHN, 1.

744 Ibid.

290 confirmed the veracity of colonial claims for the plant‘s efficacy, but the lack of information about the collection of the plant stymied efforts to investigate it further.

Jussieu outlined the steps that would be required to further study the unnamed plant.

First, it would be necessary to learn the local colonial name for the plant; Jussieu suggested a possible identity for the plant but was unable to ask his correspondents for more information without this crucial piece of information. He next wanted to know if the plant remained in usage amongst colonists and aboriginal people. If it was, he suggested that specimens could be sent to Paris, accompanied by the collection of more in situ experience of the plant in Louisiana. Jussieu also offered a method to ensure the identity of the plant, should more roots be sent to Paris. Evidently, his own investigation of the plant had included tasting the various parts of the root (where he noticed that the bark had a bitter taste), drying various parts, and experimenting with boiling the root and testing the product for taste and medicinal properties.745 Absent the visual cues on which his research normally relied, Jussieu used every sense at his disposal, but his knowledge of the plant remained fragmentary.

Naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic were just as concerned with preparing specimens to survive the challenging environmental conditions aboard ship as the merchants who transported ginseng or capillaire but maintained their focus on preserving the visual features that, through careful study, could reveal a plant‘s identity. Explicit discussions of the material practices involved in the preservation of natural historical specimens were nonetheless relatively rare in the scientific networks of the French

Atlantic World. Ostensibly, both the naturalists that travelled in expeditions to South

745 Ibid.

291

America and the Caribbean organized by the Académie and the network of resident correspondents in French colonial North America had been trained by their scientific patrons before they left France. It can be implied, for example, that Michel Sarrazin was well-versed in the techniques required to produce herbarium specimens by the time that he was elected the Académie‘s first American member; in fact, he began producing specimens before he had even touched ground in Québec during a brief stop in his transatlantic passage in what is now Newfoundland.746 The techniques that aimed to dry specimens – freezing them in a specific instant and making them observable year round for their intended audiences – were as much a staple of scientific communication in the

French Atlantic World as they were in Europe. From New Orleans Jean Prat wrote that

―for my part I am going to work incessantly to dry all those [plants] which present themselves‖ to Bernard de Jussieu in 1735.747 That same year, he asked for the paper on which he would mount his specimens.748 Herbarium specimens became a primary avenue by which Paris-based naturalists were able to experience and classify North American plants.

In the second edition of their Avis pour le transport par mer (published again in

Etienne-François Turgot‘s 1758 Memoire instructif sur la maniere de rassembler, de preparer, de conserver, et d‟envoyer les diverses curiosités d‟histoire naturelle), Henri-

Louis Duhamel de Monceau and Roland-Michel Barin de la Galissionnière provided detailed instructions on the use and means of producing herbarium specimens. Of the

746 Rousseau, ―Michel Sarrazin, Jean-François Gaultier,‖ 153.

747 Prat to Jussieu, 3 May 1735, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 124.

748 Prat to Jussieu, 13 July 1735, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 128.

292

―herbier,‖ they wrote: ―This word must not frighten those who are not botanists: here is what it means. When one finds some plants that are unknown, or that one believes to be novel in some regard, or for which one desires the opinion of the botanists with whom one is in correspondence, or that one proposes to make known to them, or ... to enrich

[their] cabinets; one can do no better than to have them dried between sheets of paper. All collections of plants dried in such a manner are called a Herbier.‖749 The origins of the herbarium which seem so self-evident to us now can be traced to what the historian Brian

Ogilvie has termed a shift to a ―phytographic natural history.‖750 This meant that, following a renewed interest in the study of plants and a decreased reliance on classical authorities such as Dioscorides and Theophrastus, there was an increased commitment to close examination of morphological characteristics, and an associated privileging of the sort of empirically derived facts that were produced in the process. Herbarium specimens became particularly important as the ambitions of early modern botanists grew, and became essential as they imagined classification systems that were global in scale.

Making a herbarium specimen was not particularly challenging, nor did it require any specialized instruments beyond a few sheets of appropriate paper; this made it an ideal technique for a colonial setting.751 The instructions provided in the Avis demonstrated this simplicity and versatility. Its authors provided step by step instructions designed to draw the moisture from the specimen that was then arranged to display its unique features:

749Turgot, Memoire instructif, 150 – 51.

750 Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 168.

751 Prat to Jussieu, 13 July 1735, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 128.

293

It is necessary to stretch out the branches in an old book or leaves of writing

paper, taking care that the leaves are not bent or bunched against each other.

The next day one examines the state of the plant; ordinarily they are

wilted: several leaves and flowers are bent back or several are rolled together.

One stretches them out again, detaching the leaves that stick to the paper; one

takes out the branch and poses it between other leaves; because as it is loaded

with the humidity of the leaves, it will get moldy.

After several days one visits the plants again to move them to dry paper;

those [sheets] which were used in the first stage can be used again if one has them

dried near a fire or in the sun.

When the plants have little sap, it suffices to change the paper one or two

times, but there are some that demand three or four times.

Every time that the paper is changed, take care to stretch out the leaves, to

separate the flowers from each other, and in the process to make sure that all the

parts present themselves with the least confusion possible.

When the plants have lost most of their humidity, put them in paper under

a press which is loaded with weights.

When the plants appear sufficiently dry after being taken out of the press,

one does well to expose them to the force of the sun or to have them passed

through an oven which has only a little heat, before enclosing them in cases to

transport them.752

752 Turgot, Mémoire instructif, 154 – 155.

294

Through such techniques the morphological features of a plant could survive the transport across the Atlantic, becoming part of the collections of Paris-based academicians and joining collections that drew similar specimens from the four corners of the globe.

These instructions also demonstrate that, as easy as producing a herbarium specimen was, there was considerably more to it than pressing a plant between two pages.

The collection of plants that the amateur naturalist François-Madeleine Vallée sent to

Paris from Ile Royale (now Cape Breton Island) and the region surrounding Louisbourg in or after 1725 shows how would-be naturalists could still manage to do it quite wrong.

Vallée‘s Mémoire sur les plantes qui sont dans la caise B contains five pressed leaves that accompany its twelve written descriptions, although from stains which are present on several other pages, it seems likely that when first sent to France most (if not all) botanical descriptions in this Mémoire were similarly augmented by a physical specimen pressed between the pages.753 Pressed and dried leaves are present on pages 4, 5, 7, 12 and 14 of the text and represent, in that order, plants that are named ―Thysaouyarde,‖

―herbe à jean hebert,‖ ―KocoKar,‖ ―Pacogire,‖ and ―Pettite fougere.‖ Although in one case there is mention of root samples that were stored in an accompanying case, each of these plants was represented by a single leaf.754 The floral and fructification structures which were required for accurate identification by Parisian botanists were entirely absent.755 While the technique used remains a mystery, as these specimens survive today there is little indication that Vallée saw them as anything more than an aesthetic flourish;

753 Vallée, ―Mémoire sur les plantes,‖ np.

754 Ibid.

755 This means that the identification of these plants remains tentative to this day.

295 particular specimens such as those for Pacogire (a sort of water lily) are crumpled and unidentifiable, while the colour of others such as KocoKar (likely Common Plantain) has degraded considerably.756 If the function of a herbarium specimen was to enable Parisian naturalists to experience American flora firsthand, Vallée‘s efforts failed miserably.

Administrative correspondence from French North America shows that other amateur naturalists also produced herbier, although what was meant by this term remains unknowable. The abbé Gosselin sent an undescribed herbier to France via Québec in

1739, Daneau du Muy travelled from his military post in the Pays d‟en Haut to Paris loaded with what were simply described as ―powders, roots and leaves‖ in 1736, and

Catherine Jérémie sent ―a packet containing several roots proper for different usages following the mémoire attached‖ in 1740.757 There is little evidence to shed light on how these collections were produced, but Vallée‘s Mémoire suggests that they likely preserved few of those features demanded by their intended academic audience. In spite of the seeming simplicity of the act of drying plants and affixing them to paper, the

Académie continued to rely on trained correspondents such as Michel Sarrazin in Québec and Jean Prat in New Orleans who had been trained before taking up their posts in North

America.

By the time that Michel Sarrazin first started sending specimens to France at the turn of the eighteenth century, ―the book and the herbarium had become more important for botany than the garden.‖758 For renaissance naturalists such as Luca Ghini, herbarium

756 Ibid.

757 CAOM, C11A, vol. 73, 416; C11A, vol. 65, 140.

758 Drayton, Nature‟s Government, 20.

296 specimens were able to replicate seasonally available gardens as a sort of ―winter garden,‖ becoming a particularly useful tool both for communicating knowledge between naturalists throughout Europe and to students first struggling to identify plants.759

Specimens could be and were rehydrated to provide a better sense of the plant as it might have existed in nature, blurring the line between herbarium and garden considerably.

Good specimens therefore preserved those features most essential to an adequate identification of the plant as an aid both to those who would seek the plant in real life and those who hoped to assign it a position in the increasingly elaborate taxonomical systems of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century botany. The Avis counseled that ―When the plants are very little ... one dries them whole, root, stem, branches, flowers and fruits. If the flowers and fruit are not found together at the same time on the plant, one dries a branch loaded with flowers & one loaded with fruit. When the plant is bigger, one neglects the stem and the roots and contents oneself with the branches, some loaded with flowers and the others loaded with fruit.‖760 The obvious purpose of a herbarium specimen, particularly in an Atlantic context, was to enable European naturalists to physically experience plants that otherwise, whether they refused to grow in local gardens or not, were often beyond the reach of metropolitan naturalists.

Herbarium specimens also allowed plants themselves to be treated as a text, legible to the observer trained in decoding the distinct array of floral structure and fruit that were understood by botanists to reveal the identity of the plant. Written descriptions that accompanied specimens worked to the same end; both packaged novel plants as

759 Daston, ―Type Specimens,‖ 159 – 60; Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 42 – 43.

760 Turgot, Mémoire instructif, 151 -52.

297 assemblages of distinctive morphological features that were explained in a standardizing and quantifying discourse. These differed substantially from the sorts of botanical descriptions written by colonists and missionaries throughout French North America which understood novel plants through their resemblance to European generic botanical types and that drew on often idiosyncratic means of comparison.761 For example, while the amateur naturalist Vallée described Bloodroot (the plant that he identified as ―herbe à jean hebert‖) as a plant that grew to the height of an elbow and that had ―a leaf similar to the leaf of the vine [grape],‖ Sarrazin wrote an account of it that focused attention on the minute details of the plant‘s morphological features and that described them in a standardized language that would allow his Parisian audience to reconstruct the plant and his experience of it for themselves.762 In Sarrazin‘s account, Bloodroot‘s fruit ―is a pod around 2 inches long, pointed at the extremities, 5 or 6 lines wide at the middle.‖763

Similarly, the plant ―produces several stalks around a foot long which each support a leaf of 5 or 6 inches in each direction.‖764 Each word carefully chosen, each measurment exact, Sarrazin‘s written description were quickly sent to waiting correspondents in Paris.

Although the written descriptions of French colonists and missionaries also aimed to transport North American flora to France as discursive objects, they preserved botanical features that were unnecessary for the work of Paris-based naturalists, and described those features that were required in a language that resisted standardization and comparative study. Visual descriptions dominated, but they were embedded in accounts

761 For more on this see Chapter 1 of this dissertation.

762 Vallée, ―Mémoire sur les plantes,‖ np.

763 Boivin, La Flore du Canada, np.

764 Ibid.

298 that also mobilized the senses of smell, taste and touch that had long since been marginalized in botanical science.765 For even if Andre Penicault, an early colonist of

Louisiana, provided detailed descriptions of the shape and colour of American peaches, plums, watermelons and pumpkins, he also added that ―… all of an exquisite flavour‖ and

―… are indeed better than those in France.‖ Like Vallée, Penicault‘s discussion of plant morphology relied on different metrics and comparisons than those common in the research of the Académie. In his description of another novel fruit, the atoqua (Atoca, or

Cranberry), he wrote that it was ―a fruit resembling our strawberries but bigger and square shaped.‖766 He wrote that the produce of local walnut trees was ―as big as one‘s fist.‖767 The only qualifier offered for red maple, for instance, was that it was red.768

Tastes, scents, textures and their accompanying senses intervened in specific accounts, even if visual observations remained the most prominent feature of these descriptions.

While plants circulated between France and its North American colonies, they took shape in the specific networks in which they travelled; this was also true when plants circulated as images. The work of the Jesuit Louis Nicolas, for example, demonstrates that the production of botanical images could be equally problematic for naturalists who required images that preserved specific morphological features of plants.

Nicolas made it clear that he sought to integrate French North America into wider Jesuit discussions about American flora that were less concerned with the physical features of a

765 Ogilvie, Science of describing, 182.

766 André Penicault, Fleur de Lys and Calumet, Being the Penicault Narrative of French Adventure in Louisiana, ed. Richebourg G. McWilliams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1953), 51.

767 Ibid., 84.

768 Ibid.

299 plant than what might be called its emblematic characteristics; based on one particular image of the his Codex Canadensis, the passion flower [FIGURE 8], it is clear that

Nicolas both read and sought to engage with Jesuits who had analyzed the significance of recent botanical and zoological discoveries in the Americas and raise his own profile as an analyst of North American nature. As Nicolas represented the flora and fauna in images in his Codex Canadensis he consciously sought to engage with the work of Juan

Eusebio Nieremberg, a Jesuit who had described the plant in his 1635 Historae naturae.

It is impossible to know precisely where Nicolas could have come into contact with this image but the exactness of his sketch suggests that he had Nieremberg‘s text in front of him as he drew.769

769 Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Historae nature (Antwerp, 1635)

300

FIGURE 8 – The Passion Flowers of Nieremberg and Nicolas Figure 8 - The Passion Flowers of Nieremberg and Nicolas (left) Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Historae nature (Antwerp, 1635) (Image Source: Google Books) (right) Louis Nicolas, ―Codex Canadensis,‖ Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK (courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum)

301

The passion flower, writes its most recent analyst Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra,

―clearly represented the whip and the pillar, Christ‘s red wounds and blood, the three nails of the Crucifixion, the crown of thorns, and the lance that pierced Christ‘s side.‖770

The image, as it appeared in Nicolas‘ Codex Canadensis was presented without comment or explanation on a page otherwise depicting the white and red cedars of North America.

The casual placement and lack of comment might invite the reader to understand that this, like these cedars, was a common and otherwise unremarkable feature of North

America environments. It therefore served as a tangible reminder of the novelty of the

Americas and the limitations of the work of those secular European botanists whose work he had read and who had never crossed the Atlantic themselves; the ―more than 30 authors,‖ he wrote ―in which I found nothing of that which I have put forward.‖771 While his Histoire naturelle mentioned or described dozens of plants in often meticulous detail,

Nicolas‘ Codex Canadenis focused its attention on only eighteen images, all of which were purportedly indigenous to the Americas. Several plants that were pictured such as

―ounonnata that pushes roots like truffles‖ and the ―three coloured herb‖ clearly lacked easy analogues with European flora and were named as their morphology was described.

Others, such as ―Montamin or Turkish wheat‖ or the red and white cedar that shared the page with the passion flower, were well known to European naturalists by that time, even if Nicolas privileged indigenous language names. Even in France, working from libraries and memory, Nicolas argued for the legitimacy of his firsthand experience of the rarities

770 Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550 – 1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 147.

771 Nicolas, ―Histoire naturelle,‖ 46.

302 of the New World, subtly critiquing the work of naturalists and botanists who had never crossed the Atlantic themselves and redefining the features by which a plant could be understood.

Nicolas‘ representation of the passion flower, as it recorded and accentuated specific features of the plant he claimed to have seen in the interior of North America, preemptively abandoned a dialogue with contemporary naturalists at the Académie

Royale des Sciences. His introduction of the passion flower into the environments of

French North America conflated natural theology and natural historical study of

American flora and positioned North American environments as a source of new insights into the relationship between God and the human and natural worlds. Nature, he suggested, was intelligible to those with the insight and the training to recognize God‘s hand in its design, without the morphological details demanded by botanists. Building upon work such as that of Jakob Gretser, a German theologian who in the early seventeenth century had suggested that ―the flower itself symbolized Christ‘s reign in

Nature…‖ and that ―Providence had selected America as the place for the passion flower to be discovered,‖ Nicolas subtly suggested that members of his (former) society had more to contribute to Atlantic and European science than new plants for a French scientific culture that had an increasingly voracious appetite for novelty.772 Adapting and updating the emblematic tradition that had defined European and American natural history a century earlier with naturalistic images and careful study of plant morphology,

Nicolas continued to insist that the natural and human worlds in French North America

772 Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, 149.

303 were intertwined.773 He also hinted that the skills required to study the multitude of new plants that were being discovered in the Americas were moral and theological as much as they were scientific. While a recent analysis of the images of the Codex suggests that

Nicolas drew heavily from the work of Conrad Gesner as he drew images of North

American amphibians and mammals, the inclusion of the passion flower suggests that the text‘s origins in Jesuit information networks directly determined Nicolas‘ conception and representation of North American plants.774 Like the ginseng produced for Asian markets and maidenhair fern transported for French patients, Nicolas‘ representation of the passion flower was neither inspired by nor intended for academic naturalists.

There is no evidence that survives to explain how the descriptions written by the

Académie‘s North American correspondents were transported along with herbarium specimens, but it is clear that they were coordinated. When, for example, the Paris-based naturalist, employee at the Jardin du Roi and future academician Sébastien Vaillant compiled the botanical descriptions written by Michel Sarrazin in the ―Histoire des plantes de Canada‖ in 1708, he included references to the shipments in which specimens of each plant had arrived. Christophoriana americana, racemosa, baccis rubris, longo pediculo insidentibus (White Baneberry) and Fragaria sterilis (Three-toothed Cinquefoil)

773 William B. Ashworth suggests that the emblematic worldview of renaissance natural history understood that ―the natural world is a complex matrix of seemingly obscure symbols and hidden meanings, which can suddenly become clear in a burst of illumination, if only you view it from enough different angles.‖ See William B. Ashworth, ―Emblematic natural history of the Renaissance,‖ in Cultures of Natural History, eds. N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17 – 37 (quote on 23). Although scholars such as Brian Ogilvie have questioned the extent to which such an emblematic worldview directed the evolution of natural history in renaissance and early modern Europe, others such as Susan Scott Parrish have argued it remained an important facet of Europe‘s intellectual encounter with the New World. See Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 16, and Susan Scott Parrish, ―Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealth,‖ William & Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 67 (2010): 209 – 48.

774 Warkentin, ―Aristotle in New France‖

304 were sent, respectively, as plants number 45 and 41 in 1705.775 Polygonatum ramosum, flore luteo, majus (Perfoliate Bellwort), on the other hand, was sent as number 93 in 1700 and Limonium maritimum, majus (Common Limonium) was sent as number 18 in

1704.776 Yet there is at least limited evidence that written descriptions and herbarium specimens might, at times, have traveled separately; when the specimens that had been collected by Charles Plumier were lost in a storm, both he and his written descriptions were safe on another ship.777 At the very least, specimens were expected to be adequately labeled so that text and specimen could be reunited in France. The Avis told its readers that ―When the different parts of a plant are separated one must be very attentive to attach corresponding numbers that mark that this fruit that is in eau-de-vie or dried on its own, belongs to this plant which is in the herbier.‖778

Specific methods were also used to arrest or slow the growth of seeds, keeping them intact and ready to be planted upon arrival in Europe, but the advice of Duhamel du

Monceau and others such as John Ellis, a member of the Royal Society of London and author of Directions for bringing over seeds and plants, from the East Indies, most often focused on using the time during transport to manage the germination of seeds.779 The

Avis counseled, for example, that ―The first of these methods is to put them in earth that is almost dried and well mixed in a barrel or in a well-sealed box. We have received some

775 Boivin, La Flore du Canada, np.

776 Ibid.

777 Kellman, ―Discovery and Enlightenment,‖ 148.

778 Turgot, Mémoire instructif, 153.

779 John Ellis, Directions for Bringing over seeds and plants, from the east-indies and other distant countries in a state of vegetation (London: 1770).

305 nuts and seeds of the Bonduc from Canada which arrived all germinated and which have all succeeded well.‖780 English texts focused particular attention on the transport of plants from East Asia and made clear that the ideal correspondent would accompany his specimens and care for them on the long trip back to England. While advising his readers that encasing the seeds of plants such as tea in beeswax effectively halted germination until they could be planted in England, for example, John Ellis recounted successful experiments where seeds had actually been sown in transit by attentive collectors.781 In either case, the instructions of authors such as Duhamel du Monceau and the experience of naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic encouraged close attention to the microclimates in which plants – both as seeds and as herbarium specimens – were transported across the Atlantic.782

Both academic and colonial naturalists were aware, however, that specimens were frequently beyond their control and at the mercy of a range of social and material environments during transport to Europe. As they focused their attention on developing methods to increase the survival of their specimens, the Académie and its members became equally concerned with the social environments of the ships on which they transported specimens.783 Even with the considerable resources of French military and administrative networks at their disposal, the North American correspondents of the

Académie worked to recruit passengers who would look after specimens while they were

780 de la Galissionnière and Duhamel du Monceau, Avis pour le transport, 57.

781 Ellis, Directions, 3 – 9.

782 Emma Spary writes that through these means plants were made to feel ―at home‖ both aboard ship and at the Jardin du Roi. Utopia‟s Garden, 96.

783 See Chapter 4 of this dissertation, for example.

306 aboard ship. In some cases, amateur collectors looking to profit from their efforts accompanied their specimens as they travelled to Paris. Botanically-inclined missionaries such as the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau and clergy such as the Abbé Gosselin brought their collections with them as they travelled on the business of their missions and orders; military officers such as Daneau du Muy brought specimens from the remote reaches of the French colonies such as Detroit when they returned to France.784 In practice, many naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic cultivated relationships with particular captains and travellers who possessed an interest in natural history or, at the very least, the attention necessary to ensure the survival of scientific collections.785 Jean Prat, for example, built his own transatlantic network when he felt that the official networks of the

French Marine were lacking. He transported specimens with missionaries and surgeons, and posted them to a colleague in Rochefort who would look after his specimens until called for.786 Specimens were frequently entrusted to the hands of specific travellers who were given both the responsibility for their safety and recognition for their presentation to

European naturalists. Jean-François Gaultier, for example, wrote to the Parisian naturalist

Réaumur in 1750 that ―I have the honour of informing you that I have charged M.

Fesneau surgeon major … with the collection of birds that I am sending you,‖ hinting at

784 Joseph François Lafitau addressed the Académie Royale des Sciences to discuss his claim to have discovered ginseng in North America. Details are scant on Gosselin‘s trip. See Catherine Fortin-Morisset, ―Gosselin, Jean-Baptiste,‖ Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004- 119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=1378&&PHPSESSID=56knibldiuln4njpambjk03pj4; CAOM, C11C, vol. 65, fol. 140.

785 This seems to have been far more prominent in the Anglo-Atlantic, see Murphy, ―Portals of Nature,‖ Chapter 3.

786 Prat to Jussieu, 8 September 1736, in Lamontagne, ―Jean Prat, correspondant,‖ 23.

307 why recruits could be found.787 At least once, however, Gaultier‘s work suffered because of the failings of his intermediary; in a letter written in the fall of 1754 he apologized to

Réaumur, explaining that the specimens that he had sent him would be useless, for he had found the labels intended for his specimens left behind by the person he had charged to transport them.788

The transport of live plants was particularly challenging. As with plants shipped as seeds or dried specimens, the primary concern with live plants was keeping them in a sort of equilibrium within shipboard environments. Yet according to Peter Collinson, a botanical collector in the Anglo-Atlantic World, it was the worth the effort as successful shipments of live plants were ―a Rarity worth accepting.‖789 Duhamel du Monceau‘s study of Canadian trees was advanced considerably by the ability to work with transplanted specimens, rather than trees grown from seed which could take years to reach maturity.790 For those plants which were sought alive, the best approach was an attempt to maintain the specimen‘s natural equilibrium and preserve as much of the plant‘s native ecology as possible. Through trial and error, horticultural technique outpaced scientific theory. When naturalists suggested, for example, that as much of the earth around roots be preserved as possible, they could have little sense of the complex microbial ecologies which they were preserving and which recent research demonstrates

787 Gaultier to Réaumur, 30 October 1750, in Vallée, ―Cinq lettres,‖ 36.

788 Ibid., 40.

789 Ibid., 58.

790 Duhamel du Monceau, Traité des arbres, passim.

308 can be essential for the survival of transplanted plants.791 Even this, however, was no guarantee of success. Collinson asked John Bartram, one his major plant suppliers who lived in Philadelphia, to send some more white cedar as his was in poor shape even

―though it has a clod of its own earth about it.‖792 Several years later he wrote that plants whose earth had been ―shaken from their Roots‖ were ―very unlucky.‖793 Hans Sloane provided similar instructions to Daniel Desmarats, gardener to William III.794 Once they arrived in France, experience had taught naturalists and their gardeners that the key to their viability was to recreate their North American ecologies as closely as possible.

Duhamel du Monceau suggested burying Canadian trees in snow during winter months to replicate the cold climate from which they had come and an anonymous gardener at the

Jardin du Roi in Paris recommended the use of cloches and other techniques to preserve those that had come from warmer climates such as Louisiana.795 French enlightenment botany became universal by becoming multi-local, preserving many colonial environments in the Jardin du Roi and scientific texts devoted to the culture of exotic plants.

791 de la Galissionnière and Duhamel du Monceau, Avis pour le transport, 12; For an overview of soil ecology and mutualistic plant-microbe relationships see E. Toby Kiers and R. Ford Denison, ―Sanctions, Cooperation, and the Stability of Plant-Rhizosphere Mutualisms,‖ Annual Review of Ecology, Evoluton and Systematics 39 (2008), 215 – 36, and Bob Schippers, Albert W. Bakker, and Peter A.H.M. Bakker, ―Interactions of deleterious and beneficial rhizosphere microorganisms and the effect of cropping practices,‖ Annua. Review of Phytopathology 25 (1987): 339 – 58.

792 John Bartram, The correspondence of John Bartram, eds. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 86.

793 Ibid., 229.

794 Cook, Matters of Exchange, 325.

795 ―Mémoire instructif pour faire réussir toutes sortes de semences & plantes étrangeres,‖ MS 1909, BCMNHN, 3.

309

Plants were nonetheless far easier to transport than animals; Michel Sarrazin suggested that his Parisian patrons simply observe French river otters and read his descriptions of Canadian varieties, rather than be disappointed by what he would be able to send them.796 Gaultier reported that his collectors were the weak link in his efforts to provide animal specimens similarly preserved. Describing a seal that he hoped to show his patrons, he wrote in 1754 that ―A stuffed seal skin has already arrived with its head

[intact]. But the entire thing was in such bad condition that I could not imagine that I could send it to you.‖797 He similarly explained that his failure to produce a porcupine specimen was the result of aboriginal collectors who ―tormented by hunger‖ damaged and discarded the skin as they consumed the animal.798 Animal, bird and fish specimens were most often sent preserved in liquor. In 1753, Gaultier wrote to the academician

Réaumur that: ―I have loaded on the vessel the Saint-Thomas a simple barrel filled with gualdive or tafia with the following animals 1) a wild dog brought from the hurons, a nation of sauvages, 2) a red fox; this species is tamed at Québec 3) a hare. This is one of the hare that becomes all white during the winter, and in the summer they recover their grey colour. 4) a bird of prey that was taken during the winter in Québec, it eats pigeons and other birds.‖799 Ensuring that the identity of these specimens would remained fixed during transport, he added that ―I have put a label on each piece, so that it will be easy to

796 Sarrazin to Bignon, 2 April 1727, in Vallée, Un Biologiste canadien, 232.

797 Gaultier to Réaumur, 6 October 1754, in Vallée, ―Cinq Lettres,‖ 41.

798 Ibid.

799 Gaultier to Réaumur, 28 August 1753, in Vallée, ―Cinq lettres,‖ 39.

310 recognize them.‖800 All was in place for his patrons to rediscover American flora and fauna by themselves in Paris.

As they sought to ensure a regular supply of the specimens required for their botanical research, naturalists at the Académie Royale des Sciences invested a great deal of energy into shaping both the physical character of botanical objects that were transported between New France and Paris, and the social environments through which these specimens circulated.

Conclusion

Through trial and error and bitter experience, naturalists assembled a body of practices that aimed to preserve the specimens on which their work depended while they were aboard ships in the scientific networks of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Ultimately, however, the natural and social spaces that naturalists discovered both aboard ships and in colonies were defined by their uncertainty. Redundancy was the only sure solution when years or even lifetimes worth of work collecting and preparing natural historical specimens could be lost in an instant to unpredictable events such as storms or capture by foreign navies, or could suffer the less visible but often more threatening presence of rats, inhospitable environments and inattentive crews. Yet as they experimented with new methods of maintaining characteristics such as leaf shape, plumage colour or scale patterns, naturalists gained new insights into North America flora. The ships that carried natural historical specimens between correspondents within the Atlantic World and throughout the larger world became an important site in the

800 Ibid.

311 production of knowledge about the extra-European world. Live plants from commercial and pleasure gardens might be repurposed as scientific specimens as they were relocated to academic gardens. Yet even if it is therefore true that ―objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become,‖ differing regimes of value in the Atlantic World ensured that only specific features of American plants would be preserved during transport across the Atlantic.801 Unfortunately for the naturalists at the Académie Royale des Sciences, those morphological features such as floral structures, leaf shape and fruit that they prized as identifying clues of the plants were rarely valued by other audiences and markets.

801 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4.

CONCLUSION

Pehr Kalm arrived in New France in 1749, taking advantage of the cessation of War of Austrian Succession to collect plants for his colleague and mentor, Carolus Linnaeus.

Travelling north from his earlier explorations of British North America, Kalm described a colony of helpful guides, welcoming hosts and exciting plants. His description of colonial science, however, was for more dismissive. He was, he wrote later in his En Res til Norra

America, the first botanist to travel to the colony; ―not a single botanist had yet researched or carefully described that the plants that are found there,‖ he wrote as he explained

Linnaeus‘ interest in the colony and the reason for his expedition.802 Kalm‘s récit de voyage was a heroic narrative, par excellence. Even the seas conspired against his efforts to bring enlightenment science to this long benighted colony. Yet, ―After a difficult crossing, some inhabitual storms and diverse perils of death, we arrived.‖803 To complete his expedition he had principally to rely on his own trained eye, translating colonial roads, forests and fields into inches and miles, and plants into discrete features each noted and measured with an exact attention, and instruments such as a carefully calibrated

802 Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada, 3.

803 Ibid., 2

313 thermometer that transformed Kalm into one observer in what was a veritable army of quantifying and standardizing travellers that Linnaeus sent world wide.804

In spite of the ease with which he dismissed the colony‘s scientific activities,

Kalm‘s experience of North American flora was continually mediated by his reliance on naturalists such as Jean-François Gaultier who represented the current embodiment of almost fifty years of research directed by the Académie Royale des Sciences, aboriginal guides, and colonists and missionaries. Kalm was expressly interested in finding useful plants, directed by Linnaeus to collect those that might enrich the ecosystems and citizens of his native Sweden.805 His pursuit of these useful plants meant that he became as much a collector of testimony as specimens during his guided tour of the region.806 He lamented that the amateur naturalists of the colony had interested themselves more in the commercial possibilities presented by local flora and had neglected to study the medicinal properties of plant ―such as it is known to indigenous peoples.‖807 Kalm therefore repeatedly showed himself to be particularly interested in collecting the knowledge of aboriginal communities, a knowledge he evidently considered more akin to a technological skill than a true science in its own right.808 An aboriginal guide from Lorette, for example, explained the properties of the white oak, used to treat a former travelling companion of his for a gunshot wound by another aboriginal companion who had ―boiled it for a long time, reduced it all into little

804 Ibid., 3.

805 Müller-Wille, ―Walnuts at Hudson Bay,‖ 38 – 39.

806 This is not unlike those colonial naturalists analyzed by Kathleen Murphy. See ―Translating the vernacular.‖

807 Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada, 85.

808 Clara Sue Kidwell argues that this is how indigenous knowledges are still understood to this day. See Kidwell, ―Native Knowledge in the Americas,‖ 209.

314 pieces, took the decoction to wash the wound and gave some of it to the injured to drink.‖809 More often, however, indigenous peoples became objects of knowledge in morphological descriptions similar to those in which he discursively dissected newly discovered plants, rather than as sources.810

Instead, Kalm most often gathered indigenous knowledge from colonists and missionaries he had the good fortune to have as guides or who he met in the course of his travels in the colony. A priest, for example, told Kalm that he himself had seen a sauvage use Red Osier Dogwood to cure one of his friends of dysuria, or painful urination.811

Likewise, Monsieur Cartier, one of Kalm‘s many local guides in the colony, told him that goose tongue was eaten by peoples further to the north.812 On another occasion Cartier described cloudberry, a plant that Kalm was not acutally able to find himself, ―in such clear terms that it was like I had it in front of me.‖813 In addition to morphology, however,

Cartier added (and Kalm recorded) that the sauvages of Hudson‘s Bay regularly ate the cloudberry fruit to combat scurvy.814 Often Kalm‘s use of impersonal pronouns masked the complex origins of colonial knowledge of North America flora, but his text hinted at the sorts of long-term multi-directional exchange that has been the subject of this dissertation.

Kalm‘s text also offers an altogether too rare view on the reciprocal exchanges that

809 Kalm, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada, 271.

810 See Ibid., 294 – 95, for a description of Wendat peoples that is eerily similar to the style of Kalm‘s botanical descriptions.

811 Ibid., 332.

812 Ibid., 359.

813 Ibid., 360.

814 Ibid.

315 transformed indigenous relationships with North American flora. For some communities, there were new botanical resources.815 He described, for example, Wendat peoples at

Lorette who cultivated barley and wheat in addition to corn, and who had introduced livestock into their domestic economies.816 In spite of his representation of New France as virgin territory for science then, he relied on currents of cultural exchange that had profoundly transformed local knowledge systems and ecologies.

Kalm‘s En Resa also shows a darker side to this process, however, as the integration of aboriginal labour and indigenous knowledge into colonial and Atlantic networks of botanical exchange occasionally had the perverse effect of disrupting the relationship between aboriginal cultures and indigenous plants. Aboriginal people, he writes, had been increasingly enlisted to provide French merchants with valuable plants, just as Chapter 4 of this dissertation shows that they were paid to collect plants destined to become scientific specimens.817 As aboriginal peoples supplied Atlantic and global markets with rare and valuable plants such as ginseng, however, the long term effects could be disastrous. Although the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau had heralded his discovery of ginseng as a boon for the colony and, perhaps more importantly, evidence of the common humanity of Iroquoian and other aboriginal peoples, the trade in ginseng that grew quickly after he publicized his discovery in 1717 was at odds with everything else that he had sought to accomplish at the mission of Kahnawake. Although he was interested in raising the profile of indigenous knowledge and medicine and had also sought to provide the

815 Kalm mentions plants that had been introduced intentionally and by accident. See Ibid., 122, for example.

816 Ibid., 266.

817 Ibid., 224 – 25.

316 residents of Kahnawake with land that could support traditional Haudenosaunee agricultural practice, the ginseng trade resulted in significant ecological degradation and threatened the survival of the plant in much of French North America.818 By the mid- eighteenth century, for example, local administrators such as Duquesne and Bigot were highlighting the fire hazard that ginseng collectors posed as they searched the woods.819

The engineer Louis Franquet, recorded burned bridges during his 1752 trip to Canada, and suggested that ―These accidents arrive most commonly through the inattention of the sauvages, the hunters and the geinseng seekers who fail to put out the fires that they have custom to make for their needs.‖820 A 1752 ordinance in New France hinted that at the height of the trade, the lands of colonists and aboriginals alike were being invaded by would-be collectors.821 For his part, Pehr Kalm commented that ―the Indians travelled about the country in order to collect as much as they could together, and to sell it to the merchants at Montréal.‖822

Lafitau warned against a repeat of the extinction of the plant that he assumed had occurred in Europe millennia earlier but seemed naively optimistic about the effects of the trade on indigenous peoples. He warned that both ecological factors that limited the reproduction of the plant that he had observed in New France and an insatiable demand for

818 Today American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius L.) is vulnerable, threatened or endangered in much of its native range. See Natural Resources Conservation Service, United States Department of Agriculture http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=PAQU

819 CAOM, C11A, vol. 98, 8 – 11v.

820 Franquet, Voyages, 60.

821 CAOM A6, v. 20, 105 – 07.

822 Quoted in Evans, ―Ginseng,‖ 13.

317 its remarkable properties made this outcome likely.823 Indeed, much of Lafitau‘s description of the ecology of American ginseng was focused on its delicate nature. ―That which is certain,‖ he wrote, ―is that the plant is difficult to grow.‖824 He had found some specimens that were over a hundred years old, certainly, but never managed to find more than seven or eight roots in a grouping. It was a virtual certainty, he argued that ―… the plant will soon be destroyed near the French habitations, and it will be necessary to travel still further into the woods to search for it, which will make it rare and very valuable.‖825

Efforts to cultivate the plant in both France and Britain failed miserably.826

Yet perhaps most importanly, the ginseng trade limited the access of the Mohawk women of Kahnawake and other aboriginal communities to what Lafitau wrote had been

―one of their ordinary remedies‖ before his discovery.827 The daily access of aboriginal communities to the plant was reduced. It also seems clear that the European discovery of ginseng began to change indigenous use of the plant as well. By Lafitau‘s own account, his research spread word of the plant and its potential value before it had even been presented to the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1718. He described, for instance, the effect that his discovery had had on aboriginal usage of the plant in the Great Lakes Region following the efforts of Louis de la Porte de Louvigny, a western post commander and military official in

New France, who had encouraged its use. Lafitau wrote that that:

After having happily and gloriously terminated the war that we had against a nation

823 Lafitau, Mémoire, 74 – 79.

824 Ibid., 66.

825 Ibid., 67.

826 Ibid., 66; Appleby, ―Ginseng,‖ 133.

827 Lafitau, Mémoire, 14.

318

of sauvages that are called the Outagamis or the Fox in 1716, he [Louvigny]

returned to Missilimakinak in 1717, to oblige them to hold to the conditions that

they had been forced to accept with the peace. He showed me the honour of writing

to me of the country there and that he had found the Gin-seng, that he had

suggested it to the Sauvages, amongst whom smallpox ran at that point and that the

Savages had used it with success. It is in effect an excellent cordial.828

While it remains impossible to prove, it seems a distinct possibility that Lafitau personally spread word of the plant amongst both aboriginal and colonial populations of French and

British North America. It similarly seems possible that, as the plant became a facet of larger patterns of trade established by the continental fur trade, aboriginal men would have laid greater claim to a plant that, Lafitau made clear, had been primarily the property of

Haudenosaunee women in 1716.829 At the very least it soon became a family affair; the engineer Louis Franquet noted in 1752, for example, that at the mission to the Abenaki at

Saint Francis, ―generally all the men, women and children were collecting the geinseing.

Only the elderly had remained at the village.‖830 Lafitau himself quickly moved from talking about the plant with the Mohawk women of Kahnawake to discussing it with

Abenaki and Wendat men.831 Aboriginal relationships with ginseng changed both as what

828 Lafitau, Mémoire, 53.

829 While it is possible that ginseng was re-gendered, it would oversimplify the gendered nature of ecological and botanical knowledge in Haudenosaunee cultures to suggest that women were excluded from discussions about commerce. Bruce M. White, for instance, has shown that in the Great Lakes Algonquian women were able to exercise considerable control (dictating, for example, the trade goods requested) over the trade in food plants that was nonetheless managed by aboriginal men. See White, ―The Woman Who Married a Beaver.‖ For more about the gendered nature of the encounter between European and aboriginal ecological knowledge, see Chapter 2 of this dissertation.

830 Franquet, Voyages, 94.

831 Lafitau, Mémoire, 50.

319 had been a traditional remedy was commodified and as new methods of using and consuming the plant circulated between colonial and indigenous communities in eighteenth-century French North America. As plant collectors invaded indigenous lands looking for the root and aboriginal communities themselves aided in its seemingly ineluctable slide towards extinction, French interest in indigenous ecological knowledge and local plants had the paradoxical effect of disrupting aboriginal relationships with North

American environments.

In the introduction to this dissertation, I wrote that this would be a history of colonial botany that faces east from Indian country. Yet facing east means going beyond tracing out the contributions of indigenous peoples to colonial and metropolitan conceptions of American flora, and means returning to indigenous communities who remained in colonial North America even as their knowledges and plants entered Atlantic and global networks of circulation. It means understanding that colonial botany was colonial not simply because it took place in France‘s North American colonies, but instead because it was part of a larger process that marginalized indigenous knowledges and dispossessed aboriginal peoples. The sanitized descriptions of North American plants in

French botanical texts, like the plants that grew in French gardens on both sides of the

Atlantic, served not only to mask the origins of French botanical science in the messy encounters between natives and newcomers in North American borderlands, but were discursive and physical statements about the illegitimacy of aboriginal knowledges and claims to North American environments. The history of ginseng, described by well- intentioned Jesuit authors, provides a rare glimpse of a far larger history rendered unknowable through scientific texts. Writing a history of colonial botany in French North

320

America requires new methods, new sources and a willingness to imagine aboriginal peoples at the centre of a story larger than the history of science.

This dissertation has argued that that the encounter with aboriginal peoples profoundly shaped French conceptions and use of North American flora. Throughout North

America, French colonists, explorers, missionaries and naturalists experienced new plants and environments through the mediating influence of aboriginal guides, hosts, doctors and chefs. The circulation of knowledge within the colonies was a subtle affair, as it was most often through an experience of aboriginal lives that the French began to understand the depths of aboriginal knowledge. Yet I have also tried to explain how this influence itself was masked by scientific practices that limited the role of colonists and aboriginal peoples in the production of scientific knowledge. It is this dual history that is most important to understand today as ecologists, botanists and climate scientists look to aboriginal communities, again, for new (to them) understandings of the rapidly changing environments of North America. Some ecologists such as Gary Paul Nabhan have argued that indigenous peoples have an important role to play in the preservation of biodiversity.832 Other scientific instutions such as multinational agricultural corporations, however, have failed to appreciate the contributions of indigenous peoples and knowledges in the creation of ecosystems and individual plants such as wild rice.833Aboriginal cultures and intellectuals remain, with good reason, profoundly suspicious of Western science.834

832 See, for example, Gary Paul Nabhan, Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989)

833 Winona Laduke, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2005), 167 – 90.

834 See Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1997).

321

Understanding the history of the encounter and entanglement of European and indigenous knowledges in colonial North America is a first step towards confronting the legacies of this process and towards recognizing that science is, and always has been, a multicultural endeavour in North American history.

322

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