Marc Lescarbot Reads Jacques Cartier: Colonial History in the Service of Propaganda

Marc Lescarbot Reads Jacques Cartier: Colonial History in the Service of Propaganda Carla Zecher The Newberry Library The parliamentary lawyer Marc Lescarbot (ca. 1570-1641) lived at the tiny French settlement of Port-Royal in Acadia (present-day Annapolis, Nova Scotia) for 13 months, beginning in July 1606.1 The colony's commander, Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt, had invited Lescarbot to join the 1606 expedition as its chronicler. Poutrincourt, an impoverished Catholic nobleman and former soldier, hoped to re-make his family's fortune overseas. Lescarbot, a bachelor in his mid-thirties, disillusioned with corruption in Parliament, was pleased to escape Paris and embark on a colonial adventure.2 Funding for Port-Royal was provided by the Protestant merchant Pierre Du Gua de Monts, whom king Henri IV had named his lieutenant general for the "païs et territoires de la Cadie" in 1603, at the same time granting him a monopoly over the Canadian fur trade.3 During the summer of 1606, however, while Poutrincourt's group of new colonists was settling in at Port-Royal, Du Gua and his business associates suffered heavy losses in a skirmish with merchants from Amsterdam in the St. Lawrence valley. As a result, Du Gua's party disbanded, Henri IV revoked the fur trade monopoly, and the colonists were repatriated in September 1607. Back in Paris, Lescarbot amply fulfilled his duties as chronicler by drafting his remarkable Histoire de la Nouvelle France, an 888-page book printed in February 1609. Du Gua having now ceded the abandoned property at Port-Royal to Poutrincourt, the latter hoped to persuade the king to reinstate the colony, and Lescarbot's book therefore took on a promotional as well as a documentary function. The Histoire de la Nouvelle France represents an early example of what would soon become the standard French colonial handbook for the Americas: a work in two or three volumes, one devoted to the author's personal travel narrative, the other(s) presenting an ethnography and/or a natural history. Lescarbot's particular innovation was to combine this genre with another one, already favored in the later sixteenth century: the travel anthology. The first book of the Histoire presents a compilation of historical narratives of the sixteenth-century French voyages to Florida and Brazil. The Canadian voyages of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries follow, in the second book, culminating with Lescarbot's account of his year in Acadia. Book three presents an extensive ethnography of the Indians of North and South America. [End Page 107] Lastly, Lescarbot appended to the volume a 66-page collection of his own poetry titled Les Muses de la Nouvelle France, much of which he had composed in Acadia—what some have called the first text of Canadian literature.4 Throughout the 400 years since the first printing of the Histoire de la Nouvelle France, the travel anthology that opens the volume has consistently attracted less attention than the later sections. Translators, editors, historians, and literary scholars have, not surprisingly, gravitated to the more original material contained in the work: the account of the Acadia colony, the ethnography, and the poetry. They have also focused on the third edition of the Histoire (1617), which is the most comprehensive of the three, since Lescarbot's practice was to add material to successive editions, replacing or updating dedicatory epistles and inserting new chapters. This custom has tended to obscure the fact that Lescarbot did make revisions to the anthology portion of his book for the second edition—specifically, in the section devoted to the narratives of the sixteenth-century explorer Jacques Cartier, a historical figure whom Lescarbot particularly wished to highlight, as a forerunner to Poutrincourt, for the purpose of promoting the Acadia colony to Henri IV. The revisions were necessitated by the acquisition of new information regarding Cartier's voyages to Canada, and in some respects they weakened Lescarbot's initial portrayal of Cartier as a hero...

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