Seeing and Knowing the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

Acknowledgments

Without a quest to find my family roots in Nova Scotia, work on this book may never have begun. I had been asked to contribute to a volume of Modernos & Contemporâneos on Montaigne. Essays on the New World (1) by Jean-François Dupeyron and Fabien Lins. In the course of preparing my contribution, I became interested in how the French trade relations with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas differed from those of the Spanish and English. At this point my focus was on Brazil.¹ My research took me of course to marine charts and maps produced in Normandy and Brittany and to the rich source or books dealing with map-making and exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

A trip to Nova Scotia and later in the same year to Québec plunged me into the history of Nouvelle France and the northern hemisphere. While on a journey to find more about my paternal grandparents lives in Halifax before they emigrated to Massachusetts, I began to visit historical monuments, national parks, and reconstructed forts commemorating the passage of the French in Nova Scotia before le grand dérangement, their expulsion. The presence of French-speaking Canadians and Mi’kmaqs at the Port-Royal National Historic Site enabled me to engage in the story of the mutual interdependency of the first French settlers in 1605 at the log stockade known as a habitation. Not able to rely on reprovisioning from France, the French soldiers had relied upon the skilled Mi’kmaqs for knowledge of survival in the cold winters. The Mi’kmaqs reached out to trade their provisions for some of the metal tools useful in trimming trees, fishing, cooking that the French had in abundance. That the narrative had been passed down to the present day motivated me to continue my inquiry into modes of encounter: positive and negative, respectful and disrespectful. And so the story of exchange and communication that had begun for me in Brazil amidst the merchant mariners and the Tupinamba continued to unfold in the abundant fields and forests of North America. A visit to St. Augustine introduced me to the story of Jean Ribault’s slaughter with his men by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés not for being French but for being Protestants or as he said, heretics. Thus began a journey for me into the stories of those Norman and Breton pilots and merchant mariners who explored the coasts of eastern North and South America in search of useful goods to exchange with their Indigenous hosts. That their voyages should begin at a time when the climate in France became hostile to Huguenots led to a shift in focus from exchange to settlement, one that soon changed the focus from exchange to encroachment on cultural values.

No work begins without the help and encouragement of those in proximity to the researcher. My thanks go out to John, Mary, and Michael, and to my group of college friends who all put up with multiple excursions to historic sites in Nova Scotia, Québec, Florida, and South Carolina. Steve and Edie urged me to explore the narrative potential of the accounts by these adventurous leaders of the expeditions. My thanks to Philip Dunshea for encouraging the project concept. Finally, while I have written about pandemics in the past, it was the time afforded by the current pandemic that allowed me to pursue the research and writing in a deliberate manner.

1 Consistent with contemporary practices, Indigenous will be capitalized in adjectival form.

Introduction: Relations and Human Relations

When the Norman and Breton armateurs sent their ships to the New World in the sixteenth century, they had faith that, through the ability to negotiate with the Indigenous peoples with whom they sought to trade, the leaders of these expeditions would return to Saint-Malo or Dieppe with precious cargo.¹ Among these were brazilwood used to dye cloth, bois d’esquine or chinaroot to relieve symptoms of the pox, and furs for the European market. Storms or attacks by hostile vessels could destroy or reduce the value of the profit, but over the years the financial return proved advantageous. How and why this risky but profitable venture fell into the hands of a group of Breton and Norman financiers lies at the heart of our story. The consequences of their investment would change the world, and the strategies used by the merchant mariners they sent out were key to the success of their enterprise.

This study is first and foremost a study of encounters. How did the French merchant mariners, sailing out from Normandy and Brittany, conduct their encounters with the Indigenous peoples in the areas around the Saint Lawrence River, present-day South Carolina and Florida, and Brazil? Were these encounters different from those in which their European counterparts in Spain, Portugal, and England engaged? By encounter I adopt the definition of James Axtell in which encounter implies a “mutual, reciprocal” experience that is “two-way rather than one-way.” “Encounters are generically capacious: there are encounters of people but also of ideas, habits, values, plants, animals, and micro-organisms.”² Over the course of this study, we will see encounters of very different kinds—some filled with wonder and interest, others tainted with judgment and ill-will, but as Axtell states, the concept of encounter is “morally neutral: the term does not prejudge the nature of the contact or its outcome” (Axtell 336). It is the perspectives of the people involved in the encounter that influence the outcome.

The analysis will focus on attitudes, not economic tools, which the French merchant mariners brought to the encounter and how these attitudes and motives encouraged or discouraged positive relationships between the French and the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. Joan-Pau Rubiés distinguishes between accounts of voyages made for “practical reasons,” whose relations and maps were collected for their “scientific value,” and the accounts by men like Cortés and Pizarro whose voyages were motivated by “political justification.”³ The model set by the Norman and Breton pilots, mariners, and merchants was built on the practical necessity of exchange that allowed their expeditions to bring back sufficient goods to profit their armateurs, without whose investments the voyages would not take place. It is thanks to the scientific information: information about the culture and habits of the Amerindians and portulans/portolans or charts of the critical coastline that transformed the “abstract myths” about the Indigenous peoples into more concrete information (Rubiés 139). There exists a growing literature by anthropologists, economists, and sociologists about how “the identity of the colonizing nation explains variation in postcolonial development,” but in the present study we look to the circumstances behind the drive to explore new trade routes and what drove the merchant mariners and their crews to undertake the expedition.⁴

In Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500-c. 1800, Anthony Pagden explores the differences separating Spain’s push to explore the little-known parts of the world from the circumstances behind the British and French expeditions.⁵ The Spanish monarchy used its close ties with the Papacy to ensure its dominance in the New World. With a series of papal bulls bearing the title Inter Cetera, Alexander VI granted to Ferdinand and Isabella “the right to occupy such islands…that you have discovered or are about to discover’” located 100 leagues to the west and south of Cape Verde Islands and the Azores.⁶ For the vital spice trade, King João II of Portugal sought to have more room for his ships to navigate in reaching the Cape of Good Hope and the Indies and so succeeded in negotiating, through the ambassadors of Spain and Portugal and the Papacy, the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The treaty gave Portuguese ships an additional 370 leagues of ocean west of the Cape Verde Islands, the equivalent of 1,786 km of ocean, in which to navigate on their way to the Indies. The treaty will be important in giving Portugal rights to occupy Brazil after the explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral lands there in 1500, thus beginning a long rivalry between Portuguese and French ships competing in the brazilwood trade.

French and British objections to the Treaty of Tordesillas were predictable since the Pope asserted authority in both secular and religious matters, a fact refuted by the French and the British (Pagden 47).⁷ Nonetheless, the existence of this treaty emboldens the authority of Spain (and Portugal) in asserting their rights over French and British expeditions and makes it difficult for François I^er to navigate relations with the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. As a result, the Norman and Breton armateurs financing and provisioning ships for trade in the Americas could not depend on consistent royal support for their trading expeditions. As François I^er sought help from the Portuguese against his rival Charles V, he was reluctant to anger the Portuguese and so withdrew support from the Norman and Breton merchant mariners seeking to intensify the trade in brazilwood, used for dyeing cloth and formerly found only in the Indies.⁸

The fortunes of Jean or Jehan Ango, Dieppe’s most famous armateur or financer of commercial navigational enterprises, offer an example of the unreliable support of the French monarchy for his commercial expeditions.⁹ Consider that in 1517 François I^er declared the liberty of the seas for all in an official ordinance. Norman and Breton mariners set off to commercial expeditions in All Saints’ Bay in Brazil.¹⁰ From 1523 to 1525, the King of Portugal, Joāo III ordered his ships to attack any French ships doing commerce in Brazil (Anthiaume II, 188). In 1530 Jean Ango sought restitution of a ship La-Marie, owned by two Dieppois associates, and through the intervention of Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François I^er, he received a lettre de marque or license to get restitution from the Portuguese by seizing ships or merchandise from them of up to 250,000 ducats, the value of the loss. In the end, he received only 60,000 ducats and the license was revoked (Anthiaume II, 190–91). By 1531 and 1532, François I^er ordered French fleets to stay out of Brazil and Guinea, although Ango claimed to be involved in commerce with nations where “never a Christian had gone.”¹¹ 1533 brought another declaration of freedom for all “to navigate on the common sea.”¹² In 14 July 1536 a new treaty of friendships and alliance¹³ between France and Portugal opened up freedom of commerce both at home and abroad, yet by 30 May 1537 and renewed in 22 December 1538, expeditions to Portuguese colonies were banned. Such instability in the conducting of commercial expeditions impeded the everyday operations of Ango’s enterprise and made it difficult to forecast profits and losses.

Unable to rely on dependable support from the French monarchy, merchant mariners such as Ango developed a unique system for maximizing the efficiency of their relations with the Indigenous people of the Americas. The most effective way to ensure the strength and longevity of their alliances with Amerindians was to acquaint themselves with the languages and cultures of their Indigenous trading allies. They put into place two methods for doing so: (1) the practice of sending young Norman boys to live with the families of the allies with whom they sought trading partnerships, thereby bringing a knowledge of language and culture to the mariner merchants by way of these Norman truchements or interpreters (Dickason 21); (2) the keen observation of ritual greetings and exchanges along with the preparation of glossaries in the relevant Indigenous languages.¹⁴ A measure of the importance of language acquisition to the French merchant mariners was the publication of a French-Tupinamba lexicon along with his navigation manual by Jean Cordier of Rouen in 1547.¹⁵ This manner of listening and learning is a form of two-way cultural negotiation, essential in the process of effective trading, and reflects not the one-way process of acculturation, but a “transcultural” process based on mutual interest with the end being mutually acceptable exchanges.¹⁶ The advantage of this transcultural method of trading is evident even as early as 1530, where the “Dieppe poet and navigator Pierre Crignon” comments, in regards to the tight rein which the French monarchy kept on the Norman merchants: “If the king would but loosen the bridle on French merchants, in less than four or five years they would win for him the friendships and ensure the obedience of the Brazilian natives without other arms than persuasion and good conduct,” (Davies 319).¹⁷ As if to reinforce the seriousness with which the Norman mariner merchants took their mission to create sound alliances with the Tupinamba, the marine historian Albert Anthiaume notes the existence of a manuscript of Tupi and French words “nécessaires pour naviguer,” (Anthiaume II, 195). Building such alliances required the Norman and Breton merchant mariners to see the Amerindians with whom they came in contact as working partners who could assist, through their skills and familiarity with the landscape, the Normans and Bretons in securing trade items. Viewing them as the “Other” guaranteed these Indigenous hosts would do the same.¹⁸ Together with their frequent voyages to Brazil and their efforts to engage in Tupi language and culture, the Bretons and Normans were the preferred allies of the Tupinamba over the Portuguese, and again Anthiaume points out that the Tupinamba considered the French more like friends than conquerors (II, 196).¹⁹ Surekha Davies reinforces this notion of friendly alliances between the French and the Tupinamba by pointing to the presence of peaceful working scenes between the Breton and Norman merchant mariners and the Tupinamba in Norman visual culture, “from stained-glass windows to pieces of sculpture and, in particular, on illuminated Norman manuscript maps,” (Davies 319). We will return to the maps in Chapter 6.

The alliances between the Norman/Breton merchant mariners and the Tupinamba profited from a unique trait of Indigenous groups in Lowland South America in that trading outside of one’s immediate group, even with non- Indigenous groups, strengthened the group’s position. Fernando Santos- Granero states that

trade goods acquired from beyond the boundaries of one’s ethnic group might have little intrinsic use or exchange value. But sometimes they are believed to be endowed with dangerous powers and, by being tokens or emblems of the courage and charisma of the trader in his dealings with the enemy, they assume the form of symbolic capital; a capital that translates into greater social prestige and power for the man who possesses it.²⁰

Having experienced the strength that can accrue from strong alliances with the indigenous hosts, the Breton/Norman armateurs adopted similar practices in their trade expeditions in North America. Olive Patricia Dickason demonstrates how the custom of encouraging peaceful trade interaction to further the goodwill that ensued from satisfactory trade relationships became the established pattern for the Breton and Norman merchant mariners in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In many cases the people involved, armateurs and crews, had experience in both areas and carried forward their common practices in what is now Canada, Florida, and Brazil (Dickason 27). Among the merchant mariners were Jean Ango the Younger, Jean and Raoul Parmentier, Thomas Aubert, and Jacques Cartier.

If, as Davies state, the French voyages privileged “quick profits” derived from effective trading relationships with the Amerindians, Spain and Portugal looked to long-term colonization and conversion of the Indigenous People to Catholicism.²¹ British practices in the Americas, after a period of settlement, favored the founding of colonies settled by Europeans, and the establishment of solid social, juridical, and administrative structures.²² The emphasis on agriculture demanded displacing the Indigenous Peoples, usually with dire consequences: outright slaughter, illness, poverty, and complete disruption of cultural institutions.

As I have said elsewhere, Frank Lestringant “puts to rest the myth that Villegagnon’s mission to colonize Brazil was a “colonisation douce.”²³ Inter-French conflict and conflict between the Indians and his crew, along with damage to the coast are evidence against the myth. What is evident is that the initial manner of approaching the Indigenous peoples and working out the ritual of trade and interaction was decidedly different from the interactions and efforts at colonization used by the Spanish and the British. How these encounters unfold and are continued will be the focus of the present study.

To better understand the nature of these encounters, we turn to the relations or accounts written often by the leader of the expedition or, as in the case of Léry, a person with authority but not designated with the leadership role. Jacques Cartier’s account of the second voyage, recounted in his Brief recit, & succincte narration de la navigation faicte es ysles de Canada, Hochelage & Saguenay & autres is the subject of Chapter 1. Notable in his account are some traits which will appear in the relations of other merchant mariners of Breton and Norman origin: a keen sense of observation of natural resources, respect for ritual, growing admiration for the physical and moral attributes of the peoples he encounters, and willingness to learn information on medicines and skills useful for life in the severe extremes of weather he encounters.