Explorers and early settlers highlighted the presence of familiar plants that were legible as symbols of the habitability—or potential habitability—of Laurentian environments. Selective inclusions of novel plants in their texts are therefore worth noting, but narrative accounts of settlement, exploration, and evangelization were not primarily interested in cataloging new botanical species.101 Their authors instead populated environments with recognizable features and familiar names even if, armed with modern scientific taxonomies, we would name many of the plants that they encountered new species. Instances where the novelty of American flora was immediately recognized are thus rare in colonial texts. Champlain, for example, brought together a number of discursive and rhetorical strategies that limited the sense of cognitive disorientation that his French audience might have felt in the course of reading his numerous accounts of foreign cultural and natural environments. His description of Wendat territory in 1615 offered numerous representative examples of these features of early colonial texts.
All of this country where I was contains some 20 or 30 leagues and is very beautiful, under a maximum of forty four degrees and a half of latitude, very well cleared lands, where they sow a great quantity of Turkish wheat [bleds d’inde], which grow beautifully there, as well as pumpkins, [and] sunflower, of which they make oil from the seed…. There are many vines and prunes which are very good, raspberry, strawberries, little wild apples, nuts, and a manner of fruit which is of the form and color of little lemons and which has none of the taste, but the inside is very good, and almost similar to that of figs…. It is a plant that carries them, which has a height of two and a half feet, each plant has only three or four leaves…. There are a quantity in several places, and the fruit is good and has a good flavor; oak, elm and beech, there are many spruce in this country…. There are also a number of little cherries and wild cherries [merise] and the same species of trees that we have in our forest of France are in this country. In truth the land seems a little sandy, but that does not mean it is not good for this type of wheat.102
In this fashion, the ecosystems of North America were presented as assemblages of recognizable plants. Embedded in descriptions of otherwise unfamiliar peoples and landscapes, the presence of recognizable French plants such as oak and grapevine anchored readers and travelers alike, offering promises of an essential similarity behind cultural and ecological difference more apparent than real.
Plants and places that French explorers and settlers were seeing for the first time in northeastern North America therefore rarely presented a disorienting challenge to Old World epistemologies or taxonomies. Colonial authors brought with them a transported taxonomy, a grid through which they learned about and made sense of novel American places. The names that an author such as Champlain used—broad classifications such as grain and herb, as well as specific names such as beech, oak, and maple—were all familiar European taxa, adapted and expanded to become abstract, generic terms. They became an implicit argument for a botanical unity between New France and Old that transcended the physical distance of the Atlantic Ocean. This meant that colonists and missionaries, employing the same terms that they used to describe French and European plants, incorporated American plants into a truly transatlantic flora that allowed them to feel familiar in environments that they were seeing and describing for the very first time. It also permitted French authors in North America to describe environments to European audiences in ways that mitigated distances and flattened the ecological and cultural specificity of what became a much more familiar New World.
Instead of working to catalogue individual species, a reliance on generic categories gave missionaries, colonists, and explorers considerable flexibility that allowed them to map Old World types onto American environments with a minimum of intellectual effort. Gabriel Sagard wrote in 1632 that “there are some pears, or that are called pears, certain small fruits a bit larger than peas, of a blackish color and soft, very good to eat.”103 Similarly, when the Jesuit Louis Nicolas wrote at the end of the seventeenth century that “the New World strawberry differs from ours only in that it is smaller, less fragrant and much more common,” he was fundamentally relying on a common understanding of strawberry-ness that persisted in spite of changes in shape, color, smell, and distribution.104 The result was to effectively mitigate the specificity of the plants they sought to describe, reducing morphological and ecological characteristics unique to North American populations to accidental traits that left essential characters unchanged. Therefore, when Jacques Bruyas wrote from his mission to the Haudenosaunee that he had found “walnuts and chestnuts, which I find in no wise different in taste from our own,” the self-evidence of his identification was clear and the phrasing even redundant.105
These accounts imagined colonial landscapes populated with familiar plants such as pines, spruce, cherries, and raspberries, making new species of plants that differed morphologically and ecologically from those found in Europe portable and comprehensible outside of local sites of observation and experience in North America. Authors relied upon a body of knowledge shared with their European audience. What this meant was that as these authors noted the presence of oak, birch, or plum trees on the banks of rivers on which they traveled, in the environs of the missions at which they worked, and in the communities that they founded, they were drawing on a set of categories that would have been obvious to their intended readers. These were obvious when Lescarbot observed “cedar, fir, laurels, musk roses, currants, purslane, raspberry, ferns, lysimachia, a type of scammony, calamus odoratus, angelica, & other simples” at Port au Mouton.106 They were equally obvious when Champlain saw forests “filled with woods, such as fir and birch.”107 The seemingly infinite references to trees such as pine and spruce or to French fruits such as cherries and plums testified to a confidence in the plasticity of common French botanical names that became, in effect, templates for the description and experience of American plants that were, as we understand them now, most often new species.
For both their present-day and contemporary readers, these references function by their obviousness. Named and listed as part of a floral catalogue of their new environments, these generic references can provide a crucial insight into both how French authors perceived North American plants and how they communicated their findings within the French Atlantic world and throughout Europe. This is in large part due to the overwhelming predominance of what scholars of folk taxonomies call a folk generic or generic specieme.108 This, as ethnobotanist Brent Berlin writes, is the “category readily recognizable at first glance, as a single gestalt or configuration,” and one that requires neither the use of specialized tools (i.e., microscope) nor considerable effort at differentiation.109 Authors such as Champlain would have come with a set of generic floral templates based on their experience of the environments they had left. Having come from regions where there may have been just one example of a particular genus, all future species encountered were understood to be subtypes of this model. When Champlain commented on the birch he found in Wendake, for example, he identified the novel Fagus grandifolia with the Fagus sylvatica he would have known in France.110 Differences in the shape of leaves and ecologies were effaced or minimized, and a piece of a new environment was cognitively domesticated.
With the use of these familiar names, the morphological details of a plant were most often simply implied. When he turned his attention to plants that he felt required more detail, Louis Nicolas situated them within particular cultural contexts and provided additional linguistic, medical, or economic information. When he described barley, for instance, he wrote that it was originally introduced from France and was used to make beer.111 To describe a species of seaweed, he wrote only that small crustaceans survived the force of waves by growing filaments that kept them bound to the marine plant.112 Thus even where a European botanical type was situated within a novel ecological or cultural context, its physical continuity with European plants was implied by relying on and reinforcing the salience of universally applicable types