Spectacle of Empire. Jerry Wasserman

charge of the Port Royal colony which de Monts had ceded to him. On board was another Renaissance man, the Parisian humanist lawyer Marc Lescarbot, called by his first American biographer “the French Hakluyt” (see Biggar). In his History of New France Lescarbot explained that he was desirous “to explore the district with my own eyes” and, somewhat mysteriously, “to flee an evil world” (II:286–87). Born sometime around 1570 in Vervins, northeast of Paris, where the historic treaty would be signed, Lescarbot received a rich classical education while studying law in Paris and Toulouse. Called to the bar in 1599, he had distinguished himself with Latin speeches thanking the Florentine Cardinal de Medici for his success in brokering the treaty negotiations between France and Spain at Vervins, and with his translations of two Latin ecclesiastical texts (Thierry 53–54, 74, 84). Soured by an “injustice” done to him in court by certain judges in favour of a “personage d’eminente qualité,” possibly a senior bishop – or perhaps just generally disgusted with what he considered a corrupted civilization – Lescarbot accepted an invitation from Poutrincourt, for whom he had done some legal work, to accompany him to the new world in 1606 (Thierry 2001, 100; Emont 58–62; see also Baudry). He remained there for a little more than a year, returning to the evil old world in the fall of 1607 and recounting his experiences in The History of New France. In it he also detailed the exploratory voyages of Verrazano, Cartier, Poutrincourt, and others; told the history of the St. Croix Island and Port Royal settlements; described at length the aboriginal inhabitants of that northerly environment; and appended a collection of poems, Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France, which included the versified Théâtre de Neptune, the only play he ever wrote. (See fig. 6.)

      Fig. 5. Champlain’s map of Port Royal with the Habitation at the centre, published in his 1613 Voyages.

      Fig. 6. Title page of Lescarbot’s Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France.

      Lescarbot departed Port Royal for France in 1607, along with all his compatriots, only because the settlement was abandoned when de Monts’s fur trade monopoly was suddenly terminated by Henri IV. Champlain would return to New France the following year and re-establish, this time permanently, the settlement of Québec. Meanwhile, left in the care of the Mi’kmaq chief Membertou, the Port Royal Habitation was briefly reoccupied by Poutrincourt in 1610 and finally destroyed in 1613 by a British expedition from Virginia. Over the next century the area passed back and forth between the French and English in a series of military campaigns and political manoeuvres, with both the Mi’kmaq and French Acadian inhabitants increasingly marginalized, until the English took permanent control in 1710 and gave the garrison and community its present designation, Annapolis Royal. After five printings of his popular Histoire and a further career as lawyer, poet, historian, and sometime diplomat, Lescarbot died in France in 1641.

      The occasion for the play was the return of Poutrincourt and Champlain from a voyage they had taken down the coast as far south as modern-day Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in the late summer and fall of 1606. They had sailed in search of yet another site for a colony with “a suitable harbour in a good climate,” Poutrincourt having deemed the health benefits of Port Royal’s locale and weather no better than those of St. Croix Island (History II:318). The winter of 1605–06, although milder than their first, had still left twelve of the forty-five Port Royal colonists dead of scurvy (Champlain 375–76). Poutrincourt put Lescarbot in charge of Port Royal while he was gone, enjoining him “to keep an eye on the place, and to keep the peace among those who remained” (History II:319).

      Lescarbot tackled his new responsibilities with relish. Unlike Poutrincourt, he saw Port Royal as a kind of paradise, a “spot more pleasant than any other in the world.” He lavished praise on its hills, meadows, and streams, its abundant river, and its beautiful harbour with “two most fair and goodly islands” (II:234). A recent biographer describes Lescarbot as a new Adam in a new Eden (Thierry 2001, 118). The citified lawyer expressed his delight “in digging and tilling my gardens, fencing them in against the gluttony of the swine, making terraces, preparing straight alleys, building store-houses, sowing wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans, peas, garden plants, and watering them, so great a desire had I to know the soil by personal experience” (History II:266). In addition to its agricultural activities Lescarbot oversaw the settlement’s other business, including hunting, gathering shellfish, digging drainage ditches around the Habitation, making charcoal for baking, and bartering bread for fish and game with the local Mi’kmaq people, whom the French called Souriquois (II:319–20). The settlement’s priest having died earlier that year, Lescarbot even preached on Sundays. “Nor was my labour without fruit,” he mildly boasts, “many bearing me witness that never had they heard such good exposition of Divine things” (II:267).

      Meanwhile, the History retrospectively describes the “many perils” of Poutrincourt and his crew’s exploratory voyage as reported to Lescarbot and recounted first-hand by Champlain in his Voyages. Their misadventures among the warlike Armouchiquois as they sailed along the coast of the future Maine, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts left significant French and Native fatalities in their wake (see fig. 7). Unable to locate a site offering a milder climate, functional harbour, and more hospitable Natives, they set sail for the return voyage to Port Royal only to find themselves in heavy weather with a broken rudder. Just two days before their arrival they had an accident which they feared might sink their eighteen-ton barque. Even “at the entrance to Port Royal,” Champlain reports, “we were almost lost upon a point” (438). So it must have been as great a relief for the Poutrincourt expedition finally to reach safe harbour as it was for those left behind in the Habitation to see its return. (See fig. 8.)

      Fig. 7. Champlain’s graphic illustration of the battles between Poutrincourt’s men and the local Nauset people at Port Fortuné – “Misfortune harbor, so named by us on account of the misfortune which happened to us there” (Champlain 423) – on 14–16 October 1606. The site is present-day Stage Harbour, near Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

      With the colony’s leader gone ten weeks, no sign of help from France, and winter fast approaching, the remaining inhabitants of Port Royal had grown seriously anxious and even mutinous, Lescarbot suggests. He writes of the joy and thanksgiving with which they greeted Poutrincourt’s safe deliverance, and the celebratory performance they contrived to mark it:

      After many perils, which I shall not compare to those of Ulysses or of Aeneas, lest I stain our holy voyages amid such impurity, M. de Poutrincourt reached Port Royal on November 14th, where we received him joyously and with a ceremony (une solennité) absolutely new on that side of the ocean. For about the time we were expecting his return, whereof we had great desire, the more so that if evil had come upon him we had been in danger of a mutiny (de la confusion), I bethought me to go out to meet him with some jovial spectacle (quelque gaillardise), and so we did. And since it was written in French rhymes, made hastily, I have placed it among the Muses of New France, under the title of “Neptune’s Theatre,” to which I refer the reader. (II:340–41, 566–67)

      Fig. 8. Champlain’s drawing of the Port Royal Habitation, from his 1613 Voyages.

      After the “public rejoicing” that greeted the expedition’s return, Lescarbot recalls