Slide Sets

The slides in this set are taken from woodcut illustrations in the works of André Thevet, Royal Cosmographer of France in the second half of the sixteenth century. In 1555 he accompanied Nicholas Durand, chevalier de Villegagnon, on the latter’s expedition to Brazil, but returned to France on the first available ship about ten weeks after his arrival. This episode almost certainly constituted Thevet’s only experience in the New World. Upon his return to France, he wrote an account of his travels, Les Singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1557). In addition to its authentic and valuable descriptions of Brazil and Tupinamba society, it also included accounts of North America, especially Canada, which Thevet claimed to have visited after his ship was blown off course on the way home.

Traditionally, scholars had dismissed Thevet’s data on Canada as either second-hand or the product of his imagination, and therefore useless. More recent investigations, however, have demonstrated that his accounts of Canada contain accurate and original data, presumably derived from interviews with French explorers and fisherman who had been there and with Canadian natives who had been brought back to France.

Thevet provided even more information about Canada eighteen years after the publication of Singularitez, when he wrote another book that dealt, at least in part, with the New World, Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575). Here Thevet claimed to have spent a lengthy period in Canada and to have conversed personally with the natives. Indeed, the descriptions of Canada in this work are more detailed, and his knowledge of the region is appreciably greater than in his earlier work. There is no evidence to suggest that Thevet returned to Canada between 1557 and 1575, however. His increased knowledge of the region comes from a greater familiarity with written sources, particularly the accounts of Jacques Cartier.

Both Singularitez and Cosmographie include woodcut illustrations that are among the very earliest European attempts to depict North American natives and animals. Although little is known about the provenance of these woodcuts, Thevet clearly intended them to complement his narrative. The notes to the illustrations that follow, therefore, include excerpts from Thevet’s texts to show the relationship between the narrative and its illustrations and to provide examples of the quality of his information.

This woodcut, from Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, illustrates the hunting methods of Canadian natives. It includes the earliest depiction of snowshoes in a printed book, and the accompanying text explains the importance of snowshoes for native hunters. “They use a kind of racket,” Thevet wrote, “woven with cords like a sieve, two and one-half feet long and one foot wide…They wear them especially when they go hunt wild beasts, so as not to sink in the snow as they pursue their hunt…To capture these animals, ten or twelve of them get together armed with long lances or pikes fifteen to sixteen feet long, armed at the end with some bone of a stag or other beast a foot long or more, instead of iron, carrying also bows and arrows armed the same way. They then go through the snows and uncover the trail, which having been uncovered they set up cedar branches, which are green in all seasons, in the form of a net under which they hide themselves, armed as I said. And as soon as the stag arrives, attracted by the pleasure of this greenery and the path beaten down, they hurl themselves on him with thrusts of the pikes and arrows so that they force him to leave the path and get into the deep snow up to the belly, where being unable to make headway he is struck by blows until dead.”

In addition to his detailed descriptions of hunting methods, Thevet also provided vivid accounts of native military campaigns. In so doing, he displayed a strong tendency to describe native combat in feudal terms, referring, for example, to native warriors as “lords” and “vassals.” Thevet especially emphasized the importance of ritual and ceremony in native warfare. When Canadians were about to meet the enemy, Thevet wrote, they placed themselves in the best order possible to fight and give assault, using musical instruments to incite themselves to battle. “Do not think they go in disorder,” Thevet warned his reader, and his described a native military procession in these terms: “They carry many ensigns made of birch branches, adorned with feathers, and the plumage of swans. Their drums are of certain skins stretched and tied as on the frame on which one makes parchment, carried by two men on each side, and another being behind striking with two sticks as energetically as he can. Their flutes are made of the bones of the legs of stags or other wild animals.” This illustration, from Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, shows such a procession, carrying a native chief home in triumph and displaying the scalp of a defeated enemy.

In his descriptions of native warfare, Thevet expressed a good deal of admiration for the cunning and organizational skills of the native warriors. “At the hour of encounter they deploy so skillfully their squadrons and show themselves so clever in either attacking or defending, and making use of ruses and stratagems according to their styles of warring, that it proves that it is nature which makes the good soldier and captain.” Among these “ruses and stratagems,” Thevet detailed the use of a poison smoke, made from wood soaked in seal oil, so that the wind always directed it toward the enemy. This illustration, from Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, shows this poison smoke in the lower right-hand part of the picture.

One of the difficulties in assessing the value of Thevet’s work is his practice of transferring data from one part of his text (and geographical region) to another, both within and among his works. An excellent example of this practice is his treatment of the animal pictured in this woodcut, from Cosmographie universelle. In Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, Thevet located the Succarath in the region near the Strait of Magellan, but in Cosmographie universelle he placed it in Florida. In both cases he described the animal in similar terms: it lived near the banks of rivers and, if it were pursued, took its young on its back, covered them with its tail, and fled. Thevet added that the Timucuans of Florida captured these animals simply by building moats into which they fell. Thevet’s Succarath later appeared in Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes (1607).

Each of Thevet’s works includes an illustration of a bison. The first, in Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, is very similar to the one pictured in Francisco Lopez de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias (1522). On the other hand, the woodcut given here from Cosmographie universelle is unique. In the text that accompanies this picture, Thevet described the bison as similar to a large bull, with horn a foot long, and “having on the back a swelling and hump just like that of a camel, with long hair all over the body and principally under the chin, whose color is nearly tawny. Its tail is like a lion’s…” Thevet also described how the natives made clothing from the skin of the animal, and how its horns were prized “for the efficacy they have against poison; so the natives keep them to protect against poisons and vermin that they meet up with going about the country and in fishing.” In another work left in manuscript upon Thevet’s death, “Grand Insulaire et pilotage d'André Thevet” (ca. 1586), he claimed to have brought two bison skins back to France from Canada, and to have had them in his study in Paris.

Thevet’s works include lengthy discussions of whales. In Cosmographie universelle, the text which accompanies this illustration of Europeans stripping down a dead whale reads: “And I understand that it is in the open sea that this monster is taken, since he never approaches the coasts, and feeds on fish which are scarcely larger than salmon: an incredible thing for one who has not witnessed it. The reason for it is very simple–it is because, although the whale is of monstrous size and grandeur, yet its throat is quite narrow and the conduit through which his food passes even smaller than the proportion of his body would seem to require, which results in his liking little fish, being unable to swallow larger ones…” In addition to the whale’s size and diet, Thevet found the species’ method of reproducing fascinating. “The female of this Behemoth has only one little one at a time, to which she gives birth as do the quadrupeds, without eggs, contrary to the nature of all other fishes. Furthermore, the whale gives milk to her little whalelet once he is on the outside: and for this reason she has breasts on her stomach under the navel, which no other fish does either in the sea or in fresh-water, unless it is the seal or the comiaco, a very large fish which is caught in the Red Sea and in the great lake of Alexandria in Egypt.”

1. Hunting Party (Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, Paris 1557).
2. Military Procession (Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, Paris 1557).
3. Native War Party (Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, Paris 1557).
4. Succarath (Cosmographie universelle, Paris 1575).
5. Bison (Cosmographie universelle, Paris 1575).
6. Whale (Cosmographie universelle, Paris 1575).

Excerpts of Thevet’s text are taken from Roger Schlesinger & Arthur P. Stabler, André Thevet’s North America. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1986.