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The North American natives aroused great interest in France even before Jacques Cartier’s voyages. French curiosity had been stimulated by Indians brought back as early as 1503 when a Brazilian named Essomericq arrived in the ship of Paulmier de Gonneville, and other explorers frequently brought back Indians as willing or unwilling guests. When Jacques Cartier returned to Saint Malo in 1536, for example, ten kidnapped Indians accompanied him. Interest in the appearance of American aborigines is attested by the Amerindians who appear in the carvings of the Dieppe cathedral and on the wooden panels (now in the Museum of Departmental Antiquities in Rouen) which once decorated a Rouen townhouse. Indians were frequently featured in ballets and “entrées,” as in 1550 when Henry II and Catherine of Medici made their entry in Rouen and the city celebrated the joyous event by constructing an Amerindian village, complete with parrots and monkeys.

Yet, despite the lively interest displayed by the populace, and despite the possibility of meeting American Indians and conversing with them, as did Rabelais and Montaigne, the illustrators of early maps overlooked all “racial” characteristics. Physical types, apparently, did not interest early cartographic artists such as the one who illustrated the 1542 Rotz Atlas. In fact, skin, hair color, hair form, traits which stand out for a modern observer, did not impress early illustrators who instead concentrated their attention on male clothing and weapons, depicting houses and occupations only secondarily, and, occasionally, on means of transportation.

Thus the Rotz Atlas depicts a wigwam, but shows Indians with gray skin, curly hair, and even one with a beard. In the Guillaume le Testu map of 1555 an Indian uses fairly accurate bow and arrows, but cohabits with medieval monsters. In the Champlain map of 1612 Indian clothing is finally accurately depicted, and artifacts such as shield, mace, bow, arrows, oar, pirouge are finally associated with the North American native. It has taken more than half a century for illustrators to show Indian clothing decorated with matachias (beading) and porcupine quills even though the French had long had the chance to become familiar with such ornamentation, Jacques Cartier having brought Francis I a pair of Indian moccasins decorated with porcupine quills (now in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris).

The fact is that the American Indian had to be fitted into the world view of explorers and illustrators. For them, the Indian was the prototype of “l’homme sauvage,” the “Wild Man,” the uncivilized, marginal being who owned nothing and lived in the woods, like the woodcutters and charcoal burners who haunted the European imagination both as a threat to order and as escape from the constraints of society. No wonder the le Testu illustrator surrounded the American aborigines with assorted monsters! The purpose was less to render the Indian in his physical, observable reality than to reproduce the ontological truth of the Indian as a being beyond the pale.

Even when the depiction was made after careful study of the explorer’s account, maybe under his supervision, as for the 1612 Champlain map, the illustrator translated into images the discoverer’s description of clothing, weapons, and artifacts, but endowed the Indian with poses out of Renaissance paintings. The image of the Amerindian was being filtered through a sensibility trained in classical, artistic styles. Even the frontispiece of Sagard’s 1632 Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons lent its Indian squaws, especially the leftmost one, a skittish grace worthy of a portrait of Diane de Poitiers or Gabrielle d’Estrées.

It is not until the Champlain field drawings, used by Jean de Laet in his 1640 Histoire du Nouveau Monde, that one finally encounters Indians carefully observed as to clothing and weapons realistically drawn. But the illustrations of Chippewa dancing at a funeral from the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des peuples idolâtres représentées par les figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picart (1728), right out of a classical temple frieze, and nineteenth-century painting such as Girodet’s Funeral of Atala attest to the durable triumph of preconceived notions over observable reality and to European determination to use Indians as exemplary rather than portray them as individuals.

In 1542, the Dieppe cartographer Jean Rotz produced for Henry VIII a Book of Hydrography containing beautifully illustrated manuscript maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The illustrations of the Rotz Atlas constitute the earliest known attempt at representation of Indian life north of Mexico, based on first-hand observation.

The illustrator had clearly used the published accounts or had conversed with the discoverers. The conical wigwam, for example, is an accurate representation of Indian dwellings and may have been derived from the account of Jean Parmentier who had visited the area between 1520 and 1526. The depiction was not drawn from Cartier’s relation, which does not contain enough details.

On the other hand, the depictions of the Indians are either vague or inaccurate. They wear brown fur tunics with ragged bottoms and tailored sleeves, unknown among the Indians of the North East. The men are shown hunting with bows and arrows, but these weapons are so general that they could as easily come from a sixteenth-century painting representing mythological hunters as from a purported portraiture of Canadian Indians.

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The Cosmographie universelle of Guillaume le Testu (1555), profusely illustrated, mixed accuracy and imagination. His map of Florida, Canada and Labrador includes conical wigwams greatly resembling a tepee and an Indian hunter surrounded by monstrous animals, but the Indian carries a bow and arrow which closely resemble those Champlain will later draw in the field. The armor worn by the hunter resembles the one Sagard describes in his 1632 account, Le Grand Voyage du pays de Hurons, “made from white rods, cut evenly and assembled close, one against the other, and tied together with interwoven strings.” These armors, noted Sagard, are “very hard and quite neatly done.”

The monsters surrounding the Indian seem to come from a medieval bestiary. A roughly-drawn cynocephalus (dog-headed man) carrying a large stick apparently rushes to the hunter’s aid, while a kind of dragon emerges from behind a rock, and an animal resembling a Chinese Fou Dog struts angrily away.

The 1612 Champlain map was included in the 1613 Voyages, which covered the five Canadian expeditions the discoverer had undertaken since 1603. A cartouche situated in the lower left corner of the map portrays two Indian couples, one Montagnais (Algonkin) and the other Almouchicois (Abenaki).

The Montagnais man is depicted ready for war, armed with wooden shield, bow, arrows, and a mace. He wears a loincloth, probably skin, decorated with porcupine quills and matachias (beading). His short fringed cloak seems to be made from pelts with the hair worn inside. In Des Sauvages (1603), Champlain had described the Montagnais setting off for war wearing, he said, “their richest fur clothings, adorned with beads and multicolor strings.” The warrior in the cartouche wears his hair carefully dressed: these were the Indians Champlain called the Cheveux relevés, “Upswept Hair,” having noted that they “arranged and combed [their hair] better than our courtiers.”

The Montagnais woman in contrast has her smooth, shoulder-length hair held by a bandeau. Her short, fringed tunic leaves a shoulder bare. She holds an oar, and a pirogue can be glimpsed behind her. While the men do their war dance, explains Champlain, the Montagnais women “strip themselves stark naked, though they keep their finest beads, then climb into the canoes, naked as they are. They dance, then set out on the water, fighting among themselves with their oars…”

The Almouchicois woman is naked but for a beaded loin cloth, a necklace, and an ankle bracelet. Feathers decorate her hair which is held back by strips of bead work. In the 1632 edition of his Voyages, Champlain noted the elaborate hairdo of an Almouchicois maiden who had “her hair dressed rather neatly with a piece of leather dyed red and adorned with little china beads, part of the hair hanging in the back, the rest intricately interwoven [with beads].”

In one hand the woman holds a squash, in the other an ear of corn. Champlain had been impressed with the fact that the Almouchicois “ploughed and cultivated the land…something,” he added, “that we had not seen before.” He observed that they grew corn which they planted along with fish scales. The plant growing between the man and the woman is probably intended to emphasize the Almouchicois’ agricultural pursuits.

The man wears an abbreviated breech clout. Champlain had been struck by the fact that the Almouchicois, men and women, seldom wore fur robes, preferring to go naked, “except for their ‘nature’ which they covered with a small piece of leather.” But the men (like the women) wore their hair in elaborate fashions: they shaved the front, says the explorer, and wore the rest long, pulled back, and adorned with “feathers, china beads, and other ornaments which they arranged very neatly, like embroidery.” The man portrayed here carries a knife in one hand, an arrow in the other. His square quiver is filled with arrows. The Almouchicois, noted Champlain, tipped their arrows with the “tails of a fish called signoc…or with bones.”

Like the Montagnais couple, the Almouchicois have assumed as graceful a stance as figures in a European academic painting. Working with Champlain’s text, the illustrator Pelletier transformed the discoverer’s words through a sensibility and eyes trained in European styles. The drawings the explorer sketched in the field (image 6 ) present the Indians quite differently.

The frontispiece of Sagard’s 1632 Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons includes the depiction of three Indian couples with tools, weapons and other artifacts. The first couple is composed of a medicine man and woman. The medicine men, says Sagard in his 1636 Histoire du Canada, wear bonnets “of hemp and bark” fashioned “into a pair of horn which they think makes them look good.” The frontispiece Indian wears only the briefest of breech clouts, but carries his badge of office, a stick with a turtle used to “sing” and “blow” the sick. In his other hand he holds a bag filled with herbs and drugs which, says Sagard, never leaves him. These medicine men, adds the missionary, “are not so simple that they ignore the way of deceiving the people with their tricks so as to gain esteem and get the best part in feasts and gifts.”

The woman facing the medicine man wears her hair in a thick single braid as was the fashion of Huron women. They tied this braid, according to Sagard, with “very dirty strips of leather.” Her short leather skirt is adorned with “chains of beads the size of a walnut, made of porcelain, fastened on both hips so that they hang in front.” She is engaged in a typical feminine task, pounding corn in a mortar.

The next couple is made up of a warrior and a young mother. The warrior, naked but for his loin cloth and a feather in his hair, wears his hair loose and divided, a style that Sagard described as resembling “two great mustaches over the ears.” In one hand the Indian carries what the account describes as “a sword stuck in half a lance” and in the other “a standard, or flag, which is…a round piece of bark on which are painted the escutcheon of the city or province, and which is attached to the end of a long rod.” The woman, dressed much like the other one, has her hair bound by a bandeau decorated with feathers. She holds an ear of corn and carries a baby on her back. Sagard was fascinated by Indian child rearing. “The baby is swaddled on a little plank, usually decorated with matachias and china beads, but they leave an opening in front of his natural parts through which he makes his water. If it is a girl, they insert an inverted corn leaf which carries the water outside so that the baby does not soil itself. Instead of diapers, which they do not have, they put under the child the very soft down from reeds and the baby rests comfortably on it. They clean the child with this same down.”

The last man is a warrior in full battle regalia. Completely naked, he wears a crown of feathers. “When they go to war,” says Sagard, “they wear around their head feathers arranged as a crown.” He carries a large wooden mace and an enemy’s head, for, Sagard notes, the Hurons usually carried off the head of the slaughtered enemy, scalping only if they were overloaded.

The woman wears the usual beaded skirt—though hers seems longer in the back than the others—and a long necklace. She carries either a pail or a basket made of bark—Huron women made both containers to hold grain, beans and other supplies. What she holds in the other hand must be the “little shovel” Sagard describes as “having the shape of an ear with a handle at the end.” The women, he noted, were the ones who prepared the ground, sowed the corn and harvested it.

In his Histoire du Nouveau Monde (1640), Johan de Laet included these engravings of Indian warriors borrowed from Champlain. The first warrior is represented naked and heavily painted. Champlain again and again noted the Indian’s custom of painting their faces with red, black and occasionally yellow and observed that the Cheveux relevés “divided their bodies in several sorts of compartments,” which sounds like a reference to body paint. The warrior portrayed here carried a large round shield, which Champlain called rondache, made, he said, from boiled leather. The other warrior wears a complex wooden breastplate such as Champlain described: “armors woven of cotton threads and wood, proof against arrows,” though, as the Indians discovered, not proof against bullets. The shield, wooden also, is decorated with feathers and a head. The warrior carried a bow in one hand, a hatchet in the other.

Both men are well built and well proportioned. Champlain, like Cartier before him, constantly marveled at the absence of malformation among the Indians, a fact which certainly stood in sharp contrast to the frequent physical deformities—hunch backs, club feet, spindly legs, to mention only the most obvious—which occurred among Europeans, even of the affluent classes.

1. From the Book of Hydrography by Jean Rotz (1542), 24r.
2. From the Cosmographie universelle of Guillaume le Testu (1555); reproduced from Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Monique de La Roncière, Sea Charts of the Early Explorers: 13th to 17th Century. Trans. L. le R. Dethan. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984, plate 50.
3. Cartouche of the Champlain map of 1612.
4. Cartouche of the Champlain map of 1612.
5. Frontispiece of Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons, by Gabriel Sagard (Paris, 1632).
6. From L’Histoire du Nouveau Monde, by Johan de Laet (Leyden, 1640), p. 51.