Environmentalism, Ethnography and Franciscan Natural Theology on the French Colonial Frontier: Claude D’Abbeville’s Tupinambá Encounter, 1612-1613

On August 20, 1612, Claude D’Abbeville, a preaching member of the Capuchin order of the Franciscans, stood in a makeshift chapel of thatched reeds, in a place he called ‘Maragnan,’ now São Luís Island, in the Bay of Maranhão, Northeastern Brazil, part of a mission to establish a French South American colony and stem Portuguese expansion in the area.[1] Shortly after the four Capuchin monks who accompanied the colonial voyage had established their church, a Tupi chief arrived with about 30 tribal elders to listen to mass, which they did with great astonishment and admiration. But when the Priest approached the moment of the consecration of the host, the Fathers pulled a curtain between him and the people, in such a manner that the Tupi could no longer see the priest or what he was doing. The elders considered this an affront and after the mass they went to find the Fathers, asked them why they had closed the curtain, they responded that they had meant no insult by their actions, that it was because the Tupi were still pagans, and that by consequence the Fathers couldn’t celebrate Mass in their presence.

The Tupi men then returned to their camp and told the women assembled there what they had seen. The women, desiring to see “these great prophets of God and of Toupan [the Tupi thunder deity, equated by the Capuchins to the Christian God],” assembled in large numbers at the door of the make-shift chapel. But the Fathers were reluctant to open the door to their small, one-room cabin, because the Tupi women were completely naked. While the Capuchin Fathers were of course clothed, D’Abbeville had mentioned several times that upon arriving they had adopted a far thinner version of their usual habit to accommodate the Brazilian heat, adding to the building corporal tension of the scene.[2] The women did not have the patience to be refused, broke down the cabin’s flimsy door, and stood staring at and contemplating the four capuchin fathers. Unable to take their eyes off them, the women stared for what became an unbearably long time; eventually the Fathers begged the women to leave the cabin, which they finally did.

The women returned to the Tupi camp and conferred with the elder men, who settled on a peace offering for the Fathers. Noting that they had been sleeping on the bare ground, they returned with four comfortable mattresses, and a young woman to go with each one. The Capuchin fathers gladly accepted the mattresses, but refused the women. Again, the Tupi elders demanded to know the reason for this new affront to their generosity. After a complicated explanation of their vows of chastity left their Tupi interlocutors perplexed, the Fathers explained that God had given them special powers to resist the charms of women. Still unsure what to make of these men, the Tupi elders retired again to their camp, where they settled on the idea of offering them several young children into their care. Seeing an important opportunity for the instruction and conversion of young souls, the Fathers eagerly accepted this final offering, which seems to have provided a tenuous meeting point for the two radically divergent interpretations of the encounter.[3]

On the surface this story seems to be another classic dialogue de sourds of the kind recently explored in the extensive literature on European colonial encounters.[4] The story offers much more than this, however. The promiscuous sensuality and sexuality hinted at by the tense moment of silent staring between the thinly-clothed monks and the naked Tupi women and the mattress episode was only the beginning; over their months in Brazil the Capuchins would be confronted by apparently unbridled polygamy and promiscuity. The violence of the women breaking down the chapel door was likewise only a hint of what was to come: the Capuchins would have to explain the specter of Tupi captive sacrifice, torture and cannibalism and somehow fit it into their growing vision of Brazil as an Edenic paradise.

D’Abbeville traveled to Maragnan as part of a colonial flotilla, supported first by Henry IV and then by his widow Marie de Medici during the regency, that brought over 300 French colonists to established a French colony to capitalize on local resources and counter the ever-expanding Portuguese and Spanish dominions in the equatorial Americas.[5] The French were expelled by the Portuguese in 1614, after only two years, and the traces of D’Abbeville’s brief visit to La France Equinoxiale have been limited. D’Abbeville’s account of the voyage, Histoire de la Mission des pères capucins en l’isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisines (1614), is best known as one of the most detailed colonial-era sources on Brazilian Tupi-Guarani society. It was popular at the time, but in modern commentary it has almost always been read against the grain: the work of a simpleton amateur with little scientific training, blinded by his missionary agenda and Eurocentric zeal, but rich with uncomprehendingly recorded clues about Tupi culture.[6] D’Abbeville’s own perspective is considered an embarrassment or a tragedy, or both.[7] Most famous are the six Tupinambà who returned to France with D’Abbeville and were paraded through the royal court and baptized in Franciscan habit, three of whom died within a month of their arrival, the other three returning to Brazil in 1614.[8] These striking symbols of physical and cultural captivity have evoked the dehumanizing quality of European colonial travel and of the early ethnographic encounter.

Much of the image of the French encounter with the Tupi in Equinoctial France has been shaped by the Huguenot Jean de Léry’s widely known Histoire d'un voyage fait en la Terre du Brésil (1578), in which Tupi ritual and cannibalism is methodically likened to Catholic practices (“eating the flesh,” etc.).[9] Recent literature on the exploration and exploitation of nature in early modern New World colonies has stressed the commercial networks that drove such exploration, and the circulation of commodities as they acquired new meanings and values within different societies.[10] In fact, by the end of the sixteenth century, many European thinkers were beginning to share misgivings about the relationship between colonialism and native peoples and their natural environment, beginning with Las Casas.[11] Two years before D’Abbeville’s voyage, the Dutch Jurist Hugo Grotius had published the mare liberum (1609), which argued both for the ocean as a space free from national dominion, and a systematic defense of the rights of East Indian island natives against their Portuguese colonizers. Both these reformers and their followers cast the colonial theater as one in which legal rights that transcended national claims had to be respected. Though D’Abbeville does not discuss the legal status of Tupi and French rights of dominion over Maragnan, his tacit position also clearly fell somewhere between the res nullius (“property of no one”) promoted by John Major at the University of Paris, which justified outright denial of any native dominion, and the Doctrine of Consent that led later French colonists into far more accommodating trade relationships with native populations.[12]

Much encounter literature has tended to construe European missionary perspectives in either generically Christian or broad Catholic and Protestant categories.[13] D’Abbeville’s account can be understood as an example of Richard Grove’s early modern island edens, but it also offers clues to a much more specific early modern appreciation of nature.[14] Far from being a simple island paradise, D’Abbeville’s understanding of Brazilian nature and the Tupi who were part of it was situated in a specific context, whose unique features make it different from the better-known New World encounter narratives. It was structured by a theological framework unique to the early seventeenth-century Capuchin order. It was also indebted to a particular natural philosophical worldview: a melding of Aristotelian, Renaissance natural philosophy with new currents in natural history characteristic of someone on the fringes of learned discourse in Europe at the end of the sixteenth-century, one that was far from unique but has yet to be examined in its application to colonial New World travel. Indeed, his position on the fringes of this natural history made him more open to a broader interpretation of nature and culture in the New World, and allowed him to draw on both his experiences in Brazil and his Franciscan worldview and theology in his understanding of the Tupi, their natural environment, and the relation between the two.[15]

For D’Abbeville, the underlying interpretive structure for the entire voyage, including the encounter with the Tupi, was his interpretation of the natural environment of Maragnan: nature itself, as a complex and transcendent system that was in many ways beyond the comprehension of European or Tupi, was the subject of D’Abbeville’s encounter story. Read on its own terms, D’Abbeville’s account of his Brazilian experience poses several challenges to the historiography of European colonialism, and has the capacity to disclose a new root of European environmentalism, one that posits the value of the environment not on the basis of its fragility, but on the basis of its very robustness.

The expedition falls between the first French naturalist explorations of Brazil, those of André Thevet and Jean de Léry, and the disciplined observation promoted by the Paris Academy of Sciences later in the century and culminating in the La Condamine expedition of the 1730s. For Léry and Thevet, the natural environment was a series of new discoveries and natural productions to be added to those already known in Europe, amazing but of the same world. The style of their illustrations conforms to this mode of apprehension and presentation. Here the natural productions of Brazil were seen primarily in utilitarian terms; plants had curative properties, trees could be fruitfully exploited for medicinal and building purposes. Brazil was a natural goldmine, but one that fit well within the framework of European naturalism, consumption and expansion. Both subscribed to a form of idealism with respect to the Brazilian jungle, but it focused on the supposed happiness and courage of its inhabitants, and became one of the principle roots of the noble savage tradition, casting natural man as the center of the natural environment and a foil for European decadence. Neither, however, elevated the Brazilian jungle beyond the level of backdrop; backdrop to the curiosity of cannibalism, to religious mission, and to the story of their journeys. This perspective is mirrored in many other European New World encounters from the period, and is captured in the pervasive illustrations of Theodor de Bry and his school, which have become the most familiar icon of this first wave of colonial New World encounters.

D’Abbeville’s interest in the natural world in which the voyage took place begins on the Atlantic crossing. The ocean plays a dual role for D’Abbeville. On the one hand, it is a lifeless and destitute place that is ‘cruel’ to its human inhabitants; on the other, it is both the gateway to the island paradise that awaits, and host to some impressive if odd displays of natural wonder. He is captivated by fish with enormous fins, and fighting and flying fish. He is struck by the bioluminescence visible at night. Both seem to indicate that he is entering a world where the familiar rules and limits of creation will not apply.

Recent scholars have pointed out that D’Abbeville’s taxonomy is less than learned in the natural history of his age. Indeed, rather than impose a taxonomic structure, he adopts Tupi names and lists plants and animals not in order of their utility or characteristics, but as part of the broader scheme of nature: birds that live near the ocean, fish that thrive in freshwater, etc. When D’Abbeville comes to enumerate the plants and animals, he is shocked not only by their robust character and by the extremity of all their features, but by their sheer number and variety. Here trees appear literally covered with birds of every imaginable size and description. They seem to arise in the air almost through spontaneous generation. The oysters and mussels are twice the size, sweeter and more delicate, and sometimes apparently are even found growing on trees.

This number and variety are the result of two factors: the climate itself, which causes the profusion of natural life in a seemingly infinite variety, and, directly by the hand of God, as yet another aspect and evidence of the special status of the region within creation itself. D’Abbeville may here be reviving a Thomistic argument concerning the variety and abundance of natural kinds. In Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas reasons that since creation was a mirror of the infinity and splendor of God, but was in itself incapable of equaling God, it strove to do so through profusion and variety of natural kinds. If this equation of God and natural creation is surprising, it is echoed elsewhere by D’Abbeville: “It seems that God and nature studied each other,” he writes, “in order to populate this country with animals more admirable than in any other country.”[16]

Recent scholarship in early modern natural history, led by Brian Ogilvie’s The Science of Describing, has opened a new category of semi-trained naturalist at just this period, in which vast new knowledge was accompanied by a lack of any reigning paradigm of classification.[17] Ogilvie suggests that the generation of naturalists working between the 1590s and the 1620s were the first to attempt to digest the profusion of natural knowledge produced by previous generations and by colonial expansion into systematic, taxonomic schemes. D’Abbeville’s own appreciation of the natural kinds of Brazil is a unique combination of mysticism, Tupi taxonomy, and Capucin natural theology. Though not a formal systematist, D’Abbeville seems to be share the collecting and naming mania of Ogilvie’s third generation (1560s-1590s), with the attempt to make sense of the profusion and place it into some scheme of the fourth.

One of the first signs that D’Abbeville saw Maragnan as a place in which the action of God on nature was special is in his discussion of climate. After a long explanation of the traditional climate zones and the physics of the sun’s heating power, he points out that, by the logic of these factors, Maragnan should be unbearably hot. But here, on the contrary, God has tempered the sun’s heat with “a multitude of marvelous means.” The chief among these is the purity and moderation of the air, which makes Brazil a “temperate and delicious place.” The elements themselves in Brazil are cleaner and purer than in France, and indeed, than anywhere else he has heard of. Nor is this purity an accidental factor of geography; if there is any corruption of the air, he assures us, it is an accident in the Aristotelian sense, and must come from somewhere else.[18] Maragnan is exempt from “all extreme contrarieties” of other places; the cold, gloomy fogs and violent storms of France are unknown here.

D’Abbeville’s depiction of the natural environment in Brazil amounts to that of a self-sustaining ecological system. In advance of the hottest part of the year, a season of heavy rain, which “temper marvelously the sun’s ardor, and render the earth extremely fecund.”[19] The winds are perfectly balanced such that they temper to effects of the sun, providing a kind of umbrella against the sun’s heat. Because of these moderating counter-forces, and unlike in other equatorial regions such as in Africa, the sun does not appear to have a permanent blackening effect, on humans or otherwise. The fertility of the entire Brazilian environment seems to D’Abbeville to have no limit: soil fertilizers are unknown here, where the ground is nourished by the air and the water. In fact, the labors of man tend only to disrupt this natural fertility. Oddly enough, D’Abbeville notes, the earth doesn’t produce if you work it, but does it you don’t. All one has to do is throw seeds on the ground and things grow. Tidal and rain pools seem to spawn an infinity of delicious fish that the Tupi carefully harvest. When these dry out and subsequently refill, a whole new crop of fish wondrously appears.

The natural environment of Maragnan appears perfectly tailored for human inhabitation. Building materials such as sand, clay and wood abound. The environment is so powerfully abundant that poverty is “virtually unknown.” The numerous poor of Europe could come to Brazil and “gather their living easily from the natural bounty.”[20] What little disease there is, nature appears to provide their cures. The medicinal properties of the many natural substances are great, but for D’Abbeville the focus on this characteristic of New World nature is a European misconception. Those who come here for healing have misunderstood; if they lived here, they would not be ill in the first place. Like Léry and Thevet, D’Abbeville was interested in native Brazilwood for its commercial appeal as a European import, but mostly the trees provoke wonder. With deep red wood that is twice the strength of European wood, they appear to grow everywhere. Some have leaves that open to the sun in the morning and close in the evening. Others have no leaves but magnificent flowers. Many produce an infinite variety of fruits ready for consumption.

Clearly underpinning both the missionary and ethnographic elements of the travel narrative was a concept of nature itself, as a complex and transcendent system that was in many ways beyond the comprehension of European or Tupi. For D’Abbeville, nature in Brazil was a kind of microcosm in which all the features of creation were seen in exaggerated form, European nature so intensified that it defied all accepted natural categories. Nature in Brazil was super-productive and super-reproductive. In D’Abbeville’s Brazil, the darkness of night is deeper than in France. Wind itself can be a corrupting or purifying force, and in Brazil it only purifies, while in France, the winds are “putride, maladif et extrêmement corrosive”.[21] Animal colorings were more vivid, animals were leaner and more stealthy, insects were almost comically large and abundant. Even birds in this part of the world seemed to exist in a profusion that indicated either spontaneous generation or a creator with heretofore unsuspected powers.

Recent scholars have pointed out that D’Abbeville’s taxonomy is not the most sophisticated of the era.[22] Indeed, rather than impose a taxonomic structure, he adopts Tupi names and lists plants and animals not in order of their utility or characteristics, but as part of the broader scheme of nature. When D’Abbeville comes to enumerate the plants and animals, he is shocked not only by their robust character and by the extremity of all their features, but by their sheer number and variety. Here trees appear literally covered with birds of every imaginable size and description. They seem to arise in the air almost through spontaneous generation. The fertility of the entire Brazilian environment seems to have no limit: soil fertilizers are unknown here, the ground is nourished only by the air and the water. The image of France that emerges by way of contrast is striking: its landscape is covered with infected vapors and putrid smoke, which fill the corrupted air.[23] The clean, pure air of Brazil is not merely a pleasant feature; according to D’Abbeville, it determines the quality of everything in it. During the Atlantic crossing, the French water upon exposure to the heat and the elements became putrid, black and ‘incontinent’ (causing incontinence), before becoming blue and still more putrid, and by the time they got to the Canaries it was completely undrinkable. The water from Maragnan, remained “delicious and healthy” for the entire three-month return journey.[24]

D’Abbeville’s natural theology draws on the early Franciscan traditions that were the centerpiece of the Capuchin movement.[25] The early Franciscan orders were devoted to a conception of nature as a vehicle for God’s wisdom and creativity.[26] This is usually taken to apply to animals, but in many ways it went beyond even individual natural bodies, focusing on whole natural systems. The Capuchin order was founded with the purpose of restoring the pure, original form of Franciscan monastic observation, from which the Franciscans themselves were felt to have fallen. D’Abbeville’s account is not primarily focused on the rigors and limits of direct observation and empiricism, as European scientific travel writing would be within a few decades. Rather it is rooted in the assumption that perception is divinely guided, apprehension and discernment are fundamentally internal processes guided by God, not external analytical reductions of the world. Confronted with the intense profusion of natural productions, the Franciscan ideal of perception was a kind of divinely guided ecstatic appreciation of the natural world.[27] D’Abbeville’s account of nature in Brazil amounts to an almost literal transposition of Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun, whose line “through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance” coincides precisely with D’Abbeville’s proposed relationship between climate and the cycle of natural production.

This framework for apprehending nature provides the underpinning of D’Abbeville’s understanding of the Tupi and in particular the differences between Tupi and Europeans.[28] For D’Abbeville, on the cusp of the integration of humankind into the study of nature, the Tupi were at once part of and apart from their natural environment. As creatures of the Brazilian jungle, they shared in its super-productive, super re-productive quality. Their nakedness and assumptions about the uncontrollability of sexual desire were not primarily moral failings, they were innate features of their environment, and contrasted with European sexuality in the same way that the two natural environments contrast. Thus the fact that many Tupi were larger than most Europeans was due to the climate and the lack of constraining clothes.[29] Their longevity was on account of the warm climate, a climate more natural for Man than the bitter European winters, and the salubrious air accounts for the lack of blindness and other malformations.[30]

The first explanation of Tupi sexual promiscuity is in the context of the natural environment: the Tupi share in the hyper-productivity and hyper-reproductivity displayed other natural kinds and by nature itself in Brazil. For D’Abbeville the proof of this natural reproductivity is not only in the sexual advances of Tupi women, but also visible in the supposed continued fertility of women as old as one hundred.[31] D’Abbeville’s explanation of Tupi polygamy fits into the same naturalistic mold. According to D’Abbeville, there are two reasons why the Tupi have multiple wives: to demonstrate the status of the strongest Tupi men, and as a natural consequence of the lopsided gender ratio caused by the death of large numbers of Tupi men in war. [32] The practice is far from being a mere outgrowth of unfettered sexual drives or corrupted moral development. In fact, D’Abbeville points out that many Tupi men do not take advantage of the license for polygamy, preferring one wife. Nor is there any strict moral value associated with this choice. D’Abbeville had attempted to explain to the Tupi how “the great Toupan” only loves those who marry one woman, but he ended by sharing their skepticism at the notion. D’Abbeville was struck by the harmony and peace of these Tupi families, which allowed for divorce by either party, contrasting markedly with Catholic families who “can’t go a day without bitter fighting and mutual recriminations.”[33] For D’Abbeville Tupi polygamy is not something that can be accounted for on traditional moral terms, but is rather simply a part of the natural equilibrium of the Brazilian forest and the society that is native to it. As such, this apparently harmonious state is punctuated by occasional outbreaks of violence: Slave women are treated well, for example, and are often free to come and go, that is, until one day the Tupi men tire of them and kill them and eat them.[34]

D’Abbeville’s theological solution to the enigma of this semi-noble savage and his Edenic environment is unique and important.[35] Drawing on passages from Paul, D’Abbeville places the Tupi as descendents of Adam, and sharing in original sin, but escaping the self-knowledge and perception of nudity because of their lack of knowledge of law. They thus occupy a unique space between the commission of original sin and the dawning of carnal knowledge of it, one that allows them to continue life as unsuspecting and nude innocents while still sharing in original sin and, ultimately, salvation.[36] At once flawed and innocent, the Tupi of Maragnan are theologically “stuck” in a natural Eden at the precise moment between sin and knowledge. Thus the Tupi share fully in the creation and the fall, but do not have the same moral relationship to it, and their society can be studied as an alternative human path, albeit one whose final moral judgment is not in doubt. With the hypothesis of this interstitial moral and biblical space, D’Abbeville creates the possibility of studying and evaluating the Tupi as both the object of missionary conversion and interesting and instructive in their own right. From this theological point of view, it follows that the Tupi are creatures who are fundamentally tied to their natural environment, and can only be understood in its terms.[37] It is a space that allows him to highlight the Tupi as morally ambiguous elements of a fundamentally idyllic nature.

It is clear that D’Abbeville’s account of Tupi warfare is drawn from other texts as much as from experience, most directly from Hans Staden’s True History. Yet his interpretation of these Tupi rituals differs from previous authors.[38] Like Jean de Léry and Montaigne, he begins by emphasizing the role of valor and courage in the genesis of Tupi conflicts.[39] But where earlier authors had stopped at the insistence on either the shocking spectacle or the transcendent morality of Tupi warfare, D’Abbeville insists on the natural economy of killing, courage and honor in the Brazilian forest.[40] He describes the revenge cycle that leads to conflicts as both reasonable and inevitable given the terms of status and honor in Tupi society: forebearers have built up a reputation in battle, and each succeeding generation must show the same bravery and prowess to avoid squandering it. D’Abbeville’s account of the treatment of Tupi war prisoners and the ritual cannibalism that so fascinated Europeans emphasizes the social and natural historical equilibrium of the practices.[41] For the captured prisoner, there is no point in escaping, because his own people would ridicule him, not only for his lack of bravery, as emphasized by Montaigne and Léry, but more importantly, for the evidence this would provide of his lack of faith in his offspring to avenge him later. Thus the defiance of the Tupi prisoner was a claim of strength not just in the obvious sense of defiance and courage, but also in the temporal sense of the ancestral definition of status and social capital.[42] It is thus out of respect for the inevitability of the captive’s situation that the captors treat prisoners as guests, offering them their most attractive young women as sexual partners and domestic servants and child-bearers during the long period of captivity preceding their death.[43]

Far from the tragic or heroic emphasis of Staden, Léry and Montaigne, for D’Abbeville this cycle mirrors the cycles of nature that pervade Brazil. Through his analysis of Tupi sexuality and cannibalism, D’Abbeville absorbs what began as challenges to his missionary project into a broader appreciation of Brazilian natural history. It was a model that influenced the Jesuit Relations from New France, beginning a decade later.[44] And it was in this model that he found a naturalist solution to the tension following the incident of the Mass in the cabin. The silence broken by both parties readily absorbed the others’ strange practices and rituals into own, but neither lost the sense of deep wonder in and belief in the transformative power of the rituals of the other.

Notes

1. Claude D’Abbeville, L’Arrivée des Pères Capucins en L’Inde Nouvelle, appelée Maragnon, avec la réception que leur ont faict les sauvages de ce pays, et la conversions d’iceux à nostre saincte foy (Paris, 1612).

2. Claude D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des Pères Capucins en l’Isle de maragnan et terres circonvoisines (Paris, 1614), 7.

3. Claude D’Abbeville, L’Arrivée, 13-14. For D’Abbeville’s discussion of the Tupi interpretation of the encounter, see D’Abbeville, Histoire, 74.

4. See, for example, Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: the Discovery of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of the Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 88-9.

5. Philip Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

6. The most comprehensive study of the expedition is Andrea Daher, Les Singularités de la France Équinoxiale, Histoire des pères capuchins au Brésil (1612-1615) (Paris: Champion, 2002). See also Maurice Pianzola, Des Français à la conquête du Brésil (XVIIe siècle): les perroquets jaunes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991), 91-116 ; Alfred Métraux et Jacques Lafaye, eds, Histoire de la Mission des Pères Capucins en l’Isle de Maragnan et Terres Circonvoisins (Graz: Akademische Druck u. Verlagsanstalt, 1963), i-xlii.

7. Miguel de Asúa and Roger French, A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (London: Ashgate, 2006), 148-52.

8. Laura Fishman, “Claude d'Abbeville and the Tupinamba: Problems and Goals of French Missionary Work in Early Seventeenth-Century Brazil,” Church History 58, no.1 (March, 1989): 20-35.

9. Janet Whatley, “Impression and Initiation: Jean de Léry's Brazil Voyage,” Modern Language Studies 19, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 15-25; Introduction, Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Alida Metcalf, Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1800 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

10. John Gascoine, “The Ordering of Nature and the Ordering of Empire: A Commentary,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, botany and Representations of Nature, eds. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 107-16; Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Antonio Barrera-Osorio Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006) stresses the commercial and royal forces that drove Spanish colonial exploration and exploitation were paramount, and undergirded the bulk of naturalist knowledge. Much recent work on French missionary travel has focused on the Jesuit tradition, especially in New France, and offers an image where the natural environment of the New World was a backdrop to the drama of cultural encounter and conversion.

11. See, for example, Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983), whose call to examine changing attitudes toward nature itself outside of England during the early modern period has not been fully heeded.

12. Oliva Patricia Dickason, “The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire: The Other Side of Self-Determination,” in Decentering the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, eda. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 87-109; Philip Boucher, “Revisioning the ‘French Atlantic,’ or, How to Think about the French Presence in the Atlantic, 1550-1625,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 274-306.

13. For a more nuanced account, see Silvia Castro Shannon, “Religious Struggle in France and Colonial Failure in Brazil, 1555-1615,” in Essays in French Colonial History, ed. Dale Standen (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 51-62.

14. See Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47-53. For Grove, Western environmentalism emerged from the intersection of a pastoral ideal with a systematic understanding of natural processes and the ability of humans to disrupt them.

15. While this paper explores the influence of Tupi natural categories on D’Abbeville’s thought, it is not an attempt to tell the encounter story from a dual or Tupi perspective. See Toby Morantz, “Plunder or Harmony? On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact,” in Decentering the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 48-67.

16. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 231. See also James Long, “Aquinas and Franciscan Nature Mysticism,” Logos 8, no. 2 (Spring, 2005): 56-64.

17. Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

18. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 192.

19. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 195.

20. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 210.

21. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 198.

22. Asúa and French, New World, 150-1.

23. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 193.

24. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 205.

25. Odulfo van der Vat, “The First Franciscans of Brazil,” The Americas 5, no.1 (July, 1948): 18-30.

26. Jean Mauzaise, Le Rôle et l'action des Capucins de la province de Paris dans la France religieuse du XVIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Lille, 1978), I, 423.

27. On the influence of marginal theological approaches to nature in New World travel writing, see Ralph Bauer, “A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, eds. James Delbourge and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 99-126.

28. The Franciscan natural ideal contrasts with the much better-known Jesuit tradition of natural observation; see Florence Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Later Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Jesuit theologians in Europe were exploring the same theological ground at this time, for example, Leonard Lessius, On the Providence of God and the Immortality of the Soul (1613), and Roberto Bellarmino, The Ascent of the Mind to God by the Steps of Created Things (1615), but their influence on colonial Jesuit missionaries is not clear. On the Jesuit interpretation of early Brazilian encounters, see Joao Azevedo Fernandes, “Feast and Sin: Catholic Missionaries and Native Celebrations in Early Colonial Brazil,” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 23, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 111-27,

29. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 262.

30. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 264.

31. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 265.

32. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 277-8; Laura Fishman, “Crossing Gender Boundaries: Tupi and European Women in the Eyes of Claude d’Abbeville,” French Colonial History 4 (2003): 81-98.

33. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 280.

34. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 283.

35. See Philip Boucher, “The Caribbean and the Caribs in the Thought of Seventeenth-Century French Colonial Propagandists: The Missionaries,” Proceedings of the Fourth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1979), 17-38.

36. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 270-1.

37. See Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 141-53.

38. Hans Staden, Wahrhaftige Historia, 1557; Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578).

39. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 288; Michel de Montaigne, “Des Cannibales,” Essais (Paris: Garnier, 1962), II, 341-5.

40. Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of De Bry's Great Voyages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Lestringant, Cannibals.

41. Neil Whitehead, “Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism,” Hispanic American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (November, 2000): 721-51.

42. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 290.

43. D’Abbeville, Histoire, 294.

44. Relations des jésuites: contenant ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquables dans les missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle-France ( Quebec, 1858)