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Reviewed by:
  • Pierre-Esprit Radisson: The Collected Writings. Volume 1: The Voyages ed. by Germaine Warkentin
  • Elsbeth Heaman (bio)
Germaine Warkentin, ed. Pierre-Esprit Radisson: The Collected Writings. Volume 1: The Voyages, McGill-Queen’s University Press. xviii, 358. $65.00

The exuberant personality of Pierre-Esprit Radisson has enlivened many a textbook and classroom devoted to early Canadian history, but never has it been so thoroughly aired as in Germaine Warkentin’s edited collection of his writings, beginning here with volume 1. Radisson was a keen-eyed, if never disinterested, observer of the extraordinarily diverse societies in which he immersed himself on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in France to a family that emigrated to New France, he was still a boy when captured by Mohawks, a captivity he survived by showing enthusiastic adaptation to their culture and mores. “We” tortured enemy captives; “we plagued those infortunates, we plucked out their nails one after an other,” to avenge “our parents,” he later declares nonchalantly. When Radisson betrays his hosts and runs away – killing someone in the process – only to be recaptured, there seems no chance that he can escape a painful execution that is soon under way. But his adoptive family determines to save him if they can: they draw on their reserves of social capital to persuade their community to release their wayward son, pleading, dancing, and offering gifts. The episode is one of many electrifying moments in Radisson’s [End Page 432] account of his voyages to the southern, western, and northern borderlands of the French colony on the St. Lawrence River.

Radisson’s stories provide rich fodder for social and political historians. In this instance, they illustrate some mechanisms for achieving popular consensus on the disposition of prisoners in his Mohawk village, situated near present-day Schenectady. Another story exemplifies comparable negotiations in an Onondaga village, albeit with a different ending: when a man decides to claim two captive women, with their children, for himself, he is told, “Nephew you must know that all slaves as well men as women, are first brought before the councell and we alone can dispose of them.” All four slaves are immediately killed. The fruits of scholarly reflections on such subjects are provided in two superb explanatory essays by Germaine Warkentin and Heidi Bohaker and in innumerable footnotes that explain obscure wordings, place names, and tribal names, as well as contradictions and improbabilities. Radisson sometimes incorporated into his narratives stories told to him by other people, and Warkentin can only guess at some of the seams between the first-person and third-person narratives.

Warkentin sees Radisson undergo a transformation from an adventurous boy with a longing to see new lands to an increasingly single-minded fur trader who calculatedly puts his ethnographic knowledge to commercial purpose. She points to an extraordinary performance on Lake Michigan, designed to attract new trading allies among people fearful of sending canoes full of furs through Iroquois territory to French trading posts. Radisson began to beat a member of his 800-strong audience with a beaver robe, in order to show that guns made better weapons, guns they would obtain by trading robes. You will die from Iroquois attack even here at home, he warned them, unless you arm yourselves and behave like brave warriors – like the French, the Iroquois, and above all like himself, described, pointedly, as both French and Iroquois. “For myne owne part I will venter choosing to die like a man than live like a beggar. … They were amazed of our proceeding.” In the end, the “councell” came around and committed to the trade. Radisson illustrates the complicated relationship between diplomacy and economics; he reminds us that the early fur trade was not, any more than the early slave trade, intrinsically commodi-fied. Scottish Enlightenment philosophers might reason that trade was “natural” (and perhaps they even reasoned from the Hudson’s Bay Company governance of Rupert’s Land primarily through trade), but early narratives like that of Radisson convey a much more complicated world of reasoning and mutual adaptation. But “early narratives like that of Radisson” is a misstatement: there is only one Radisson. The exuberance is rather exalted...

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