Voyage and Discovery: Myth and Memory of the Canadian New World

• Main Author: Rowley, Brendan
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Washington University Open Scholarship 2015
• Subjects: French and Francophone Language and Literature; Northwestern passage
• Online Access: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/491

The New World, the unknown lands of the west, for the French explorers of the early 16th century, are filled with strange and new peoples, unknown customs and seemingly incomprehensible savagery. When Jacques Cartier, André Thevet and François Rabelais' Pantagruel set sail from France towards the new continent, whether to search for the infamous northwestern passage, or as a kind of early modern ethnographer or on a quest for the Word of the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, parts of the New World had already been discovered by Europeans, but much remained to be explored. This work shows how each of these three authors experienced and wrote about their particular encounters with the Canadian New World. Moreover, this work demonstrates how the works of Jacques Cartier, André Thevet and François Rabelais, detailing their respective voyages to the New World, work in unision, either through intertextual borrowings or as epistemological inspiration, to create an image of the New World that gives a contemporary reader of the 21st century an idea of how the New World was perceived and understood in the early modern era.