Introduction
At about one in the morning on Pentecost Sunday, May 19, 1652, a cleric, the Abbé de l’Isle de Marivault, Docteur en Théologie de la Faculté de Paris, de la Maison de Navarre, fell into the Seine and drowned and in so doing doomed a budding French colony in Cayenne even before the ships carrying the colonists, including a contingent of four missionary priests, set out from Le Havre for South America. The priests had volunteered to take part in a new French effort to establish a colony on the “Wild Coast” of Guiana. The shareholders in the project called their chartered monopoly La Grande Compagnie de la Terre Ferme de l’Amérique ou de la France Équinoxiale (sometimes spelled Equinoctiale).Footnote 1 According to Fr. Antoine Biet, who wrote a lengthy narrative of the colonial project from its inception to its demise within two years of its establishment in Guiana, Marivault’s death was the beginning of the end for the nascent colony.Footnote 2 “In this we have the first premonition of all the misfortunes and of all the disasters that happened to this ill-fated colony. The intentions of all those who went into this land lacked the required purity: in addition, God would not allow that this great man, whom we did not deserve, would see and witness such misfortunes that befell the colony, its innumerable sins having elicited Divine vengeance that the colony justly incurred.”Footnote 3
In 1638, fourteen years before Marivault drowned, Mazarin’s predecessor and mentor, Cardinal Richelieu, who had appointed himself grand maître de la navigation et du commerce de France, chartered the Compagnie du Cap de Nord, a joint-stock company whose shareholders were mostly from Rouen.Footnote 4 This was part of Richelieu’s scheme to expand France’s colonial and commercial presence in the New World. The company’s director, Captain Jacob Bontemps,Footnote 5 collaborated in 1643 with the wealthy Parisian noble Charles Poncet de Brétigny to create a colony of about three hundred men, including four priests and two Capuchin monks, in Cayenne.
The mid-seventeenth century represented for French Catholic missionaries a time of great opportunity in the New World, but also challenges. The defeat of the Huguenots at La Rochelle in 1627–28 ushered in a new era for the role of Protestants in French colonization. Soon after he claimed the throne of France in 1594 Henry IV set about to reinvigorate French efforts to build a colonial empire in the New World. Although now Catholic, Henry retained close ties to Huguenot noblemen and merchants. Well aware that many of his supporters had sponsored numerous fishing and trading voyages to Canada and the coast of South America, Henry turned to these Protestant allies to fund and lead new commercial and colonial ventures.Footnote 6 During the regency of Marie de Medici and the minority of Louis XIII, the Recollects, Capuchins, and Jesuits, drew upon Catholic supporters at court to sponsor missionaries to take part in and even help organize colonial ventures in the New World. Once Louis XIII shook off his mother’s tutelage, and especially after Cardinal Richelieu named himself grand maître de la navigation in 1626, Protestants trading in the New World found themselves under increasing pressure. Richelieu and the clerical orders were united in their desire to centralize colonial ventures under the Crown and to reduce the role of Protestants in funding or founding colonies. The clerics in particular viewed the Protestants as a threat to their Catholic evangelization of the native peoples and wanted Protestants barred entirely from settling in the New World. Protestant merchants attempted to hang on to their monopolies but over time found themselves marginalized or at best reduced to the role of passive investors in companies dominated by Catholic merchants, royal office holders. and nobles, mostly based in Paris.Footnote 7
In the case of the Compagnie du Cap de Nord, the leader of the 1643 expedition, Charles de Brétigny, was a devout Catholic, as was Paul Boyer, who chronicled the colony’s establishment and demise. The founders of La Grande Compagnie de la Terre Ferme de l’Amérique ou de la France Équinoxiale claimed that Jacob Bontemps, head of the Compagnie du Cap de Nord, was a Protestant. But Bontemps was closely associated with multiple overseas ventures that Richelieu sponsored. In 1636 Bontemps bought shares in the Compagnie des îles d’Amérique and in 1638 he invested in Richelieu’s Compagnie de la Nouvelle France. It is doubtful that Richelieu would have granted Bontemps a royal monopoly if he was indeed Protestant. Some of the colonists the Compagnie du Cap de Nord sponsored may have been Protestant, but there is no indication that they were the majority or that the colony at Cayenne suffered from the religious strife that tore apart earlier French colonies in Florida and Brazil.Footnote 8
Yet a year after Compagnie du Cap de Nord founded its colony at Cayenne (1643) most of the colonists were dead. Over three hundred of them, including Brétigny, perished in an ambush in the forest, probably the work of the native Galibí.Footnote 9 The survivors took refuge in the fort where they remained besieged until the Capuchins, who retained some credibility with the Galibí, managed to establish a fragile peace. Most of the survivors fled to Suriname, although a few hung on and worked their plantations. The priests stayed as well and continued their mission to the Galibí.Footnote 10
Among the survivors was Paul Boyer, Sieur du Petit-Puy, a gentleman from Normandy and one of Brétigny’s lieutenants. Boyer had received a solid humanist education in his youth and in 1654 he published in Paris a history of the disaster replete with references to classical literature, Catholic theology, and Renaissance science. Boyer was a soldier and one of the officers under Brétigny’s command, but unlike Brétigny he was very close to the priests, whom he credited with saving his life from the ravages both of the half-mad Brétigny and the Galibí. Only the clerics kept their heads during the crisis, according to Boyer, and tried—albeit largely in vain—to rein in Brétigny, broker agreements between Brétigny and his mutinous men, and negotiate truces between the French and the Galibí.Footnote 11 Without the clerics, Boyer insisted, none of the French colonists would have survived.
In the accounts of both colonies we have narratives of heroic priests vainly struggling to ensure the survival of the colony, so that they could carry out its central mission of evangelizing the natives. The clerics’ adversaries in this battle for souls, both those of the natives and those of the French colonists, lay in nature—and in human nature. The natural world remained a constant foe unless harnessed to the benefit of the colony. But despite the realities of the tropical climate and swampy geography of Guiana, the most serious adversary the French faced in Boyer’s narrative, as in Biet’s, was always human nature. Boyer and Biet alike portray both the French and the natives as possessing deep, intrinsic moral flaws that required clerical mediation and moral guidance to tame.
Of course it would be unwise to take the authors’ interpretation of these stories at face value since neither Boyer nor Biet was an objective observer. They were participants in the power struggles within the colonies and both chose sides. Because they survived disasters that claimed most of their fellow colonists as well as the funds investors in France had sunk into the ventures, Boyer and Biet needed to exculpate themselves in their accounts. Moreover, other factors besides factional strife in the colonies contributed to the demise of these mid-seventeenth century efforts to colonize Guiana—a lack of commitment from a French court distracted by political unrest in France, company directors who absconded with funds, and rivalry among competing companies whose shareholders pressed their claims at court.
Still, the Boyer and Biet narratives and others like them reveal the expectations that everyone involved in an early modern colonial venture had of clerics. Shareholders, company directors, royal officials, colonists, and the clerics themselves all believed that clerics could “make or break” a colony depending on their ability and willingness to fulfil the roles expected of them. Above all, clerics needed and were expected to be successful mediators, between the colonists and the natives, between the colonists and other Europeans powers claiming the same territory as the French, and among factions within the colonies. Mediation was a primary benchmark by which colonists, shareholders, and the clerics themselves assessed the performance of clerics in these French colonies.
The Guiana ventures examined here are those the French launched during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. These colonies disintegrated mostly as a result of the inept colonial administration in France and the organizers’ ignorance about conditions in Guiana. The directors and shareholders of each new monopoly company insisted on excluding their displaced counterparts from earlier companies, which naturally engendered persistent lawsuits from the denuded investors. More dangerous, the leaders of the new colonies stubbornly refused to profit from the “local knowledge” of the survivors from previous colonies that they found working plantations in Guiana, even as they insisted that these “veteran” colonists bow to their authority. As a result, the colonies launched in the mid-seventeenth century imploded as the companies sponsoring them went bankrupt and failed to dispatch to the settlements fresh colonists and provisions. The leaders seemed to develop a kind of megalomania that inspired mutinies, while the natives decimated the colonists who survived the tropical diseases and incessant infighting. In 1666 the Jesuits arrived, which marked a turning point. They built a large and successful plantation at Rémire that helped to “anchor” the colony. By the eighteenth century, French planters were cultivating sugar and tobacco in and around Cayenne using primarily the labour of African slaves, and the French were in Guiana to stay.Footnote 12
This centrality of clerics to the dynamics of colonial ventures can also be seen in the 1643 and 1652 Guiana colonies because the clerics in question failed to live up to the hopes and expectations of their secular associates. In the case of Boyer, the inability of the Capuchin missionaries to stop the spreading “madness” that led to the destruction of the colony is implied rather than explicitly stated, but it still emerges from a close reading of the text. Boyer’s Capuchins were heroic, but in the end unable to stem the tide of chaos that engulfed the colony. Biet is more honest about his own shortcomings, in part as a strategy to explain why he was unable to prevent the assassination of the expedition’s leader or to broker a lasting truce between the leaders of rival factions in the colony. Had Marivault survived, things would have turned out differently, Biet asserts. But as it was he, a humble priest whom Marivault’s demise obliged to assume a position of authority for which he was unprepared, could never have commanded the same measure of respect from the haughty French nobles on the expedition that Marivault would have enjoyed. Biet did his best, but he was unable to rein in the forces of disorder and sin.
Like the Dutch and the English, the French launched a series of ventures to colonize the coast of South America beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. The French failed to establish any lasting footholds south of the Amazon River, and even the enclave the Dutch managed to carve out in Brazil collapsed after a few decades in the face of determined Portuguese resistance. All three northern European powers, unable to break Spanish control of the South American coast of modern-day Venezuela and Colombia, or to oust the Portuguese from Brazil, turned their attention to the “Wild Coast” in between, the region north of the Amazon and south of the Orinoco River.Footnote 13 Most of the scholarly attention to the French portion of this territory during the ancien régime focuses on the eighteenth century, and on the twin issues of slavery, which ultimately assured the survival and prosperity of the colony, and the “disaster at Kourou” in 1763–66, in which approximately 9,000 mostly French colonists died at Kourou in Guiana as a result of a yellow fever epidemic and administrative ineptitude on the part of the Chevalier Turgot and the Duc de Choiseul.Footnote 14
The organizers of the French colonies in Guiana examined here recruited the Capuchins because of the order’s extensive missionary experience in Africa and Brazil. Thus the Capuchins were the logical choice of missionaries for the French colony to the north of the Amazon.Footnote 15 Ultimately it was the Jesuits who became the most important missionaries partnering with the French throughout the French colonial world in the ancien régime. The Jesuits were not necessarily more devout or more learned than the Capuchins, but they were more adept administrators and diplomats, and better equipped to solicit funds and political support from the French aristocracy and to stabilize the often tense relationships among the colonists.Footnote 16
The Compagnie du Cap de Nord
In his account of the Compagnie du Cap de Nord, published in Paris in 1654, Paul Boyer tells us little about the gestation of the company, although more can be learned from the documents derived from the legal struggle between the Compagnie du Cap de Nord and its younger rival, the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale.Footnote 17 It was clearly no accident that Boyer published his book when he did, in the same year that the latter company was on the verge of collapse. Although Boyer did not take part in the 1652 expedition, he was a firm supporter of another effort to plant a French colony in Guiana. Upon his return to France from Guiana in 1645 he immediately joined another Guiana venture in 1648. This project too ended in disarray, with Boyer and the Capuchin missionaries stranded in Martinique after internal dissension between the colonists and the ship’s crew, which the Capuchins tried but failed to temper, made it impossible for them to remain in Guiana.Footnote 18
Throughout his accounts, Boyer emphasizes the importance of the Capuchins to the success or failure of the entire colony. The Capuchin fathers wanted to tend to souls and yet found themselves obliged to mediate among the French. The clerics recognized that the French colonists were almost as badly in need of evangelization and instruction as the Galibí, and strived to increase prayer, religious devotion, and morality among the French whom they expected, in vain, to set a good example for the Galibí. But they could not escape the increasingly dire situation of the colony. According to Boyer, Brétigny appointed himself “king” of the colony, attempted to force the Galibí to wear clothes and give up polygamy, imprisoned, tortured, and executed colonists who opposed him and, in what ultimately led to Brétigny’s demise, attempted to kidnap for himself the beautiful wife of a Galibí chief. Thus in Boyer’s telling, which seems largely to reflect the perspective of the Capuchins, Brétigny’s classic sins of pride, anger, greed, and lust doomed the colony. Brétigny’s irrational behaviour caused a breakdown in formerly cordial relations with the Galibí. The French depended on the Galibí for food and were too weak militarily to risk open warfare with them. The French colonists found ample opportunities to desert and join the better-equipped Dutch settlement in Suriname.Footnote 19
The deteriorating situation led to a mutiny in which a large faction of the colony, including most of Brétigny’s officers and military leaders, imprisoned him.Footnote 20 The mutineers soon quarrelled amongst themselves and it became apparent that without a strong leader the colony was doomed. The Capuchins took the initiative to negotiate a truce between Brétigny and his captors that led to his release. The truce was set down on paper in “Articles accordez par Monsieur de Brétigny.” The first article stated that Brétigny would “maintain the Ecclesiastics in all of their privileges, rights, powers, authorities, immunities, franchises, and liberties accorded to them, by the Holy See and by the King, and will maintain the Capuchin Fathers in the habitation that they have chosen, with lands suited to the number of their Religious.”Footnote 21 The Capuchins were determined to protect their mission and assert its centrality to that of the colony as a whole, which without doubt undermined Brétigny’s trust in them. The colony existed to support the mission, in the Capuchins’ view, and Brétigny’s prerogatives began where those of the mission ended, not the other way around. In agreeing to the terms of the truce, Brétigny was also on notice that if he violated its terms they would withdraw their support for him. The enmity between them and Brétigny was papered over, literally, but barely, in the truce. From Brétigny’s perspective, the Capuchins were asserting that they were the real political authority in the colony as well as its spiritual foundation.
Things came to a head a second time when a Galibí leader who supported the French drowned. Paranoid and fearful of a mutiny, Brétigny beheaded one of the few supporters he had left among the colony’s officers. He then clapped the Capuchin fathers in irons and refused to permit them to say mass when they again attempted to mediate between the mutineers and Brétigny; clearly he no longer trusted them to act as neutral arbiters.Footnote 22 He also took two sons of the chief of a nearby Galibí settlement hostage. When the hostages escaped, Brétigny insisted, against the advice of Boyer and several other officers, on pursuing them with three hundred of the colonists. In doing so, he was marching straight into a trap the Galibí had set to lure the French out of their fort so that they could be ambushed in the forest. Boyer did not accompany the expedition because he had fallen out with Brétigny and thus remained behind to hide from Brétigny and remain close to the Capuchin fathers, who were still chained in the fort’s jail. After killing Brétigny (and eating him, according to Boyer) and most of the colonists, the Galibí burned the French plantations and besieged the fort. The French still had a cannon, which they were able to use to keep the Galibí at bay, but provisions were scarce and the Galibí obviously could not be counted on to bring more. Since the colony had not received any new supplies or settlers from France, the survivors holed up in the fort would not last long if they couldn’t get out to forage for food.Footnote 23
Fortunately for Boyer and the other French survivors of the massacre, the Capuchins had nurtured better relations with the Galibí than had Brétigny and were willing to step in at this critical juncture to save the remaining French colonists. In the heat of the battle to defend the fort, the surviving colonists decided to release the Capuchin priests. Father Anthoine, head of the clerics, sent two priests out to negotiate with the Natives. According to Boyer:
And sure enough, these visible angels always animated by a glorious and zealous sentiment and charity for the salvation of all people, no sooner than had they been freed from the chains and bonds by which they had been so unjustly held up to that day, then did they go out before those thunderous legions [of Galibí] with nothing but a crucifix in their hand, at the sight of which those ferocious beasts put down their arms, as if they had been compelled to do so by force. Then Father Anthoine, Superior of the Order, after the Frenchmen who remained in the fort had told him about everything that had taken place, called their [Galibí] leader before him and commanded him on the part of God, of whom he had often spoken to them, to impose silence on all of his people, which was immediately done, to the great joy of our people [the French].Footnote 24
The Capuchins then negotiated a peace treaty with the Galibí, who retreated—with the encouragement, Boyer admitted, of a couple of cannon shots. It is important to point out that this incident is likely exaggerated if not wholly apocryphal. Boyer’s account does contain a brief glossary/lexicon of Galibí words and phrases and it is clear that among the French and the Galibí alike there were individuals who could translate at least some of the negotiations between the two peoples. But just as in Champlain’s accounts of his discussions of religion with the Montagnais at Tadoussac in 1603,Footnote 25 it is unlikely that the French and native peoples comprehended each other nearly as well as Boyer asserts in this passage. But what is significant here is what Boyer believed the clerics could be expected to do on behalf of the colony—mediate among the colonists and between them and the Galibí, as well as between them all and God.
The Galibí continued to harass the French, however, even though some of them also invited the Capuchins to leave the fort and establish a mission at Kourou. The Galibí assured the clerics they would be quite safe and receive food and protection. Evidently the Galibí were willing to keep the priests, or at least unwilling at that point to risk angering the Christian God by massacring them, but wanted to separate them from the colonists, whom they hoped to evict from their territory or kill.Footnote 26 The Capuchins accepted the offer and left for Kourou with a small group of the colonists, even as a French ship arrived and forty other French survivors boarded it and sailed to the island of Saint Kitts. When the new colonists sent by the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale arrived in Cayenne in September of 1652, they found four priests and two Capuchin monks from the previous colonies still there, with a small following of baptized Galibí.Footnote 27 The Capuchins were essentially acting as ambassadors, mediators, and, in the absence of company-authorized leaders of the settlement, colonial administrators.
Boyer’s narrative has a single driving theme throughout: the suitability of Guiana for French colonization. The land is fertile, the air and water healthy, the climate mild, and even the stars are “beneficent” in the wholesome environment, astrological and natural, that they create for the colony.Footnote 28 The French should not, therefore, have let the failure of Brétigny’s colony deter them. In Boyer’s narrative, it was Brétigny’s pride and lust that sowed discord among the colonists and between them and the Galibí, who favoured the French over the Dutch or the Portuguese. Boyer also portrays the Capuchin clerics as both within yet apart from the colony at the same time. They were central to its raison d’être, justifying the colony’s existence before God and man. When the colonists ignored the advice of the Capuchins, the Capuchins withdrew their support, which they could do because they were above and outside the colony. God turned his face away from His people in Old Testament fashion and the result was a disaster that only repentance and a return to obedience (to the Capuchins as God’s representatives in Guiana) could save the situation. Thus the environment and the Galibí were instruments of divine wrath. In this way Boyer crafted a narrative in which Guiana can be the “Promised Land” of a French colonial empire, but only if that empire served the holy purpose of evangelization, and obeyed the clerics who should advise its leaders. For Boyer, “spiritual geopolitics” was the only politics that could assure the success of a French colony in Guiana.
The Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale
In 1646 François Dolu, Conseiller en le Conseil Privé du Roi and President de la Chambre des Comptes de Paris,Footnote 29 persuaded Cardinal Mazarin that the Rouen company had failed to carry out its mandate. The time had come to establish a new joint stock company to again try to colonize Cayenne.Footnote 30 Dolu had previously been a shareholder in a monopoly company, La Compagnie de Montmorency pour la Nouvelle-France, created in 1625.Footnote 31 Dolu and his associates, who included Sorbonne theologian Abbé Marivault, Norman nobleman Étienne Le Roux de Roiville (sometimes spelled Royville), and general secretary of the marine Pierre de La Boulaye, asserted that Bontemps and his associates had reneged on the conditions of their charter. Bontemps had neither planted a viable colony nor supported a mission of sufficient size to convert the Galibí inhabitants of Cayenne to Catholicism. Worse, Bontemps had tolerated Huguenots among the colonists, and kept the colony woefully undersupplied and poorly defended. After Brétigny’s death, Bontemps still had not sent fresh colonists or priests to revive the colony. The royal charter granted to the Compagnie du Cap de Nord ought to be abrogated, therefore, and a new charter granted to Dolu and his associates. Another cleric at the royal court, the Abbé de la Boulaye, Conseiller du Roy en ses Conseils et Intendant général de la Marine sous Monseigneur le Duc de Vendôme, played a central role in organizing this 1652 Guiana venture and in persuading Cardinal Mazarin to issue a charter and trade monopoly to the shareholders, whom he also helped to recruit. Capuchin priest, Father Antoine Biet, Curé de Ste. Geneviève de Senlis, published an account of the colony that includes the tale of Marivault’s untimely demise and the subsequent disintegration of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale.
After Marivault’s death the remaining four Capuchin priests who made the voyage to Cayenne in 1652 chose Biet as their leader, although Biet readily acknowledged that he was ill-prepared to assume Marivault’s role.Footnote 32 Most of what we know about the colony comes from Biet. In his telling, he and his fellow clerics represented a force promoting order, morality, and peaceful relations with the native peoples and amongst the colonists, even though without Marivault they lacked the strength to fend off the immorality—the greed and pride of the French, the irreligion and sloth of the Galibí—that ultimately destroyed the colony. Clerics, therefore, were at the heart of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale, in the politics at court that led to its genesis, in its internal dynamics in France and in Guiana, in its diplomatic relations with opponents who threatened its survival, and in its disintegration. And Biet’s story also contained a moral similar to that of Boyer—the clerics were not responsible for the sins of the lay colonists, but only the moral guidance of priests could quell the chaos and sin that threatened the colony from within and without, and only a moral Catholic French colony could convert and tame the native peoples of the New World.Footnote 33
Dolu, the Abbé de la Boulaye, and Marivault were part of the circle of dévôts at court surrounding Mazarin and the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria, and were able to tap into these connections to fund the Guiana project, just as proponents of French colonies elsewhere in the New World had from the late sixteenth century forward. Richelieu’s niece, the Duchesse D’Aiguillon, for example, was a powerful supporter of the new company. The company’s directors seem to have been sincere in their devotion to the Christianizing mission in the New World, although they also highlighted their eagerness to advance the cause of evangelization to contrast themselves favourably with their less ardent rival Bontemps. Moreover, they had the support of César de Vendôme, the illegitimate son of Henry IV, who now that Richelieu was dead held the title of grand maître de la navigation. With Vendôme’s help, Dolu and his associates were able to persuade the crown to nullify the charter of the Compagnie du Cap de Nord and accord a new one to Dolu’s company, the Compagnie de la Terre Ferme de l’Amérique ou France Équinoxiale, in 1651.Footnote 34
The directors recruited hundreds of colonists for the venture, among them approximately ninety women; but we know very little about most of these colonists, unfortunately. At least a fifth of the settlers, entitled habitants, were wealthy and from genteel backgrounds. The habitants in turn sponsored retinues of more humble colonists who were expected to serve them and work on their plantations as paid employees or indentured servants in return for the cost of their passage. Ominously, many of the gentlemen who planned to make the voyage also demanded the right to bring with them armed supporters in the guise of valets, supposedly to ensure their personal safety. Biet signalled early in his account the danger this posed, as it meant that factions could, and did, quickly emerge, as these proud nobles, unused to shipboard discipline, bridled at Roiville’s authority and possessed the means to resist it. The expedition also originally included six priests, although only four (including Biet) actually made the voyage. Judging from the subscriptions and shares the directors claimed they had sold, as well as the number of colonists, the company at the outset at least had ample funding. Despite Marivault’s death and further delays in Rouen and Le Havre, on July 2 the two ships carrying six to seven hundred soldiers and settlers and the four missionaries finally set sail from Le Havre for Guiana, where they arrived on Sunday, September 29.Footnote 35 For Biet, the narrative arc of his story, and that of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale, begins and ends with a cleric.
Biet’s story is also illuminating from another perspective, that of what he did, and what he failed to do, during the voyage and in Guiana. Again and again he portrays himself as helpless to mediate among the strong-willed, powerful gentlemen colonists whose struggles among themselves led to the assassination of Roiville before the ships even arrived in Guiana. He found the Galibí intractable and preferred to remain safely within Fort Cépérou to minister as best he could to the spiritual needs of the colonists, whose morality and piety he found alarmingly lax. Moreover, none of the leaders of the colony seem to have been inclined to permit Biet to assume any sort of authority beyond the realm of the spiritual and Biet was aware of the dangers such a role would pose for him anyway. If he became too embroiled in political struggles he would lose his credibility as a broker.Footnote 36
Biet was well-educated and not a stupid man. There was a strategy behind how he portrayed himself in his narrative, as a well-meaning but largely ineffectual cleric, unable to stave off Roiville’s growing madness, broker a peace among the colonists, or tame the wilderness of Guiana or its “savage” denizens, the Galibí. It is true that the challenges Biet faced were, if anything, more complicated than those facing Boyer’s Father Anthony. But Biet was also navigating treacherous waters in writing his account of the colony. He needed to show himself doing his duty, performing the services expected of the leader of the clerical contingent in a colonial expedition, and yet explain why his best efforts failed. Biet urgently needed to deflect blame from himself and from the Sieur de Bragelonne, with whom Biet sided in the struggles that tore the colony apart after Roiville’s death. In Biet’s case, being at the centre of the “action” was dangerous because the “action” in this case was a mutiny that resulted in the assassination of the captain of the ship upon which Biet was sailing and the governor of the colony to which Biet was supposed to minister. Biet knew that there were other eyewitness accounts besides his own circulating in France and he needed to demonstrate that he did his clerical duty in ministering to all factions, including to Roiville himself, but that he was in no way to blame for the outcome.Footnote 37 Biet’s solution, like that of Boyer, was to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the expedition’s leader. Roiville’s pride and paranoia alienated the other expedition leaders and forced them to eliminate Roiville before he could endanger the entire enterprise. They couldn’t wait until they got to Guiana and take the risk that so far from French royal authority Roiville and his partisans would usurp power from the colony’s governing council and Roiville would become another Brétigny.Footnote 38
The Sieur de Roiville appears to have been playing a double game with the directors of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale. The Compagnie du Cap de Nord was based in Normandy. Roiville had friends and relatives in Rouen, where he insisted that the two ships of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale stop for nearly a week before heading on to Le Havre and from there finally embarking for Guiana. In Rouen, Roiville was “regaled by the principal [inhabitants] of the city who were his kin and allies.”Footnote 39 Biet was suspicious of the stopover in Rouen, and suspected that Roiville had secretly negotiated with his fellow Norman, Jacob Bontemps, who was suing the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale for damages even while lobbying at court for the reinstatement of his charter.Footnote 40
After Marivault’s demise, the directors of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale asked one of their number, the Sieur de Bragelonne, to sail with the expedition to the New World. Bragelonne was a powerful man, a member of the royal council and of the Parlement of Brittany, and Intendant of Orléans. Bragelonne agreed to travel to Guiana and take over Marivault’s position as one of the company’s directors who would help lead the colony at Cayenne. The articles of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale specifically stated that whereas Roiville, as was customary, would have absolute authority over the expedition while it was as sea, upon arrival in Guiana, he would have to cede power to a council, one that Bragelonne intended to lead. This provision appears to have been added to the charter precisely to avoid the situation in which the previous colony found itself under the leadership of the “tyrannical” and unstable Brétigny.Footnote 41
Bragelonne, Roiville, and the Sieur de Vertaumon, another leading noble and company director who joined the expedition, soon entered into a three-way power struggle as they sailed toward Guiana on board the flagship, the Charité. Although Bragelonne and Vertaumon despised each other almost as much as they did Roiville, they and their heavily armed valets joined forces to assassinate Roiville and throw his body overboard when, they claimed, they discovered that he was secretly plotting to undermine the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale by accusing its directors of clandestine support for the frondeurs waging war against Mazarin and Anne of Austria back in France.Footnote 42
There is a great deal of mystery surrounding these events, and the goal here is not to seek to unravel them. Rather, I want to focus on what Biet claims that he did or did not do, in the tense days leading up to Roiville’s murder, and in the immediate aftermath. Roiville had brought his own supporters, including armed valets, on his ship, and the other colonists began to accuse him of “tyranny,” of plotting to use his soldiers and valets to control the colony even after it landed in Guiana.Footnote 43 Biet obviously knew that something was afoot but claims that Roiville and the other seigneurs mostly excluded him from their company and their plots, so that he and his fellow priests were left to their own devices, except to say mass on deck when conditions at sea permitted it. Given the course of events, he had good reason in his subsequent account of the voyage to dissociate himself from the assassins, whom Roiville’s heirs sued in France upon receiving news of Roiville’s demise. The ships sailed from Le Havre on July 2, yet according to Biet it was only on August 25 that he was invited to dine at the captain’s table, after having said mass that Sunday, the feast of Saint Louis.Footnote 44 It was thus a sign of Roiville’s desperation that he turned to Biet for advice and support in September. The vessels were becalmed, making only slow progress toward Cayenne, and fevers were spreading among the passengers and crew. Roiville’s supporters were especially hard hit, and Biet states that he found Roiville “very melancholy to see his principal allies ill or in convalescence and nearly unable to get to their feet.”Footnote 45
On September 12, Roiville himself fell ill. Biet’s solution to the troubles besetting the voyage was to recommend a penance service on the Feast of Saint Matthew, in which everyone took part and received the Eucharist. On September 16, the Sieur de Bragelonne and his “associates” moved their quarters to the far end of the ship from Roiville in order, according to Biet, to leave Roiville “in greater liberty.” But Roiville, sensing danger, also insisted on joining Bragelonne and the others on the poop deck. Before moving out of his cabin, Roiville summoned Biet and asked the priest to say a mass and give him communion the following day. Essentially Roiville was asking Biet to give him the last rites should he not survive the voyage. Biet’s response? “To console him, I told him that his illness was not such that he needed to receive the Viaticum … I commended the whole thing to God.Footnote 46 On the evening of September 18, Roiville again asked Biet to hear his confession and then, “all of a sudden” announced that he was not disposed to confess. Biet returned to his cabin and prayed for Roiville’s soul.Footnote 47
Clearly these scenes were meant to exculpate Biet for the reality that Roiville died without receiving last rites. Biet portrays Roiville here as driven half-mad by his own duplicity and his overweening pride and hunger for power. The crisis came the night of the 18th. Biet was convalescing from a fever, and went to bed. He was sleeping on top of the trunk holding weapons on the upper deck, as he found the odors from the many sick men below deck unbearable. He was soon awakened from a sound sleep by the noise of voices and men moving about. Then he heard someone yell “Throw the bastard into the sea!” He got up and tried to get onto the poop deck to see what was going on, but was pushed back by “someone from that faction,” whom he claimed not to recognize in the darkness, and who told him it was “nothing” and that he should go back to bed, which Biet did. About fifteen minutes later that same person who pushed him away came to fetch Biet on the part of the Sieur de Bragelonne. Biet went onto the poop deck and what he saw made his “hair stand on end” and his blood “freeze in his veins.” The tent in which Roiville had been sleeping was overturned and Roiville’s sheets and mattress were “bathed in blood, with two bloody bayonettes laying on the mattress, and the blood-soaked poop deck appeared “as if someone had gutted a sheep.” And there was no sign of Roiville.Footnote 48
Biet’s reaction to this turn of events was understated to say the least. Bragelonne explained to Biet that he and his “associates” had decided it was “a propos” to unburden themselves of a man who wanted to kill them all and destroy the colony. Biet’s response is revealing. “I told him that up to that time I had neither taken sides nor wanted to get involved in their temporal affairs, that I knew nothing about their differences and that if they had acted rightly, they would find that out soon enough.”Footnote 49 After that, Biet went back to bed, wept copiously and then put himself in God’s hands. The next morning, Bragelonne again summoned Biet and asked him to announce that Roiville had been killed because of his plots to do away with the other members of the company on board who opposed him.Footnote 50
Bragelonne’s request placed Biet in a terrible dilemma. Biet knew that in publicly endorsing their accusations against Roiville, he would render himself as guilty as they in the eyes of the law. But if he did not concede to Bragelonne’s demand, “the spectre of death” rose before his eyes, as they could kill him too and throw him overboard. Clearly Biet was unsure of his support amongst the colonists or the crew, even though he asserted that “it occurred to me that I had only to open my mouth, and it would have been easy for me to persuade three hundred persons to grab a billhook and avenge the death of the General [Roiville].”Footnote 51 But, Biet decided it wasn’t worth it, since after all a terrible carnage would result, a massacre that “would not bring him [Roiville] back to life, as his soul was before God and his body was in the sea.” So Biet again prayed and then addressed the ship’s company and crew. “My children,” said Biet, “no doubt you’ve already been informed that we no longer have a General, and during the night God forbade me to tell you what happened, but perhaps it has all taken place according to the will of Divine Providence, which you should all adore in all things, and perhaps it has been for the good of the colony that things have turned out this way.”Footnote 52
From that point until the dissolution of the colony, Biet followed his own advice. As Bragelonne and Vertaumon began to feud in Guiana, Biet resolutely supported Bragelonne and condemned Vertaumon in much the same terms he had earlier used in criticizing Roiville. He did attempt, however, to mediate between Bragelonne and Vertaumon, whom the company had elected to replace Roiville as governor.Footnote 53 In his later account, Biet made no secret that he viewed the decision to choose Vertaumon over Bragelonne to have been disastrous and a main cause of the colony’s subsequent collapse. As tensions rose between the factions in the colony, on January 26, 1653 Vertaumon left the fort at Cépérou and retired across the Rémire River, where he took refuge with supporters in their plantations. After Bragelonne and his allies made several fruitless attempts to arrest Vertaumon, Biet stepped forward and advised them to let him try to mediate. The colony was on the verge of open conflict with the Galibí, supplies were lacking, the weather was unceasingly rainy, and a “civil war” among the French would destroy the colony. Biet asserted that not only should the French refrain from “spilling the blood of their brothers,” but on the contrary, they needed to conserve it so that they could in unity “oppose their common enemies, the Savages.”Footnote 54
Biet’s mediation took the form of writing a letter to Vertaumon, hiding that Biet was speaking also on behalf of the colonists at Cépérou and begging Vertaumon to see reason and make peace with Bragelonne. Biet received a conciliatory response from Vertaumon, who no doubt was also worried about the ramifications of the colony’s divisions and fearful that the Galibí would take advantage of the infighting to attack. After further negotiations, with Biet writing letters to mediate, the two sides agreed to a truce and “articles” of a treaty were drawn up that would permit Vertaumon to return in safety to Cépérou as governor of the colony, but that required him to submit to the will of a council comprised of the seigneurs, company officers who considered themselves Vertaumon’s equal. Biet, however, never left the fort at Cépérou, and rather than clerics, Vertaumon and Bragelonne each sent one of their gentlemen to carry out the face-to-face negotiations that finalized the treaty. Although Vertaumon returned to the fort, tensions remained high between his faction and that of Bragelonne.Footnote 55 Although in his capacity as priest and “peacemaker” Biet made the initial overtures to the fugitive Vertaumon, he neither drew up the articles of the “treaty” nor carried out the actual negotiations. He may have wanted to avoid the mistake of the Capuchins in the previous colony, whose assertiveness and insistence on their prerogatives in the treaty with Brétigny ultimately alienated Brétigny. Moreover, since Biet could not know which faction would prevail, he needed to be careful in his dealing with all the colonists to preserve the moral high ground that was the only real guarantee of safety for himself and his fellow clerics.
Meanwhile Biet seems to have had little success in evangelizing the Galibí. Like Bragelonne, Biet had little real sympathy for the Galibí, whom he described observing a mass held soon after he arrived as “watching these things with admiration, but purely like beasts and as idiots.”Footnote 56 The Galibí in Biet’s account remain mostly nameless and faceless, wild and untrustworthy savages as difficult to tame as the wilderness itself. Biet also distrusted the Sieur Le Vendangeur, a veteran from the Compagnie du Cap de Nord and practically the only one in the colony with any local knowledge or ability to negotiate with the Galibí. The six clerics already in Guiana when Biet arrived had built a small church and established a mission, so he and his three fellow priests did not have to start from scratch. As superior of the clerical contingent in the colony Biet led the religious processions and spoke on behalf of the fathers. He appears to have let the other priests do most of the actual work evangelizing the Galibí. Biet’s main focus remained the miserable state of the souls of the French colonists.
Throughout his account, Biet is at pains to emphasize that he was carrying out what he thought was expected of a cleric in a colonial venture. He took part in the councils of the leading colonists, and offered advice and support to Bragelonne as best he could. Biet was a close observer of the personalities within the colony. As readers expected from early modern travel literature, in the third section in his book he also described in some detail the flora, fauna, and human inhabitants of Guiana. Despite his effort to mediate between Bragelonne and Vertaumon, however, for the most part he was content to observe them just as he observed the Galibí and the natural world of Guiana. Like Boyer’s Capuchins, because of their special role as missionaries and mediators with God Biet and his priests were “of” the colony but also apart from it. As he told Bragelonne the night of Roiville’s murder, he wanted no part in the “temporal affairs” of the colonists, and that seems to have included not only the rivalries among the colonists, but also the conflicts between them and the Natives. Unfortunately for the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale, however, what they needed in Guiana was an ambassador and an administrator of a colony who could mediate among the factions, exert ecclesiastical authority to help impose order, and develop good diplomatic relations with the Galibí.
Conclusion
The two case studies examined here help illuminate the various roles that clerics were expected to play in the genesis and establishment of a colony. As priests, the clerics were to act as peacemakers and to be trustworthy neutral arbiters who could remind the colonists of God’s will and the ultimately religious purpose of the colony and who could mediate with God as well as among the colonists. Their prayers could help soothe divine wrath against the colonists’ sins, and clerics’ religious authority could admonish the pride and rein in the propensity toward violence that early modern French culture considered to be natural and expected behaviour from gentlemen, soldiers, and sailors. As missionaries and men of God, clerics could nurture bonds of trust and friendship with the natives whom they won over to Christianity, and this reservoir of local allies could then help the colony live in peace with other indigenous people, even those not yet baptized. In this guise, clerics were expected to act as diplomats, serving in essence as ambassadors of French goodwill to the Galibí. If clerics played their roles well, they could be key to the success and prosperity of a colony. If, like Biet, they were not up to the task or overwhelmed by the passions and sins of the colonists, the colony would suffer keenly from the lack of the clerical guidance and mediation.
There is another way to think about the events and historical problems raised in this article, one that there is insufficient time or space here to explore more completely. I call the colonial ventures I have discussed here “failures.” Yet were they, and from whose perspective? I would contend that the “failure” in these instances was primarily institutional. The Compagnie du Cap de Nord and the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale collapsed. But the plantations themselves did not “fail.” The numbers of French colonists rose or declined, depending on the fortunes of the colony, as disease, conflict with the Galibí, lack of adequate resupply from France, poor leadership, and the difficult natural environment took the lives of many colonists and discouraged others who returned to France or sought their fortunes elsewhere in the Americas. But the French presence in Guiana never disappeared.
After the collapse of the Compagnie de la France Équinoxtiale, the British took possession of Cépérou and installed a number of Dutch Jews who took over the plantations. They worked them, and made at least some profits, along with some of the French who remained as well, until 1663 when two Frenchmen, the Sieurs Lefebvre de la Barre and Bouchardeau, ousted both the Dutch and the English, and regained control of the colony for France. Most of the Dutch Jewish planters left, but some French planters, among them some who had arrived under the auspices of the Compagnie du Cap de Nord or the Compagnie de la France Équinoxtiale, hung on throughout the ensuing century.Footnote 57 And the Capuchin mission endured, even during an interlude of English rule, as the Capuchin fathers continued to evangelize the Galibí while living side-by-side with Dutch Sephardic Jews and a mixture of French, English, and Dutch colonists. So “failure” here is a relative term. The history of the European settlements on South America’s “Wild Coast” was more complex and multicultural than scholars have perhaps acknowledged and it cannot be captured by the traditional histories of colonization based in the paradigm of the nascent nation-state.
