ROCHEFORT, Charles de.

Second ‘authorized’ edition, revised and augmented with new material, including an extended description of the island of Tobago, of this fascinating and sumptuously illustrated survey of the Caribbean by French Huguenot minister Charles de Rochefort (1605-83), based largely on his own travels, with an historical account of French settlement in the West Indies. It includes descriptions of sugar plantations and slave labour, an account of the Apalachee people of northwestern Florida, and a dictionary of the ‘Caribe’ or Kalinago language. First published by Leers in 1658, with a simultaneous and probably pirated edition issued in Paris.

Rochefort’s work was intended to persuade Huguenots to emigrate to the Americas and escape the intolerance they experienced in France. The first part is a natural historical survey of the Caribbean, and in particular the Antilles, describing their wondrous natural qualities. The author describes the discovery of the islands by Columbus, with a critical account of their subsequent early settlement by the Spanish, including the devastating effects of European diseases on the Indigenous population. There follow hundreds of descriptions of native plants and animals, many illustrated with imaginative etchings depicting, for example, Indigenous people harvesting papaya and processing cassava roots, and a European man demonstrating the ‘sensitive’ qualities of the mimosa tree’s leaves.

The second part, the ‘moral history’ of the region, continues to present the region as a natural paradise and emphasises the economic possibilities of settlement there, including the use of enslaved people. The folding view of the governor’s plantation on Saint Christophe or Saint Kitts shows slave cabins just outside the garden walls, and there is a folding illustration depicting a sugar cane mill at work, with Europeans directing enslaved workers, and an extensive description of the process in the text. Rochefort describes both foreign colonisers, of whom he says ‘they are not made up only of base and low people, as one would expect, but include many noble personages too,’ as well the use of enslaved people, both Indigenous and from Africa, especially Angola, of which he is not critical. He then describes, with much material new to this edition, the societies of the Apalachee and Caribe Indigenous peoples, including their habitation, warfare, marriages, habitual diseases and medicine, funerary rites, etc., with a dictionary of the Caribe language, also called Kalingo, which Rochefort arranges by subject: body parts, kinship, rank, ‘actions and passions’, goods and trade, ornaments and arms, animals and plants, and abstract and spiritual concepts.

Much of this new, supplementary or revised material came from Édouard Graeves, a settler and missionary to the Apalachee people in Florida, from whom there is a long letter reprinted at the start; he had read the 1658 edition and sent corrections, new information and even crayon sketches to the publisher for inclusion in this edition. His drawings were the basis for the striking and fanciful view of the Apalachee kingdom, appearing here for the first time, which shows Apalachee men in robes and crown-like headdresses, a mimosa tree, and depicts the royal city of Melitot with palace and Christian church, and Mount Olaimi with the old Temple of the Sun.