PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France C ATHERINE J. L. T HEOBALD B RANDEIS U NIVERSITY The verbal and visual works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describing encounters between indigenous North Americans and Europeans foreground the many definitions of the word “la chair,” or “flesh,” derived from the Latin “caro” or “carnis.” From its literal meaning of the “tissu musculaire” of the body—or its edible parts as meat (an “aliment”)—to its strong association with pleasure (“des appétits physiques”) (“Chair”), the many physical and metaphorical notions of flesh permeate representations of interactions among explorers, missionaries, and autochtones in “la Nouvelle- France.” Often presented as naturalists’ specimens in early maps, exploration logs, and travel memoirs, indigenous people feature heavily in such wordimage depictions, forcing the reader to oscillate between different representational vocabularies. The persistent exposure of aboriginal bodies coupled with recurrent reports of cannibalism and torture reveal a European obsession with flesh in its many forms. Unsettling desires and a strong colonial bias, effects of the dual French aim in North America of “évangélisation et civilisation” (Trudel Histoire 278), complicate the underlying nexus of meaning and referent in the depicted body. These engagements of power and flesh continue—and even amplify—in accounts about seventeenth-century French missionary activity. Reports of conflicts between native peoples, particularly the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and the “Canadian martyrs” (also “North American martyrs”), as they are called in Catholic circles, abound. The visual and verbal rhetoric of Jesuit priests armed with the body of Christ in the form of the host reveals the power of flesh and of representation in its many forms to persuade past and present readers about morality and agency in the colonial space. The very first depictions of the “New World,” a term most likely first applied by Pierre Martyr d’Anghiera when describing the explorations of Christopher Columbus (Berthiaume 46), exhibit this fixation on bodies. Often Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 116 wearing little, indigenous people nurse their babies, farm, butcher animals (and humans), and dance under the gazes of explorers and their avid readers, a trend that continues throughout the following centuries. Jacques Cartier’s three reports of his expeditions between 1534 and 1542 are the primary source for the first descriptions of New France, despite the fact that no verifiable manuscripts in the explorer’s hand exist (Cook x-xi). 1 The first voyage led to present-day Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, New Brunswick, and the Gaspé peninsula, a trip commissioned by François I in the interest of finding a passage to the Pacific and acquiring material riches (Trudel Mythes 19). Cartier describes his first sighting of indigenous people in the following way: “Il y a des gens à ladite Terre qui sont assez de belle corpulance, mais ilz sont gens effarables et sauvaiges. Ilz ont leurs cheveulx lies sur leurs testes en faczon d’une pougnye de fain [foin] teurcze et ung clou passé par my ou aultre chosse, Et y lient aulcunes [quelques] plumes des ouaiseaulx” (11-12). Keeping his distance, Cartier relates that the surveyed individuals are “effarables,” similar to the modern French adjective “effarant,” joined to the idea of “effroi.” They are also “sauvaiges,” translated in the first Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694) as “féroce, farouche” or pertaining to “certains Peuples qui vivent ordinairement dans les bois, sans religion, sans loix, sans habitation fixe, et plustost en bestes qu’en hommes” (“Sauvage”). In fact, this later dictionary uses the example of indigenous people of the Americas and Africa to further define the word (“Les peuples sauvages de l’Amerique, de l’Affrique etc.”) (“Sauvage”), a circular logic that spectacularly shows the widespread othering of indigenous Americans by the time of its publication. As we will see, Cartier’s persistent use of “sauvaiges,” his reliance on comparisons to European norms, 2 as in the references to hay and nails above, and his pictorial focus on bodies and their flesh reverberate in accounts of subsequent voyages for centuries. Indeed, scholars assert that such word-image descriptions of Native Americans in the relations of early encounters represent “the foundation of physical anthropology” (Mazzolini 137). That foundation, as we will show, resides in turn on a rhetorical base, a pediment of persuasion. Historian Ramsay Cook describes Cartier’s motivations: his narratives are “commented upon and organized into a story that was designed to make North America, and Cartier’s actions there, understandable and even com- 1 The publication history of Cartier’s accounts is murky. There is decent evidence for the existence of the manuscripts of the second voyage, but not for the others. For more on authenticity and authorship in his writing, see Ramsay Cook’s introduction to The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. 2 For a detailed study of comparison in Montaigne and, particularly, in Cartier’s writing, see Berthiaume (53-69). Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 117 mendable to sixteenth-century French readers. That meant filtering the story through the cultural lenses that he and his countrymen wore” (xv). Cook elaborates upon Cartier’s broader view of the story as well: “Cartier […] had no doubt that the line between France and Canada, between civilization and savagery, was sharply drawn and that civilization was on the march” (xv). One of those lenses was also Roman Catholicism, which would become a pillar of the colony, particularly under Louis XIV, who dreamed of a unified, Catholic New France, although not one run exclusively by the Society of Jesus (de Waele 7). From the outset, Cartier, as did his sponsor François I, amalgamated politics and religion in his actions and interactions in the region. Having planted several crosses as geographic markers during his first voyage, he erected one measuring ten meters in height with great ceremony (to Iroquois Chief Donnacona’s irritation) near the end of this initial time on the continent. Canadian historian Marcel Trudel views this act as one of asserting ownership: “cette croix de Gaspé marque une prise de possession” (Mythes 22). Works by explorers like Cartier simultaneously bring indigenous life of this time into focus and blur it for present-day readers navigating the codes of the past. As the many examples of this study will reveal, multimedia depictions of Native Americans reflect the political, economic, and religious interests of the men translating their cultures into European languages and reproducible images, and their focus on the flesh of the body also points to other impulses in this large-scale power struggle. Key travel documents of the second half of the sixteenth century, such as those by Jean de Léry, André Thevet, and Thomas Hariot (also Harriot), employ similar strategies as Cartier, despite their different origins. Most noticeably, they share common pictorial strategies and a fundamental lexicon, generally referring to aboriginal Americans in their respective languages as “savages” and “barbarians”; indeed, the subtitle to Léry’s Histoire du voyage fait en la terre du Brésil of 1578 includes the term “Sauvages Ameriquains.” In an accompanying ode that introduces Thevet’s earlier book, François de Belleforest evokes the “Hommes nuds […] & Sauvages” (np), tropes that Thevet repeats throughout his Les Singularitez de la France antarctique (1558). Those characterizations seem particularly fraught, considering the “adverse testimony” (Schlesinger 4) swirling around Thevet’s book in both the past and the present that questions the accuracy of his information in Les Singularitez and in later claims of additional travel North America (1-3). 3 Léry, for example, offers a scathing review of Thevet’s writings in the preface of his Histoire du voyage, where he announces wittily that Thevet’s Les Singularitez 3 Despite the strong doubt that he ever set foot in North America, he indeed sailed to Brazil briefly and is rightfully known as the first French historian in the Americas. Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 118 is « singulierement farci de mensonges » (np). Despite those doubts, scholars like Roger Schlesinger note the influence of Thevet’s depictions of the Americas in terms of tone, theme, and readership of his accounts: “his works anticipated some of the conceptual frameworks used by French authors in the seventeenth and later centuries to explain the New World to their readers” (1). A main element of that impact was the woodcut illustrations of the Singularitez, attributed by some scholars to Bernard Salomon and by others to the Fontainebleau school (possibly to Jean Cousin the Elder). The crowded half-page illustrations, where native bodies occupy a majority of the space, pair with, for example, graphic depictions of cannibalism (see fig. 1). 4 Fig. 1. Bernard Salomon (? ), wood engraving. Les singularitez de la France antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique, & de plusieurs terres et isles découvertes de nostre temps, André Thevet, Maurice de La Porte, 1558, p. 77, https: / / www.loc.gov/ resource/ rbc0001.2019gen09857/ ? sp=357&st=imag e&r=-0.246,-0.04,1.584,0.645,0#. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Images intermingling the naked flesh of indigenous Brazilians (whose faces and hairstyles notably echo European norms) and their dismembered “ennemis” (Thevet Singularitez 77) provided information and inspiration for 4 For more on the “obsession” with cannibalism among the European readership, see van Groesen (182-88). Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 119 works like “Des Cannibales” in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580) (Losse 518). Art historian Michael Gaudio also suggests the influence of the Singularitez on the much-studied print America (1580) by Jan van der Straet, which features both a scene of cannibalism and a naked allegory of the Americas, a “savage other” to the “imperial subject” (xv). 5 Echoing Cartier’s techniques and metaphors cited above, Thevet also constantly offers analogies to European objects, such as his comparison of the hair of certain tattooed, “cruel” inhabitants of New France to horse tails: they wear topknots “sur le sommet en pointe, tout ainsi que nous lions & laçons la queuë de nos chevaux par deça” (Cosmographie 2. 1010 v). Thevet’s “tendency to describe artifacts of indigenous ethnic groups in the Americas in terms of the familiar” (Losse 518) in works promoting “singularities” exposes a basic paradox that proves seemingly inescapable in early accounts of the New World: an oscillation of same and other. From Cartier’s first accounts, where autochtones are “gens” but “sauvaiges” (11), that uneasy pairing casts a long shadow, establishing and reinforcing the power imbalances to come. This paradox developed quickly into an imposition of the European sociopolitical framework onto North American native cultures by France and other nations, particularly Great Britain. It dominates the visual vocabulary of the impactful copperplate illustrations by Théodore de Bry accompanying later editions of Hariot’s influential A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1588) (reissued again by de Bry as the first book of the series Grands voyages in 1590). Hariot, an agent of the English crown, worked in conjunction with the expedition artist John White to document early British impressions of North America and its inhabitants during investigations of the area surrounding the Roanoke colony (Bouyer and Duviols 129-30). While de Bry, a prolific Walloon engraver, never traveled to the New World (30, Schlesinger 1), he capitalized throughout his career on the experiences of others like Hariot and White. De Bry used White’s accompanying watercolors as the basis for his engravings, which he then distributed with Hariot’s written account in several different editions beginning in 1590. De Bry altered White’s work in several key ways, such as lightening the skin and plumping the bodies of his refashioned indigenous subjects (Bucher 33-34), discussed below. His work significantly impacted discussions and perceptions of the New World in spite of his lack of first-hand knowledge of the continents, as scholars Jean-Michel Bouyer and Jean-Paul Duviols emphasize: “Les gravures de Théodore de Bry seront la référence visuelle pendant deux siècles » (133). Unlike the woodcut illustrations in the texts by Léry and Thevet and the 5 For a discussion on the layers of meaning in this famous print, see Gaudio pp. xivxvi. Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 120 watercolors of White, de Bry’s engravings enjoyed the advantage of relatively easy duplication (compared to wood cuts) and the prestige of the new printing technology (Gaudio xvii). The plates were contributing factors in the popularity of the Voyages and their lasting impact on how and what early modern travel books would depict; anthropologist Bernadette Bucher emphasizes the wide (and negative) impact of fusing a complex semantic web to technological innovation in Thevet’s work: “The Great Voyages, one of the first examples of mass communication through pictures in Europe, give us an overview of the semantic richness and insidious power of iconic signs” (172). We witness an immediate focus on bodies of the “savage nations” (Hariot 38) in this editorial power structure that helped generate the foundational myths woven around indigenous Americans: “Readers considered the engravings— particularly those that depicted the bodies, clothing, and daily life of the Indians—to be especially fascinating. Although they described only the inhabitants of the region around the Roanoke settlement, they soon came to represent all indigenous Americans in the minds of many early modern western European readers” (Zacek np). The plates excited such fascination, in part, by their manner of presentation, which often resembles that of a naturalist’s sketchbook. For example, exposed in both a frontal and dorsal view, a style appearing in seven of the first ten of de Bry’s illustrations, the figure “A weroan or great Lorde of Virginia” appears muscular, nearly naked, and tattooed in plate three (see fig. 2). 6 6 For in-depth discussions of bodily markings including tattooing, see Katherine Dauge-Roth’s Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France and the collection edited by Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky, Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World. Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 121 Fig. 2. Theodor de Bry, A weroan or great Lorde of Virginia, copperplate engraving. A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, of the commodities and of the nature and manners of the naturall inhabitants, Thomas Harriot, John Wechel, 1590, plate 3 (n. p.), https: / / tile.loc.gov/ storageservices/ master/ rbc/ rbc0001/ 2019/ 2019rosen0723/ 2019rosen0723.pdf. Accessed 26 April, 2026. He poses with his quiver, arrows, and bow in front of an active hunt scene, mixing violence and nudity in a heady cocktail for public consumption. De Bry’s dense picture-story is part of a work that also includes Hariot’s verbal descriptions rife with references to barbarianism and immorality; for example, he laments in the figure legend for plate XIII, “So savage is this people, and deprived of the true knowledge of god” (51). The Hariot-de Bry multimedia experience thus harnesses the similarities between different representational systems, amplifying their effects on the reading public. 7 7 My view on word-image interaction runs counter to that of Bucher, who hypothesizes that “Unlike speech, which is controlled by a rational logic, pictures stem from the unsaid. As a result, they contain a wealth of implicit, thus virtual and ambiguous, meanings” (173). I maintain that illustrations have a logic, while not necessarily a prescribed (temporal) path of unfolding and, moreover, that words, such as metaphors, can suggest “ambiguous” significations. I believe that words and Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 122 The focus on the body joined to discussions of immorality, nudity, and power continues in the following century throughout its many illustrated volumes dedicated to North America. The verbal accounts, maps, and images by Samuel de Champlain, considered the founder of the first viable French colony, are crucial to any discussions of the continent and its inhabitants. Following established patterns, he calls autochtones “Sauvages” in the title of his 1603 expanded ship’s log, Des sauvages, ou, Voyage de Samuel Champlain, de Brouage, fait en la France nouvelle, l’an mil six cens trois. Throughout his works, as in this example from the second book Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois (1613), the explorer focuses on knotted hair, nudity, and feathers of Native Americans, seemingly imitating his predecessor Cartier: Nous vismes en ce lieu quelque cinq à six cens sauvages, qui estoient tous nuds, horsmis leur nature, qu’ils couvrent d’une petite peau de faon, ou de loup marin. Les femmes le sont aussi, qui couvrent la leur comme les hommes de peaux ou de fueillages. Ils ont les cheveux bien peignez & entrelassez en plusieurs façons, tant hommes que femmes, à la manière de ceux de Chouacoet; & sont bien proportionnez de leurs corps, ayans le teinct olivastre. Ils se parent de plumes, de patenostres de porceline, & autres jolivetés qu’ils accommodent fort proprement en façon de broderie” (125). Of note also are the frequent comparisons to European culture; for example, under Champlain’s gaze, the native beaded necklaces become rosaries. To push the idea further, his lack of comparators (like “comme”) functions in a performative way in that it at once appropriates the novelties into his Catholic culture and erases their meanings as anything other than what they signify to him. The above explorers and reporters collectively establish a rhetorical vocabulary for these “new” humans, one that at once assimilates their culture and, through a refrain of wildness and animal references, divorces them from European notions of culture and propriety. That separation provides the pictures in illustrated texts form an incredibly complex set of signifiers and meanings that is, despite its best intentions, subject to very individualized (personal) readings based on the infinite variety reader responses. Bucher gives predominance to the written word by her use of “the unsaid,” in the tradition of Saussurian semantic theory, but images have their own logic and vocabulary that is not subaltern or reliant upon verbal content, as W. J. T. Mitchell argues throughout What Do Pictures Want? . The word-image system is both complementary and tense as readers find overlap and discrepancy between the two media (or one can give additional information missing in the other). When they reinforce one another, as they do in the aforementioned verbal and visual descriptions of cannibalism, the system generates an “iconotext” (Wagner 16) greater than the sum of its parts, as explored in the conclusion of this paper. Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 123 conceptual foundation for European self-presentation as morally superior teachers with a more advanced civilization, despite the many documented instances of autochtones ensuring the survival of early explorers and colonists. 8 Moreover, Québécois historian and sociologist Denis Delage assures us of the utter dependency of the French on indigenous communities and their “immense réseau d’alliances” for the success of New France in the face of the stronger navy, larger colonial population, and increased trading profits of the British: “Cette alliance constitue un facteur décisif dans la capacité de maintien d’une entreprise coloniale française en Amérique malgré un désavantage numérique énorme vis-à-vis la colonisation britannique” (15). Native peoples, on the other hand, perform as primitive humans—even as animals—when the colonizers and readers need them to do so, whence the word-image cycle of rapprochement and rejection married to rationalization of European exploitative practices. The visual content of the above texts reinforces that colonizing project of comparison and colonization while emphasizing additional significations of flesh. Frontispieces, operating simultaneously as entryways into the books and as summaries of their contents, provide a unique perspective on the perception and repackaging of indigenous culture for the European market. De Bry’s evolving frontispieces again provide models for later publications, particularly for that of Champlain. In A Briefe and True Report, the frontispiece (see fig. 3) is striking in virtue of its mix of neoclassical elements and “New World” objects. 8 Some primary examples are the curing of scurvy among Cartier’s crew by indigenous North Americans in the sixteenth century and the material and educational assistance by the Powhatan and Wampanoag peoples in the early seventeenthcentury English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth, respectively. Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 124 Fig. 3. Theodor de Bry, Frontispiece, copperplate engraving. A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, of the commodities and of the nature and manners of the naturall inhabitants, Thomas Harriot, John Wechel, 1590, https: / / tile.loc.gov/ storageservices/ master/ rbc/ rbc0001/ 2019/ 2019rosen0723/ 2019rosen07 23.pdf. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 125 The visual framework featuring, among other elements, a “fronton brisé, pilastres, coquilles, frises, [et] guirlandes de fruits et de fleurs” (Bouyer and Duviols 133) contrasts with details meant to suggest the exoticism of the book’s subject, such as the inclusion of certain plants. The female figure holds in her right hand what appear to be North American native species like corn and squash, but the garlands below the pediment and the arrangements in the urns contain fruits not native to the Americas, like apples and oranges. When combined, the varied vegetation suggests the idea of cross-pollinated bounty. Fruits and flesh play off of each other semantically to push the idea further into the realm of fertility in this cornucopia representing a space to be explored and consumed visually by the reader and symbolically by the colonizing French kingdom. When considered alongside the objects and human figures discussed above, it is clear that the engraving presents itself as a printed wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. Such early modern protomuseums functioned as displays of wealth focusing on the “costly, exotic, and rare” (Impey and MacGregor xx), which supports their role as an advertisement for the new colony and its riches. The hair feathers of the male figure repeat previous descriptions, but we note the addition of a tail, a further connection to the animal world. Held by the main couple, the two objects that escape the confines of the stone edifice also capture our attention. The man and woman, respectively, wield an arrow, “an emblem of the savage” (Gaudio 2) by this time, and a squash or gourd, associated with water gathering and storage. Indeed, the objects subtly underscore both the genders of the aboriginal couple and the sexual undertones of the image: the phallic arrow contrasts with the vessel of the gourd. Their legs and torsos bare (although marked with tattoos), these two figures in the midground advance in unison with an extended left foot while exchanging glances, a coupling that both titillates and draws the reader’s eye toward the “carved” title plate in the center. 9 In terms of the shapes and drawing style of the two figures, Bucher remarks a distinct Europeanization of aboriginal bodies in de Bry’s refashioning of White’s original watercolors, noting that de Bry “rounds out the women’s flat faces and makes them chubby and even corrects the shapes of the body here and there, giving the men an athletic musculature and the women shapely legs, thus sacrificing to contemporary taste and the canons of the beau nu” (33). Bucher expands the argument to criticize engraving norms 9 In fact, these full-length portraits are recycled from two of the main illustrations of the tome, plates three and eight (as seen in fig. 1), as are the three other human forms. The squatting figure above the bucranium that forms the center of the classical pediment is identified as the idol “Kiwasa” worshipped by certain indigenous Floridians in plate 21, and the male and female figures seem inspired by illustrations 11 and 22, respectively (Hariot). Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 126 of the time: “One is immediately struck by the inability of the European draftsmen to grasp the physical differences that distinguish Amerindians from Europeans or other peoples” (32), a bias that aligns with period notions of body typing. The illustration history of the de Bry edition of A Briefe and true report helps shed additional light on those motivations and biases. De Bry did not independently undertake the reworking of the White watercolors; rather, the Anglican priest, author, and royal secretary Richard Hakluyt approached him with the project in the late 1580s as an extension of Hariot’s initial propagandic effort “to encourage investment in Sir Walter Raleigh’s Virginia colony” (Gaudio 1). A staunch supporter of the continued English colonization in North America, Hakluyt had two main purposes in mind for translating the images into copper plates, as historian Michiel Van Groesen explains: “Firstly, Theodore and his sons were supposed to inform Europeans of the Tudor claims to Virginia. Secondly, India Occidentalis [Grands Voyages] was meant to convince English readers of the attractiveness of the New World for settling” (175). De Bry’s “corrections” thus seem part of a larger project of encouraging a transfer of the reader’s desire from the Europeanized aboriginal body to the very idea of colonization. The illustration of the native form delivered as a “beau nu” at once stimulates the desire and satisfies it, a cycle of pleasure and fulfilment that could then (in the view of Hakluyt) result in a favorable view of the colonial project. The exploration effort was, after all, largely economic at its core, and illustrated travel books sanctioned by the crown can also be viewed as advertisements, which hinge on the notion of wanting. Publicity specialist Todd Joseph Miles Holden explains, “Desire has traditionally been employed by advertising as a means of selling product. Regardless of culture, more powerful than context, desire is invoked as one of capitalism’s iron-clad codes of quality” (Holden). The cycle of desire seems amplified when we examine the frontispiece in Samuel de Champlain’s 1619 Voyages et descouvertes faites en la Nouvelle France, depuis l'année 1615 jusques à la fin de l'année 1618, a plate that draws heavily from de Bry’s frontispiece from thirty years prior. This anonymous image from his third log (see fig. 4) retains the basic structure of de Bry’s work (the neoclassical arch, symmetry, foliage, and emblems of the New World like the arrow and the gourd), but it modifies the picture in significant ways. Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 127 Fig. 4. Frontispiece, copperplate engraving. Voyages et descouvertures faites en la Nouvelle France, depuis l’année 1615. iusques à la fin de l'année 1618, Samuel de Champlain, C. Collet, 1619, https: / / digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/ fc2b64b0c609-012f-22c1-58d385a7bc34? canvasIndex=0. Accessed 26 April, 2026. We find an intensification of the Europeanization of its male and female figures in this later frontispiece, coupled with other modifications: de Bry’s fluted Grecian columns metamorphose into square pilasters with “rams horns” capitals, the trio of figures atop the pediment are absent (along with the original square building feature), and there is far less foliage and additional decorative detail. Those changes contribute to an enhanced focus Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 128 on the aboriginal couple, who, as in the earlier engraving, wear only small coverings. Here, however, they appear in a tighter view, their bodies enlarged in comparison to the surrounding architecture. The conventional associations of the arrow, feathers, and the gourd persist, but the pair now reflect even more intensely neo-classical norms of beauty, since their hairstyles, muscular bodies, and poses more closely resemble sculptures of ancient athletes and goddesses. Of key importance is the extreme “whitewashing” of the pair compared both to the de Bry plate and the verbal account. Champlain describes the people he meets in New France as having skin that seems “olivastre” (Les Voyages 125), the most frequent characterization of their skin color together with “basané/ bazanné” by explorers and authors like Thevet, Léry, Marc Lescarbot (who traveled to New France in 1608 with Champlain’s expedition), and Gabriel Sagard (a Christian missionary who lived among the Huron in the 1620s and 1630s) (Dauge-Roth “Different”). The contrast between the verbal description and the images in Champlain’s books, none of which show indigenous people with an olive complexion, is not due to technological limitations, since period intaglio and engraving techniques allowed for shading that could produce a darker flesh tone. The discrepancy in skin color points to a complex artistic and semantic heritage. On one level, it seems a function of period frontispiece conventions and their neo-classical style, which simultaneously encompasses and modifies the bodies of the two figures. The metamorphosis also speaks strongly to the period notion, inherited from artists like Albrecht Dürer, that the world exhibits only two human body types: European and African with slight variations. That theory relied upon “the separateness of the black species (polygenism),” contrasted “with white attitudes toward the Amerindians (of French Canada, for example), who were considered part of the same species as the Europeans” (Forster 50). Fitting indigenous Americans into the confines of such a mold greatly impacted their pictorial history by European artists (Bucher 32-33), even once the number of recognized body types later expanded to “quatre ou cinq” following the publication of the 1684 article by François Bernier “Nouvelle Division De La Terre, par les differentes Especes ou Races d’hommes qui l’habitent […]” in the Journal des Sçavans. In this influential work that foregrounds skin color as a guide for racial categories, Bernier places Native Americans in the same category with “white” Europeans : “ils sont à la verité la plûpart olivastres, & ont le visage tourné d’une autre maniere que nous. Néanmoins je n’y trouve point une assez grande difference pour en faire une espece particuliere & differente de la nostre” Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 129 (Bernier 136). 10 Finally, in light of the overt propagandic nature of works like those of de Bry and Champlain, the changes to exposed native bodies suggest again the ideas of assimilation and desire. The picture sketches out the stated goal of the French to shape the autochtones into their willing helpmates and trading partners, as described by Trudel: “L’œuvre de civilisation française est […] la transformation du mode de vie des indigènes en celui des Français ou des Européens” (Histoire 278). Elements of the exotic and the dangerous— the feathers and the arrow—fuse near-naked flesh to the neo-classical body to generate a hybridized, enticing picture that, at least on paper, makes the civilizing dream a reality. Throughout Champlain’s account and that of many others, native bodies provide specimens for scrutiny and comparison, as shown on the accompanying fold-out map from 1612 that functions as a frontispiece to his second book, Les voyages du sieur de Champlain, Xaintongeois, capitaine ordinaire pour le Roy, en la marine from 1613 (see fig. 5). Fig. 5. Samuel de Champlain, Detail of Carte geographique de la Nouvelle Franse faictte par le sieur de Champlain Saint Tongois cappitaine ordinaire pour le Roy en la Marine, copperplate engraving. Les voyages du sieur de Champlain, Xaintongeois, capitaine ordinaire pour le Roy, en la marine, Jean Berjon, 1612, https: / / central.baclac.gc.ca/ .redirect? app=fonandcol&id=3919638&lang=eng&ecopy=e01076473 3. Accessed 26 April, 2026. In this detail of his map, autochtones—and, in fact, the same couple as in the frontispiece studied above (and that likewise appear in his 1619 publication 10 I am very grateful to Katherine Dauge-Roth for sharing her work on Bernier and colorism, as presented at the annual meeting of The Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies in 2026 and in private correspondence. Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 130 Voyages et découvertes faties en la Nouvelle France as an illustration) (23)— appear alongside detailed botanical sketches as objects to be studied and classified, adding to existing taxonomical databases for living things. Each of the figures holds two objects (one of which is a nursing child) to place them in better context and animate their stiff forms. Similarly, many of the plates in Robert Beverley’s later The History of Virginia, in Four Parts (1701), illustrated by Simon Gribelin, seem largely copied from the naturalistic images of de Bry, indicating an ongoing objectification of the native body, as we find in this image of a Huron warrior from the 1722 edition (see fig. 6). Fig. 6. Simon Gribelin, copperplate engraving. The History of Virgina, in Four Parts, Robert Beverley, B. and S. Tooke, 1722, preceding p. 141, https: / / archive.org/ details/ historyofvirgini00inbeve. Accessed 26 April, 2026. The plate presents the same man in both a ventral and dorsal view to better show his tattoos, and the artist adds a key for interpreting the scars, assigning them Latin alphabet script in the illustration, a departure from the de Bry image. 11 Deborah N. Losse, citing ethnographer James Clifford, explains that “there are always two ends to an ethnographic narrative: first, the ‘scientific’ description of the ‘strange’ culture, and second, a guiding strategy to make the ‘often strange’ behavior of another way of life understandable. A descriptive surface is counterbalanced by a ‘more abstract, comparative, and explanatory level’” (521). We see the second half of that process play out in the 11 For a fascinating discussion of this multi-layered symbolic colonization, see Gaudio 2-6. Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 131 legend accompanying Beverley’s detailed descriptions, which retain prior explorers’ foci on hair, feathers, and nudity, in conjunction with comparisons to European objects and animals, such as, “like a Purse” and “like the Comb of a Cock” (Beverley 141). The Champlain journals and Hariot-De Bry text therefore marry scientific-style pictures to vivid, metaphor-rich stories to pitch their collective story of “savage” bodies. To return to the frontispiece for Champlain’s Voyages in fig. 4, we can see that the oppositional pairs of European/ New World, human/ animal, and grandeur/ baseness function as semantic engines, providing its tensions and allure. Such contrasts become more sinister as we consider this detail from the embedded vignette at the bottom of the frontispiece that challenges its aforementioned classical motifs (see fig. 7). Fig. 7. Detail of Frontispiece, copperplate engraving. Voyages et descouvertures faites en la Nouvelle France, depuis l’année 1615. iusques à la fin de l’année 1618, Samuel de Champlain, C. Collet, 1619, https: / / digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/ fc2b64b0c609-012f-22c1-58d385a7bc34? canvasIndex=0. Accessed 26 April, 2026. The central naked figure, arms behind his back and tied to a poll, is twisted in pain, and a pyre threatens to his right, ignited by the kneeling figure. Two crowds of indigenous Americans, as indicated by their loincloths that mimic those of the sculptural pair, surround the platform with the captive in its Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 132 center. This vignette suggests that just underneath the bountiful beauty of the surface lie the power and the danger of brute force. Champlain’s Voyages from its first page thus offers a familiar package of exoticism, flesh, excess, and violence, encouraging not only continued reading, but also acceptance of the author’s (and his sponsors’) colonizing perspective on the New World. Champlain’s accounts also include many illustrations by the hand of the explorer, most of which feature native peoples. The entanglement between the body and domination tightens in his battle scenes, such as we find in this detail accompanying his self-reported defeat of the Agnais group of Iroquois in 1609. Here, Champlain parts a sea of naked flesh, a picture evoking the divine miracle performed by Moses when helping the Israelites escape the Egyptian army in the Bible’s book of Exodus (Exod. 14.21-25) (see fig. 8). Fig. 8. Samuel de Champlain, Defaite des Yroquois au Lac de Champlain, 1609, copperplate engraving. Les Voyages du sieur de Champlain, Xaintongeois, capitaine ordinaire pour le Roy, en la marine, Jean Berjon, 1613, preceding p. 177, https: / / central.baclac.gc.ca/ .redirect? app=fonandcol&id=2928537&lang=eng&ecopy=c005750v8. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Aided by his armor, musket, and two fellow Frenchmen in the background, Champlain does not shy away from the hail of arrows and the bifurcated indigenous crowd that visually encircles him, three of whom lie dead on the ground. He adds alphabetical labels and descriptions for different elements, Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 133 such as “Tous nos sauvages amis” which is assigned to the letter “E” (176). That ironic caption reinforces historian Yann Lignereux’s assessement that Champlain sought to dispel the myth of a prosperous land full of willing trade partners and to offer, instead, a picture of “des peuples nomades, encabanés de manière saisonnière et livrés au dénuement. Un dénuement qui alimente le mauvais ‘génie’ de ces lieux: la peur […] d’ennemis cruels et abominables” (24). Such oppositions continue in Champlain’s additional accounts and illustrations, such as in his elaborate depiction of an attack on French troops led by Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt (see fig. 9). Fig. 9. Samuel de Champlain, copperplate engraving. Les voyages du sieur de Champlain, Xaintongeois, capitaine ordinaire pour le Roy, en la marine, Jean Berjon, 1613, preceding p. 137, https: / / central.baclac.gc.ca/ .redirect? app=fonandcol&id=3919635&lang=eng&ecopy= e010764750-v8. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Charged by Champlain to map an area of the coast from Cap Breton to Cape Cod with a view to increased trade (Lignereux 23), Poutrincourt, while studying the suitability for a French settlement at what they had named “Port Fortuné” (near present-day Chatham, Massachusetts), engaged in a multi-day conflict with a large band of Haudenosaunee. The concept of morality enters the scene explicitly as Champlain describes the false welcome of the in- Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 134 digenous community, which Poutraincourt claims to treat “humainement” (122) but that exhibits a “mauvaise intention” (129) to attack the French. That judgement reaches a crescendo as the text verbally and visually depicts the atrocities of their newfound enemy. While the historical record indicates that the Iroquois chased them away, thus winning the battle, Champlain’s multimedia story gives the moral upper hand—the ultimate victory—to the colonizing force. Enhancing the action and violence in the engraving, the illustration compresses the timeline of several sequential events into a single instance: the reader simultaneously views the Iroquois attack, the killing of the French, their stripping and burning, the later recuperation of the bodies, and Poutraincourt’s construction of a cross on the site (130-33). The written account both continues the story and intensifies the immorality of the indigenous behavior by highlighting the desecration of French flesh, as found also in the key to the illustration; for example, for the letter “E” we find the caption, “Trouppes de sauvages faisans brusler les François qu’ils avoient tués” (137). Champlain adds that after Poutrincourt buried the sailors and retreated, the Haudenosaunee dug them back up, dismembered them, and destroyed the cross, prompting the French to repeat the burial the next day and re-erect the cross before fleeing in despair, “voyans bien qu’il n’y avoit gueres d’apparēce de s’en vēger pour ce coup, & qu’il failloit remettre la partie quand il plairoit à Dieu” (133). Passing judgement by evoking divine justice, Champlain, summarizing the quantity of Iroquois killed by Poutrincourt’s men, declares that “Dieu n’avoit laissé impuny le mesfait de ces barbares” (139). The fact that he situates this violent incident and its focus on bodies within a religious context—the cross and the repeated direct invocation of God—underscores the semantic complexity of the notion of flesh. Exposing bodies exposing their own flesh (the Iroquois warriors) and violating that of others (the French soldiers), Champlain again presents flesh as locus of opposition. First, it is a site and source of revulsion in association with the heathen body lacking salvation. That animal state provides a foil to his own belief in the Christian God, whose moral system hinges upon acceptance of the bodily sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the “Word” that became “flesh” according to the Bible (English Standard Version John 1.14) in his moral system. Similar conflicting associations with the body pervade the reports of the Jesuit missionaries in New France throughout the seventeenth century. Their reports are bursting with references to different meanings of flesh, from the physical to the metaphorical. Such proselytizers, as we shall see, wished to sacrifice their own flesh with one main goal: “entamer la conversion des sauvages,” as the Catholic missionary Isaac Jogues states emphatically to his mother in a letter from August 20, 1636 written upon his arrival in New France (Roustang 180). In a missive sent the following June, he restates his Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 135 mission and argues that saving souls justifies any hardship or suffering. Furthermore, his shift to the first-person plural pronoun “nous” makes a similar claim for all of the Jesuit missionaries: “Il est vrai que les incommodités que l’on endure en ce volage sont grandes, mais l’amour de Dieu qui nous appelle aux missions et le désir que l’on a de contribuer quelque chose à la conversion de ces pauvres barbares rend tout cela si doux que nous ne voudrions pas échanger ces peines contre tous les contentements de la terre” (Roustang 183). Jogues’s indiscriminate use of the metaphors “sauvages” and “barbares” in the above citation repeats the language of the explorer accounts studied above. However, in the context of the Jesuit mission, the references to wildness and savagery are framed both within an existential struggle and a physically dangerous environment, the latter paving the way for victory in the former. Throughout the Relations de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France (largely 1632-73), the annual summary of mission work by the French Society of Jesus, missionaries describe their ranks as "soldiers” for Christ. For example, in the 1638 edition, a new missionary recruit becomes a “nouveau soldat de Jesus-Christ,” a welcome addition faced with “le grand nombre de Sauvages qui ont besoin de notre secours” (Le Jeune 12). Word-image texts by Jesuits at this time recount their successes and failures to convert indigenous people, who call them “the Blackrobes” or “the Charcoal” in their native languages (Anderson Death 72). One such priest, the Italian François-Joseph Bressani, spent most of the 1640s in New France preaching mainly to the Huron in present-day Quebec. Captured by the Mohawk (one of the five Iroquois nations), Bressani endured four months of brutality, including the removal of nine of his fingers. After more time both in Europe and again in the Huron missions, he settled back in Italy, recorded his memoirs in 1653 (the Breve Relatione d'alcune Missioni […] nella Nuova Francia) (Historical Records 1. 21), and published a remarkable visual record of what is now the Northeastern United States and a great swath of Eastern and Central Canada, the Novae Franciae accurata delineatio. Drawn from memory and Jesuit sources and published in 1657, Bressani’s map is now extremely rare, but certain visual elements enjoyed an enduring cultural presence. Not only is it important for its geographical data (and mapmaking techniques) as one of the first detailed drawings of the interior of the continent, but it also contains a wealth of cultural information. While engraved in a fairly rudimentary way, the multiple embedded vignettes show more variety regarding, for example, native dress than do the verbal accounts studied above (which generally choose to omit their clothing). Clusters of autochtones perform everyday tasks and rituals, including hunting wearing snowshoes, smoking, canoeing, carrying children on their backs, and completing domestic tasks. The largest vignette on the top of the map’s left side Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 136 shows a couple with two children, a group that appears much larger than any other figures on that half (see fig. 10). Fig. 10. Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Novae Franciae accurata delineatio, engraved map. 1657, https: / / central.baclac.gc.ca/ .redirect? app=fonandcol&id=3805607&lang=en g&ecopy=e008222453-v6. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Genuflecting in reverence, the father and one of the children clasp their hands in an additional gesture of supplication and prayer, 12 and all four look up 12 For a discussion of the “praying Indian” trope and “praying towns,” which were particularly prevalent in the English colonies but also a factor in Jesuit-run villages like Kahnawake (formerly Caughnawaga) and Sillery in Quebec, see Kristina Boss’s Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 137 toward a cross suspended in the center of the image. Their gazes likewise draw the viewer’s eye toward the Christian symbol, an effect highlighted by the drawn lines around it suggesting light emanating from the cross and, by extension, from heaven. Countering the “converted family” scene, we also witness one of ritualized murder by fire in the center of the lower-left quadrant of the map (see fig. 11). Fig. 11. Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Detail of Novae Franciae accurata delineatio, engraved map. 1657, https: / / central.baclac.gc.ca/ .redirect? app=fonandcol&id=3805607&lang=eng&eco py=e008222453-v6. Accessed 26 April, 2026. The raised platform, central pole, restrained victim, and surrounding torturers seem to inspire the small insert of the later frontispiece of Champlain’s Voyages, studied above (see fig. 7). That image of cruelty is enlarged and made specific on the right side of the map, where we find a fine engraving of a chaotic group of Native Americans lashing two European men to poles. (see fig. 12). Dry bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (2003), Kathryn N. Gray’s John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England (2013), and Allan Greer’s Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (2005). Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 138 Fig. 12. Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Detail of Novae Franciae accurata delineatio, engraved map. 1657, https: / / central.baclac.gc.ca/ .redirect? app=fonandcol&id=3805607&lang=eng& ecopy=e008222453-v6. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Taking up over one-third of the map’s right half, the details of the torture scene, drawn from historical accounts, come clearly into focus. The violent inset displays a roaring fire heating a cauldron, a necklace of white-hot axe heads, and knives and spears piercing both men. A closer examination shows the names of the captives inscribed on the two poles: “P. Gabriel Lallement” (also Lalement/ L’Allement) on the left and “P. Je. De Brébeuf” (also Bréboeuf) on the right, both killed in March of 1649 after a Haudenosaunee raid on the Huron village of St. Louis in present-day Ontario. The two priests are remarkable for their stillness in the face of such cruelty, an attitude supported by eye-witness accounts: “Brébeuf’s behavior through these ordeals was, according to the Wendat witnesses who lived to escape and to report it, extraordinarily courageous. Even in the midst of his torture, he apparently used his voice only to pray, preach, and exhort. Otherwise, he suffered like a rock, insensible to the fires and the flames, without uttering any cry, and keeping a profound silence” (Anderson Death 44). Three smaller scenes rise out of the smoke to the left, and they similarly depict the extermination of named Jesuit priests. The center image combines the deaths of Antoine Daniel, Charles Garnier, and Noël Chabanel into one frame, all of whom died between 1648 and 1649. Of particular interest to this study is the smaller embedded scene just below that grouping that shows a Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 139 trio of priests, one of whom is identified as “P. Isaac Jogues,” being attacked by warriors (see fig. 13). Fig. 13. Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Detail of Novae Franciae accurata delineatio, engraved map. 1657, https: / / central.baclac.gc.ca/ .redirect? app=fonandcol&id=3805607&lang=eng& ecopy=e008222453-v6. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Captured with Jean de Lalande, Jogues was killed in October of 1646 by the Mohawk. Essentially, Bressani’s map provides both a map of colonized North America and a family tree of New World martyrs. From that tree, a mythological heritage for political and religious colonization and continued demonization of indigenous people would grow for centuries. Indeed, the priests named in the above vignettes, along with Father René Goupil (killed by the Iroquois in 1642) are now called the eight Canadian Martyrs. Canonized in 1930, they provide case studies of literal and metaphorical meanings of flesh both inside and outside the frame of representation. There are few, if any, more appropriate examples than that of Jogues, who spent seven years between 1636 and 1646 as a missionary among the Huron and a captive of the Mohawk. The latter enslaved, tortured, and eventually killed him, and he and his witnesses document his journey in both letters and the Jesuit Relations. The autobiographical account of his first capture in August 1642 (published in the 1647 Relations) reveals the extent to which the Haudenosaunee associated nakedness with humiliation and Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 140 imprisonment (hence, weakness). At the same time, the description underscores Jogues’s association of his own flesh with that of Jesus, two bodies connected by baptism, torture, and salvation. When describing his first captivity that lasted for more than a year, Jogues, as retold by Jérôme Lalemant, the general superior of the Quebec missions, begins by emphasizing his determination not to abandon his fellow Christians after an Iroquois ambush. Instead, he leaves his hiding place in the brush and willingly joins a Frenchman and a small group of Huron captives, offering the prisoners absolution and baptism in the face of likely death (Lalement 19). He explains his reasoning, posed as a rhetorical question: Pourrois-je bien, disois-je à par moy, abandonner nos François, et quitter ces bons Néophytes et ces pauvres Catechumenes, sans leur donner le secours que l’Eglise de mon Dieu m’a confiez? La fuitte me sembloit horrible: Il faut, disois-je en mon cœur, que mon corps souffre le feu de la terre, pour delivrer ces pauvres ames des flammes de l’Enfer, il faut qu’il meure d’une mort passagere, pour leur procurer une vie éternelle […]. (18-19) The premonition of his bodily suffering by fire and the necessity of that infliction (“il faut […] que mon corps souffre le feu de la terre”) sets the stage for the lengthy report of his physical trials. Throughout, Jogues constructs an opposition between different types of flesh and their relation to power, but he also suggests their close relationship. Later in the same chapter, he speaks again of Jesuit willing self-sacrifice and applies that paradox, reiterated by the oxymoron of God’s “loving anger,” to their efforts to “save” the North Americans—humans living as animals: “nous nous offrismes d’un grand cœur à sa bonté paternelle pour estre des victimes immolées à son bon plaisir et à sa colère amoureuse pour le salut de ces peuples.” (22). Two sides of the definition of “flesh” again emerge—and merge—as he relates many scenes of graphic torture that show the weaknesses of the flesh of his body, the principle means for his captors to wield power over him. Yet, in his view, Jogues’s resistance to self-pity and refusal to renounce his faith connect him to a higher power, one accessed through faith and holy flesh through the rite of the eucharist and its process of transubstantiation. Following the Council of Trent (1545-63), the Catholic church held that the ingestion of the host and the sacred wine during holy communion transformed the bread into the actual body and blood of Christ, giving access to life after death. As the Apostle Paul summarizes in the Bible, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (English Standard Version 1 Cor. 15: 22). Indicated by Paul’s statement and repeated in Jogues’s emphasis on necessity (“il faut”) above, a spiritual rebirth allowing man to achieve perfection is predicated on death of the body and the physical suffering associated with that vessel. Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 141 Paul’s exclamatory admission of sin later in the same letter to the Corinthians, “I die every day! ” (1 Cor 15: 31), seems to apply directly to the excruciating trials of Jogues’s enslavement. Viewing his torture as a connection with God, he describes the violence of his entrance into the first Mohawk village by employing a religious metaphor and biblical citations: “La procession commençant dans ce chemin estroit du Paradis, on entendoit un chamaillis de tous costez ; c’est bien pour lors que je pouvois dire avec mon Seigneur et mon maistre, supra dorsum meum fabricaverunt peccatores, les pecheurs ont basty et laissé des monumens et des marques de leur rage sur mon dos” (Lalement 22). Referencing the biblical book of Matthew (19: 24), Jogues in the above passage compares enduring the gauntlet of blows at the entrance to the Iroquois village with the difficulty of a rich man’s path to heaven (“Paradis”), described in the Bible as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. He then cites Psalms to explain how godliness, often coupled with persecution, brings reward (Ps. 129: 3). In the Latin quote that he translates into French, Jogues describes the furrows carved into the back of a fellow sufferer, a biblical model for the priest to follow during his own trials. Throughout, Jogues references the notion of bare, human flesh, linking it to humiliation: “J’estois nud en chemise comme un pauvre criminel, les autres estoient tous nus[…]; plus la procession marchoit lentement dans un chemin bien long, et plus nous recevions des coups. […] Telle fut notre entrée dans cette Babylone” (Lalement 22). Moreover, his mention of Babylon exploits a familiar Christian mataphor to illustrate the danger of his situation: the city functions throughout the Bible as a symbol of idolatry (Isa. 47: 8), pride (Isa. 13: 9), and cruelty (Hab. 1: 6): “a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast” (Rev. 18: 2). Throughout the account, Jogues refers to his captors as “barbares” (Lalement 19, 26), “Demons” (19, 20, 21), various fierce animals [“Lions” (19) and “Leopards” (20)], and Babylonians (22), underscoring their inhumanity and immorality despite his stated mission to love and save indigenous people. By his own reckoning, he cannot succinctly record the amount and types of torture he underwent (21), but he focuses on additional scenes related to the exposure and mutilation of his own flesh. He continues to show great concern for his modesty when running another Mohawk gauntlet of blows while naked: “cette nudité me fut très-sensible” (23). He also recounts his nightly torture by hot coals at the hands of children (23), framing it in a now familiar way through faith: “de verité ces tourmens sont grands, mais Dieu est immense” (23). Most strikingly, he writes at length of his own dismemberment, equating it to a “caress” in light of its connection to God: Un vieilard me prend la main gauche et commande à une femme Algonquine captive de me couper un doigt : […] elle me couppe le poulce de la main Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 142 gauche, on fit les mesmes caresses aux autres prisonniers. Cette pauvre femme ayant jetté mon poulce sur le theatre [l’estrade], je le ramassay et vous le presentay, ô mon Dieu ! […] j’acceptois ce supplice comme une amoureuse vengeance du manquement d’amour et de respect que j’avois eu touchant vostre Saint Corps.” (23) Jogues’s idea of a “Saint Corps” refers not only to the body of Jesus, a fellow victim of torture and the priest’s path to rebirth, but also to that of believers bound together by the ritual of consuming the eucharist—the only path to eternal life in the Catholic faith. We see evidence of Jogues’s commitment to sharing in Christ’s death on the cross and the power of that association via his return to New France from Europe, where he recuperated after his escape. Walking back into the fire so to speak, Jogues gladly accepted the role of potential peacemaker between the French government and the Haudenosaunee. However, his seemingly uncanny geographical knowledge and the tools of his trade, notably his mass kit, aroused suspicion among them and led to the collapse of the reestablishing of trade corridors and his execution in Ossernenon, located in presentday New York (Anderson Death 25). Studied above, Bressani’s map crudely reproduces (reversed horizontally) the most widely circulated of the images of his death, an anonymous engraving from 1667 (see fig. 14). Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 143 Fig. 14. A. Millaert [Malaer] after A. van Diepenbeeck, Martyrdom of Father Isaac Jogues S.J. in Canada, copperplate engraving. 1667, https: / / commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/ File: Martyrdom_of_Father_Isaac _Jogues_S.J._Engraving_by_A._Malaer_Wellcome_V0032209.jpg. Accessed 26 April, 2026. Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 144 The illustration presents Jogues, identifiable by his missing fingers, in the center of the foreground as he kneels in prayer in front of two other missionaries (one of whom, again, was Lalande). Swinging their weapons, indigenous warriors surround them as the newly-founded Jesuit mission burns in the background. The artist presents dueling trinities (three nearly identical Mohawk surround the three Jesuits), but, between those groups, contrasts abound. The “barbaric” warriors act as a foil to the holy prisoners to yield a stronger rhetoric, and the most striking differences center around the bodies of the six individuals. First and foremost, the near-nudity of the indigenous men contrasts with the priests’ full-body attire, particularly with the traditional black cassock that Jogues wears. Muscular and in motion, the warriors project physical strength coupled with a wildness—a sauvagerie—via their unbound, long hair and proximity to the running hound, an unsurprising connection to animals in light of the above examples. By contrast, the priests’ hands are clasped in prayer, and their eyes are downturned in contrition, the kneeling bodies projecting a rock-steady calm in the face of death. The rhetorical device of antithesis manifests itself in the details of the men’s physiognomies as well: Jogues’s serene, oval face and smooth forehead clash with the open mouth of the warrior on the left and the prominent brow ridges and lined foreheads of the three Mohawk. Highlighted by the play of light and shadow in the engraving, their bulging brows reinforce the general binary of good/ bad, an unsurprising illustrative bias in virtue of the growing influence of the ancient pseudo-science of physiognomy in Europe beginning in the previous century (Bragagnolo and Martin 1-3). 13 Such features linked to hyper-masculinity were often contrasted with “effeminate” features like a smooth, pale face or small chin (Porter 195-96). Those dichotomies— symmetrical-asymmetrical, smooth-bumpy, violent-calm—stand out in the martyrdom engraving of Jogues, which emphasizes the moral and physical divide between the two groups by aiming to stage the fight between a trio of murderous, fire-setting devils and a holy trinity. Strengthening the connection to Christian dogma and, particularly, the Jesuit view of martyrdom, certain additional details in the engraving imply that the desecration of the three priests’ bodies does not extinguish their souls. The artist adds iconographical elements to the upper background in the form of flying clusters of birds that draw the eye to the sky, a connection to the idea of heaven (“le Ciel,” “l’au-delà”) in the Christian tradition. We find 13 Based on Aristotelean ideals of the connection between character and appearance, the early modern “physiognomic mentality,” influenced in particular by sixteenthcentury Italian treatises (Bragagnolo and Martin 21), held that “Just as the right proportion of parts of the body reflected harmony and goodness of mind, so too were ugliness and deformity signs of a defective nature” (22). Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 145 an even stronger association with Christianity and its belief that Jesus rose from the grave in the engraved lines of the smoke from the burning church. The form of this element echoes techniques of the aforementioned artist de Bry, whose decorative smoke in his illustrations of aboriginal life in Virginia can be viewed simultaneously as “surface” markings and as lines that encourage the reader to consider their “depth” or additional signification in the image (Gaudio 63). Gaudio offers that de Bry’s patterned smoke “invites our interest as it hails us as the interpretive subjects who can discover the new world, invest in its opportunities, engrave our own names upon it” (62). 14 That argument can easily be applied to the mass of smoke in the Jogues martyrdom image in virtue of the ghost-like figures, possibly even wearing cassocks, rising up from the burning mission and the scene of physical death. The symbol of the cross, standing undamaged amidst the blaze, adds more weight to that subliminal message, for it reinforces the themes of an everlasting Church, and all-powerful God, and the confirmation of eternal life through sacrifice and faith. The image thus suggests strongly that Jogues’s flesh, like that of Jesus, was merely a shell, waiting for the ultimate blow to release the soul back to heaven where God would judge it worthy of entry. The Jesuit commitment to “martyrdom as the fearful portal through which they must pass into a glorious and eternal afterlife” (Death 17), as religious studies scholar Emma Anderson succinctly describes it, is amplified in pro-Catholic word-image publications issued for centuries after the deaths of the Canadian martyrs. As on the Bressani map (fig. 10), many such depictions juxtapose their death scenes, conflating time, space, and identity into a single message. Those widely-circulated pictures leverage their shared iconography, as we have seen, by contrasting two different types of bodies via the binaries listed above and by activating different sets of associations with the notion of flesh. Historians consider an amalgamated scene of the martyrdoms of Jogues, Lalande, Brébeuf, and Lalement “one of the most powerful images distributed of the New World, not least for its value as propaganda” (Jaenen and Ma), and it is a prime example of that process (see fig. 15). 15 14 Gaudio devotes an entire chapter to interpreting the smoke in de Bry’s illustrations (45-85). 15 There are many variations of this image, some of which reverse the engraving (a common technique used when copying another artist’s work), change the indigenous figures and their poses, and add clothing to the saints. Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 146 Fig. 15. Martyrdom of the Jesuits, lithograph. Jean de “Brébeuf,” Corneluis J. Jaenen, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2023, https: / / thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/ en/ article/ jeande-brebeuf. Accessed 26 April, 2026. This collage from the eighteenth century reproduces the image of Jogues’s death from 1667 studied above, but it is now vertically reversed and cropped. On the right is an adaptation of the Bressani map vignette of the torture of Brébeuf and Lalemant from ten years prior, which presents them in a similar manner as the Jogues print: their pale skin, short hair, and stillness aim to deliver a cohesive picture of calm acceptance in the face of unimaginable pain. 16 In contrast to Jogues and Lalande, however, Brébeuf and Lalement are shown stripped nearly naked, which supports the fact that exposure of the skin was a frequent element of Haudenosaunee trials. Later European interpretations also note that; for example, the colonial official Claude-Charles Le Roy de Bacqueville de la Potherie’s book Histoire de l'Amérique septentrionale (1722) states that “Quand on [les Iroquois] brûle un prisonnier de guerre c’est le plus grand dépit qu’on puisse lui faire que de l’exposer nu” (3.15). In contrast to the stoic martyrs, the engraving shows the Mohawks’ naked limbs—a nudity reflecting a cultural choice, not a punishment—in a chaotic jumble as they prepare their cruel instruments. A refrain of typical antitheses structures the image, sketching out what Anderson sees as a main engine of 16 An extensive historical record proves that Brébeuf, like Jogues, held tightly to the Jesuit celebration of martyrdom by adhering to a “daunting regime of self-punishment, which encompassed flagellation, the wearing of a hair shirt, and strict limits on food consumption and sleep […] [, a] fervent desire to suffer with and for his savior” (Anderson Death 30). Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 147 persuasion in Jesuit documents. She uses theatrical terms to describe their hagiographic texts and their reliance on simplified, “destructive” models like “missionary/ convert and martyr/ slayer”: “Each highlights the struggle and the sacrifice of European Catholic missionaries (the leads) while casting native people in supporting, reactive, and largely non-speaking roles” (9 “‘White’ Martyrs”). It is essential to add that autochtones almost always remain unnamed in the European representtational space, as they do in the above martyrdom collage. As an article of Catholic propaganda and of the North American historical record, pictures of unnamed, caricatured Mohawk attacking the Canadian Martyrs still circulate today, particularly in the digital sphere. In fact, their shared afterlife has led to a confusion about the men’s identities in that virtual ecosystem. For example, the conservative Catholic website One Peter 5 misidentifies Isaac Jogues as Jean de Brébeuf in its reproduction of the 1667 engraving shown in Fig. 14. Similarly, Google’s “AI overview,” summarizing the life of Brébeuf, shows the image of Jogues studied above (see fig. 16). Fig. 16. Catherine Theobald, “A.I. Overview for Jean de Brébeuf,” screenshot image. April 9, 2026. The linguistic collapse of these priests into the term “Canadian Martyrs” seems a verbal equivalent of their interchangeable online identities. In some respects, their specificity as individuals matters little within the overarching context of their shared beliefs, mission, and deaths by the same ethnic group. Through the optic of sense-reference theory, we can see that their referents may be different (the physical bodies to which their names are attached) but that their signification, at least for those propagating the martyr stories, fuses into a single meaning. In the Catholic view of sainthood, what is now a “body” of canonized men who sought martyrdom offers a quasi-divine model for the faithful, according to the definition issued by the church for the word “saint” (“Saints”). The pictures suggest that the martyrs have collectively overcome the limitations and temptations of the flesh and thereby gained power over Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 148 death. As Europeans did in their first accounts of “savages,” the Canadian martyrs have been concentrated into an abstract concept, and the collective portrait provides an easily digestible antagonist to the stereotype of the North American native. That simple binary, however, breaks down—or at least becomes more complicated (and interesting)—when we consider not how Europeans portrayed indigenous flesh, but, rather, how aboriginal people conceived of their own bodies within their cultural systems 17 . A study of the Haudenosaunee approach to the bodies of Jogues and Brébeuf and their associated meanings provides key examples of that necessary counter-perspective. The Mohawk took captives with a dual aim in mind. On one hand, as the physical punishments above attest, they sought retribution for the ills seen as the product of the European invasion. In fact, the Relations notes that the Algonquins, Huron, and Iroquois had many reasons to detest and resist colonization not related to resource sharing, including fear of disease: “[ils] ont eu et quelques-uns ont encore une haine et une horreur extreme de nostre doctrine, disant qu’elle les fait mourir, et qu’elle contient des sorts et des charmes qui causent la destruction de leurs bleds et qui engendrent des maladies contagieuses et populaires” (Lalement 39). Their second aim was to recover those they had lost: the Iroquois, Orpheus-like, sought to lure their beloved dead back to the terrestrial plane. By capturing prisoners in warfare, they symbolically stormed the afterworld to rescue their dead kin. In a time of high mortality, they reasoned, only accelerated conflict could address their serious population loss. Taking more captives would help them resuscitate the scores of souls drowned in punishing waves of epidemic, as the dead could then return to these new host bodies and resume their rudely interrupted lives as family and community members. […] Through adoption ceremonies, the Iroquois urged the deceased to resume, in the bodies of war captives, their prior identities and occupations. (Anderson Death 17) Haudenosaunee culture thus held a deep sense that the deceased could adopt a new body, which curiously coupled well with the Christian ideals of an immortal soul and rebirth through baptism. These intersections surface in the reports of Jogues’s and Brébeuf’s deaths and the events that followed. After Jogues was killed by tomahawk by the hand of an unnamed Mohawk warrior, he was decapitated, his head was placed on a pike, and his body was thrown in the river. That warrior was later captured by the French and tried for the priest’s murder (Lalement 38). While awaiting his sentence, the Mohawk converted to Catholicism and asked to be 17 I acknowledge that period indigenous accounts are filtered through European writers. Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 149 rebaptized as “Isaac Jogues,” a choice that Anderson explains as having weighty semantic stakes: “It is likely, then, that Jogues’s apparent slayer would have understood his new name as not merely honoring the man he had slain but actually incarnating Jogues’s spirit in his own living flesh” (Death 73). Despite his baptism, the reincarnated Jogues was then put to death for the murder, resulting in a second death for the Catholic saint (62). From a Christian perspective, this may seem like the warrior viewed his own body as a vessel, a new home for Jogues’s soul. However, the concept of rebirth from the Hadenosaunee viewpoint seems more physically transformative in that the second body offers a “revitalizing” (74) of the deceased individual, the latter overtaking the living flesh. The afterlife of Brébeuf’s body following his death in 1649 allows us to nuance further the relation between flesh, identity, and power in the Iroquois culture. After many rounds of torture including baptism with boiling water, removal of the lips and tongue, and scalping, the group ripped Brébeuf’s heart from his body and passed it around for those who wished to share his courage by eating it (44). We can say that Brébeuf “lived on” in a physical way, since his flesh nourished living bodies and provided perceived mental strength. This recorded act of cannibalism, a practice considered one of the most heinous (if not the most heinous) acts of the human race according to early modern discussions of humanity and morality, may seem at first an additional aggression—a further desecration of his body. Yet, according to the Haudenosaunee view of the practice at the time, it represented a way of honoring the memory of a brave enemy, restoring his status, and thereby negating the degradation, hatred, and suspicion implied by their own acts of torture. The story of Brébeuf’s body, however, has a continuation that further branches it semantically and multiplies its power. A young nun in the colony, Catherine de Saint-Augustin, possessed a bone from Brébeuf and used it systematically as part of her nursing and healing practices. She purportedly grated the bone at times and fed it to the very ill as a cure (70), which is essentially cannibalism. Moreover, throughout the centuries since his death, many Catholics have reported miracles and cures through contact with his relics (71), thus claiming a powerful physical effect upon their own flesh through contact with that of Brébeuf. Providing perceived valor and healing, Brébeuf’s remains are, therefore, no longer “remains” in the sense of a lack. Even more impactfully, they achieved status in both cultures as capable of multiplying life and of fusing identity (and even physical bodies). Nevertheless, the above images of the Canadian martyrs, together with their accompanying descriptions of torture, expose only a shadow of that semantic density of flesh. Part of various propaganda campaigns by European colonizing states and the Church, the pro-Catholic and/ or pro-colonization Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 150 authors and illustrators of the time pitched a multimedia story of good versus evil in North America. We can conclude that those opposing views generated a tissue culture from which the myth of the relationship between colonizers and indigenous peoples flourished and continues to grow. Such portrayals underscore the idea of complementarity and tension in the word-image relationship as each account forges an “iconotext,” “an artifact in which the verbal and the visual signs mingle to produce rhetoric” (16), as defined by Peter Wagner (building on the work of Alain Montandon). The resulting representation, interpreted by individual readers over the centuries, is thus a flexible space for infinite receptions and reactions. The euro-centric depictions studied here that fuse a common visual and verbal rhetoric occupy a central place in the canon of North American colonialism. The resulting iconotext aims to persuade us of the binary between civilization, generally tied to Christian morality, and indigenous savagery. As we have witnessed, this cohesive word-image construct seems curiously alive in its ability to titillate, propagate, and evolve. Such depictions thus not only possess but act as “vital signs” (6) to use a concept explored famously by the visual culture scholar W. J. T. Mitchell. He offers a thought experiment in which we consider “the varieties of animation or vitality that are attributed to images, the agency, motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity, or other symptoms that make pictures into ‘vital signs,’ […] not merely signs for living things but signs as living things” (6). Considering Mitchell’s idea as itself a living thing able to metamorphose, the present study applies the concept to the iconotext, an idea that circumvents Mitchell’s questions about primacy regarding words and images throughout his body of work. 18 In the verbalvisual nexus, the two modes of depiction form a flexible system in which the different forms of representation and their webs of associations activate in each reader what word-image scholars like Liliane Louvel label as “infinite dialogues” (13, 41) or what Jacques Derrida has termed “discours potentiels” (“Spatial” 11-12) or the “univers infini” (Signéponge 23) of representation. Much like an atom, this relationship allows for both a seemingly fixed meaning (a simplified way to discuss basic function and structure, in the case of an atom) and ambiguities—tensions, unknown characteristics, fluidity— that come into view, paradoxically, as we study it on its deepest (quantum) level. This view gives us the flexibility to evaluate images in the cultural context in which they were produced and also to reinterpret them at a temporal, spatial, and cultural remove. 18 More specifically, Mitchell argues that “pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language” via scholars’ constant comparisons to language signification systems (47). Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 151 Overall, it is clear that the depictions of Europeans interacting with autochtones appearing in this article function simultaneously as powerful creators, reinforcers, and challengers of social structures threaded through with desire. Their various authors and recipients show a panoply of intersecting desires: for readership, belief, flesh, and power—desire for desire, in short. Such undercurrents of longing, ranging from the sexual (Cohen 341) to the reinforcement of social hierarchies and practices (350) (key theories of myth-making), provide a landslide of rhetoric, one that reverberates in European depictions of indigenous North Americans up to the present day. Yet, as reception theory teaches, readings change over time, and post-colonial theory has long pushed for a reappraisal and rejection of the early-modern demonizing of Native Americans in explicit and implicit ways. The above case studies have shown that Europeans scrutinized and exploited indigenous North Americans in a one-way mirror meant to dominate and disempower, a warped reflection, in anthropologist and activist David Shane Lowry’s view, “intended to completely eliminate the presence of American Indians” (xvii). In Lowry’s view, that distortion promulgates via the continued diffusion of “colonial scripts that teach us how to talk about American Indians” (xxi), texts reliant on misconceptions and simplifications. Citing another Lumbee Tribe member, Lowry laments that within the ethnocentric representational trap described above, there is still “really no way to illustrate what Indians want within an American media machine that wants us to appear Indian” (xxi), a conclusion supported by research into that domain: “Native Americans are typically depicted as 18th and 19th century figures (i.e. as teepee dwelling, buckskin and feather wearing, horse riding people) and, in the rare case in which they are shown as contemporary people, they are negatively stereotyped as poor, uneducated, and prone to addictions” (Leavitt et al. 40). In Canada, indigenous people have received similar treatment in the multimedia space in the past and present. Quebec historian Donald B. Smith emphasizes nineteenth-century historians’ intense focus on “each grotesque detail” of torture in accounts of missionaries and settlers, coupled with the same stereotypical language as seen in the writings of Cartier, Champlain, and the Jesuits: “Everywhere […] one finds the ‘sauvage’” (43-45). An egregious example is the description of “le sauvage,” a generic term grouping all of the First Nations, Innu, and Métis, in the most widely used Canadian history textbook from the 1930s until the 1960s, L’Histoire du Canada des Pères Farley et Lamarche. The manual characterizes native people as vicious, sly, overly prideful, weak (prone to debauchery and drunkenness) (Farley and Lamarche 12-14), and, in general, “sans force morale, sans caractère” (14). In both countries, we can point to the continued extensive exploitation of aboriginal bodies and iconography via sports mascots and product names (such as, Catherine J. L. Theobald PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 152 among thousands of examples, the McGill University “Redmen,” the Washington D.C. “Redskins,” the Jeep “Cherokee,” and “Native American Spirit” tobacco products). Unlike in the United States, the Canadian government has made strides to gather information about abuses and disparities experienced by native peoples and to take measures to improve equity. Most visibly, Canada created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate its history of discrimination, which resulted in the publication of 94 “Calls to Action” in 2015 (“Truth and Reconciliation”). Unfortunately, it has yet to complete more than 16 of those measures by most accounts. In both Canada and the United States, the physical and economic well-being of Native Americans lags far behind every other surveyed group. 19 The effort to eliminate self-characterization and nuance (or, worse, to demonize) that we see in most, if not all, early modern depictions of autochtones generated a representational environment reinforcing impunity and systemic discrimination that encouraged and justified uncountable atrocities, such as targeted exterminations like the Lachine Massacre (1689) and the Bloody Falls Massacre (1771), outright wars, such as King George’s War in the mid-eighteenth century, the church-run residential schools of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and patterns of unsolved murdered and missing indigenous women continuing in the twentyfirst century. The common thread is the systematic objectification of native bodies in the interest of domination, exploitation, and forced assimilation, the very same goals outlined in the documents examined in this paper. Continuing with Lowry’s and Mitchell’s calls to focus on what people and portrayals “want,” the death scene of Isaac Jogues (fig. 14) presents different types of power, most strongly via its depiction of flesh, urging us to recognize a struggle between the physical and the moral. Now, however, when viewed through contemporary theoretical lenses and in the context of a better understanding of Mohawk culture, the image fails to convince of the inherent evil of aboriginal bodies within a representational system based on essentialist dichotomies. While we may condemn the killing of Catholic evangelists (or of anybody), we must strive to understand the exceptionally intricate network of events and meanings around those events. Rejecting blind acceptance of the colonizers’ narratives, we should flip the “script” of the image, as Lowry encourages, to view it from an indigenous perspective, which could yield a picture of a life-and-death struggle for culture, language, and bodily agency. In that alternate view, the Haudenosaunee warriors appear in the lead roles (to recoup Anderson’s metaphor), protecting their culture. This 19 For health and wealth statistics in the U.S., see Ndugga and Asante-Muhammad. For Canada, see “Key Health Inequalities” and “Overview of the Community.” Flesh and Power in Early Depictions of New France PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-007 153 reconsideration turns the tables on the dichotomies examined above that provided the source material for forging an enduring power imbalance, with a view to challenging the problematic idea of a dichotomy at its core. Finally, on a representational level, all of the above depictions call our attention to a different type of power: that of the iconotext. Portrayals of savagery and barbarism in word and image furnished the text for the colonizer’s script. Today, pitched battles for political, economic, and moral control take place in digital spaces that rely to an even greater extent on hybridized multimedia to interpret and, in a sense, generate reality. It is thus crucial to better understand the ways that different types of depictions interact with each other to influence readers in overt and subtle ways. A study of the intertwined concepts of flesh and bodies in early accounts of interactions between Europeans and North Americans teaches us not only about the conflicting biases of the past and their underlying motivations, but also about the efficacy (and danger) of representations when they are synchronized for a common goal. 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