Jérémie (1720)
Bernard, Jean-Frédéric (d. 1752). Recueil de voyages au Nord [...]. Amsterdam: J.F. Bernard, 1725-1738 [vol. 3].
Nicolas Jérémie, known as Lamontagne, was born in 1669 in Quebec City and died there in 1732. When still young, he learned to be a trader by travelling with his father to different trading posts along the Saint Lawrence, as well as to the Saguenay and Lac Saint Jean.
From 1694 on, he worked at Hudson Bay as an interpreter and chief trader for various companies. In 1708 he was appointed governor of Fort Bourbon. Five years later, under the treaty of Utrecht, France ceded Hudson Bay to England for good, and in 1714 Jérémie surrendered Fort Bourbon to James Knight, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Nothing is known about the rest of his career, except that he wrote Relation du détroit et de la baie Hudson, apparently at the request of a councillor to the king of France.
Jérémie's Relation first appeared in 1720, before being brought out in a new edition by Jean-Frédéric Bernard about ten years later. By its subject matter the work belongs equally to history, ethnography and the natural sciences. The account of the French campaigns on Hudson Bay, which he knew both as a witness and as a participant, provides some information about this phase of history. But it is, rather, on the level of ethnography and the natural sciences that Jérémie's writings have remained valuable to this day. Jérémie lived for some 20 consecutive years in the Hudson Bay area, at a time when explorers, traders and travellers made only brief incursions into the area. Moreover, his descriptions of Native life in the area contribute some valuable elements to North American ethnography, especially with regard to the Inuit, whom he describes at some length.
Furthermore, Jérémie had a very special interest in the fauna, which earned him the distinction of being the first writer to mention the existence and give a description of the musk ox, a mammal going straight back to the Pleistocene, the period when the mammoth flourished.
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