Thévet (1558)
Thévet, André (1504?-1590). Les Singularitez de la France antarctique [...]. Paris: Les héritiers de Maurice de la Porte, 1558.
André Thévet, a Franciscan friar and a historiographer and cosmographer to the King of France, was one of the first French authors to describe North America. He was born in Angoulême in 1502 and died in Paris in 1590.
After studying in Poitiers and Paris, Thévet was appointed secretary to the bishop of Amboise. During most of the 1540s he travelled in Europe and Africa. From 1549 to 1553 he stayed in the Middle East; he published his account of the journey in 1554 under the title Cosmographie du Levant. From 1555 to 1556 he accompanied Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon's expedition to Brazil as a chaplain. Thévet later claimed that he had also been to North America, but this claim is disputed by most specialists.
In 1557, shortly after his return from Brazil, Thévet published Les singularitez de la France antarctique, a work which has remained invaluable to this day. For even if he did not personally see what he describes, and even if many of the details he supplies are not based on any known written sources, we now know that they are usually correct. Thévet actually obtained some of his information in meetings with explorers, pilots and fishermen who were then frequenting the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, as well as in interviews with Indians of North America brought back to France. His work therefore contains valuable ethnographic descriptions of the Indians of the time: their war customs, hunting methods, religious beliefs, medical practices, dietary habits, traditional dress, and others.
Les Singularitez was well received and earned their author several subsequent positions at court. Thévet also published other works, including Cosmographie universelle (1575), which provides many additional details about the Indians of North America.
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