ABSTRACT
Travellers’ tales were probably the most popular form of reading in seventeenth-century France. French overseas ambitions had been resumed after eighty years of neglect during the Wars of Religion, and the literate elite was fascinated by distant countries, including the Americas. Individual travellers were encouraged to publish accounts of their journeys into countries which were deemed available for colonisation. Their personal testimony bore witness to the French presence in lands not yet occupied by the Portuguese, Spanish, or other European powers, at the same time as it re-assured readers about the feasibility of building New France in uncouth places. An integral part of this territorial extension of French civilisation was to be the bringing of Catholicism to the natives, generally imagined as wild savages.
