ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which Du Tertre frames the historical narrative of the early stages of France’s Caribbean colonisation with ancient and mythical European temporalities. In fact, Du Tertre begins the 1654 edition by comparing the colony to Romulus and Remus, Moses, and Joseph, as we shall soon analyse in detail. The chapter addresses the profoundly contradictory temporalities that haunt Du Tertre’s representation of the French establishment. The thematic structure of history writing produces a layered temporality, and temporal folds have both a function and a symbolic significance since they facilitate connections between the Old World and the New. Since Du Tertre’s temporal comparisons do not mainly serve to frame the Native Caribbeans or the New World in itself but, instead, to focus on the process that the colony undergoes as it takes the islands in possession, we have to rethink the assumption that the Greeks and the Romans provided the model for the French’s relationship with Amerindians.
