The Reliability of Andre Thevet's New England Material

Abstract

In his very informative paper on English-Indian Contacts in New England Gordon M. Day states that During the century preceding Gosnold's voyage [in 1602], an unknown number of vessels had coasted or touched upon the New England shore, but they seem to have left us only two accounts of encounters between Europeans and Indians, the accounts of Giovanni de Verrazano and Andre Thevet. ,, Unfortunately, the source materials for this period are probably even more meager than Day suggests, since the Thevet account must almost certainly be rejected. In his Cosmographie Universelle, published in 1575, Thevet describes a visit supposedly made in 1556 to one of the finest rivers in the whole world, which we call 'Norumbegue,' and the aborigines 'Agoncy, ' and which is marked on some marine charts as the Grand River. 2 He describes the Indians and their way of life in some detail and even gives words and whole sentences from their language. This account would be most valuable were it not for the fact that there is good reason to question its veracity. First, though Thevet is known to have visited Brazil in 1555, and to have returned to France via the North Atlantic, his Singularitez de la France Antarctique, published in 1557