Pierre-Esprit Radisson

Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1636?-1710) was many men. He was a teenager captured, tortured, and adopted by the Mohawk and he was a youth relishing the freedom of the wilderness. He was the French-born servant of an ambitious English trading company and a hapless petitioner at the court of Louis XIV. He was a central figure in the tug-of-war between France and England over Hudson Bay and a pretender to aristocratic status who had to defend his actions before James II. Finally, he was a retired "sea captain" trying to provide for his children, and despite the pension he had fought for, he was the "decay'd Gentleman" described in his burial record. Radisson's writings, characterized in parts by hubris and in others by contradiction, provoke many questions. Was he a semi-literate woodsman? Are his accounts of Native life ethnographically reliable? Can he be trusted to tell the truth about himself? How important were his explorations? All these questions are raised in this first critical edition of Radisson's writings in both English and French, which includes three previously unknown documents.
While Pierre-Esprit Radisson remains a North American icon, the interpretation of his career presents a vexing historical problem: who in fact was this "mercurial genius?" Germaine Warkentin's richly annotated new edition of Radisson's writings brings us closer to an answer. Germaine Warkentin is professor emeritus of English, University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.