by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Beavers don’t really greet humans by displaying their private parts.

It might not be news now, but it was a controversial revelation that might have cost the career of a little-known local Jesuit priest named Louis Nicholas, who included it in his 90-page manuscript from 1680, L’histoire naturel de l’inde occidentale.

According to Concordia art history professor François-Marc Gagnon, Nicholas’s work was the “first natural history of Canada,” and he’s been furiously working to decode it and bring it to the masses.

Nicholas was the first to map out the state of nature upon the arrival of the French in the New World, and by doing so, debunked some unusual although prevalent European notions about beavers.

“These people in the 17th century, especially the Jesuits, were immensely knowledgeable about the ancients like Pliny and Aristotle—whatever they wrote about nature, the Jesuits could quote by heart,” says Gagnon. “There’s some legends about beavers in antiquity. Back then, they used beavers to create a remedy called castoreum. It was supposed to be a wonderful medication because it contains the acid you have in aspirin. The ancients thought the glands that produced it were in the testicles, so they invented the etymology ‘castor’ from ‘castrated.’”

Ancient literature convinced early settlers that beavers would gnaw off their own nutsacks to avoid being neutered by knife-wielding Europeans. Nicholas denied this. “Pliny and Aristotle repeat the story that when a beaver had lost its testicles, he’d stand up and show that he has nothing to offer,” Gagnon says. “It’s an example of a legend that Nicholas says isn’t true.”

Man of mystery

Assertions of this sort might have displeased the Jesuits, and Nicholas’s text never hit the printing press. “The manuscript was never published because, I think, his superiors found that it needed to be transformed, and he resisted and quit the order, which was very rare,” says Gagnon. Nicholas returned to France and finished his days as a secular priest, but Gagnon believes him to also be behind the Codex canadiensis, an album of sometimes-gruesome illustrations of Canadian flora and fauna from 1701.

Gagnon hopes to learn more about Nicholas before publishing the text, but Nicholas’s return to France makes him harder to track. “People don’t realize that we have much better records here in Canada than in France because we didn’t have a revolution and nobody destroyed our books,” he says. “If he had died here we’d have known, but in France it’s more difficult.”

Gagnon also needs to decipher some names he used to describe local fauna, such as “l’oiseau jaune” or “l’oiseau sans nom,” and flora, as well as many old Indian terms. “He mentioned over 200 plants, and of course he compares them to what he knows in France, so we’re not always sure what he saw here,” says Gagnon.

Man and beast

Nicholas’s text predates the more rigorous scientific approach as set out in Carl Linnaeus’s 1735 publication Systema naturae, which measured, analyzed and gave a double Latin name to animals and plants. “Nature is perceived in the 17th century for its usefulness to man,” says Gagnon. “They never ask what the usage is of something to animals. For example: Why do they have fur? It’s to give us beautiful coats.”

Without the benefit of an analytical system, Nicholas employs analogy. “He says the beaver has the tail of a fish—which is why early settlers could eat it on Friday—and that it has the legs of a duck, and is the size of a sheep,” Gagnon says. “He goes on like this with comparison and analogy. Now we describe nature very differently.”

Nicholas also wasn’t immune to lazy assumption. “He affirms without any doubt that the left hoof of a moose could heal epilepsy,” Gagnon says. “It’s wrong, but such notions were common at the time. Pharmacology was very strange back then—people were swallowing spiders, bizarre things like that.”

The manuscript has been translated into English and, after 325 years, it looks to be a year or two from publication. “The importance is that there’s nothing to compare it to at this early date—the description of flora and fauna and Indian folklore and pharmaceutical knowledge at the time,” says Gagnon. “We have lists of birds and animals in Cartier, Champlain and Boucher, but nothing compares to the description of Louis Nicholas, so it’s the first natural history of Canada at this more scientific level.”