1 Introduction

This section introduces the French colonial activities in the Americas during the 16th century and their documentation in travel writings, emphasizing the significance of travel narratives in recording, disseminating, and exploring New France. Travelers employed analogies to compare the two worlds, aiding readers in understanding unfamiliar territories while expressing their observations and experiences of the new lands and cultures. Travelogues emerged as an open, heterogeneous, and flexible literary genre, adaptable to various aesthetic and ideological shifts. The travel writings of the New France period bear witness to the discovery, establishment, and expansion of French colonies in North America, reflecting the explorers' evolving emotional perceptions and identity formation on this land. The travelogues of Jacques Cartier and Marc Lescarbot are highly representative, documenting the process of French Canada from conquest to construction. Both authors extensively used analogies in their works, reflecting the spiritual connections travelers maintained with the Old World during different periods and the nascent formation of a "New French" identity.

2 "Boundary Figures"

This section explores the role of travelers as "boundary figures" in travel narratives, who cross the boundaries between "here" and "there," serving as mediators, transients, and translators between the two worlds. Through analogies, travelers transform their observations and feelings into content comprehensible to readers, fulfilling the "translation" function of travelogues. Analogies were particularly crucial during the Age of Discovery, as explorers relied on familiar concepts to understand and describe the unfamiliar. In his travelogue, Cartier compared New World species to European flora and fauna, accelerating the acceptance of novel phenomena. Similarly, Lescarbot employed analogies in his History of New France, using Old World animals as references to make New World fauna cognitively accessible. Lescarbot's travelogue not only described nature but also incorporated a critical awareness of colonial realities, reflecting on the violence and exploitation in colonial economic activities. His descriptions adopted a broader perspective, proposing a unified worldview, which indirectly revealed the shifting mindset and cognition of French colonists toward the end of the Age of Exploration. The use of analogies evolved from sensory perception to cognitive understanding, from observation to systematization, reflecting the transformation of French colonial discourse from experiential writing to discursive construction.

3 North American Landscapes: From Occupation to Construction

In the writings of explorers, Canada's natural landscapes were imbued with political and strategic significance. Through analogies, they linked New World scenery to French imagery, alleviating the anxiety of travelers and readers toward the unknown and achieving cognitive conquest and control over the New World. Cartier's works were filled with a desire for conquest and domination over the New World, as he observed and described it from a Eurocentric,居高临下的 perspective. He frequently employed Christian vocabulary and allusions to depict the New World, attempting to integrate it into the discourse of Western religion. Lescarbot, on the other hand, used analogies and even imaginative elements to create an idealized Canada that closely resembled France, downplaying the harshness of North American climates and portraying it as a temperate, resource-rich land. Lescarbot's fictionalization was not merely a literary technique but also reflected a deeper political intent, serving as part of the French colonial project and providing cultural and psychological impetus for subsequent colonial activities.

4 "Our Savages": From Taming to Imagination

The explorers' interest in the cultural customs of the New World is evident in their detailed records of indigenous languages, social structures, and traditions. Cartier's descriptions of Native Americans were marked by contradictions, oscillating between fascination and judgment from a European perspective. He was the first to use the term "savages" to refer to Indigenous peoples, revealing a sense of European cultural superiority. While he attempted to immerse himself in local life, he consistently used French society as a reference, imposing the "self's" order onto the "other" and domesticating the unfamiliar culture through familiar frameworks. Upon arriving in Canada, Cartier erected a cross, symbolizing France's intent to claim the land. He likened Indigenous leaders to French military officers, using French "equivalents" to map tribal power structures onto European feudalism, thereby re-encoding the alien cultural hierarchy. As Marc Augé noted, identity is constructed through negotiation with the "other," and Cartier's texts exemplify this. He did not place the two civilizations on equal footing but presupposed Europe as the representative of higher civilization. Travelers were "recognizing" rather than "seeing," exploring the New World with pre-established knowledge and frameworks, identifying and categorizing the unknown through existing cognitive structures. Cartier did not truly understand the "savages" but sought reflections of Europeans in them. His analogies reduced the distance between the two worlds but also denied the unique customs and social structures of Indigenous peoples, leading to a blurred and distorted portrayal of their true nature.

In contrast to Cartier, Lescarbot acknowledged the "other" and human diversity, placing North American Indigenous peoples on a relatively equal footing. He used the term "our savages," bridging the psychological distance between Europeans and Indigenous peoples and implying kinship or commonality. He employed imagination to depict the Americas as a "new Eden," with Indigenous peoples as "new Adams," symbolizing prelapsarian innocence. European migration to the Americas was likened to a "journey back to the prelapsarian era." Lescarbot compared the Indigenous peoples to "children"—naked, simple-minded, and living in rustic harmony—offering Europeans a "mirror" to reflect upon their own civilization. He emphasized that converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity should be a gradual process, akin to nourishing them with "milk," rather than overwhelming them with unfamiliar doctrines. Despite his praise for Indigenous peoples, Lescarbot did not escape a Eurocentric perspective, framing American culture through European standards and judging New World civilizations by Old World metrics. He adopted a "hegemonic discourse of negating (Indigenous) identity," positioning the narrator as an adult observing naive children, seeking to assimilate the latter into European culture and incorporate them into Western narratives.

Lescarbot consciously juxtaposed the northern and southern hemispheres, drawing parallels between Canada and France, portraying the former as a "natural extension" of the latter. He depicted Canada as an embodiment of Europe, while casting Brazil as a dangerous and evil counterpart, rationalizing France's failures in the southern hemisphere and attributing higher political value and potential to North America as justification for colonial redirection. Lescarbot likened North American Indigenous peoples to the Gauls, ancestors of the French, elevating their image and attempting to remove the "savage" label, transforming them into "an early version of humanity." He sought to create a "genealogy" for the New French people, adopting a gentle "domestication" approach to integrate Indigenous peoples into the European civilizational system, laying the groundwork for a "New French" identity. Lescarbot's travelogue was filled with poetic imagination, glorifying and beautifying the New World, creating a "nascent utopia"—a new frontier awaiting development and enlightenment.

5 Conclusion

Foucault argued that in the 16th century, the search for meaning lay in revealing resemblances, and analogies held a special place in the travel narratives of the Age of Exploration. As French explorers of the Renaissance, Cartier and Lescarbot interpreted the New World through the knowledge system of the Old World, alleviating unfamiliarity and anxiety while participating in the Western construction of the "other." European travelers adopted two modes toward the New World: "anti-primitivism" and "primitivism," neither of which treated Indigenous peoples objectively or equally but projected their own values and cultural norms onto them. The analogies employed by Cartier and Lescarbot were, in essence, "assimilation strategies," reflecting different emotional orientations and power dynamics. As colonial history progressed, the relationship between colonizers and the colonized shifted from unilateral conquest to complex cultural intermingling and identity reconstruction. Analogies were not merely cognitive tools but also instruments of power discourse, reconfiguring the hierarchical order between the self and the other. The narratives of Cartier and Lescarbot reveal how travel texts depicted foreign lands, projected the self, reinforced power, and constructed the relationship between colonies and the metropole. Re-examining analogies helps deepen our understanding of the cultural logic, knowledge configurations, and power operations behind colonial narratives, offering insights and theoretical inspiration for contemporary discussions on cultural identity and discursive power.