A Legitimate Discourse Based on What Has Been Read and Experienced: Notes on a French Traveler in the Contours of South America (17th century)

Abstract Te descriptions of America made by the young engineer François Froger in his Relation d’un voyage fait en 1695, 1696 et 1697 aux côtes d’Afrique, détroit de Magellan, Brésil, Cayenne et isles Antilles, par une escadre des vaisseaux du roy, commandée par M. De Gennes (1698) are a valuable testimony of his on-the-ground observations as well as of the influence exerted by previous travel accounts to the region. In principle, they reveal how, towards the end of the 17th century, navigation along the coasts of South America and the Caribbean became a concrete French expansion policy. At the same time, they show the multiplicity of representations established around a historically constituted space and, at the same time, in constant transformation. With special emphasis on the epistemological status of the text and its context of production, the article examines the processes of adaptation, translation and appropriation by which Froger articulates various domains of knowledge (geography, ethnography, etc.) about the visited areas. In this sense, the article examines the rhetoric and visual resources used by both the French engineer and his editor to validate the account and, in consequence, to present Froger as a learned traveler.