author
Marc Lescarbot
1570–1641
A French lawyer, poet, and traveler, he left one of the earliest vivid accounts of French North America after spending a year in Acadia. His writing helped preserve both the ambitions and the daily life of Port-Royal in the early 1600s.
5 Audiobooks
Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (Version 1617)
by Marc Lescarbot
La Defaite des Sauvages Armouchiquois par le Sagamos Membertou et ses alliez Sauvages, en la Nouvelle France, au mois de Juillet dernier, 1607
by Marc Lescarbot
Les Muses de la Nouvelle France
by Marc Lescarbot
About the author
Born around 1570 in Vervins, France, Marc Lescarbot trained as a lawyer in Paris, but he is remembered today for his writing about the early French presence in North America. In 1606 he sailed to Acadia with Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt and spent about a year at Port-Royal, where he observed colonial life at close range.
After returning to France, he turned those experiences into Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609), the work for which he is best known. The book combined his own observations with broader research on French exploration and colonization, and it became an important early source for the history of Canada and Acadia.
Lescarbot also wrote poetry and is often credited with presenting one of the earliest theatrical performances in New France, Le Théâtre de Neptune, staged at Port-Royal in 1606. He died in 1641. His work still stands out for its energy, curiosity, and eyewitness value, even as modern readers approach it with an awareness of the colonial world in which it was written.