Author Mark Bourrie captures the disturbing, historic adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson GlobeArts
Lake Superior had frozen over. Temperatures hovered around 40 degrees below zero. Families slept in huts they dug out of the snow. They counted their dead each morning. Pierre-Esprit Radisson, starving himself during this “Hunger Winter” of 1659, described people digging for roots, “which could not be done without great difficulty, the earth being frozen two or three feet, and the snow five or six above it.
Anybody who finds this hard to read should take a miss on Bourrie’s vivid narrative because you ain’t seen nothing yet. Having arrived in New France in 1651 as a peasant teenager, Radisson was taken prisoner by Iroquois. He showed such a keen interest in Mohawk language and culture – and had such an extraordinary gift for languages – that, after enduring some mild torture, he was adopted and assimilated.
That Otherworld comprises people of many different cultures and languages. As often as not, they treat each other badly. Some are polygamous, others aren’t. Some torture their prisoners to death, others just bonk them on the head. Bourrie insists repeatedly that 17th-century Europe, gripped by feudalism, was in many ways less progressive than what is known as the New World.
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