In his text, “Mathieu Da Costa, the phantom interpreter”, which appeared in the Ideas section of this journal this month, Jean Delisle returns to the place of Mathieu Da Costa as we have presented it in our series African Canada. African Canada is a series that retraces, I remind you, the presence of Afro-descendants in Canadian history; which is a first in itself.
Mr. Delisle questions the validity of the presence of Mathieu Da Costa as being the “first Black in Canadian history”, exposing an absence of written evidence, archives, which leads him to affirm his presence as a myth based on falsehoods and exaggerations.
It is important to answer, first of all, that Mathieu Da Costa is quoted in a number of historical studies in Canada, which we consulted and on which we relied, including those of Paul Fehmiu-Brown who devoted several years of his life to this history and to the rehabilitation of the history of the Afro-descendants of the country.
The facts related by Mr. Delisle are undeniable. However, he omits an important element by barely touching on the question of the legal documents of 1609 which, in short, are contemporary witnesses to the existence of Mathieu Da Costa. It is because of these documents that his name has long been associated with the French exploratory movements of the early 17th century.e century. This series of documents (compiled by Robert Le Blant and René Baudry in New documents on Champlain and his time, 1967) concerns a dispute between Pierre Du Gua de Monts and Nicolas de Beauquemare, a merchant from Rouen who allegedly accompanied Dutch merchants to Tadoussac in 1606. “, which would have been kidnapped by the Dutch.
Too few traces
We know that Mathieu Da Costa entered the service of Nicolas de Beauquemare in 1608 “for trips to Canada, Cadie and elsewhere” for 60 crowns per year. Mathieu Da Costa being imprisoned in Le Havre the following year, Pierre Du Gua de Monts sent an agent there to have him released, and the power of attorney, signed by his hand, mentioned that Da Costa had been hired by Beauquemare “for and on behalf of of the said sir [Du Gua de Monts] “.
Even if he left no traces in the accounts of Champlain and Lescarbot, it cannot be ruled out that Mathieu Da Costa may have accompanied them to Île Sainte-Croix and Port-Royal. He could also have accompanied the Dutch to Tadoussac in 1606 or any other unofficial fishing trip at the turn of the 17th century.e century. Reading these legal documents, it is clear that Pierre Du Gua de Monts went out of his way to employ the services of Da Costa in Canada. So here are the facts.
Mr. Delisle’s arguments, if he is well informed, are based entirely on evidence drawn from official texts and never take into account this reality that we nevertheless present from the outset in the series. Afro Canada, namely the rarity, even the absence even of written evidence, of exhaustive archives to retrace the history of blacks in the country. Philippe Néméh-Nombré, sociologist and researcher in black studies, also states this in the first episode: it is all the difficulty of relating the history of Afro-descendants in the country. The trace of their presence is only very rarely reported or noted. Their presence rarely emerges, and often unofficially, through announcements of slaves for sale or on the run, in the course of factual information, which does not mean that they were not present, on the contrary , but which unfortunately contributes to denying their existence.
Take for example the facts recounted by Mr. Delisle himself in his text, concerning the presence of an anonymous black man who died of scurvy during the winter of 1605-1606, during the same trip with Champlain in which Mathieu took part. Da Costa, and whose body was dissected. However, the presence of this man does not appear at any other time in the texts, and we would never have had proof of his existence if he had not died and had been listed at that time.
A transparent approach
This is the reality we faced, and which was presented to us by many of the archivists, historians and researchers we consulted throughout our research for the series. It is for this reason that we have chosen to use this device – also presented in the first episode of our series – which is called “critical storytelling” and which allows us to imagine, relying on the some archives found, to imagine what would have been the reality of the Afro-descendant characters present and that we had to bring back to our memories, in their rightful place.
It is with this in mind that we have therefore treated some of the stories in fiction or animation, like “animated fables”, narrated by the independent historian Aly Ndiaye. The narrator also takes the trouble to specify about Mathieu Da Costa that “little information exists” and to keep the whole narration in the conditional.
Thus, it is in a series of forms and a transparent approach that with African Canada we approach this great “History” which was, from the very beginning of colonization, perceived, interpreted and preserved by the colonizers according to their scales of values and priorities. This is the posture that seems to us here the most honest and fair to look at history which, like the anonymous black man on Champlain’s boat, has been dissected and amputated from many of its elements.