Desperate in Saint Martin Notes on Guillaume Coppier

By all accounts, the “Anonymous [Chronicler] of Carpentras” whose manuscript predates Coppier’s book, was a buccaneering musketeer who was shipwrecked in Martinique for nine months in 1619. This manuscript might well be the oldest and one of the most extensive French descriptions of the Caribs known to date (Moreau, 1990:21). But Coppier’s account of the Lesser Antilles is at the very least more comprehensive. On a number of interesting and informative items, Coppier’s description also corroborates the account of the anonymous chronicler of Carpentras. Coppier’s style of writing is fairly similar to that of the author whom Dampierre refers to as l’Anonyme de la Grenade, the “Anonymous [chronicler] of Grenada.” Dampierre surmises him to be Father [Bénigne] Bresson (Dampierre, 1904:149). This chronicler of events on Grenada and surrounding islands from 1649 to 1659 was indeed subsequently identified as being Father Bénigne Bresson (Petitjean Roget: 1975). For a number of French and European authors of this period, traveling to foreign lands yielded three major “fruits”: prudence, science and virtue (Doiron, 1995:23). Coppier is one such author. For him, traveling abroad is “a school that teaches the perfect virtues” and all disciplines. History, like traveling, is the “mistress of life” (“vitae magistra”) (Preface: 12). Its ultimate aim, its teleology is the progress of civilization. History is under the direction of a philosophy wherein laws are said to be rooted in universal reason. For Coppier, history is intrinsically philosophical, inherently moral. But this appreciation of history and of its near double (voyage) with its representation of the world, its search for truth; its seemingly rational and universal aspirations often conflicts with Coppier’s esthetics and with his style of writing; with the artistic, stylistic, literary reality of his craft. Coppier is much more of a moralist than a moralizer; he engages in some moralizing, but he describes more than he prescribes and he doubts as much as he sermonizes and asserts. Like Montaigne who preceded him, and the great French moralists who came after him, Coppier is an author who values wisdom, and for whom philosophy, discourse and everyday life are intricately linked. For Coppier, virtue is not only theoretical, it is also and mainly practical; it is a practical matter. Like a number of other French authors of his era, Coppier wanted to influence the behavior of his reader. Twenty-four years after Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and some forty years before John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) Guillaume Coppier was traveling through life and the Atlantic. He sailed the perilous sea and the storms of existence, staying clear of treacherous reefs and of the sweet songs of sea nymphs while trying to make it safely back home. For Coppier (1606–1674), as for his contemporary the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), Milicia es la vida del hombre contra la malicia del hombre, “Man’s life is warfare against the malice of men” (Maxim 13). As Professor Louis Van Delft reminds us in reference to this aphorism, “to be unaware of this is to run the risk of ending up like the lamb or the donkey” (Van Delft, 1985: 92). Paraphrasing Van Delft’s eloquent and insightful remarks on the “moralist-cartographer,” we may venture that like Gracián, Coppier is one of those 17th-century moralist-cartographers whose absolute urgency is that of knowing how to live. This most perilous enterprise of all “is due to the hostility of the environment, and even more so, due to the antagonism of other viatores,” other travelers. Coppier’s chronicle is all of the above and it is also a manual for prospective settlers in the West Indies. It is a handbook containing advice and information on the natural resources of the Lesser Antilles, on their inhabitants, both the indigenous peoples and the non-natives, predominantly Europeans. In addition, it is a witnessing in praise of Coppier’s protector, the Magistrate [François] de Solleysel, of Coppier’s home city of Lyon, of the ideals of the French Counter Reformation, and of the kingdom of France. Last, but in no way least, Coppier’s History and Voyage to the West Indies is witness bearing and propaganda in favor of France’s burgeoning colonial enterprise in the Caribbean.