Maliseet

An AlGONQUlAN-speaking tribe that lived along the modern-day eastern border between Canada and the United States, the Maliseet established contact with the French before 1535 and maintained an alliance with them throughout the political existence of New France.

The Maliseet (also known as the Amalecite, Etchemin, Malecite, and Maleschite) inhabited Passamaquoddy Bay, the lower St. John River, and St. Croix River in what is today northeast Maine and western New Brunswick. They lived in oval-shaped wigwams made from sapling poles covered with birch bark and grass matting. In the winter bands broke up into small family units to hunt the solitary moose. In the summer families came together to form bands along the coast and rivers, where they fished and cultivated TOBACCO. During the warm months the Maliseet used canoes to move among bands to socialize, to perform religious ceremonies, and to arrange marriages.

Their first recorded contact with Europeans occurred in 1535, when they met jAcquES Cartier at Passamaquoddy Bay and offered to trade furs with the French for various goods produced in Europe. More than likely, the Maliseet had already encountered French fishermen on the coast of New Brunswick and learned what these new people had to offer them. At the time that Samuel de Champlain formally made an alliance with the Maliseet in 1604, they seem to have been at war with the Abenaki, but eventually they participated in an alliance system with the Abenaki, Micmac, PASSAMAQUODDY (which some consider to be a subgroup of the Maliseet), and Penobscot. The French used this confederacy during the colonial era to keep English expansion in New England in check. Eventually, the French built Fort La Tour on the St. John River. They used this post to keep the Maliseet supplied with guns and ammunition and to promote the fur trade with the nation. Descendants of the Maliseet still live in New Brunswick, Canada, and continue to perpetuate their rich cultural heritage.

Further reading: Charles George Hebermann, ed., The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, vol. 9 (New York: Appleton, 1910); Michel R. P Herisson, An Evaluative Ethno-histori-cal Bibliography of the Malecite Indians (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1974); Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, 3 vols. (Cleveland: Burrow Bros., 1896-1901); Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian (New York: Facts On File, 1985).

—Dixie Ray Haggard

Mandeville, Sir John (fl. 1322-1356?) explorer, writer Long deceased by the time Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492, the 14th-century writer Sir John Mandeville left an account of his alleged journeys beyond the boundaries of Europe that had a remarkable impact on those who hoped to expand the continent’s intellectual and economic horizons.

Little is known of Mandeville other than the few personal clues he left behind in his account of his travels. He tells his readers that he was an English knight who journeyed from 1322 to 1356 and that during those decades he came to serve the sultan of Egypt and the “Great Chan,” the purported leader of China. Many scholars believe that Mandeville never left England at all but was simply a master writer whose account fascinated everyone who saw it. In that age, before the advent of the printing PRESS, it is difficult to know exactly how many people ever had any encounter with Mandeville’s story. Because approximately 300 surviving manuscripts have existed since at least 1500, and because they exist in virtually every language spoken or read in Europe (including Irish, Czech, and Dutch), there is no doubt that the book had many readers. Given the difficulty of producing extensive texts in an age when each manuscript had to be copied by hand, often in a monastic scriptorium where copyists tended to focus on religious texts, the mere fact that so many manuscripts of Mandeville’s travels survive suggests its extraordinary popularity.

Mandeville took it upon himself to describe what Europeans termed the East, the lands that stretched from Muslim-dominated North Africa through China and Japan. Mandeville’s was not the only account circulating in the 14th century; during those same years manuscripts of the Venetian Marco Polo’s travels also spread across Europe. Although there were other sources of information, it would have been difficult for any writer to top the incredible phenomena that appeared in Mandeville’s text, such as his memorable account of MONSTERS who ranged from midgets to giants, some of whom lacked heads, others of whom had only a small hole for a mouth and had to suck their nutrition through narrow reeds, and still others of whom had ears so long that they touched their knees or lips so large that they covered their faces while they slept. Yet even Mandeville admitted that he had not seen everything. “Of Paradise I cannot speak properly,” he wrote at one point, “for I have not been there; and that I regret.”

It would be easy to agree with scholars who have dismissed Mandeville and termed him a “travel liar” instead of a traveler. His claims are, after all, preposterous and impossible, but whatever judgment modern readers might claim, there is no doubt that Mandeville helped to shape Europeans’ expectations of the world beyond their borders. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the great intellectuals of the age, possessed a copy of Mandeville’s book, and it was the only travel book that he had in his library at the end of the 15th century. Columbus studied Mandeville so that he would have a better understanding of the peoples he was sure he would find at the end of his journey in 1492. Mandeville’s popularity was so great in England that Martin Frobisher took a copy with him on his journey to North America in 1576, and Richard Hakluyt the Younger even included the text, in Latin, in the 1589 edition of his Princi-pal Voiages, Navigations, and Travels of the English Nation. But Hakluyt, who tried to include only truthful accounts in his books, apparently decided that Mandeville lacked credibility. When he published the expanded edition of his work at the end of the 16th century, he excised Mandeville, thereby relegating him to the realm of the incredible rather than the reliable.

Yet even if Hakluyt became suspicious, Mandeville remained popular. Scholars tend to believe that an author was popular if his or her book was reprinted or translated. That premise makes sense: If someone spent weeks (or months) translating a work or took the time to set type for each page, then whoever performed that labor presumed that there existed a market for the text. But in the age before the printing press, ideas circulated in written manuscripts, and some of the most captivating texts spread from one language to another (see scribal publication). Among these manuscripts few were as popular as Mandeville’s account. By the dawn of the 16th century, it had been translated into virtually every known European language (including Irish and Czech), a sign that it possessed a cross-cultural appeal. Approximately 300 manuscript copies still survive. More than 600 years after the initial appearance of the manuscript, Mandeville’s Travels remain in print, a testimony indeed to the staying power of some 14th-century books.

Further reading: Malcolm Letts, Mandeville's Travels: Texts and Translations, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd Ser., CI-CII (London, Hakluyt Society, 1950); C. R. D. W Mosley, trans. and ed., The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1983).