At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the French and the English tu ed their attention to the northerly climes of the New World. With the naïve and benevolent complicity of Native tribes, they penetrated, awestruck, the wild Eden that had been inhabited for centuries by Kanadyens, Wanabakis, and Gaspégois. In only fifty years, the foreigners took posession of those territories, calling them New France and New England. Cristoforo recounts the rollicking adventures of Europeans in the New World, who did their best to recreate the Old World despite their intentions of leaving it behind forever. It is a Baroque tale, a pell-mell mixture of fictional and historical characters. The Puritan John Winthrop, makes a pact with the cunning Father Joseph in La Rochelle. A young Irishman, riased as a Native, dies in the conflageration of Drogheda in one of Oliver Cromwell's fanatical missions after witnessing the horrible death of his boon companion, the Pequot sagamore, Sassacus. A camel leads an astonishing pilgrimage through the forests of Acadia while his master loses his head-and his body-in the streets of Paris. The heroic era of France, England, and savage North America is revealed in fantastic episodes by an undeluded fur merchant with an imagination as original as it is fertile, and who happens to have been bo without legs.

Willie Thomas' profile page