Discours sommaire de la navigation et du commerce, jugements et pratique d’iceux. Par Thomas Le Fevre, escuyer, sieur du Grand-Hamel Conseiller du Roy, Maître des Requestes de Monsieur le Duc d’Orleans, et cy-devant Lieutenant en l’Amirauté de France au Siege General de la Table de Marbre du Palais à Roüen. Dedié a la Reyne.
A Rouen: Chez Julien Courant, derriere le Pallais pres la Bastille à l’Image Sainct Nicollas, M. DC. L [1650]. First edition. Woodcut title ornament, headpieces, and initials throughout. Printer’s corrections in ink and mounted paper slips in the dedication; a corrected royal printing privilege mounted over the originally printed text. Later half-leather binding, boards covered with marbled paper. [16] 271 [1 blank] [2 privilege and errata, verso blank] pp. Complete, with pagination irregularities: pp. 196 misnumbered 199; p. 209 misnumbered 208; page numbers 226–228 and 232 omitted. Pages lightly tanned, with occasional light foxing. A few contemporary marginal notes in ink in the main text. Title page with light staining and a possible early collection stamp at the lower margin. A small wormhole running through the first two quires at the lower margin, not affecting the text. A few leaves shaved at the top, touching the page numbers. Otherwise a sound and well-preserved copy.
An uncommon early French Admiralty treatise with a substantial section on Canada and New France.
Discours sommaire de la navigation et du commerce, written by Thomas Le Fèvre—esquire, sieur du Grand-Hamel, royal councillor and former lieutenant of navigation and commerce—and published at Rouen in 1650, is a substantial mid-seventeenth-century treatise on maritime law, navigation, and overseas commerce from the standpoint of royal administration. Issued with royal privilege and dedicated to the queen regent, the book reflects the perspective of a senior royal officer directly engaged in the regulation of navigation and trade. Rouen—seat of the Admiralty’s Table de Marbre and a central hub of Atlantic commerce—forms the institutional setting from which Le Fèvre addresses questions of overseas navigation, chartered companies, and maritime jurisdiction.
Of particular importance are the three consecutive chapters, spanning some fifty pages (pp. 198–249), devoted to Canada and its Atlantic environment, which together form one of the earliest sustained French printed discussions of New France as a juridical, commercial, and strategic territory. In these chapters, Canada is presented as a space of possession, governance, and economic integration within the French maritime system.
The first of these chapters, Du pays, conqueste et traitté de Canada, provides a general and juridical introduction to New France. Le Fèvre presents the territory as a grand pays, first explored under Francis I and incorporated into French interests through navigation, long-established fisheries, and royal commission. He recalls the voyages of Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier and stresses the St Lawrence as a navigable artery opening the interior of the continent to settlement and commerce. Governance occupies a central place in his account: figures such as Roberval, and later de Monts, are shown acting under extensive viceroyal authority to fortify ports, establish justice, regulate trade, and govern in the king’s name. The region is consistently situated within a broader North American framework linking Acadia, Florida, and Virginia, and episodes of Spanish and English violence against French settlements are cited to argue that control of this territory was essential to the security of French navigation and Atlantic commerce. Indigenous peoples appear primarily within diplomatic and commercial relations, as partners in negotiation and exchange, while the legitimacy of French presence is argued through navigation, long-standing usage, and royal sanction rather than conquest.
The following chapter, De la Compagnie et société de Canada, avec les articles d’icelle, et les noms des associez, defines New France as a corporate and juridical entity governed through charter, monopoly, and Admiralty jurisdiction, and sets out both the articles of the Company of Canada and the names of its associates. Le Fèvre delineates the territorial scope of the Company—covering Acadia, Cape Breton, the Gulf and River of St Lawrence, Gaspé, Tadoussac, and their tributaries—and details the prohibitions on unlicensed trade, association with foreigners, and unauthorized navigation. Administration, accounting, and disputes are centralized at Rouen under Admiralty jurisdiction, emphasizing governance through maritime and commercial law rather than autonomous colonial institutions. The material economy of New France is described with precision, listing exports from France and returns—above all beaver pelts, alongside fish, whale products, timber, and ashes—and identifying Quebec and Tadoussac as principal points of exchange with Indigenous traders. The full register of the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France, headed by Cardinal Richelieu and including senior clergy, royal officers, financiers, merchants, and naval figures, underscores the degree of direct state involvement in the Canadian enterprise.
The chapter De la pesche des Molues aux Terres-Noeufues, de la droguerie & pesche prochaine treats the cod fisheries of Newfoundland and related fisheries. Le Fèvre presents the Newfoundland and Canadian fisheries, together with coastal whaling, as the foundation of sustained French navigation to America, predating permanent settlement and continuing to support it. He details the organization of voyages, crews, provisioning, processing, costs, credit, profit-sharing, insurance, and the Admiralty ordinances governing seasons, departures, and penalties. These fisheries are shown to sustain hundreds of vessels and tens of thousands of seamen, supplying domestic consumption and foreign trade and strengthening French maritime power without direct cost to the Crown. While near-coastal fisheries and ancillary trades are noted, the Canadian and Newfoundland fisheries are consistently presented as superior in scale and strategic importance.
Beyond Canada, the Discours sommaire ranges across the wider world opened by long-distance navigation, treating the East and West Indies, Brazil, Africa, and the lands of the “Grand Mogor” within a shared legal framework governing access, trade, and sovereignty. Le Fèvre directly addresses Spanish claims to exclusive dominion over the Indies and sets out the French counter-arguments grounded in earlier peace treaties—notably the Truce of Vaucelles (1556), alongside other historically significant agreements—thereby situating Canada within broader disputes over access, exclusion, piracy, reprisals, and the legitimacy of commerce beyond Europe, while distinguishing between Europe, where peace treaties applied fully, and overseas regions where their application was contested. The book moves from general principles of navigation and maritime law, through overseas conflict and treaty doctrine, to a substantial three-chapter treatment of Canada as a legally claimed, corporately organized, and economically productive part of the French maritime system.
Piracy and irregular maritime warfare are treated as structural features of Atlantic commerce rather than as marginal abuses.
Le Fèvre distinguishes lawful prize-taking and authorized reprisals from illicit pillage and articulates the doctrine operating au-delà des lignes d’amitié, under which hostilities could lawfully persist overseas despite peace in Europe (Laprise 2021; Laprise 2024). In his discussion of Atlantic and African commerce, he also includes an explicit reference to the trade in enslaved Africans, noting that since the discovery of the Indies and of Brazil, trade is carried on in “Nègres,” who are transported to the Bay of All Saints, to Pernambuco, and elsewhere, where they are regarded as particularly suited to labor, being considered more hardy and enduring there than others (p. 72).
Taken as a whole, Discours sommaire de la navigation et du commerce combines practical description with legal argument. It records voyages, fisheries, chartered companies, and commercial disputes while advancing a vision of overseas expansion grounded in regulation, law, and royal authority. Written during the regency of Anne of Austria, between the early exploratory phase of French expansion and the later mercantilist system of Colbert, the book captures a transitional moment in which overseas commerce was being brought under systematic state control. It remains an important early French printed source for Canada and New France, and more broadly a contemporary synthesis of maritime law, commercial practice, and global navigation in the seventeenth century.
The book itself appears to have had a limited and specialized circulation. Copies are sparsely represented in institutional collections (WorldCat locates a copy at the BnF and an extract of the three Canada chapters at Library and Archives Canada) and are extremely rare on the market (only the sale of the present copy is recorded in RBH), a circumstance that may be explained by its local production at Rouen for a restricted audience connected with Admiralty practice and the Table de Marbre. The present copy shows clear evidence of correction during the printing process: alterations in the dedication to the queen regent, some corrected in manuscript and others by means of pasted paper slips, together with a corrected royal printing privilege mounted on the final leaf. Comparison with the digitized BnF copy suggests that these changes were later incorporated into the printed text, indicating that the present copy represents an earlier state and that multiple states or issues of the edition exist.
Boucher, The Shaping of the French Colonial Empire 492; Not in Sabin and Kress
References: Bures, J. de. (1928). Ce qu’un lieutenant de la navigation et du commerce pensait du Canada au milieu du XVIIe siècle. Nova Francia, 3(6), 372–379.; Laprise, R. (2021). Quelques réflexions sur l’étymologie du mot “flibustier”. In Gazette de la flibuste.: Le Diable Volant. https://diable-volant.github.io/flibuste/blog/GdF2021-etymologie.pdf; Laprise, R. (2024). Roving in Troubled Waters: The Fairy Tale of Alonso Ramírez as an Alternative Narrative to Dampier's New Voyage? Québec: Le Diable Volant, https://diable-volant.github.io/flibuste/blog/GdF2024-roving-in-troubled-waters.pdf
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Price: €85,000.00