In his new book Bush Runner, Ottawa author Mark Bourrie portrays the European arrival much differently through an unvarnished account of the life of Pierre Radisson. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland — thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions. Respiration is the common O 2/CO 2 exchange accomplished by paired lungs located in the upper body cavity. He was a true freelancer, which took him from an impoverish peasant upbringing to the royal courts of King Charles I and King Louis XIV, experiencing the Great Plague and Great Fire of London.

But that’s not the only reason to read the book– read it because Radisson is, as Bourrie says in the introduction, “the Forrest Gump of his time. Here is where I put down the book and thought of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith born in the London suburb of Stepney in 1585. Bush runners congregate in family groups of two parents and from 6 to 12 juveniles in various stages of development. Then he lured the dog away, stabbed it to death, and had it “broiled like a pig, cut in pieces, guts and all, so every one of the family had his share.Instead, he betrayed his adoptive family, slipping away not once, but twice, eventually defecting to the Dutch in what is now Albany in upstate New York. He could have lived a good life among the Iroquois or the Mohawk, but his restless nature wouldn’t let him settle.

This book will help American audiences understand the importance of this character and the struggle to make a go of it in an inhospitable wilderness. Just as Radisson arrived in Trois-Rivières in 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his Leviathan, famously writing that life was nasty, brutish and short. Bourrie points out that judging ancient First Nations people “on the details of torture adapted from the historical record is akin to reading Rudolf Hess’s autobiography of his years as Auschwitz commandant to get a grasp of how mid-20th-century Europeans lived and felt.He double-crossed just about everyone, from his adoptive Mohawk family to his wife, the Jesuits, the Dutch, the king of England and the king of France to name but a few. Still Radisson comes out looking better than most of his historical contemporaries regardless of their social standing. Born in France, Radisson came to New France with his family and managed to be kidnapped as a youngster, and then adopted by a Huron family. Radisson’s ups and downs, frustrations, self-interest, and mishaps that leave him shipwrecked with pirates or penniless after great trading adventures seem Chaplinesque and this too is part of the reality of life in any era. Among the Ojibwa, an Algonquian people, collective enterprise revolved around “dozens of duodena, the clans that were the main social organizations in the community.

If you only ever read one book about seventeenth century Canada, make it Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson by Ottawa author Mark Bourrie. Started from scratch fifteen years ago, the garden is naturalistic in style, with an extensive wildflower meadow and informal planting. That said, he spares us nothing – not the burning of hands and feet, the pulling of fingernails, or “the dance of the heads. The allegiance of our adventurer to one side or the other seemingly alternated from one year to the next, ultimately ending up with the British, in England, where he spent his twilight years. These took Radisson back and forth across the Atlantic into royal courts and the homes of the powerful in France, England, and Holland as well as to the ringside of London’s Great Plague and Great Fire.Special interests include hardy shrubs, trees, herbaceous perennials, flower bulbs, wildlife and garden design; he has authored books on all of these subjects. By the third volume of Mantel’s trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell’s earliest proteges have become powerful courtiers, if not always reliable allies. A regular contributor to magazines, newspapers and BBC Radio, Andy lectures widely at home and abroad. One pair of books that talked to one another as I read them at the same time: Bush Runner by Mark Bourrie and The Mirror and the Light, the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell.

The book is compelling, authoritative, not a little disturbing – and a significant contribution to the history of 17th-century North America. He spent time at the court of Louis XIV of France and Charles II of England and inspired the establishment of the Hudson Bay Company.

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