What Did Radisson Know?
but What do we know about Radisson? Probably lots, if we were brought up in Canada, where Radisson and his brother-in-law Groseilliers are remembered as the hairy-chested wilderness men, Radishes and Gooseberries, that we of a certain age learned about long ago in school. Most people think Radisson is the guy who owns the hotels. But if you read his Voyages and other documents, which Im editing for the Champlain Society, you encounter a man who amply justifies the epithet, this mercurial genius one historian has applied to him.1 Where did he come from, what were his experiences, what did he write about, and most important, what did this unusual man know? Born in France sometime in the mid- or late1630s to a family from around Avignon, Radisson may have been born in the south himself. He died in London in 1710, a pensioner of the Hudsons Bay Company (HBC) and a decayd gentleman, as a melancholy entry in the parish burial register of St. Clement Danes describes him.2 In between, he and h
