Arborvitae

(This column was published in the January 20, 1992 Buffalo News.)

   Imagine for a moment that you are a crew member with the French explorer, 
Jacques Cartier in the winter of 1535-36. You are very ill and you expect to 
die soon.

   In the fall you sailed through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up the St. 
Lawrence River to Hochelaga, a Huron camp. There Cartier climbed a height of 
land and named it Mont Real. But from this promontory he observed upstream "a 
sault of water, the most impetuous one could possibly see." That "sault" was 
the La Chine Rapids that effectively blocked your passage.

   So your three ships retreated to another Huron camp, Stadacona, at the 
mouth of the St. Charles River where you have built a small fort. (In later 
years this will become Quebec City.)  Earlier Donnaconna, the chief of these 
Hurons, had warned you that your trip to Hochelaga would lead to your death.

   Winter arrived early and in full force. "From mid-November," Cartier will 
later write, your ships have been "frozen in ice thicker than two arms' 
length, and the snow piled to four or more feet."

   And now early in the new year Donnaconna's prophesy seems to be playing 
out. You and every other crew member have become progressively sicker with 
"the pestilence." Already 25 of the original 110 have died and you are one of 
40 more near death. Your legs are swollen and covered with purple blotches. 
Your gums are rotting and you can feel the few teeth you still retain loose in 
your mouth. You are in constant pain and can hardly see. Less than a dozen men 
are well enough to tend their dying shipmates: "a thing pitiful to see," 
records your captain.

   Although the Hurons have been friendly, Cartier is afraid that they will 
take advantage of your troubles to attack. Under his orders and sick as you 
are, you must occasionally call out and clap rocks to suggest activity within 
the closed-off fort.

   But now Donnaconna, who has recovered from the disease himself, tells 
Cartier of a tree, the anneda, that provides a curative. Indian women show the 
captain how to make tea by grinding the anneda's bark and fronds and boiling 
them in water. Cartier himself spoons out this evil-tasting potion, and you 
almost immediately feel miraculously better. "All the doctors of Europe," 
Cartier will write, "could not have done as much in a year as this tree did in 
one week."

   The disease that beset you and your comrades was, of course, scurvy, the 
bane of anyone whose diet contains no fruit and vegetables that provide 
vitamin C. (It will be another 260 years before the British fleet is ordered 
to carry lime juice, effectively eradicating this dread sailors' affliction.)

   The anneda, its evergreen foliage and bark both rich in this vitamin, will 
later be misnamed the white cedar for it is not related to the Old World and 
Biblical cedars.

   Your captain is so impressed with its curative powers that he will carry 
specimens back to France. It will be the first native American tree 
transplanted to Europe. And based on this harrowing experience it will come to 
be known by a better name, the tree of life -- arborvitae.

   As I write, I can see through my study window a hedge of arborvitae across 
the street. They stand like green tenpins, conical and with a dusting of white 
snow. In swampy areas and damp forests they grow taller, in the open 
maintaining this compact cylindrical shape even when they reach 50 to 80 feet. 
Arborvitae are easy to identify by this shape, their twisted and shaggy trunk, 
and their delicate evergreen branchlets that are flat -- they seem pressed -- 
and yellowish.

   I invite you to associate, as I do, this lovely evergreen, the arborvitae, 
with the salvation of those Hurons and 85 French explorers.