Codex canadensis

Codex canadensis is a handwritten and hand-drawn document from c. 1700 that depicts the wildlife and native peoples of Canada. It contains 180 drawings of First Nations' people, plants, mammals, birds and fish of the New World. Although the manuscript was neither signed nor dated, scholars believe its most likely author was Louis Nicolas, a French Jesuit. It is currently kept at the Gilcrease Museum, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Author

When a facsimile of the Codex was produced in 1934, a foreword by Baron Marc de Villiers attributed the original work to Bécart de Granville. Scholars have more recently discovered that the author was probably Nicolas. The Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales, a document held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, is speculated to have also been written by Nicolas and provides an in depth description of the animals, fish and plants of Canada, which are all depicted in the Codex Canadensis.

The author of the Histoire Naturelle also mentions that the descriptions of his observations are accompanied by illustrations: French: toute sorte de bons poissons, qu'on ne voit pas dans nôtre Europe, dont je vous donneray a la fin de mon Histoire naturelle, les noms, les figures, et les portraits. The author of the latter document signed his work M.L.N.P, which recalls the initials of the Grammaire Algonquine 's author, Louis Nicolas. Furthermore, in the Grammaire 's preface, the author specifies that he has placed at the end of his book an extra section on the history of the country: "On a mis à la fin de cette grammaire un petit supplément de l'histoire du pays".